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5 Step Guide To Hiring a Rockstar VA To Handle Your Business

Envision

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Alright, figured since Im in somewhat of a hiring phase I would document and outline how I'm going about the process.

While I've hired people within the US to manage my warehouse and operations I am going to specifically go over how to find and hire a VA for your company.

We start in the Phillipines, Im not going to get into the why and what makes them the best but essentially, their loyalty, skills, talent, and pay required makes them the ideal VA location to source from.

1. Start by going to Onlinejobs.ph and creating an account.

This is essentially a marketplace to hire VA's to manage all sorts of tasks - literally anything. Most jobs will range from $300-1000/mo for people working a 40 hr work week. Ive found great contractor VA's on upwork before but when you are looking for an employee I dont think there is any better than this platform because they provide you with extremely competent people looking for full time work.


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2. Post your job, be specific, be clear, give instruction

I honestly believe that most people fail before they begin with this step here. They expect that their poor instructions and lack of clarity will give them the ultimate employee and then blame the employee for not knowing what to do.

I broke my posting very specifically.

- What three tasks did I want the VA to be skilled with (Amazon, Shopify, Inventory Mgmt)

- What specific things did they need to know, be willing to learn, or already be doing

- What apps,forms, etc did I want them to know

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Important Note: I mind mapped out all the work that I was doing, that I needed to get off my plate, and then in order of importance ranked it in how I was going to hand it off.

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Then BEFORE HIRING, I’ve created a process or system on how to train the VA on that task - I bought an amazon course that would train her on tasks, I bought a udemy course on shopify to teach her on those tasks, and I will spend the time training on suppliers,etc. By making videos and doing in depth training.

Note that this would be after shes proven herself with the first two videos so I dont waste my time training someone that isnt good/leaves.

3. Create a Google Form application form, ask ~10 specific questions to the job and give instructions on how they should apply.

Ex: Start your response with three sevens. If they dont, they are automatically out.

From the 10 responses to the application I got, three got it right and the three that did are rockstars and you can tell they are competent.

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4. Once you’ve identified between 2-5 candidates for your position you will set up interviews with skype.

My candidate was open to talking on the phone but I opted for text. The filipino culture are generally shy and most will opt to chat via email/text as it makes them feel more comfortable. I generally spend this time asking them about their experience, current living situation, and try to get a feel for if they are right for the position I’m hiring for.

To give you an example of this - the woman I decided to hire to basically run my entire backend operation with me has an industrial engineering degree with a focus on both inbound and outbound logistics and has worked extensively on inventory planning. She was asking for $600/mo and wanted to stay home with her young kids.

To me that's priceless because she has the experience that I dont to continue scaling my companies and fills many of the gaps Im seeing in my business and I have the means to help her stay at home with her kids.

NOTE: If you have multiple candidates you like, set them up on a 2-4 week trial and determine which one you like more, if you still like them both hire them both and get them to work with each other. Otherwise, opt for the one that's most coachable.

5. Training and Implementation

If you’re like me you probably have 0 standard operating procedures written down and all of them jumbling around in your head 24/7. It’s a pain in my a$$ and I F*ckin hate the thought of sitting down and writing it all out.

So im not going to. If you’re VA is competent give them small tasks a few at a time and have them create your SOP’s. You may not want to do this if you don’t have the faith/trust.

  • Hand off all login info needed to take over necessary tasks

  • Send over training itenerary/plan

  • Send over instructions on how to communicate (Im using a mix of slack and asana)

  • Emphasis trail period

NOTE: You need to build trust and in the first month or two you should pay them their salary broken down weekly ($150/week) for my example to gain their trust and give them the stability they need.

Common Questions

1. When should I hire a VA?

Honestly, looking back I hired one way too late - Im literally hiring them because I am spending all my time working in my business and not on it. I figured 100k/mo was a safe time to afford to hire one but I should of done it at like half that revenue.

2. I dont think I have enough work for them

I’d hire them before you have the work and have them build the SOPS and take all menial tasks off your plate. Cause now im doing all the bullshit tasks I shouldn't be doing. Im my own bottleneck currently.

3. How do you pay them?

Paypal, they are paid as a contractor

-----

Onlinejobs.ph has some really awesome ebooks to study and learn from on this. Ive just condensed my process for all of you. I think its a great way to go and I know of a couple guys running 8 figure companies with entire offices of VA’s in the Philippines.

Hope this is useful to some of you!
 
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Envision

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Just wanted to update this thread. My company has a bit over 100 skus ranging in sizes/colors etc through various sales platforms. It's complex and my biggest bottleneck is the management of inventory between manufacturers our internal warehouse and our 3PL's.

