Focus on your top 10% and dump the rest: Navigating the freelance workforce and virtual administrator environment for your benefits.

By Justin Waltz

With the right VA team (Virtual Administrators) you WILL get tons of work done, drastically improve your design and quality of your output, raise your prices and scale quicker than ever… all while managing a remote workforce of virtual administrators.

The world of virtual administrators and freelance contractors is a competitive crowded space. However, with the right strategy, some time and patience and a little bit of luck, you will build a team that will elevate your organization and raise the stakes for you and your work.

Without a strategy and a bit of understanding how to have success with VA’s and freelancers, it can be very frustrating working with a remote team, so let’s get right to it.

 

Let’s Start With The Why

Why use freelancers and virtual administrators?  First off there are millions out there performing tasks for as little as $5 that may take you or your team hours or days, and you can save time, which saves money.

Aside from small tasks, there are highly skilled virtual freelancers who you may need for part time work or project work. Again, having these highly skilled workers available to you will allow you to utilize their skill set without the cost of a full time employee. This is great for project work or weekly or monthly tasks/reporting etc that only requires a few hours or a few days a month. Or a short-term project that you define clearly, and when is over you no longer need that skill set anymore.

Lastly for the WHY:  It is so critically important, more than ever to double down on your strengths and outsource the rest. Dump the workload that is bogging you down everyday and focus on the top 10-20% of what you are really great at! Freelancers do exactly that. Break down your day, your week and month by tasks you absolutely despise doing, and guess what? That will be the first thing you outsource to a freelancer to learn and test how to properly utilize a freelance team.

Try the monthly expense reporting, or pulling data and organizing the data for your monthly all staff, or booking travel and hotel rooms, designing your company newsletter, building an exquisite PowerPoint presentation, someone to write and post blogs about industry data on your social media site or your company’s site. There are 1,000s of tasks and projects freelancers can help you with. So the first step is write down the 3-5 things you absolutely despise doing, or just flat out are terrible at accomplishing. And let’s work to freelance those.

As a tip before getting started and when brainstorming the tasks you’ll offload, I recommend you browse tasks and categories of freelance workers and virtual administrators on upwork.com and fiverr.com — by browsing you will see the wide array of who is available and what exactly their skill set is or their task. You can read reviews about graphics designers, branding and marketing experts, data analytics experts and data visualizers, lawyers, writers, editors, sales assistants and administrative assistants.  Browse those two sites to learn more about what they can do. Another tip: the Fiverr.com App is great and easy to use. I recommend you download this for simple and quick tasks you need to be completed at your fingertips.

 

How to get started:

First let’s start by signing up for accounts with Upwork.com and Fiverr.com — download the Fiverr app.  The Upwork app is not as quite as useful so I only access Upwork via desktop browser.  Complete your profile, put up a professional photo, logo’d even better. And then let’s begin by posting a job – by posting a job we have selected a specific task we want completed, and now we are going to put it out there for other Upwork contractors to apply to be the one you choose to complete the task monthly.

 

Let’s Post a Task

For this example, let’s start with a job titled “Monthly Expense categorization help via excel spreadsheet” (This will be the title of our job)

For the description: (it’s best to write a detailed description now including a detailed breakdown of what you want completed and how you will get it completed.  This is important because you will leave the site for a little while, and when you come back to select your freelancer, if you’ve already described exactly how you want the job done, then you’ll have very little training to do when it’s completed.)

Here will be our description: “We are in search of a virtual administrator to complete the CEO’s monthly credit card statement reconciliation report. Approximately 350 charges with many reoccurring charges for easy categorization. The CEO will provide the spreadsheet template, the categories and account numbers and each month the credit card statement.

The contractor will receive the statement each month and we expect the reconciliation report to be completed within 3 days of receiving the report.

 

First step will be to categorize the reoccurring charges by matching previous months charges to any repeated charges.

Second step will be to google any unfamiliar charges to determine what the service is (i.e. Airline, hotel, restaurant, paid advertising)

Third step will be to hold a short conference call with the CEO with any questions you may have regarding charges and what they are. Most of these the CEO will be able to answer quickly.

Once completed the spreadsheet will be emailed to our accounting department directly from you.”

Now that you have written a detailed description including the step by step process you will use, the contractors will see that you have clearly defined the task, and your posting will be more attractive and you will have more contractors to choose from.  Also, by displaying clear instructions you have exemplified the ability to communicate and train the contractor easily, thus making you a good client to work for.

 

Set the Budget

This is where you can use your own discretion – since you are asking for a conference call to clarify any charges, you want a speaker of your native language. If that’s English you may want a freelancer in the US, if so, you’ll pay more money.  You can still use an offshore freelancer with English speaking ability, but communication may be a challenge. We can overcome this by reading the contractor reviews and ratings.

For US workers, you want to set a budget of $7-$10/hour but this project shouldn’t be too long. Maybe 1-2 hours max. For offshore workers, who may have just as great communication skills, you can pay $4-6/hour.

For skilled work you will be able to determine costs and average hourly rates based on who is the most active and who has the best reviews.  A job posting and project posting is negotiable; so you can ask the contractor to name their rate when they apply for the project or task, or you can set a rate you are looking for. I recommend selecting “intermediate” when the website asks for a specific skill range, and going with the rate the website recommends. Then allow contractors to apply for the task or project and they will propose rates. The proposed rate is negotiable so you can always ask for a lower rate.

Once you have posted the job, set a detailed description with how the task will be completed, discussed any training or supporting documents (tip: if you have a template or examples of the work that has already been completed in the past, you can attach it to the job posting for the contractor to view) then you want to set the posting and give it at least 8-12 hours to accept bids.

