Navigating Your First Month with a Virtual Assistant: What to Expect and How to Succeed
You’ve taken the leap—hired your Virtual Assistant (VA), signed the contract, and made your first payment. But now you’re wondering: what happens next?
As the owner of Virtual Assistant agency owner with over 6 years of experience, I’ve seen firsthand how the first month can set the tone for success or failure between a client and their VA.
So in this short episode I’m sharing what to expect and how to succeed with your Virtual Assistant in those important first four weeks of working with a VA.
From setting up systems to communicating expectations, I’ll walk you through exactly how to ensure this new and eventually close knit partnership delivers results.
We’ll cover:
Why the first week is all about setting your Virtual Assistant up for success
How to streamline the onboarding process and avoid common client/ VA mistakes
The importance of communication and feedback during the early stages
How to delegate efficiently from day one without overwhelming yourself or your VA
Strategies to avoid the "I’ll just do it myself" trap
If you’re ready to build a strong, lasting partnership with your VA and truly lighten your day to day workload, this episode is just what you need to hear today.
Key Takeaways:
Week 1: How to kickstart your VA relationship with a detailed onboarding call and essential access setups.
Week 2: Why communication and clear task delegation are vital as your VA begins handling your workload.
Weeks 3 & 4: Building a rhythm of feedback, task refinement, and autonomy to set your VA (and yourself) up for long-term success.
Resources Mentioned:
Book a 20-Minute Discovery Call to discuss how a VA can transform your business. No icky sales pitches, just all the info you need to see if this is for you.
-
Welcome to Delegate Like a CEO, I’m your host Mel Maw and I am a Virtual Assistant turned VA agency owner and podcast host.
I've gone from charging a just 15 pounds an hour with nightmare clients to turning over multiple six figures in the past 5 years by building an agency roster full of ambitious CEOs, change makers and impact driven clients. I get to match these phenomenal business owners with the cream of the crop of Virtual Assistants within my team.
On this podcast you can expect to find out everything you need to know about Virtual assistants, from what they can do for you, to how they can make you way more productive and why virtual assistants are just magic. Let’s dive in to today’s episode.
So you’ve found your perfect VA, you’ve signed your contract and paid your first invoice and you’re ready to roll.
The problem is, you don’t know what comes next? Or what happens in the first month together? It’s kind of a mystery grey area.
It’s also a time where a lot of things tend to be ‘expected’ but not explained by the VA to the Client.
It can be the perfect chance to make a success of it with your VA, or it might be the most disappointing time.
Today I’m going to tell you what to expect, exactly how we make a success of the first crucial few weeks between our clients and their VA so you can see success with yours too.
So imagine you’re all excited, you just took this leap with a VA and want it to work, right? But you don’t know what’s meant to happen next and you’re probably sitting there wondering…
Can you start to get tasks off your plate?
Will your VA get going straight away?
How long does it take before you feel your load get lighter?
What do you need to do to make sure you can both get started quickly?
Knowing what happens in that first month matters, because when you know what to expect, you can relax and settle into your new partnership.
Whilst you’ll probably be itching to dump your to-do list on your VA, there are things you both need to figure out first to make it possible.
When we as VAs don’t explain this, and if the client expects so much - it can lead to disaster instead of ease and success.
We want you to be well served as soon as possible, so we can get going too.
In my agency my on-boarding is such a thorough process, so you know as soon as you sign your contract what happens next, who does what, what info needs to be shared and so much more.
So let’s run through what realistically happens in month 1 and how me and my awesome team of VAs do for our clients from day one…
1️⃣ Week One
At this point you’ve signed your contract and paid your first invoice, my best advice is make yourself available for a 30-60 minute on-boarding call with your VA as soon as humanely possible.
They need lots of useful things from you to even begin taking over tasks, this is specifically what our on-boarding calls cover off.
Here’s some of the key things your VA needs to support you and will cover on that first (ideally) hour long call:
Do you need to set her up on your systems?
ie If you want her to email on your behalf, you may want to provide her with an email address so she looks like she works within your organisation - the majority of our clients prefer this. So can you set that up? Or do you need to contact someone to do that? This feeds into the next point
You’ll need to give your VA Log ins to your inbox and calendar if she’s going to manage it.
Then you need to delegate edit rights to her inside your inbox AND calendar, if you need them to have an email address from your organisation, they need this set up first before they can access your inbox and schedule - so think about getting that sorted for them ASAP or you might be the one holding up their start.
We walk our clients through this on the first call, helping them do it on zoom with us, or by sending them quick links to guides on how to give that kind of access.
Once into your inbox and calendar and your task management system (like Asana, Monday or To-Do for example) your VA can start skimming your inbox and diary to see what you do, who you work with, how you communicate, what’s coming up on your schedule, how she can streamline it. This is the info by osmosis stage and yes it uses your monthly hours and she can simply learn by absorbing your inner sanctum and day to day business or life and topped up with you giving her context around the ‘who’, ‘what’ and ‘how’.
She’ll ask you about your key goals and priorities, or what is coming up this month for you, or even the next few months - what you do and how you do it. That way she can work her way back and help you focus on your top priorities together as soon as you get off your first call. She’s starting to learn your business model.
Start assigning her tasks, once she’s up and running on your systems with log ins, passwords, email and calendar access she can begin.
The quicker you can get her this, the sooner she starts. So simply put - if it takes you a week to get this sorted, she has to wait for you. That’s why as soon as you sign up with us, my on-boarding process fires you off a list of things you need and can be setting up for your VA in the background.