I hired the VA I did for $600/mo with logistic experience and prior Amazon knowledge and instructed her that I needed a complete backend system to manage all inventory, forecast forward, and get accurate cogs on each order incoming dependent on the shipping situation, country imported from, etc.

Due to doing this poorly, Ive been spending money air shipping to ensure I dont run out of stock, running out of stock on various sizes, not managing my inventory properly at ALL.

Within 2 weeks, she had created a complete inventory management system to operate the entire backend of my company within excel (not a single page document - a 5 page multi functioning, trend line, 365 day updating forecasting model), many of the functionalities added in I didnt even think about and she added them in anyway. The money I could lose on one error has covered her salary for the next couple years with this system.

Im blown away at what was created and I've even cancelled some Saas programs I was running which will eventually bring her salary in half with the saved costs on the systems. If you have weaknesses, hire them out, and definitely look at allocating and testing tasks with VA's. It works.
 
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Envision

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For those of you who hire VAs to handle the admin part of the work, don't you feel worried that they might mis-use the data?

E.g: company related data, spreadsheets with customers/products info, or maybe you hire them to sort out your list of suppliers/manus.....what if they sell all these to your competitors? Or say, VAs that provide customer service. What if they reply your customers' emails with nonsense and rudeness?

I've also heard of people hiring VAs to manage their social media accounts for them. If the VAs decides to change the password / login info etc, you're screwed.
Especially since they're half the earth apart, there's no way you can control them.

Yes, control.

Sure thats a fair fear, but it's a scarcity mindset. Any employee could take your data and steal from you - if you're going to be an entrepreneur you need to build trust and loyalty in your workforce.
 
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Envision

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Just an update on what a VA can potentially do for you.

My company is growing exponentially and my second one is also starting to take off. Some of the tasks that I need her to be competent in are:

  • Forecasting inventory on a 90 day cycle
  • Managing listings, optimization, complete backend for amazon
  • Managing and working with suppliers while I sleep
  • Sourcing and essentially being a lead generator for future suppliers/products.
(All these things she's showing signs of complete competence in)

Bigger picture breakdown:

Mathematically, I know to hit a 10MM revenue mark I need X amount of products and assuming they're all under 2-3 brands while it seems big... it's manageable with roughly 3-5 employees and about 3-5 warehouse staff. My sole job is to ensure they are good at what they do, happy with what they do, and are focused on our goals.

My fault is in myself trying to constantly be the one producing, managing, and scaling where we are at. Im writing this out not only for myself to reference to but to anyone who's trying to grow a bigger company beyond 1-2 employees and past 1M revenue/yr
 

eliquid

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I have a friend I have known for over a decade that lives in Brazil that I have a good relationship with.

We've made a lot of money together, sharing info and business ideas in those 10+ years.

He hit a rough patch and I thought I could help by hiring him as a VA into another business I run to test the VA waters again myself. I specifically brought him on to help teach him PPC, while he earns a paycheck to help out. So I look at it as a way to teach him a skill while also contributing financially to him and also re-testing VA stuff for myself.

I've historically handled all my PPC agency clients 100% by myself. My "agency" is small in the number of total clients I have at 1 time ( less than 10 at any 1 time ), but my clients themselves are not small. I've self-managed the PPC for:
  • Alibaba
  • Virgin
  • TeamViewer
  • University of Cincinnati
  • more...
So while the number of clients is small, it ends up being more than full-time because of the brands and size of company I deal with. I also had to deal with the fact these companies wanted to deal with me personally, not a VA or someone else in their account. They wanted Jason Brown, not some random other person.

I worked around a lot of my fears and issues this way:
  • For password issues, I simply had another login and password created if I could. For my Google Ads MCC account, I just added another additional email that looked like me.. like jasonbrown@protonemail.orgthat only the VA used.
    • This also let me follow and track changes made in the PPC account so I could monitor what was going on
    • A lot of services will let you have "add on" emails and team members. I just had these look like me so clients wouldn't ask questions or get nosy.

  • For things I could not create a new email and password around, I set up a VPS server with windows and opened a browser with several tabs of URLs and services that I could not add a additional email and logged into them myself while on the VPS at the same time. I then gave use of the VPS to the VA. They didn't know the logins for these accounts. The browser stayed open forever and never closed down.
    • True they could reset logins at this point, but like others have said above you need some level of trust.
    • The VPS also served as a way to not store logins and passwords in other systems like Slack/Trello/Google Docs, etc that could get hacked
    • The VPS also made it look like the logins were from the USA and not Brazil or some other IP.

