Episode 5: The ACTUAL Virtual Assistant skills paying clients want

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The ACTUAL Virtual Assistant Skills Paying Clients Want

Thinking about becoming a virtual assistant but not sure what skills you actually need?

One of the biggest myths about starting a VA business is that you need tons of certifications or advanced tech skills before you can begin. In this episode, Abbey Ashley breaks down the real skills paying clients are looking for right now.

If you have ever wondered, “Do I have what it takes to become a virtual assistant?” this episode will give you clarity and confidence.

Do You Need Experience to Start a VA Business?

Abbey shares how she started her own virtual assistant business while pregnant with her second child, without prior VA experience. Instead of waiting for perfection, she leaned into action and started with skills she already had.

You do not need 40 services on your website to get started. You can begin with just a handful of high demand, beginner friendly skills.

The 5 Virtual Assistant Skills Clients Actually Want

In this episode, Abbey walks through five foundational services new VAs can confidently offer. Curious? Hit play to find out!

These services are in high demand across online businesses, coaches, course creators, and small companies.

If you can organize information, communicate clearly, and manage basic systems, you likely already have what it takes.

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If you are ready to turn your existing skills into a profitable virtual assistant business, this episode will help you take the first step.

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Transcript

Hey, hey, you are tuned into Work From Anywhere with the Virtual Savvy, where you learn how to launch and grow your virtual assistant business because you deserve work that fits your life, not the other way around. All right, friend. Let's get started.

Are you thinking about becoming a virtual assistant, but you're not sure what skills you actually need to get started? I've been training VAs for years now. In fact, over 7,000 individuals have gone through my programs, and the number one question that I get asked time and time again is Abbey. What skills do I need in order to get started?

So if that's a question you've been wondering, I've got you covered in this episode.

Quick intro, just in case you haven't met me. My name is Abbey Ashley and I am the founder of the Virtual Savvy. I love helping people discover the world of virtual assistance. Virtual assistance changed my life back in 2015, and over the past 10 years I've been able to help so many individuals discover their own freedom life. Have a life of flexibility and a job that they love. So if that's something that you're interested in learning more about, I talk about it here on my podcast so make sure that you click subscribe to be notified every time I release new content.

I think there's a common misconception that we have to have a ton of skills readily available before we can start a virtual assistant business.

In fact, when I was starting my virtual assistant business, I had that same fear too. What if I'm not skilled enough? What if I don't have what it takes? What if a client asks me to do something and I don't know how to do it? So many fears could have held me back, but I had a very powerful why keeping me driving forward.

I was actually pregnant when I started my virtual assistant business, so even though I didn't have ton of experience, I hadn't been a VA in the past. I did have a drive and a very real deadline. Coming around the corner that I needed to make this thing happen if I wanted some stable income in my life before the birth of my second child.

So I decided to embrace what is now one of our company's core values, which is action over perfection. And just start with the skills that I already had. So what did I start with? Well, in this episode I'm gonna share with you the five general virtual assistant skills that I started my new business with.

And these are the same skills that I highly encourage our new VAs to learn. And then launch with. Now you may have skills beyond the five that I share, and that's wonderful if so, in fact, I tell most VAs to start off with as many services. If you wanna have an hourly package of 10, 20, 40, 80 hours per month that you're selling and you just list your general virtual assistant skills out, that is a wonderful first place to start whenever you are putting together your first VA packages.

But if you don't have a list of 10, 20, 40 skills to put on your portfolio. That's fine too. You can simply start with these five. So what are they? Let's jump into 'em.

The very first skill that I recommend all VAs put on their list of services when they're first getting started is email management. Now, you don't have to learn every single email platform that is out there. What we encourage our students to do is to learn the Gmail platform and Outlook. Not that every single client is going to use those two platforms, but with a working knowledge of those two platforms, you're gonna have enough understanding to get into most email systems and have an understanding of how it works.

And the concept of email management is simple. The thing is that. Your clients are already answering their emails. They already have a system, whether it's a good system or a bad system is another story, but they already have a system for how they're answering their emails. They're logging in, they're answering their emails, and they're logging off, right?

And so literally what you're doing is you're taking this task off their plate and hopefully improving on it. So you'll be answering customer service emails. You will likely be filtering out their emails, maybe deleting spam and unsubscribing from messages. What we do here at the Virtual Savvy, I have my VA come in every single day and she will answer any emails that she knows how to answer because we've given her templates on how to do so.

She'll go ahead and delete any spam emails or anything that we just know. These are not the types of emails we respond to, and then she will place anything that is for me into one of two folders. I have an end of day folder and an end of week folder, and that's a really simple system, so I know I really only have to check that end of day folder.

And I usually take some time every day to look at the end of week and maybe answer some of those too. But the amount of emails that actually end up in my inbox is really, really small because over time I've been able to train her more and more on how to answer those emails for me. So this is a wonderful system to answer your client's emails, and it's one that you can go ahead and likely add to your list of services, especially if you know how to answer your own email.

