Get your time back: 25 tasks you can outsource to a VA

John Nieuwenburg

John Nieuwenburg has been a professional business coach since 2004. Prior to becoming a coach, he held executive positions with Tip Top Tailors and BC Liquor Stores. In 2019, MacKay CEO Forums awarded him with Canada’s CEO Trusted Advisor Award in the Small Business category. Since becoming a coach, John has worked with over 350 clients, taking them through a systematic process that helps them feel organized, confident and in control of their businesses.

Does this sound familiar?

The other day I was in a session with a client and their top issue of the week was having all their time taken up by emails, customer service inquiries, invoicing, and entering tasks into their project management tool.

How much time?

25 hours per WEEK.

What could you do with that time if you had it back? I asked.

Grow my business. Bring in more revenue.

Exactly.

I’ve discussed how to hire a great VA.

We’ve talked about delegation.

You know how to identify the tasks you don’t want to do.

Now let’s get specific.

Here are 25 things you can take off your to-do list and give to a VA.

Save time by getting your VA to handle these email and communication tasks

How much time do you spend each day on emails and other communication?

Imagine having someone to schedule for you, follow up with clients, respond to emails, and make sure that you only ever see emails you NEED to respond to.

With a bit of training, your VA can do the following for you:

Filter your emails and manage spam
Send appointment reminders and follow up emails
Send appreciation gifts or cards to your clients
Schedule appointments and manage your calendar (especially helpful for those meetings that require coordinating with 3 or more people)
Take and distribute meeting minutes (they can sit in on the meeting – or you can record it and they can do this from a transcript)
Organize your files and folders
Develop powerpoint presentations
Draft proposals
Send invoices

If you get a VA with the right mix of skills you can delegate graphic design and social media

Many VAs have social media, graphic design, website, and other technical skills.

Notice all the nice graphics that go with my blog posts? My assistant Noeme makes these for me. She also posts to my social media accounts.

If you get a VA with the right mix of skills, they can:

Create social media graphics
Post blog posts to your website
Schedule or post content to your social media channels
Create Facebook pages, groups, or events
Publish articles on LinkedIn, Facebook, Medium
Upload videos to Youtube
Moderate comments or respond to social media messages

Depending on their level of technical expertise, they may also be able to manage tasks like these:

Editing audio files for your podcast
Scheduling emails or newsletters
Performing keyword research for your SEO
Creating reports from Google Analytics
Updating your wordpress theme and plugins

You can also get a VA to handle project management – including managing other VAs!

Once you have a VA you can trust, they can grow with your business – moving into more of a project manager role and looking after things like:

Updating your project management tool to input tasks and due dates
Tracking deadlines and deliverables
Creating and managing spreadsheets, performing data entry
Hiring, training, and supervising other VAs

Know you should be delegating…but still putting it off?

If you want to grow your business, you need to make room on your calendar to work ON your business instead of IN it.

It’s been my experience that sometimes owners make this more complicated than it needs to be.

If this sounds like you, why not delegate “figuring out how to delegate” to me 😉

I invite you to book a 15-minute call with me here: book time with John