  • I paid my friend weekly. This helped build trust I feel and also made a difference to him personally. While we already trusted each other from before, you know how "money and friends" goes in the long run. I didn't at any one time want money to be an issue ever, so I made sure to pay weekly and I even covered the PayPal cost too.


  • I gave him all the jobs I hated to do myself first. Things like reporting in Google Docs every week for each client, forecasting budget until the end of the month every day to make sure we are on even spend. Making sure all accounts were running daily ( in case credit card was messed up or other random errors ), setting up new campaigns or ads in different cities, etc. These tasks were needed to be done daily across all PPC platforms per client.
    • This alone freed up a lot of head-space and mental anguish. Have you ever tried to go on vacation, have a nice weekend, or just "sign off" from work and have this nagging shit in your head all day? It ruins the time off you get. This alone was a blessing.

  • Then I gave him all the jobs I thought he needed to build a skill set in PPC ( this was me trying to help him personally ). In my specific example, I showed him things like:
    • Negative keywords
    • Ad split testing ( the way I do it )
    • Bidding of keywords ( script based, logic , etc )
    • more...
    • Don't get me wrong, teaching him this also helped me free up those tasks that while I didn't hate, needed to be done weekly or on some routine of some kind. This ended up saving me more time.

  • Everything I showed him, I did 3 things:
    • I outlined it in Slack for him since we talked in Slack almost daily
    • I did a video or 3 in Jing to show him it visually and where things are and why/how
    • I had HIM create a document to outline it, checkmark it, and organize it and report on it.

  • I monitored his progress and results meticulously for 90 days to see when and how he did everything I asked. This wasn't to micro-manage him, but for me to learn where I needed to improve my communication with him and to also resolve any misunderstandings quickly. Once it was all good, I basically stopped checking up on the tasks and let him work.


  • As he got better and into a groove ( which freed up some of his time ) I gave him more work in other business I do outside of PPC. I always waited until he got better and into a groove before giving him new work so he had prior work done excellently and down pat. Then I put new work on his plate.


  • I was able to go from 100% handling everything in this specific business myself, to just handling phone calls, emails, and invoices for months at a time per client. I did do some things myself at random times, but it was so far and few in-between that I can't measure it. Plus, I was able to help him and his new family ( he had a baby while I hired him ) and it felt good to help out too. ALSO, he learned a new skill that he can one day use on his own to get hired or start another new business in the future.
 
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Envision

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Great write-up @Envision.

Hired my first full-time employee from OnlineJobs in January and he's been AMAZING.
Seriously, the cost vs value for labor in the Philippines is insane.

I've been in a weird middle area between doing everything myself and hiring part time subcontractors for a year, neither being effective. When I learned you could get full-time help for the cost of a part-timer, it was a no brainer.



Question about this...why does it seem Ecom guys hire so late?
Could be wrong but it seems like a pattern.

I know a guy doing $1.2MM/y as well, and he was reluctant to hire anyone for more than $15/hr for an admin/VA.

Personally, I NEED free time to THINK and DRIVE REVENUE, which IMO is the most important roles of the founder. Without extra help, I was spinning my tires.

My guy gets $225/wk and have cut down my personal workload to ~10ish hours/wk.
I'm still whittling it down, but that's a small price to pay for headspace.

Thoughts?

Frugality and lack of knowledge + thinking your the only one capable to execute the task properly. I have all those problems. And im not wrong, most people cant do things the way I do them and wont do them to the level I can.

But letting go and allowing that person to become competent is something that needs to be done to grow
 

MJ DeMarco

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Marked NOTABLE, not sure how I missed this. But I see I miss a lot.
 

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3 Questions To Ask Your Team Each Week That Will Keep Them Accountable.

For a long time, I had an issue with keeping my direct reports accountable on their weekly/monthly/quarterly goals.

A friend who had experience in managing a sales team in a venture-backed startup shared this simple framework with me.

It's eliminated 90% of bottlenecks and helped us to grow bigger, faster.
1) What's your commitment?
2) What are the bottlenecks?
3) How can I help?

You set up a weekly meeting rhythm with your direct reports, follow up on the "commitments" they made from the previous week and ask them these 3 questions.

Then, if they don't achieve them the next week, you start asking questions.

Why didn't you achieve this goal? If they start giving excuses, then you need to identify whether it's a problem with your system (aka Standard Operating Procedures) or with the person.

"Do they have a reliability problem? Is this task not fitting within their strength? Is their focus divided?"
- This "diagnosis" I learned from the book "Principles" by Ray Dalio.

