Create Your Virtual Assistant Invoice Template for Financial Services

Virtual assistant invoice template for Financial Services

welcome everyone welcome to office hours with Michael kitsis so for the topic this week I I wanted to field a question I'm actually hearing more and more often I came in most recently from Brandon who asked I'm thinking about hiring a virtual assistant but how do I find one of my timezone or does that even matter and I hear this discussion a lot of more interest in virtual assistants but how like the cool thing is they don't have to be geographically located where you are they can be anywhere that that they want to be and then of course the challenge is they don't have to be where you are they can be anywhere they want to be and a whole lot of dynamics change around how you work effectively with the virtual assistants I want to talk a little bit about this dynamics I I live a lot of this a bit a large portion of my business off of virtual assistants so I'm actually supported by a pretty wide array of part-time people each of whom have had their own specialized functions so I've got a web developer he's 150 miles away I've never met him in person my full-time executive assistant is 600 miles away in Chicago my graphic designer is 800 miles away in Kansas my marketing assistant is 1,200 miles away in Texas and so you're spanning a lot of the country multiple time zones I it's certainly been transformative for me to be able to find good people that I can delegate to to give specific tasks make sure it gets done it lets me leverage my time frankly it's taught me to get better at delegating as some of you may have seen some the articles I've written on the past about how I got better at delegating using screencasting software to capture what I do and then delegate it to someone and never do it again and so it for me it started with bookkeeping some like client advisory agreements and contracting contractual kinds of stuff and then it's just expanded over time to to the depth of the team that I've got today so as advisors we have lots frankly if opportunities leverage virtual assistants and help in the business that could be anything from outsourcing operational tasks so downloads a reconciliation of your software preparing reports at least digital ones not physical printout reports handling client agreements making sure meetings are getting scheduled that follow-up is happening when it's supposed to on administrative tasks even things like preparing financial plans outsourcing your bookkeeping and accounting for the business outsourcing some support on blogging social media and marketing activities I frankly for advisory firms because most of what we do is ultimately work we're knowledge workers like we interact with clients and contribute intellectual value not you know physical stuff we're not making things we're not making widgets there's frankly almost nothing I think that actually has to be done physically in an advisory firm to support an advisory firm almost none of it actually needs to be done there it can all be out sourced out but then let that lead raises these kind of administrative practical questions like to timezones matter and does the location actually matter so as someone that's live this I have to me like I think it matters a little I even in one point I have done some virtual work where I actually outsourced overseas you know there's a lot of virtual assistant companies out of Southeast Asia that are extremely inexpensive so you can you your your dollar gets a lot of bang for the buck but I've debated it didn't work well for me the the the halfway around the world thing means there's almost no contemporaneous communication that you go back and forth on it doesn't really work you have to you know I send a message before I go to sleep they work on it while I'm asleep I wake up in the morning there it is well that's fine if it was a finite item but if there's back-and-forth then I have to respond to something then I gotta waited another day for them to get into it so I I didn't like the halfway around the world thing but time zone changes within the US I found frankly are pretty negligible I'm most of my team actually is not East Coast time they're either Central Time or Mountain Time and I found almost no issue with with that dynamic in particular you could see the truth it's like you don't always each be in constant contact you need some chunk of time where you overlap with your virtual assistants that you can delegate things and get feedback and give feedback and get things back but like you're not gonna be with them continuously I mean just realistically even the staff that's physically in your office but you see them an hour to here or there through the day because the rest of the time you're in client meetings are out seeing clients of doing other stuff so you don't need them like perfectly aligned with you all day every day but you do need some reasonable overlap of time so I think almost anything in the u.s. is pretty feasible when you start crossing oceans and you start moving five plus time zones at a time it gets up it gets a little bit harder and and so I did lean at least us base for that reason even though you know US base U is going to be more expensive than outsourcing to some other countries where the labor is is cheaper now that story's the question is how do you find a virtual assistant so I find this gets done a lot of ways there are kind of generic virtual assistant sites that are really not specific to our industry but can be done for a wide range of sort of operational administrative or personal tasks virtual is a kind of a growing upstart in this space virtual assistants calm virtual staff finder calm that's actually run by a gentleman named Chris Ducker who's kind of big in the building virtual assistants leveraging yourself with virtual assistants his team mostly is based in the Philippines but reportedly very well run and executed for being a basically a foreign virtual service team you can work look at general freelancing sites places like upwork that just helps you find people for general freelancing projects Fiverr is another one where you can delegate little tasks for $5 that's the name a lot of them have add-on so you pay a little more but it's a good place to outsource sort of one-off tasks now I think for a lot of us advisors you know you need someone that's a little bit more focused and dedicated to the practice on an ongoing basis so when you start going down that road you know I think you're gonna be back to kind of a dedicated service or frankly a lot of our industry based solutions there are a number of virtual providers in the advisory world that work primarily or solely with advisor I find are very underappreciated places like Jennifer Goldman's my virtual CEO Oh Jennifer Ryan errs consider it done Donnie carpenters back office solutions they all help with a wide range of kind of operational administrative tasks in advisory firms you can you can outsource specific things