Ep. 7: How to Hire A Virtual Assistant Successfully with Nathan Hirsch of Freeeup.com

The Unstoppable Amazon Academy Show with Robyn Johnson (Season 1)

In this episode, we have Nathan Hirsh the Owner of Freeup.com/Nest. He shares from his vast experience working with virtual assistants what works and what doesn't work when hiring virtual assistants. We share about considerations about hiring virtual help. As you go from scrappy entrepreneurs to CEO of an e-commerce business you have to make sure that you are working on tasks that get you a good ROI on your time.

Step one is identifying where you are in your business. Are you hiring someone to follow existing systems or do you need someone to help you create systems or that will execute an advanced skill set.

You want to identify what tasks and areas outside your strengths to outside first. You also want to make sure that you take time to interview your freelancer to make sure the personality is a match. Once you hire you want to set clear expectations for your virtual assistant and give them clear feedback.

One of the things that Nathan and I talk about is the importance of self-awareness and being willing to own your personality type and weaknesses to make sure you find a virtual assistant that will be able to work with your personality type.

You also want to make sure that you don't set up your business is not completely dependant on one hire. It is predictable that every person you hire will quit at some point.

We talk about building standard operating procedures and don't forget if you are an Academy member we have a template you can use to start your systems and onboarding documents.

One of the biggest mistakes we see people make is to not be clear about what your expectations are for your virtual assistant. You want to make sure that he or she feels free to ask questions. When it comes to hiring to be unclear is to be unkind. You can never overcommunicate when you bring a new hire on.

Your company culture, the meaning of your work, and how you treat your virtual assistants or employees can play a more important role in keeping your people happy. Even more than pay (outside of a fair and just pay). We also talk about one of the common questions in hiring a virtual assistant about pay, bonuses, and raises. After you have someone hired you want to make sure you are managing your workflow over time.

Remember ultimately you are responsible to make sure that your hires (virtual and employees) are trained and supervised correctly. There will be mistakes, but you can use those mistakes to make your systems better over time.

When you are looking to hire a contractor for your business our favorite places to hire are Upwork.com and Freeeup.com/nest. Freeeup is a great place when you need to hire someone quickly with a specific skill set. It can be a little more expensive, however, they have great customer service and take a lot of the stopping points out of hiring.

We have a fairly large section of material on hiring in our Unstoppable Amazon Academy. Membership starts at just 49.99 a month!

You can find out more at BestFromTheNest.com/academy Just getting started on Amazon, let us help you begin your Amazon business for free.

We have a free getting started guide at Bestfromthenest.com/startfee.