Expanding your solopreneur speaking business: is it time to hire a virtual assistant?

1. Better time management

When you are on the road, moving from city to city giving talks, it can be a struggle to stay on top of everything that needs doing. Keeping on top of your inbox can take hours each week. Hours that are hard to spare when you are booked to speak several times a week and trying to come up with compelling social media content in the back of a cab. 

Then there are all those tasks you don’t really like doing. Managing invoices, adapting your slides for each presentation, trying to find the best hotel or Airbnb close to the venue—these tasks quickly become mundane. 

Virtual assistants can help you organize your day-to-day affairs and take care of all the tasks that are not essential for you personally to do. This will give you the time to focus on those tasks that are essential for you to build your business—like speaking, writing, and real-life networking.

Freeing up time will also help you manage your work/life balance, giving you more time to spend with family and friends while still growing your speaking business. 

2. Utilise your time better and use it to make more money

Let’s say you spend 10 hours a week on emailing, bookkeeping, and booking travel. 

Imagine using those hours for something “bigger picture”. Maybe you could write a book? Maybe you could set up an online training course? Maybe you could go to more networking events and conferences, which could lead to more bookings? All of these things would add to your bottom line, whereas emailing and bookkeeping are just keeping you afloat.

(Need some more ideas on how to add to your bottom line? Read next: How to develop multiple revenue streams as a speaker) 

Let’s look at an example. 

Say that you decide to create an online training course. It takes you about 40 hours to develop all the content and organize the course. Then you charge $65 and host it on Udemy. It becomes a passive source of income and you get an average of 20 sign ups a month—that’s $1300 a month, or $15,600 a year. 

Those 40 hours will yield a much higher profit for you than answering emails and sending invoices, even if those tasks are essential. 

Comparatively, let’s say you find a great virtual assistant for $10/hr, and they take on the tasks, and it costs you $5,200 a year. At first blush this might seem like a lot, but if you are able to use the time you save wisely, your investment will pay off in no time. In the example of creating just one course, you would already be ahead by +$10K. 

3. Focus on what you love doing

As an expert speaker, you have a set of highly specialized skills. Why are you wasting hours each week sending emails and invoices? 

If it is not essential and does not require your specific skills—you shouldn’t be doing it. 

If you are managing your speaking business solo, you should ensure that everything you do, adds value to the business in a way that only you can. Admin work can be delegated, whereas your expertise, creativity, speaking and networking skills? Those are not transferable. 

4. Improve your communication

The moment you start losing potential speaking opportunities because you couldn’t keep up with your email, you need to hire help. 

Losing potential speaking opportunities and exasperating existing event organizers you’re working with isn't an option if you want to grow your speaking business. 

Getting back to someone within 24hrs shows you are dependable, organized, and have their needs at the forefront of your mind. 

If a potential event organizer emails you and doesn’t hear back for a week because you have just been slammed with a hundred other things to do, or you’ve been on the road — it makes you look bad. They might just go to the next name on their shortlist. 

Virtual assistants can ensure that you are serving your clients in a timely way that leaves a positive impression. 

5. Start some specialized projects

You can hire virtual assistants who have complementary skill sets that your speaking business is lacking. 

Imagine you’d like to add a new process to your business. 

For example, you want to start using LinkedIn to generate new speaking leads. 

Now let’s say you don’t actually know anything about how to use LinkedIn to get new leads, which is complicated at best. You need to have a pretty good working knowledge of how to use LinkedIn and connects, plus where to look and how to get noticed. 

You could spend 2 or 3 weeks teaching yourself how to do this—there are plenty of free resources—but once again, we come down to the time factor. 

Hiring someone who already has this skill-set and experience will save you hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars, while allowing you to focus more on what you like doing—speaking. 

What could you delegate to a virtual assistant? A comprehensive list

1. Administration

Small administration tasks eat time. 

If you spend 10 minutes on a task each workday, by the end of the year you will have spent roughly 43 hours on that task—that’s an entire working week on that one task. 

While it needs to be done, if it is not essential for you to do it, hire a VA.

Here are some examples of how a VA can help with administrative tasks:

- Calendar management

Meetings with event organizers. Flight to Berlin for three days of training sessions. Networking events. Skype call with an upcoming panel moderator. A conference in New York. Coffee with your mentor. Your great Aunt Sophie’s 97th birthday… Keeping your calendar organized is essential.

