Episode 5: Thinking About Hiring a Virtual Assistant (VA) for Your Acupuncture Practice?

Welcome back! Today we’re talking everything virtual assistants.

  • How do you find one?
  • What can they do for you?
  • How much do you pay them?
  • Can they write content for you?
  • How much autonomy can you give them
  • And more!

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🎙️ Episode #5: Thinking of Hiring a Virtual Assistant for Your Acupuncture Practice? Your Questions Answered

Show Notes:

Transcript:

Hi there, welcome back!

Today I’m excited to talk about virtual assistants and social media managers because I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately about this topic.

I’ll just call virtual assistant “VA” to keep it short.

So, I have a VA, her name is Meghan, she’s wonderful, and sometimes I’ll mention her on Instagram. And whenever I do, some common questions I get are:

  • How to hire a VA
  • What to look for
  • What can they do for you
  • How much do you pay a VA, etc.

I think that more and more acupuncturists are warming up to the idea of hiring a VA to save themselves some time, and they’re on the cusp of doing it but have a few questions first.

So if that’s you, I hope this episode is really helpful. I’m going to share the things that my VA does for me, how I found her, and then answer whole host of other questions that I get pretty commonly.

Before we start, I wanted to say thank you so much to everyone who attended my live workshop this past weekend.

The workshop was all about building your email list with your ideal patients by creating a lead magnet and you guys made it really awesome. Thank you for showing up with thoughtful questions and spending time with me on Sunday. It was amazing.

If you missed the workshop you can certainly sign up to watch the replay. I’ll include the link in my bio. Again it was all about creating a lead magnet that gets more of your ideal patients on your list so that you can market to them with email and actually make them become your patients. Kind of like the first step in really good email marketing.

All right, let’s dive in. A virtual assistant is just what it sounds like. It’s someone who is not located in your office who uses the Internet, and sometimes phone, to do tasks behind the scenes for your business.

There are dozens of things that that a virtual assistant can take care of for you, which we’ll talk about in just a little bit.

One common question that I get is, “What’s the difference between a virtual assistant and a social media manager?”

I think that a social media manager is a type or a subset of virtual assistant. If virtual assistant is the big umbrella then social media manager falls under that; it’s like one specialty that a VA might have.

So a virtual social media manager, of course, runs your social media, which could include writing and scheduling posts, finding images for posts, checking and answering your social media messages, etc.

Whereas a VA typically takes care of more administrative tasks, like maybe answering emails, data entry, bookkeeping, there’s a huge number of things they could do for you.

I think this distinction is really only important if you’re getting ready to hire someone and you’re writing up a job description. So the job title will matter, right? If you need someone who’s going to do more administrative tasks then you would put in your job description that you’re looking for a virtual assistant, versus whether you need someone with expertise specific to social media.

Another question I get all the time is, “What exactly can I have a VA do? What can I assign them?” Really you can have them do whatever you want. Because it’s virtual, for a lot of tasks, you have to be willing to give them login information for different platforms, like your social media accounts or your social media scheduler, like if you use Hootsuite, for example. But as long as you’re okay with that, then you can ask them to do just about anything you can think of.

You may also want to have them sign a non-disclosure statement, like your other employees, depending on the access you’re planning on giving them. Like if they will have access to patient information or patient conversations, for example.

Really there’s a huge number of things that a VA can do and I’ll give you some good examples in a minute.

But you could think of it this way: Think of the things in your business that you don’t like to do, that you feel like you’re not very good at, or that needs to get done but you shouldn’t be the one doing it.

So let’s think of an example for each. Something you might not like doing is finding new articles to publish on social media. Maybe you feel like it’s really tedious and you hate it. That’s a great task for a VA or social media manager to take over.

Something you might not feel very good at could be, for example, graphic design. So you could hire a VA with a specialty in graphic design to make images for your social media and your website.

And the last one – I think this one is really interesting and deserves some extra attention – the idea that there are tasks that need to be done in your business but you as the skilled laborer, for lack of a better term, should not be the one doing them.