like financial planning prep work to delegated planning or burt williamson's planned prep you know as many of you know we have a business for outsourcing your bookkeeping accounting for advisors called fa bean counters so they're actually a lot of specialized services and and the important thing to recognize in doing virtual assistants and outsourcing well is that you're not necessarily trying to find one person to do everything the point is to find focus experts that do particular things well so hand out you know specific items in areas of relevance so there's a question here compliance issues to be concerned about yeah I certainly anything where you've got access to private client information you probably need a privacy agreement with the provider that you know acknowledges that they're supposed to respect the the privacy of the clients particularly since they're otherwise likely going to be engaged as a an independent contractor now ultimately you're gonna tie them in with web-based software right we already have cloud crms it's not new that you might access the crm from a different place and any staff member that touches your client information your crm should have a controlled login you should have an audit trail to track what's going on with with the client activity and any staff members should be acknowledging that they're gonna honor the privacy policy of the firm so you'll still need that done even if you're working virtually as well but beyond that I'm not aware at least of any specific impediments around compliance beyond the same things that frankly you should have as an obligation for any employee of the firm virtual contractor or or otherwise then just make sure that you're using your software where you can control the access so it means things like don't give your virtual assistant your personal login to your adviser CRM buy them a separate license I know it's a little bit more expensive to buy them a license but when you buy them a license if you let them go you can turn the license off if you give them your access to to access to all your personal stuff and your personal logins it's kind of hard when you terminate the relationship whether or whether like problematically for Claus or just are moving on now you have to change all your passwords and logins to cramp down on the information that that's just more problematic so get them their own logins or use a controlled system that led us there access like Mel diem where you're not sharing your personal passwords directly so you can turn off their access to client information when you terminate that's probably the biggest thing you know the agreement should should make them honor your privacy policy and then make sure that you can terminate their access at the end I suppose I have to blanket or Issei run this by your compliance firm as well maybe your compliance consultant as some of something else to say about it but at least for as advisors I've commonly seen doing this those are sort of the primary items that are blocking points or where they need to handle this so there's a question about posting these references when we post the full video for this with the transcript to nerds eye view on Thursday we'll have all the all the links to all the resources as well so I'll make sure they're listed they are excite I can't type them into periscope while we're while we're chatting here but I'll make sure there's a list of them so stay tuned on on Thursday now I know why the other oh sorry I'm actually the last thing I should note on this in terms of where you find virtual assistants is also just your your own personal network like the people you know on my original virtual assistant actually came from my personal network it was someone that I knew who was had would have worked in the workforce did great work she took time off to start a family she was out of the workforce for a couple of years her kids got to the point where they going to kindergarten she wanted to come back into the workforce and so she started working with me and and as her kids have gotten older and are a little bit more independent and my business seeds have grown she went from five hours a week to ten hours a week to 15 hours a week to 20 hours a week and now works with me full-time so kind of evolved into it in a way that that worked for both the both of us so even for me it's been a blend my primary virtual assistant came from a virtual network but a lot of the others that I've I've done for you know web developers came off the referral actually most of the team is I think that I use I came off of you know personal networking around just trying to find people who are good at certain things and and the good news was I didn't care where they were I can work with them virtually so that's actually very freeing like I get to leverage my whole national network to find do you know anybody who does Blanc well not that you even have to go that broad but a lot of the good people that you may find you just need flexible work you can find them through your personal network as well so not to not virtual and up work in the other places I've used up work in Fiverr a number of times as well but a lot of the the ongoing relationships I think you'll find actually come from your personal network now in terms of what it costs I get this question a lot what do you pay for it so a lot of this actually varies depending on the kinds of tasks you're doing so the broad beasts of column administrative style tasks operational stuff I find tends to start at about fifteen to twenty five maybe thirty dollars an hour for that sort of work a lot of the work can get done in about 20 to 25 dollars an hour that's kind of a healthy professional hourly rate for someone that that does reasonable work particularly when they're flexible on their end right they don't have to go to an office they get flex time all the kind of the nice lifestyle benefits that come from being a virtual assistant working with someone else you know the more experienced they are and the more competent starts moving up the line and the more specialized the experience the more it moves up so if you're trying to find people that have deep background experience in our industry you might find $30 now $40 or $50 an hour if you're looking at outsourcing things like financial plan preparation where you probably need someone that's got a CFP and a lot of experience to be able to do that fairly unsupervised and just give you a quality finished product that gets more expensive you might pay a hundred dollars an hour or 150 or 200 dollars an hour for that work but again recognize this in the context of your of your own time so you know the simple math is if you work 40 hours a week for 50 weeks a year there's about 2,000 hours a year of working time and so if you want to be productive on your end you if your goal is hey somebody I want make $200,000 as an advisor the value of your time should be $100 an hour and anything you can let go of that isn't worth $100 an hour you need to let go of so it