Finding the right virtual assistant talent — Nathan Hirsch // Outsource School

Quotes

• “My whole thing is scaling businesses that are run by virtual assistants. I scaled an Amazon business to 25 million dollars over 6 to 7 years with a team of VAs and then I scaled the FreeeUp marketplace which is a marketplace for freelancers which is a place for freelancers but my internal team on the platform are not the people offering services but the people that work for me was 35 remote VAs from the Philippines. We had no office, no US employees, we hit eight figures in 4 years, we were acquired at theend of last year.” -Nathan“Now my new company, Outsource School not only teaches people how to scale businesses with VAs but our internal team is VA. So my thing is scaling businesses without the high overhead costs.” -Nathan“For clarity, there are three levels of people you can hire. You’ve got followers, doers, and experts. The followers are what I consider a virtual assistant, 5 to 10 bucks an hour, non-US they might years of experience but they are there to follow your systems and processes and if you don’t have those, you are going to struggle in hiring them.” -Nathan“Understanding the three levels is important because as you are going higher you need to break down your tasks into systems. The starting point is understanding the different levels and creating a list of what you need followers, doers, and experts for.” -Nathan “Money is obviously an element because maybe you can hire a Facebook expert but the second you do that, your margins are out the window. I think there’s also an element of time and lastly, it is how much do you want to own your systems.” -Nathan “For me, the process as a solopreneur here was to create a process, document, and hand it off and most of what we’ve used virtual assistants for has been micro tasks.” -Ben “I like to break down hiring into four parts. We got interviewing, onboarding, training, and managing. Most of the issues actually come from the onboarding but in terms of interviewing, we call it our care interview process. We are focused not just on experience but on their communication, their attitude, on their experience, and also what are the red flags.” -Nathan“The real way that you prevent issues is through the onboarding and this is where people mess up.” -Nathan“Almost all the issues that people have with VAs can be fixed with a good onboarding process.” -Nathan“I don’t make people commit to me for life but during the interview and onboarding process, I want to make sure they are looking for this to be their long-term job for as long as I treat them well. That’s what I am looking for.” -Nathan“Turnover kills a lot of businesses and I think a lot of startups don’t understand how bad turnover can be if you’re a small business.” -Nathan“I used to make the mistake of hiring one VA and teaching them how to do everything. You don’t want to do that so that if someone does quit, you just need to fill that particular spot. Then it comes down to good SOPs that if someone quits, you can just plug in someone into the system and they can do it very similarly and you do those SOPs to reduce their training time, and then from there it becomes cross-training.” -Nathan“Doers are actually in that $10 to $45 dollar range although a lot of the time it is project-based. The experts can be $50 bucks an hourto $100,000 dollars an hour. They could be monthly retainers, there is really no limit there.” -Nathan“I try to avoid hiring US followers. That’s the biggest thing because if you are going to hire US employees which is nothing wrong with, make sure that you are hiring the doers or the experts.” -Nathan“If I am talking to someone who is hiring VAs for the first time, I wouldn’t go out and hire two people from the Philippines, and two people from India, and then another person from South Africa only because there’s a learning curve whenever you deal with any culture and it’s going to add more work to your plate.” -Nathan