Think about it this way. If you charge $70 a treatment and you can see two patients per hour then you’re looking at $140 an hour. So focus on that. In that case you really shouldn’t be doing $15 or $25 tasks when you could be spending that time making $140 an hour. Does that make sense?

Or if you don’t have that many patients yet, to consistently see two per hour, you could be spending that time marketing and building your patient base so you can get to that point. Instead of feeling like you’re drowning in social media or playing email tag with patients or just managing other minutia.

The busywork stuff that you hate anyway and that you can pay someone else 15 bucks to do, that’s definitely the kind of thing that you should hand off to a VA. And then commit to using those free hours and that freed up mental space to either treating more patients or building up your patient base to fill your schedule.

And let me share what my VA does for me before giving you a slightly longer list of ideas, since people often ask me this as well. By the way, for this episode I’m mostly going off questions that I’ve received on Instagram, so if you ever have a thought and want to shoot me a quick message, Instagram is a great way to contact me. My Instagram handle is @michellegrasek.

People also ask a lot whether my VA writes any content for me. For example, does she write blog posts or does she write captions for social media posts, that kind of thing.

My VA, again her name is Meghan, she is essentially a social media manager. She mostly takes care of a few of my social media accounts but if I need help with administrative things, she can also jump in and help with those things as well, on a case-by-case basis. And when I was hiring her this was something we talked about – that most of her weekly hours would be repeated social media tasks, and every once in awhile I might email her to ask if she has time this week to help me with other things.

So every week on Monday, I write my posts for Instagram inside Hootsuite, which is a social media scheduling platform. I schedule them for the upcoming week. And then on Tuesday, Meghan jumps into Hootsuite and repurposes those Instagram posts for Facebook.

So this is really simple – she copies and pastes the caption and image into a FB post, and edits the captions so that they make sense on Facebook. Basically she is changing my Instagram call-to-action of “click the link my bio” to a Facebook-appropriate call-to-action, which is usually, “Click here to schedule now,” and adds the link. And she removes hashtags. So again, this is also repurposing content, and she does it for me.

Now I try my best to do three Instagram posts a week, which leaves two weekdays without content on Facebook. So in that case, Meghan does find articles about acupuncture, writes the captions, and schedules those to post on Facebook. So in that case, she is writing some content for me, in the form of captions for Facebook.

She also runs my Pinterest account, using the app Tailwind to set up new pins and repeating pins, one hour a week.

And she spends an hour a week using a specific Instagram growth strategy that I really like, which you can actually find inside my online course, Instagram Marketing for Acupuncturists.

So she’s working three hours a week for me. And sometimes, like I mentioned, if I have other things I need help with, like answering basic emails or helping me review an email sequence or something like that, she jumps in with an extra hour or two a week.

All of this was stuff that I specifically needed help with to really keep my FB and Pinterest accounts feeling “alive” because, and you might notice I say this a lot, I really love Instagram but I don’t enjoy Facebook. I do enjoy Pinterest but I just wasn’t spending enough time there.

So I knew that I needed someone else to help me have a consistent presence on Facebook. This is a great example of a way that a VA can help you show up better while you focus on bigger tasks that you don’t hate.

Let’s quickly brain dump a few other things a VA-slash-social social media manager could help you with. Bookkeeping, payroll, maybe if you have other employees, a VA could calculate their hours, database entry, inventory if that is tracked online, banking, paying bills, sending invoices, collecting overdue cash from patients.

They could send snail mail on your behalf, like holiday cards, birthday cards, newsletters, thank you notes, etc. If graphic design is a specialty of theirs, they could create images for your social media or for your website, or design brochures or other content like informational flyers for your office.

You can also find VAs who specialize in marketing, and you could have write press releases or even write email newsletters or blogposts. I think content creation is a specialty, like graphic design, and you may expect to pay more for someone to able to write great content about acupuncture, it’s pretty specialized, but it’s certainly a possibility.

And then of course if you find a social media VA, they can help you publish and manage your social media. Not just writing or scheduling posts but also checking in on messages you receive via social media, answering questions or elevating certain questions to you if they feel like they can’t answer them.