 

Selecting A Contractor:

Now that you have your job posted you can begin reviewing your proposals. You can do so as soon as they start coming in but I recommend waiting 8-12 hours before you start.

Before reviewing proposals you can browse existing freelancers by clicking the browse portion of either websites.  By doing this you can view freelancers who match your key words you are looking for in your search. They will have specific skills like administrative, excel or spreadsheets.

When looking at an existing contractor you can read reviews and their ratings on their work. Other folks who have hired them will leave comments and rate their work. This is a best practice we will advise for you later on once you have selected a contractor.

Upwork.com has great filters in place when searching for contractor. You can filter language preferences, how well they know the language, where they are in the world, number of hours worked and how recently they have performed work.

For Upwork, because of the sheer volume of contractors on the website, I recommend you filter contractor with at least 100 hours of work, active within the last week, and you can check language preferences to your choosing.  If you prefer someone work during business hours you may want to limit where they are around the globe, however many contractors who do a lot of work with US based clients, have accommodated their working hours to US based hours, but not all have done this. So you will have to determine if this is important to you. Especially with our example tasks where we ask for a monthly conference call.

Once you have filtered your search you will receive search results listing contractor that match your request. From here you can click “Invite to your job” and you can invite them to check out your job posting. From here it is up to them if they are interesting in your task and if they are currently accepting new clients. Not all contractors will be interested and some and booked full, so it’s ok if they decline your request.

Once you have searched and invited people to your job, and you have waited 8-12 hours for people to respond to your posting, it’s time to review your candidates.

When reviewing candidates you will look for number of total hours worked, rating and reviews from clients, examples of the work they have completed, hourly rates for their past projects, hourly rate proposed for this job, and where they are in the world.

Also you can see things such as any testing they have completed to demonstrate their skills, any awards they have won for doing a great job (some contractor are top 20% in their field or a specific skill and this is a great thing) and their language abilities.

All of the above are things to consider when choosing your contractor.

For this specific task I would say an interview is NOT needed; but an email or chat exchange, or skype call will be needed to get them started.

If you choose a contractor who is well reviewed and has a good track record, you will have a 90% chance of success and you’ll be on the way to getting tasks done quickly and efficiently… a few hours of work on the front end (posting, training, documenting the steps and allowing for any questions) and you will soon no longer have to do this task again!

I’ve hired my contractor – now what?!

Now that you have found the perfect contractor (and let me be clear, you will learn a lot in your selection process, and they all will not turn out great, but it’s ok. It may be a trial and error) you are now ready to get started.

 

Let’s Talk Tools

Google Drive & Google Docs – use this for sharing files, saving documents, and a weekly status document that your contractor can update their progress, list and questions they have for you and list the progress of their work. This is a great tool if a contractor is working on multiple projects or tasks. Also on google drive create a google sheets where you share passwords and logins for any specific sites your contractor will need access to. If you do not want them to have your access or your permission levels with certain sites or programs, create a separate login for the administrator and allow them to login under their own name.

Slack – this is a great collaboration tool for messaging, posting documents, and allowing your contractor to quickly respond or post questions for you to answer. With Slack you may not need to jump on that Skype call if your contractor can post questions and you answer quickly.

Zoom meeting software – I use Zoom all the time! For hosting meetings BUT also for recording short videos. (Or long ones) — the best way to train a contractor is to have you, or someone on your team who does the task you want completed really well, to do it first on a computer screen, record it via zoom and then save it and upload it to google drive and share it.  Zoom allows you to host a meeting with yourself, record it, share your screen, speak into your laptop and record exactly what you are doing and saying. This is HUGE for showing a contractor exactly how you want something done, how to pull data, how to access certain documents or how to use a proprietary program in good organization.

Tip: if you record your training videos, you never have to record them against, so if you want to hire a new contractor you already are setup. Same posting, description, documents and training videos. It gets easier once its recorded and documented.

Skype – great for chat box and also for video chatting – most of your contractors will not have a traditional phone line (they cut cost this way) so if you do need to talk to them, plan on doing it by Skype or a Zoom meeting.

Checklist App like ToDoist or Evernote — if you want to create checklists or add tasks to a list for an administrator that’s virtual, and allow that person to check off the task once it’s been completed; or you can build a training checklist and check off the list once you have trained the person on that topic, I recommend an app that you both can see the checklist and then you both can update, add, delete, check off as you are working remotely and on projects together. For that specific area I use ToDoist.

 

Now Get to Work

Now that you have posted, reviewed candidates, selected your contractor, documented exactly what you want done (be super specific, provide screen shots, videos and allow for a Q&A session) shared documents and logins, you are ready to sit back and have successfully offloaded that task.

A few hours of work up front, will save you hundreds of hours for years to come, even if you follow the above steps and execute well, you can duplicate tasks and hire many freelancer at the same time, or replace a freelancer as needed.

You are now well on your way to employing a remote workforce. Please make sure to leave valuable feedback for your freelancers once they complete the work. They rely on this for future work; especially if they did a great job for you.

Lastly, remain professional and respect their time and skills. Freelancers will rate you as a client as well, and as you build your history and rating, you will attract better freelancers as you become a reliable source for freelance work. Respect and reviews are a two way street and they benefit both the freelancer and the employer.

 

Good luck and go out there and get started!

 

Justin Waltz is a business leader and coach. He is also an executive facilitator of forums and mastermind groups around the United States. He is currently a Senior Manager at a major franchise organization College Hunks Hauling Junk and Moving based in a Tampa, FL and an investor in a boutique startup business media agency, Sizzle Synergy. (SizzleSynergy.com)

 

Justin resides with his family in St Petersburg, FL.

 

For speaking requests, facilitation requests, writing and coaching questions please email Justin at JW@JustinWaltz.com