2️⃣ Week Two
So now she’s logged in, she has all the access she needs and you’ve discussed some tasks with her she’s off…sort of.
Okay so we need you here, you still need to be really communicative with your VA. So she’s not a mind reader and I know it feels like there are 20 million questions coming your way (I’m exaggerating here), but it’s needed.
You’ll probably have thoughts like ‘Ugh this would just be quicker to do it myself’ and start to think about… just doing it yourself.
But here’s why that’s a terrible idea.
You simply can’t do it all yourself. You hired a VA because you needed one.
What you need to know here, that I will remind you of as much as I can is that you neeeeeed to invest the time teaching here at the start, so you can win back the time later on.
Teach your VA once, let them do the thing, they’ll do it and ask for feedback, give them the feedback, have them do that next thing correctly and YOU’RE DONE.
Best thing you can do is start copying your VA in on your emails BUT don’t just do that alone, give them a single line or two of direction or whatever action you’d like them to do.
Otherwise they are wasting so much time reading everything, trying to work out what you need and who you’re emailing. They need your guidance to be effective.
One of my favourite past clients would reply to one of her contacts and CC me and say “Looping Mel in to find a space in my calendar.”
Then she would separately forward me the email with a line that described the action she wanted me to take, the priority level and any other info I needed.
Sometimes it would be ‘Urgent, next 7 days please and please make sure my COO can join us. Internal meetings can be moved to make sure this happens ASAP.’ Other times she’d get so many invites, she couldn’t possibly attend or her presence as CEO wasn’t needed, so she’d forward it to me with the letters ‘PN’ (Which means ‘Polite No’) or ‘PN - send to X person’.
Her and I had a couple of different email scripts to politely decline things graciously, I even had them saved in my Google based email as a template, a one button click and it would autofill and I’d make some tweaks.
The other PN was when she wanted to see if the person inviting her would be happy to extend that invitation to someone on her senior leadership team instead, I’d simply go off check whether the team member could attend on the date, reply to the organiser and copy said team person in. Voila. All she did was say ‘PN - send to X’.
With a simple line of direction, I didn’t need to then ask her loads of questions to get something done.
Gradually I got to know her business, her team, her clients and important partners and could decipher priority levels - but I needed that initial input, which only took her 1-2 extra minutes per task in the beginning.
Yes it feels like you’re spending more time than you imagined with your VA in these starter weeks, but you won’t need to after this.
Not if you really communicate with them, explain things and deliver really helpful feedback. I don’t think a time goes by when I don’t have to remind new clients in the early days that they need to spend actual time with their VA and be really communicative.
VAs are not mind readers. We’d love to be. I mean we are magicians, but we aren’t mind readers!
Now, say you explained how you like this thing done and they did it, but they didn’t quite get it right.
They asked questions and you had to engage with them a bit and you’re thinking ‘See - quicker for me to do it myself!’ just STOP your brain from running down this path.
INVEST the time, so you gain it back TEN FOLD down the line.
TEN FOLLLLD… like truly, your time is precious, we know. But you need to let them learn bits and bobs from you, so they can be more autonomous as soon as possible.
Give them feedback, allow them to succeed. Trust the damn process.
Trust me it’s worth it.
My bonus tip here is when you start thinking about getting ready to hire a VA, start writing down the way you do things, write SOPs, record videos or screen record you doing things and explaining them. Better yet try something like Komodo Decks, it’s a screen recorder which transcribes and creates SOPs just from your video recordings - winner. I’ll do an upcoming episode on preparing to hire a VA too!
Do all of these things the moment you start thinking about hiring a VA, not later!
3️⃣ Weeks Three & Four
Let’s say you got started in week one and you gave your VA access within a day or two and had your kick-off call pretty quickly.
That means week two your VA is starting to have a go at tasks and weeks three and four she’s continuing to do tasks and ask questions and for feedback, you’re getting into the swing of things.
IF you signed up, but you have zero space in your calendar to on-board your VA, give them access or get onto that first kick off call in week one… you’ve held her up, and that’s fine, but please do then have realistic expectation of your first 2 weeks.
Some clients take 2 weeks to get the access bits and delegation going and you know - it’s not a problem, you’re still getting effective help and tasks taken off your plate within the first few weeks.
If you’re hectic when you hire or travelling alot, just make sure you take a ‘measured’ outlook on what can be done if you’re not able to be quickly responsive to your VA or spend alot of time with them at the start, vs expecting miracles.
Give them the time they need from you and you could be up and running and firing tasks over and your VA maybe zipping through your hours quickly, which often happens in month one and settles down in month 2.
With recaps
To wrap it up - the first month with your VA is different for everyone.
It’s also not a perfect view of what life is like with your VA, all the upfront effort and energy pays back quickly and that tends to show up within a couple of weeks and firmly into that second month and this expectation is so important to manage.
Yes you’ll feel the magic of having a VA, but it needs time and dedication from you at the start too and the most successful and long term VA and client partnerships I see are the ones where good communication flows easily and quickly from the beginning.
Let them in, show them your ‘mess’ and they will roll up their sleeves and get to work - they love your chaos, it’s their thing.
So this has been a really great look at realistically what your first month with a VA looks like.
Thanks for tuning in, if you’d like to hear more about the wonderful ways Virtual Assistants change lives for ambitious business owners and CEOs and how you can benefit from having one in your life, simply join my email list by the link in the show notes.