If there are places you need be and people that you need to meet with or call, it’s best that these things do not overlap, and that you know where you are supposed to be and when.

VAs can:

• Remind you what is happening daily

• Schedule and confirm appointments 

• Respond to emails about upcoming meetings

• Set up calls and take meeting notes

• Make travel arrangements on your behalf

• Book lunch/dinner reservations as needed

- Bookkeeping and invoicing

Recording bills, invoices and payments, logging receipts and filing your taxes: bookkeeping is a time-consuming chore. But you can’t afford to be rushed or sloppy.

The level at which your VA can help will depend on their experience. If this is a task you are going to need a lot of help with, look for someone who has accounting experience and knowledge of your local laws. Additionally, having proficiency in the best accounting software experience would be advantageous.

Either way, most VAs can help with: 

• Sending and following-up on invoices 

• Logging data into your financial program/platform or spreadsheets

• Ensuring your tax filings are accurate and timely. 

• Paying invoices

• Cost tracking

- Travel plans

Has an organization just hired you to give a talk to their team in Amsterdam? Attending the Forbes Women’s Summit in New York City? Offering a training session to a group of students from the University of Toronto?

While travelling for work is exciting and fantastic for building your brand and credibility, it can be a hassle to plan. You need to make sure you have the best price on a flight, that your Airbnb or hotel has WiFi, that there is a shuttle to and from the airport, or that you’ll be able to pick up and drop off your rental car easily in accordance with your flight times. It can add up to hours of planning. 

VAs can help: 

• Research the cheapest flight for the date and times you need, and if necessary, check back for price drops

• Book hotels or Airbnbs that are near the location which meet your requirements

• Adhere to budgets for your bookings

• Check for transportation options, book shuttles or rental cars 

• Update your calendar, and remind you about travel times and relevant information (like meeting or conference addresses and times) before you leave

• Log your expenses and send them to the event organizer on your behalf.
   

2. Communication

Imagine you are working on new content for an upcoming talk you are giving in Chicago. You are just getting into the flow of ideas when your phone pings. It's an email from another event organizer who you are hoping will book you for their upcoming event. You open it up and think “Oh, I will quickly answer this.” It ends up taking you 30 minutes, and by then you’ve long lost your flow.

You can’t afford to simply ignore emails and calls. At the same time, what wouldn’t you give for a few hours of quiet, uninterrupted focus!

You could turn your phone off for a few hours, but this could make you look unresponsive, and the emails/calls will snowball and end up eating a lot of your time after you are already tired from working so hard on the new content. Asking a VA to manage your communication is a win-win. You look ultra-responsive and you personally get to have the quiet, uninterrupted time you need to be creative and focused.

- Inbox management

Have your VA handle all of your emails. Instead of you constantly getting interrupted, everything goes to your VA. If there is something incredibly urgent, your VA will let you know.  On a daily basis, your VA can flag urgent items, prioritize which emails are essential for you to answer, and answer anything that is not essential. Even having someone delete spam or newsletters from your inbox will shave minutes off each day, and hours off each month. 

VAs can:

• Prioritize your inbox and let you know what is urgent/essential

• Answer client queries and frequently asked questions

• Add meeting dates and deadlines to your calendar

• Keep your inbox organized: deleting inessential emails, filing emails into folders, and keeping the inbox clean and orderly

- Answering the phone

Have calls forwarded to your VA. There is a reason many professionals have secretaries and assistants—answering every call can be time-consuming and draw your focus away from tasks at hand. 

Have you ever been to a meeting with an organizer who gets a call every few minutes?

Each time, she says, “Hold on, just let me get this.” The 20-minute meeting you were supposed to have has just been extended without your consent. You come away feeling that they are unfocused and disrespectful of your time. Don’t be that person.

You could turn off your phone, but what if there is an emergency? The VA can help catch all the calls and pull you in only when essential.

VAs can: 

• Answer all your calls

• Patch them through to you when it is an emergency or an essential call

• Take messages for you and prioritize your callbacks

• Offer customer service to clients and potential clients

3. Research 

From finding out about audience demographics to staying on top of current industry trends, the amount of time spent researching and reading online can be drastically reduced with the help of a VA. 