Then you can decide whether to help them, warn them or fire them. Instead of keeping people on board that were not the right fit for weeks/months, we can eliminate them off our roster and find the right person a lot faster.
 
G

GuestUser4aMPs1

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Great write-up @Envision.

Hired my first full-time employee from OnlineJobs in January and he's been AMAZING.
Seriously, the cost vs value for labor in the Philippines is insane.

I've been in a weird middle area between doing everything myself and hiring part time subcontractors for a year, neither being effective. When I learned you could get full-time help for the cost of a part-timer, it was a no brainer.

I figured 100k/mo was a safe time to afford to hire one but I should of done it at like half that revenue.

Question about this...why does it seem Ecom guys hire so late?
Could be wrong but it seems like a pattern.

I know a guy doing $1.2MM/y as well, and he was reluctant to hire anyone for more than $15/hr for an admin/VA.

Personally, I NEED free time to THINK and DRIVE REVENUE, which IMO is the most important roles of the founder. Without extra help, I was spinning my tires.

My guy gets $225/wk and have cut down my personal workload to ~10ish hours/wk.
I'm still whittling it down, but that's a small price to pay for headspace.

Thoughts?
 

Greg R

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Thanks @Envision. Great stuff.

Recently hired a full-time VA for customer service.

Quickly ran out of things for him to do, so I'm currently training him to work on sales.

Right now, I'm making video SOPs and uploading them to Youtube. Starting a small collection of video documented tasks.

Also spoke with a Forum member recently and his best advice was to find one that was self-motivating.

So I choose the person that bothered me/ followed up the most for the job.

Heard that the best VA's right now are Fillipino, but this guy is from Pakistan.

We currently work from Skype, Trello, and Slack.

Skype- quick chats
Trello- Task Managment
Slack- Knowledge Center
 
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Envision

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Brilliant posts! Does anyone have any book recommendations to build stronger bonds and understand the Philippino culture better? It is important that the VA and employer have a strong work relationship.

No need for books, just do it and treat them how you would want to be treated.
 

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Hired a VA in the Philippines after reading this thread. It's been about two months now since. Some days I put her to work doing mundane tasks. Other days I don't have anything for her to do. But at $8 per hour, four hours a day, when it happens, that's just fine by me.

I'm taking it slow. Trying to figure out what I can effecticely delegate. I don't feel comfortable having her directly interact with clients. I need someone in the states for that.

But so far she seems to be doing a fairly good job. And in the long term, I think this experiment will pay handsome dividends.

Cost savings aside ... no bureaucratic paperwork to deal with ... no equipment or office space to rent ... no concerns about workplace discrimination or sexual harassment claims ... all big advantages over a worker here in the states.

And she never complains. No entitlement attitude like you often get from disgruntled Americans.

Glad this thread inspired me to action.
 
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Envision

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Does anyone have any tips for paying a VA in a way that doesn't have a ton of fees associated with the payment for processing? Paypal charges me $5 per every $50 paid.

Use Transferwise and set them up on monthly retainers
 

Eskil

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Nice write-up man, and basically exactly what I did when I hired my first ones from OnlineJobs.ph a few years ago. I've been recommending that site to others here ever since.

And yes, hiring too late is a mistake that is easy to make. A lot people are surprised how affordable quality VA's can be.

:thumbsup:
 

Mutant

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If the VAs decides to change the password / login info etc, you're screwed.
Especially since they're half the earth apart, there's no way you can control them.

Yes, control.

Would a password manager not solve that? Afaik (I don’t currently use one) you can grant & rescind access to various things, without them having knowledge of the actual password. They have their own password, & you control what it can unlock.



Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
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Great post @Envision !

As I'm also in the process of looking for virtual staff, and I've found great value in a couple of books, both available on Kindle:

1. Virtual Freedom, by Chris Ducker
2. Outsourcing Mastery by Steve Scott

The first one has the best tips to hire full time virtual staff (and talks extensively about hiring Philippino staff).
The second is more a "tips and tricks" kind of book, and might be better to experiment on short term projects before hiring full time staff.

I found both helpful.
 

Envision

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Wanted to say that this thread has tremendous value, thank you @Envision. As for your VA with the kids, after doing all this, do you plan on giving her raise? Keep her more motivated and do better.

In addition, I noticed that you hire them as contractors. I'm not familiar with the hiring process, as I'm still in the slowlane. But before you start a job, you typically have tons of papers to fill out, get money taken out, etc... How does it work with your end when hiring someone out of the country? (Legalities wise... Taxes wise...)?