All right. The second service that I would highly encourage you to add to your list of general virtual assistant services would be calendar management. Now, have you ever tried to book an appointment with somebody and there's this back and forth of what time can you meet? I can meet these days. Oh, that day doesn't work for me.

How about this one? Back and forth, back and forth. What if you were the middleman actually helping that back and forth happen? This is what calendar management is. You will literally go through and take a look at your client's calendar every single day. You will help them see any conflicts. You will schedule new meetings for them, and you can even set up tools and automations.

I personally love using a tool like Calendly or Acuity Software, or even Gmail now has its own native. Tool to do calendar bookings, and so setting up a tool like this for your client may work out really well in order to help them manage their calendar and to not have that back and forth. At the end of the day, you'll be the person actually coordinating their calendar, checking out their availability, possibly sending or setting up reminders for meetings, and all of that could be covered under calendar.

Management. The third service that I would highly recommend you add to your list of services if you are a new va just getting started, is data management. Now, data management can cover a variety of different software and tools, but essentially if you know how to type data into your computer, you can add this to your list of services because the platform really doesn't matter as long as you know, Hey, I can take data and I can put it where it needs to go.

A lot of times this looks like understanding a tool like Google Sheets. If you can enter information into Google Sheets, even if you're not an expert and you don't know all the formulas, you don't have to know all of that. You can obviously expand your services and have spreadsheet management and you know, configuration as a service later down the line.

But if you can be the person that actually manually enters in that data and you can add data management. To your list of services, and again, it might not actually be a spreadsheet. They could use some kind of software that is proprietary to their industry. But in any case, this is a really great service as long as you can enter in that information.

This was actually one of the first jobs that I had as a new va. I had a massage therapist who came and handed me a giant box of index cards with all this information and she literally just wanted me to take that information and enter it into a spreadsheet. I did that. I charged her an hourly rate 'cause I had no idea how long it was gonna take, and that was my very first job as a va.

All right. Are any of these services sounding like something you. Do or with a little bit of training that you could quickly learn. You have to realize that these services are high in demand and you need the confidence to do them.  Service number four is another broad category, but I'm going to call it customer service. Now, we already talked about email management and while there might be some overlap with email management and customer service, they're not the exact same thing.

See email management, you may never end up actually answering those emails. Your client may simply want you to filter out emails. Direct them where they need to go and use templates. Now when it comes to customer service, that can look like actually answering the emails with that customer service lens.

It also could translate to other platforms or software. Maybe you are a customer service agent for a chat, or you're doing customer service on a webinar, or you are customer service on social media. Yes, even responding to comments. All of these fall under that customer service.

Category. And so if you are able to really deescalate a situation or provide helpful advice, provide content, that is something that even in our large Facebook group, we have customer service VAs and ambassadors who are in there answering people's questions. And that is a highly, highly needed skill because again, it can translate onto so many different platform. So if that sounds like something that you're able to do, especially if you get that information, you need to be able to answer the questions for the clients. Go ahead and add customer service to your list of services that you can offer as a va.

All right, the fifth and final service that I am going to suggest, a general virtual assistant service that you can add on day one of your business is going to be community management.

Now there are a lot of different types of communities. There are Facebook communities, there are LinkedIn communities. There are even platforms now like Circle and Mighty Networks, which are community platforms. And inside of these communities a lot of things happen. People ask questions. So that's where you're gonna be able to flex that customer service muscle that we talked about earlier.

However, there is also content that needs posted. There's content that needs organized. Sometimes inside of these platforms, there are videos that needs. Posted. There's also the managing of the members themself. If it's a paying membership and somebody leaves, you may have to go and actually manually remove that person.

There is letting people into the group. In our big VA savvy community, which shameless plug, if you're not a part of, you should totally join it is the best virtual assistant community on the internet. You can go to the virtual savvy.com/community to join it. Inside of this community. We literally get hundreds of member requests per week, and I physically cannot go in and accept or decline every single one of those. And if we just blindly accept everyone, then we're gonna get bought and spam accounts inside. So we actually have somebody that very meticulously goes through and make sure the right members are coming into our community. Ones that are real humans that didn't create their profile yesterday.

We have to make sure that that is happening. And so community management is also letting those people in. It is also watching out for the safety of the group if somebody is being harassed or if there is, you know, just a lot of negativity. Or name calling, then we are quick to remove that person from our group, and we need an actual person to be watching and engaging and really asking questions.

And so community management is what that is all about. So does this sound like a service that you could offer if so. Add it to your list of services.

All right. That is it. Those are the five services that I wanted to share with you today. If you were thinking, oh my goodness, I could absolutely do this, then congratulations, you have the services you need to start designing your virtual assistant packages.

If you're still a little nervous, Abbey, conceptually, I think I could do these, but I want that confidence. I wanted to let you know about  a free resource that we have for new VAs. It's a checklist and starter kit and the link is in the show notes.

All right, friends, that's all I have for you.

I'll see you in the next episode.