Let’s say you have a potential organizer who would like to see a proposal for a training session for a group of new employees on how to communicate effectively. You could ask your VA to create a report which includes information about the organization, their values and history, the demographics of their staff, and recent news about the company. You could take that information and design a proposal that fits the specific needs of the company, instead of just winging it or giving them your bog-standard talk.

Project VAs can also help research: 

• New client leads

• What other industry speakers are doing, from prices to social media activity.

• Industry trends

• Research for blog articles you want to write

• Social media content you can share with your audience (e.g. new articles, funny memes, industry developments)

4. Marketing and online presence

Marketing is an area which either:
 

1. takes up a lot of time

2. doesn’t get done

Neither are great options for your speaking business.

Marketing is essential for gaining new speaking opportunities and building up your credibility as a speaker. However, it often gets put on the backburner or is a focus for a short time and then gets forgotten about as you get busy.

For example, let’s say you just listened to our recent podcast “World of Speakers E.52: Using Twitter to make more connections and get hired with Samantha Kelly” and you decide that you will spend a few hours on Twitter every day building your audience and connecting with top speakers and organizers from around the world. 

Then a big training session comes along and monopolizes the majority of your time. You haven’t even opened Twitter for the past two weeks, let alone tried to connect with your audience or post interesting content. 

Wouldn’t it be ideal if you could work on marketing when you have the time, and then when you get busy, someone else could manage it?

Guess what I am going to say next… VAs to the rescue! 

- Content marketing

Blog posting can be time-consuming. Researching, writing, formatting, finding and uploading photos, posting to your website and answering comments can end up taking hours each week. 

Now what if you could cut that to be a fraction of the time? And post more frequently?

VAs can help: 

• Research content for articles

• Add introductions and conclusions to articles

• Find, create, or format appropriate images

• Proofread

• Format articles

• Post articles on your website and ensure the SEO is strong

• Respond to comments on articles

- Social media management

A few weeks ago, I saw a speaker give a talk, and was following him on Twitter throughout his talk. 

Almost magically, when he would say a key phrase, it would pop up on his Twitter feed, while he was on stage. 

I thought perhaps he had his talk timed to a T, until he was answering a question and the question and answer appeared on his feed. 

After his talk, I asked him how he was managing that, and he told me he had his VA on Skype listening to the talk, and whenever he would say the key phrase, she would post for him via Twitter. It was innovating, interesting and very effective. 

From handling comments and questions, to —your VA can manage the day-to-day of your social media, and you can swoop in when you’ve got some spare time. 

While it is best to have a clear overarching strategy, VAs can post content that you've created, create graphics to go along with posts, interact with your audience by replying to comments and messages, and research external content to share.
 

VAs can help: 

• Posts great consistent content, for example: regularly sharing photo updates, posting your blog articles, sharing interesting studies, fun videos, and industry articles from around the web.

• Reply to comments and DMs, or prioritize them for you to reply to

• Post photos of you and the events you are attending

• Share new and older articles from your blog. 

5. Advanced tasks

You can hire VAs with specialized skills to help you with some of the more advanced tasks that take up a lot of time, here are two examples:

• Website maintenance

  Updating your websites requires some expertise, and can be very time consuming if you are not an expert on web design or development. Having a VA either maintain the website for you or take on the project of hiring and managing a professional to do so, can take a lot of the weight off your shoulders while ensuring that when an event organizer visits your website, they see you at your best.

• Design

  Tasks like logo creation, social media images, one-sheets, and proposals can also be assigned to a VA with design skills.

  Take, for example, slide design. While you work on the content, they can be creating a fantastic design to make your content shine. 

Even if your VAs only help you with one or two of the above tasks, imagine how much time you will save each week. That is time you could spend thinking about your business at a higher level, working on new projects, or enjoying some much needed time with friends and family. 

To sum up

Virtual assistants can help you manage your time better, improve your communication, reduce your costs, help you with specific projects where you lack the skills, and free up your time so you can focus on the big picture of running your speaking business.  

While you likely have the skills to do the administrative and specialized tasks detailed above, hiring a VA is more about saving you time so you can scale your business. 

At some point in your business’ growth, it will become essential to start working smarter rather than more. Investing in a VA can be the perfect transition from running solo into creating a growing, thriving, larger-scale business. 

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