1) Obtaining hard-to-get email addresses
Need the email of that venture capitalist or biz dev VP, the type of important person for whom firstname.lastname@company.com won’t work? Have your virtual assistant call their office, giving a vague backstory in order to get connected to the big-shot’s assistant. Once the assistant’s are connected, the email address is yours 75% of the time – usually with no explanation necessary. You’ll be surprised at how well the assistant-to-assistant sympathetic connection works. Both are just doing their jobs, and boom, you have your email address.
2) Being the most popular person in your industry
If you’re the type who is paying for VA services, chances are you’re a productive and forward-thinking person, who knows that networking is as important a work task as any other. Let your virtual assistant hyper charge your networking with this system: Create a Google Sheet with a column list of people you want to network with, and their email addresses. An ideal list might be 20 influential folks in your industry who you’ve had a cup of coffee with / have a casual acquaintanceship with and would like to be closer on their radar. Then, have your VA set up Google Alerts on them and their companies, and regularly check the social media accounts of those folks. When they do something notable (their company has a big announcement they are part of, they publish a blog post, they announce the birth of a child), have your Virtual Assistant email them a brief note of congratulations from your email account. Simple, sweet, relevant and asking nothing in return: “Congrats” with a link, “Great post!” or “Exciting business!”, etc etc.
Everyone loves a compliment, and for little effort you may reap big future returns for the increased favorability.
3) Virtual assistants get you out of worthless meetings and let you be in two places at once
It’s everyone’s dream to be in two places at once, and with a Virtual Assistant you can (kind of) do it. Whenever you have a long, informational conference call meeting – for instance, vetting a new vendor, or a project status call for a project that’s only FYI for you – have your VA join. Often they can just dial in sans announcement, but no one minds if you invite them as well. While you listen in one ear and do real work with the other 95% of your brain, and in the meantime your VA is taking summary notes to share with you later.
4) Virtual assistants make sure you always have invitation-worthy evening plans
Whether for business networking, clients, significant others and friends, or your own enjoyment, it can be hard to keep on top of the latest hot ticket, hard-to-get reservation, or unique event in your city. Your VA can do this for you, knowing your tastes. Have them scan event listings that suit your tastes, whether that’s The New Yorker, or Flavorpill, or checking out venue’s announcements. Take it a step further by having them make reservations or buy tickets for you one to two nights of the week – for instance, you could have them book something for you every Thursday. Most things are cancel-able or re-sell-able, which your VA can also do. But this way, you’ll always be the person who has fun invitations to offer, rather than stuck at “what should I do tonight…”
5) Wife/Husband/Girlfriend/Boyfriend/Partner management
Research shows that strong relationships at home are an overwhelmingly good predictor of a happy life. But still, it is easy to neglect these due to the pressures of work, business, and day-to-day chores. Here’s where a Virtual Assistant can keep things cruising along as a supplement to the time you dedicate (which you should be doing!) For example, if you can tell your partner is having a rough week, tell your Virtual Assistant to have flowers ready for pickup on your way home. Once they know what your partner likes, this goes from a thirty minute or more task on your end, to a single email their way. Also, it’s much easier to get a perfect, thoughtful gift for someone you love when you’re thinking about it well ahead of time. You can have your VA email you 3 months before a holiday or birthday, and you can through the year forward ideas to your VA of things they might like, to be collated and saved for when the time is right. They stare extra long at that designer wallet when you’re window-shopping this summer? Snap a picture and forward it to your VA with the subject line: Husband Birthday. Then, three months before his big day, your VA will put it back in front of you. All that’s left for you to do is make the purchase!
6) One word: Upgrades!
Getting upgrades, special reservations, or collecting on bad customer service experiences requires persistence and pushiness, often to the point of unpleasantness. It’s the perfect thing to outsource. Virtual assistants tend to have great patience, and because they have less emotional attachment to the outcome (they weren’t the ones stuck on the tarmac for 5 hours, or whose reservation was ignored at the trendy restaurant) they will handle things in a more even-keeled, productive way. They’re also able to ask more questions than you may have time for, which is often the path towards a sweet deal or upgrade.
7) Deleting your older tweets (yes, you should be doing this!)
The new trend amongst the technoliterati is to keep their Twitter recent. By deleting all tweets more than one month old, Twitter can remain a record of your recent thinking, but you don’t have to worry about an old joke taken out of context coming back to bite you 5 years later. While there are apps that will do this for you, none have the capacity to get you started if you have a significant archive of tweets. So, get your VA on it – give them your login (change the password if needed) and have them delete everything up to a month ago (you can download an archive from Twitter first for your own records). Then, setup TweetDelete or a similar program, and you’re good to go!
8) Virtual assistants vet opportunities
Maybe you get emails from recruiters, or industry newsletters with weekly job boards. Maybe you are looking for a small SaaS business to buy, or interested in media company bankruptcies. Virtual assistants are perfect for regularly collecting, vetting, and summarizing opportunities for you. Create a process for your VA to check for what you’re looking for, daily, weekly, or monthly. That may mean scanning the job boards of your top-five dream companies, or rummaging through online bankruptcy filings, or looking out for funding announcements. The more the VA learns your criteria and what you’re interested in, the better they will filter for you – for now, way better than any artificial intelligence can.
In summary, virtual assistants are a must-have for all those tasks where human judgement is necessary. As much as we love our productivity apps and ops systems, to do certain things right you need a human touch.
Update (November 5, 2017): Here is some more information on how to become a Virtual Assistant.