doesn't matter whether they cost $80 $60 or $50 a $30 second they cost $30 and takes them three times as long to do it as it took you you're still ahead by doing that so recognize the opportunity I mean part of this is just the virtues of delegation in general but the nice thing about virtual assistants and virtual staff the the flexibility that comes from it including the fact that for the person who's working with you you're they're only expecting get paid for the hours they do stuff for you that's connected to the work that you've done and delegated to them so relative to hiring a full-time staff member that almost anybody who's a small or solo advisor has gone through when you're thinking about hiring someone and your headcount is going to go up by a hundred percent because you add a second human being and you have to swallow a full time salary and benefits and all the rest at once and it's a huge jump for most advisors to go through virtual assistant is like the blessed middle ground if you just need to delegate 10 hours a week of work bring someone on for 10 hours only pay for that 10 hours not a full-timer where you only have 10 hours of stuff for them to do and then as your business grows you may find 10 hours becomes 20 and 20 becomes 30 and then maybe you graduate up into having a full timer but you get there more slowly and steadily in a manner that better aligns with the business than taking on a big hiring chunk all at once so there's a lot of virtue for the flexibility as well as just getting people who are really specialized as what they do so you know when you hire a virtual assistant you'll have to train them on your process how you want to work with them how you're gonna interact when you expect other work quality but you generally don't have to train them about the details of how to do their job right like you don't have to train Effie bean-counters about how to do accounting for advisors that's what we do you don't have to train outsource operations people for advisory firms how to do operations that's what they do and so when you find more focus and dedicated virtual staff you also relieve at least a big portion of that training obligation that I know is very burdensome for a lot of advisors you just should really just have to show him or explain to him once and then you saw have to occasionally check in and make sure that's being done the way you expected but it's not the same kind of hands-on intensive training experience so I hope that's helpful as a little bit of food for thought around just virtual assistants where to find them kind of what it what it realistically costs and you have a great question here how do you oversee quality standards and their hours yeah I mean ultimately as with kind of anything quality standards you're gonna judge my outcomes you're gonna judge by the quality of the work that comes back to you I know certainly for my interaction with virtual assistants I keep most of it directly to me it was a long time before I opened up having my virtual assistants interact directly with any of the people that I work with it started through me because I then I could be the ultimate quality control check as they got more competent and I got more comfortable like I kind of open the loose and the reins on that and allowed them to communicate more effectively than each other but I think part of it is just you graduate them up in complexity of tasks over time as you see the outcomes and what they're doing and evaluate whether ultimately it's it's good work product is good work quality now in terms of evaluating like their their hours and whether they're putting in the hours frankly I mean a lot of this is gonna come down to to trust I don't you know I mean even if someone's physically in our office like unless I hover over their doorway and keep looking over their shoulder at some point even the people are physically in our office I only so know know so much about what they're doing all day at the end of the day I mean I think you judge by work product you don't buy outcome like did the stuff that was supposed to get done get done and you're particularly in the small advisor environment where you're delegating things and frankly you should have some sense that's the how long it takes you know how long it took you to do it in the past before you delegated it that should give you some some sense of it I mean add a little timing because they're not as trained on it or experienced on it necessarily as you may be sometimes they'll be more they'll be faster and more efficient but but you can get a sense on that end I in terms of billing typically buy time for almost everything that I've seen because frankly virtual assistants are in the business of dollars for time so when they do it based on tasks you know frankly they don't want the risk that it takes longer or that you interact with the more and ask more questions and make them do more changes and then it comes out of there kind of their margin cuz they quoted the wrong time upfront so I suppose you might find some project-based items that that fit a little bit into that context I think some of the outsource plan delegation folks actually have an ability to let you delegate like here's a plan it costs blank here's what we'll produce for you but most of the ongoing virtual assistant work I find is it's it's billed based on time hopefully their their time is comparable to yours may be slightly longer but it's lower cost than what you value your time at or maybe if it's even higher cost but you're just trying to leverage yourself a little bit more to get over that so yeah there's a question here you'll build per project on one offs yeah I think you could try to do it that way but again you know I I mean a it's gonna be a two-sided thing like Y from the adviser end do you want to build a single project on a one-off basis because you're hoping to get more time out of them for a single project right like that's why we do it so if you're the virtual assistant why do you want to do project time when you can just bill hourly well same thing the other end you'd rather bill hourly right I mean we go through this with our clients our clients want us to build a fixed fee for the plan we want to build our lease so that the plan takes 47 hours we don't get screwed on the project you're gonna go through the same thing I think with a virtual assistant so I think with a specific one-off project that's feasible with a more ongoing relationship which i think is where you'll find a lot of these turn into if they go well they just it's not project-based in the first place it's it's more ongoing time based here's the stuff I need help with here's the time they put in and the and the exchange happens so I hope that's helpful is food for thought great questions everyone thanks for joining in sorry again for the technical difficulties in the first attempt for the broadcast but this is office hours with Michael kitsis 1:00 p.m. East Coast time on Tuesdays and have a great day everyone thank you you