Episode 244: A Week in the Life of a Virtual Assistant – What It’s Actually Like Working from Home as a Virtual Assistant

Full Episode Transcription:

[00:00:00] Hey, y’all. Welcome back to the Virtual Assistant Mama Podcast. Today, I am going to be walking you through what a typical week of being a virtual assistant looks like for me. I had a request from somebody to just share what my schedule looks like. So I’m just going to go ahead and walk you through that. Just a little caveat up front, obviously, you know, this works well for me, but it might not work amazing for you. So just take what you think would work well, implement it into your life and adjust as needed. But I just wanted to share what has worked really well for me. I used to have my kiddos home full time with me and work on my virtual assistant business, but I personally found that I had a hard time doing both at the same time well, and I’m the type of person who wants to give my all to like one main thing in my life and then like transition and give my all to the other big thing I’m working on. So. I ended up deciding to put my kiddos in daycare three days a week. So, I work those three days while they are in daycare, and then the other four days of the week they are home with me and we’re doing tons of fun stuff. So, let’s just go ahead and I’ll jump in and you’ll kind of see what this looks like.

[00:01:21] So, my kids go to daycare Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Typically, my husband takes them… Two mornings of those three days Because I still get up with my son if he wakes up through the night So that allows me to sleep in a little bit more in the morning Plus my husband is more of a pop tart in the morning. He jumps out of bed. He’s ready to go. I’m a pancake. I want to cook a little bit more on both sides. So I really like to have a slow morning. So Two of those three work days I have, I usually have a slow morning, um, where it’s like nobody’s home. I like to drink my orange juice. I don’t like coffee, so my drink of choice is orange juice. Make my breakfast, read my Bible. Sometimes I’ll go to the gym right away in the morning. Other times I’ll wait and do that like before I go pick up the kids from daycare. But once I do that whole kind of morning routine type stuff, then I’ll sit down and work on my business tasks for the day. Now, I always plan out what I’m going to be working on for the week, the week before.

[00:02:26] And I do that on my Trello board, which I have for you guys. It’s my free weekly planner, the weekly Trello planner. And you can get that at ariannavernier.com/free-weekly-planner. Later or find that link in the show notes, but basically the week before I go in and I figure out what tasks I need to get done for the week in my business, what meetings I’m going to have, and I just plug that all in into my Trello board. And then that way, when the week starts on Monday, I’m not like sitting down like, okay, what am I going to be working on? So I already have that planned out the weekend or the week prior. So, when I sit down to work, I can just go ahead and bust it all out. So, typically the things that I’m doing on my business throughout the week. Is doing things like website updates for my monthly website maintenance clients. Typically, this only takes me 2 to 3 hours per client per month, so it doesn’t take me very long to do that at all. I also take time to network every day and apply for jobs. Any jobs that I see that look good, I’ll apply to them.

[00:03:41] Now, if you don’t know that networking is super important, you need to go back and find the episode I have talking all about the importance of networking off the top of my head. I don’t know what podcast episode that is, but if you go into our podcast catalog, which you can find at virtualassistantmama.com/catalog. You can hit CTRL F and type in networking or network, and that’ll show you which episodes I talk about that. So that’s, yeah, you can go find that episode there, but I always spend time networking, just like communicating with people, building those connections, taking that time to pour into others, because that is always going to help your business in the long run.

[00:04:25] Then I take time to follow up with past and potential clients. Past clients, like if I haven’t heard from them in probably six months, I tend to follow up with them just to see if they need any like, help with anything, if they’ve gotten stuck with making their own edits, or if they need to, you know, add a new page or whatever. I’ll just check in with them to see how things are going. And then potential clients, if I’ve communicated with someone but haven’t heard from them in over a week or so, I’ll send them a message and just be like, do you Do you want to set up a call to chat through the process, or if we already had a discovery call and I sent a proposal, I’ll just follow up and ask if they had any questions about the proposal, but following up is so crucial.

[00:05:05] I can’t tell you how many clients I’ve landed just because I took the time to follow up. I also take time to record podcast episodes for y’all that’s not on like the virtual assistant side of my business But that’s something that I do every week And typically I try to batch these so I’ll record five to eight episodes at a time And then the next week when it’s Time for me to work on podcast stuff. I’ll work on getting the show notes ready. And then the next week I’ll work on getting the edits done from my podcast manager, things like that. So I kind of break it up into chunks and batch things together. So when I record, I do a big chunk of them at a time. Then I also like to factor in time to work on any new projects in my business.

[00:05:53] So if I’m developing a new website template to sell for people to DIY their own website, I’ll spend time doing that. Any different big project I’m doing to grow my own business, I’ll take a few hours throughout the week to focus on that. And then also if I have any discovery calls, I will take some time to get ready for those. Usually I try to do a bit of prep beforehand, like I’ll go look at the potential client’s website if they already have one or just their Facebook page or their Instagram to learn more about their business. I do have them fill out a form before we have the call, like when they book the call there’s a form attached to it so they have to fill it out. And that gives me a lot of good background info about them already, but I do. So I’ll do a bit of prep beforehand just to have an understanding of their business. And then on the call, I always have a very similar list of questions I usually ask. And so I’ll just get that like ready to go on my computer just like with a sticky note on my computer.

[00:06:56] Just so I don’t have to don’t end up forgetting like what I was going to ask and then yeah, those calls typically take I don’t know anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes It depends on if a potential client has a lot of questions, but it’s it’s not too time consuming I’ve kind of got it down to a science now and right after the call I send them a proposal which again I’ve got down to a science that usually only takes me like 10 15 minutes to get that Proposal together. Now I do give you a list of questions and a flow for the discovery calls and a proposal template in the virtual assistant mama Academy. So if you need help with that, I’ve got your back. You can go to virtual assistant mama. com. Check out all the details of the program. See what else is included. Can’t recommend that program enough.

[00:07:44] It’s really going to give you everything you need to become a successful virtual assistant. So just a shameless plug there. But yeah, discovery calls typically take me a max of an hour, including sending the proposal, doing the prep beforehand, all of that. So it doesn’t take super long. So those are kind of the main categories of things I do throughout the week in my business. I typically only work a maximum of five hours a day. And then. I will take time to run errands, and then go grab my kids from daycare, and then I just spend time hanging out with them, cooking dinner, and doing all the mom things in the evening. Thursdays, they’re typically home with me all day. We try to go do something fun. Sometimes I work a little bit while they’re napping. If I have a little task I don’t get done throughout the week, but not always. I don’t always do that. And then Fridays, we don’t work at all. We’re doing fun things. A lot of times we’re traveling because we travel a lot. And yeah, so I really only work in my business about three days a week.

[00:08:48] So this is how I structure my work on a week that I don’t have a full on website project I’m working on. If I do have a website project, then my work days are a little bit more structured, and they’re a little bit longer, typically like seven hours. A day and the way that I do websites is what I call VIP days. And that’s where I build a client’s website completely in three to five days. I’m only focused on their project during that time. I will be talking more in depth about VIP days on the next episode. So make sure you tune in for that. So you can see how that would look on a project week that I have. But yeah, I really only do like one to three of these a month. Three’s kind of a lot because that’s probably three weeks I’m working on client projects and I don’t have a whole lot of time to work on my own business. So I try to keep it around two projects, maybe three.

[00:09:50] Alright, y’all, I hope this was helpful. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me. Again, this works well for me, but take what would work well for you, run with it, adapt it to what you need, and just make it your own. Alright, y’all, thank you so much for tuning into this episode. Again, make sure you tune in to the next episode to learn more about how I structure my VIP days for my clients. And we will see you back here, real soon.