The thing here is that no one person is likely to be totally fluent in all of these areas, so you sort of have to decide what’s the most important for you, what would you like taken off your plate, and then when you’re looking for a VA or writing up a job description, focus on those things. Make sure to discuss what’s essential for you not to have to do anymore. Maybe advertise for the top three things that this person needs to be able to do for you at a really professional level.

I also want to mention that sometimes people are looking for a virtual receptionist. So this is a type of VA, at least I think so, but instead of it being all online over email or using apps or software, they are actually taking phone calls for you, right?

So there is actually an entire service dedicated to this specifically for acupuncturists, called AcuHub. I definitely recommend it and I’ll link it in the show notes.

AcuHub is set up so that calls to your clinic number are routed to a remote receptionists who is trained in answering questions about acupuncture, and has secure access to your patient calendar. So if you feel like playing phone tag with patients is making you crazy but you don’t want to pay for an in-office receptionist, that’s a great option.

Okay, the next question I get is, “How much should I expect to pay a VA?” This can vary pretty widely. I would say expect pay anywhere from $15 to $35 an hour.

If you need someone who does content creation, like writing blog posts, for example, or who does graphic design, I think they’ll probably be on the more expensive end for sure. If you can find someone who is newer, then $15 or $20 an hour is a reasonable rate.

The next question is, “Where or how do you find a VA?” I found one of my first VAs on upwork.com and this is a great place to find qualified VAs. It also has this awesome software where the VA is actually logged into Upwork while they’re doing with the work that you assigned them, and Upwork records the amount of time that they have been working.

And then Upwork bills you and says OK they were online for 15 minutes doing social media management and if you want to check you can actually take a look at the screenshots showing what the VA was doing. It’s very regulated. It’s a way to know that people are doing what you’re paying them for.

So these features are great but the downside to Upwork is that it takes a fee from you, as the business owner, and takes a fee from the VA as well.

So eventually my VA wanted to know if we could move off of Upwork, so that neither of us had to pay that fee. I decided that we’ve been working together long enough and I trusted her to be working for the amount of hours that I asked her to. So that was not a problem. Then she just sent me a bill using Freshbooks every Monday morning and I paid it online with PayPal or my credit card.

Eventually that VA decided to work full time for someone else and she helped me find her replacement. She was a member of a virtual assistant Facebook group and told them that she was going to be leaving soon and asked if anyone would be willing to take the job. There were a couple people who said, “Yes I have availability,” and so I just emailed back and forth with those people and that’s how I ended up with my current VA, Meghan.

Now, another really awesome way to find a VA is to find out if you can get an intern from a local college. For a few semesters, I participated, as a business owner, in what’s called an “Experiential Learning Program” with nearby Keuka College. I’ll include links in show notes.

I don’t know if they do this program anymore but I have recommended this to many other acupuncturists and it has worked out for a couple of them. The idea is that Keuka College requires students to have a certain number of hours of on the job training in order to graduate. So I contacted one of the professors in the communications department and said, “I’m looking for a virtual social media manager to help me with my business. Do you have any students who are looking for experiential learning to complete their hours?”

And she recommended students to me for several semesters in a row. This is a huge win-win for you and the student. Because they’re interns, you don’t have to pay them. Instead, they get credits through the university. And if you really like them, at the end of the semester you could hire them and pay.

Again, I will include the link to that specific university in the show notes, but you may find that other schools near you do something similar.

Another really common question I get is, “Do you have any recommendations for VAs that you know?”

Yes, I do know a couple of wonderful VAs through Instagram who have availability for new clients. I will link them in the show notes. If you’re thinking of hiring them, shoot them a DM to start a conversation discuss what you’re looking and what they specialize in. And remember that they have a network of people of other VAs that they might be able to refer you to if you need something that they don’t do.

All right, I hope this has been helpful and that it kind of liberates you and inspires you to hire a VA!

Again, definitely check the show notes for the links to the VAs and other resources mentioned. As always, it’s awesome to talk to you and I will see you in two weeks for the next episode!