P.S. Have you considered using Shopify's Partner Academy to teach your VA?

She makes above average for the Phillipines, I believe average ranges around $450. If we hit the metrics needed this year I will raise 10-25%.

In the US i have myself and my US employees as W2's - im required to pay payroll taxes and yes there are more legalities that go towards establishing that. With the VA I pay her bi weekly via transferwise and our agreement is she works 40 hrs/wk in reality she probably works somewhere around 25 at the moment. I dont track it nor do I make her track it - as long as it gets done I dont care because the money Im paying her is saved through her efforts.
 

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For those of you who hire VAs to handle the admin part of the work, don't you feel worried that they might mis-use the data?

E.g: company related data, spreadsheets with customers/products info, or maybe you hire them to sort out your list of suppliers/manus.....what if they sell all these to your competitors? Or say, VAs that provide customer service. What if they reply your customers' emails with nonsense and rudeness?

I've also heard of people hiring VAs to manage their social media accounts for them. If the VAs decides to change the password / login info etc, you're screwed.
Especially since they're half the earth apart, there's no way you can control them.

Yes, control.
 
G

GuestUser4aMPs1

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It's not a bulletproof solution, but I've wrote about how to filter potentially bad hires in the past: Interview Questions to Hire for Character

E.g: company related data, spreadsheets with customers/products info, or maybe you hire them to sort out your list of suppliers/manus.....what if they sell all these to your competitors? Or say, VAs that provide customer service. What if they reply your customers' emails with nonsense and rudeness?

These two are solved in the hiring process.

I don't know about Singapore, but there are definitely legal ramifications for leaking company data in the USA afaik.

Afraid an employee will be rude?
Then hire someone with customer service experience so it doesn't happen.

Expect a standard, and replace them if it's not met.
 

Envision

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One question, guys. If you need the VA to handle your support email, how best should I go about doing it? Do you give the VA the credentials to your support email?

Yeah,

Create a library of canned email responses in slack and slowly hand off repetitive emails and teach them how to respond on a case by case scenario. Any escalated or complex emails would go to you until they are competent
 

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If you want to save yourself time with hiring all those peeps, you may want to consider hiring a project manager or HR manager that can do all of that for you, on a rolling basis and monitor them to make sure they're hitting KPI's. If you focus all your time and energy into choosing the right project manager, then they will build out an effective team.

You can also get them to write out SOPs for each task/department.
 
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Fantastic thread guys. Thanks for all the information. Will definitely look into this for doing what I need to do. I'm looking for more of an executive assistant/admin for both my life and business. Someone to manage my calendar, appointments, reminders, book stuff while also helping out with business tasks, as right now my business is not that intense or require a lot of business specific knowledge. Will report back on my experiences.
 

mikecarlooch

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@Envision Thanks for this great thread! I saw this a while ago, but a question just popped in my mind that I needed to ask.

I believe it was @fastlane_dad that said recently, with the right systems, training, and leadership even the most low-level workers can become rockstars.

This got me coked up on the fact that this can also be done with talent in other countries ("Virtual Assistants").

The question I've got is that if you're a pretty new company and you don't have a crap ton of money to invest into talent for fulfilling a product..

Could you use inspiration, influence, and long-term benefits to get that third-world talent to see the vision you have in mind as a CEO (kind of like what @Ravens_Shadow was talking about in his thread about getting programmers to work for little pay)?

Kind of like... letting them know if they stay the course at the beginning, they will reap the benefits in the future?

Also letting people know right off the bat that any suggestions they make to the company that is implemented successfully will allow them to get a cut of the benefits that come from that, kind of like what Charles Koch preaches about not running a company like a dictatorship.

Another thing is - what if you used skills from other parts of your life, in my case it would be health & fitness, to help that talent on their own self-improvement journeys and keep them motivated in that way?

All in all, what I'm asking is do you think that these things matter and could work to start a relatively large team without having to put up a lot of money at the start if you explain the vision correctly to them?
 
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Frank H.

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Brilliant posts! Does anyone have any book recommendations to build stronger bonds and understand the Philippino culture better? It is important that the VA and employer have a strong work relationship.
 

AppleUnited

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One question, guys. If you need the VA to handle your support email, how best should I go about doing it? Do you give the VA the credentials to your support email?
 
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Jeff Noel

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Lots of value in this thread ! Thanks a lot @Envision and @Greg R for all these posts. I'll need to reread them a couple of times as we're looking to hire our first VA for my GF's business. We might have to go with locals since we're working in a specific language, but the hiring/training process and SOP building process is really valuable !
 

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