When you’re starting out, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the skills needed to be a virtual assistant:
Best practices, changing algorithms, and sales funnels.
Automating social media posting.
Setting up email marketing systems.
Graphic Design. Copywriting. Marketing strategy.
With the abundance of content on the internet, It’s quite possible to spend hours (and days!) reading all the freebies and watching the webinars to learn the skills needed to be a virtual assistant.
In fact, this is probably how you landed on this post.
As you’re starting your business, here’s my advice on how to learn the skills needed to be a virtual assistant:
Be strategic about the skills you choose to learn.
Choose a handful of tasks that light you up. When I started my virtual assistant business, I focused on learning as much as I could about social media management. I learned my way around Canva as I taught myself basic graphic design. I spent time playing in different social media scheduling tools to figure out which ones I liked best. And (most importantly) I spent a lot of time working with as many clients as I could.
The easiest way to set yourself apart from other virtual assistants is to find a desirable niche and to go all in. Eventually, I morphed from doing social media to specializing in podcast production. Once people learn that you have a speciality skill that not many people offer (or you offer a more common service for a smaller niche), word of mouth referrals will grow your business.
Challenge yourself with the type of clients you work with.
Many coaches and strategists will tell you to spend time focusing on the type of client you want to work with. To a certain extent, this is a good idea. What I’ve found is that there can be a lot of fear and frustration during this time in your business because you’re slowly landing clients using this strategy. You’re spending a lot of time lurking in Facebook groups and on LinkedIn finding that “ideal” client along with a hundred other virtual assistants.
What I found was that it was more helpful for me to use the skills I was learning to niche down by the services I offered instead of searching for a particular type of client. By doing this, I was able to grow my portfolio more quickly AND learn how to work with many types of clients. To this day, I’m able to navigate difficult situations because of the “non-ideal” clients I worked with in the beginning.
Be transparent with your clients…and willing to grow with them.
Even though I’ve been a virtual assistant for years, there are still times when a client will ask me to use a system I’ve never worked in before. And my answer is always the same: “I’ve never worked in that system but I’m totally willing to learn as long as you’re okay with going through that learning curve with me.”
It’s a complete game-changer because you’re able to grow your skill set and add to the work you’re doing with a client. I’ve learned that one of the fastest (and easiest!) ways to build up the hours you’re working each week is to increase the work you’re doing with existing clients. In fact, my largest client right now started as a simple website build. When you take the time to be transparent and go out of your way to be helpful, it will give you a huge payoff!
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Looking back, I wish that I had taken better advantage of those moments I had before the clients starting rolling in. There were so many webinars, free trials of programs, and networking opportunities I missed because I was so worried about chasing every lead I could find. When you spend the time to hone the skills needed to be a virtual assistant and are open to working with different types of clients, your business WILL take off faster than you dreamed it could.