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Nathan from Freeeup is with us on the Amazon VA Conundrum, he started buying and selling books using Amazon and drop shipping. Nathan found a baby products niche while in his dorm-room. After getting swamped, he looked into hiring people and hasn’t looked back.
Growing Pains
- Really have to be strict in the vetting process to avoid the Amazon VA conundrum and set expectations when bringing on a VA
- Depends on where you are in your business as well
- Typical areas for a VA include Customer Service, book-keeping and sourcing
- Things that don’t lead to expansion or growth or scale are ripe for a VA
- Repetitive tasks make sense to go to a VA
- You work on the business and not in the business
How do you Hire?
- Get away from your business for a day and come up with a list of how you’re spending your time
- Where are you spending your time
- prioritize it from easiest to hardest
- Get the easy things off your plate first
Trust
- Always an element of risk
- Even if you hire your best friend they can still make a mistake
- Look for someone who can care about your business
- Focus on attitude and passion as well as skills
- VA working on multiple Amazon accounts is a risk
- Never give a VA your main Amazon account username and password
- You can setup user access in Seller Central to limit things
Ways of working
- How do you work with your VA
- Some people like face-to-face, or video chat or just writing and email
- Nathan prefers to work in the written word so that it’s there in black and white and the VA can refer back to it
- All in chat or in text so it can be read again
- In a 30 mins phone call a sentence might get lost and an issue can appear down the line
- Identify what’s good for you as a business owner – VAs need to know how you want to work
Interview Process
- The trip-up rounds
- Danny doesn’t look at the fist CVs coming in the first round
- His autoresponder send them the questions etc
- On the 2nd or 3rd round Danny gets in touch
- Making sure they are investing their own time – if they can’t fill out an application then will they be into your business
- People can be really good at the application process and not so good on the job – dig deeper
- Look for the passion and communication skills
- Once you’re through the interview – the test is only just starting
- Test them a little bit and know you can work with them
Treat people well
- Show your VA respect
- Give a path of education and learning to them to encourage them
- Some people don’t realise how their tone is coming off
- Nathan had this problem – he was losing VAs
- He asked his mail VA to give him feedback on how he was performing
- She told him that he was saying stuff that VAs are taking to heart but that wasn’t how he was meaning what he was saying
- This feedback helped him go from 50% turnover in staff to 20%
Digging in
- What part of the job is taking the most time
- What are you struggling with
- Get them to ask you questions and seek answers
- Questioning shows that you do care and you’re trying to work it out
Hours
- No minimum
- Can do 8am to 9am just to help you get caught up
- They will need to fill their hours and will look for other clients to fill their hours
- You could hire two part-timers to fill full-time to give you a buffer
Wage
- Low level $5-10/hour – Followers you have everything setup and processes clear
- Mid-level $10-30/hour – specialists, Amazon listings, graphic design or book-keeping
- Experts $20+ – can audit your business, execute high level game plans, project manage, supervise low-level workers
- People hire the wrong level for the work needed and it doesn’t work
- Get people at a rate they are happy with
- Offer too low and you might get someone take the work but be looking for other work that pays what they want
Payment
- Initial people that join the business early and help grow it – their pay rises as the business grows
- Raises 6 months or every year
- A Christmas bonus is okay
- SOme people do the 13th month – Nathan doesn’t
Keep them engaged
- People care about more than money
- Want to be part of a community
- Want to grow and feel they are contributing to the business
- Keep them informed
- Event a part-time graphic designer – tell them goals, how the company is doing, how their work impacted
- Help them feel involved in the growth of the company
Contact
- freeeup.com – go sign-up
- Book a free meeting with Nathan
