[ALISON]: Today’s sponsor is Move Forward Virtual Assistants. We are a virtual assistant company that specializes in helping therapy practice owners. We have US-based, highly trained VAs who are ready to help you with your small to medium-sized group practice. They are available during regular business hours to live answer calls and take all of those nagging, administrative tasks off your plate. If you’re looking for training because you want to hire your own VA, we have an option for you as well. We’ve designed an e-course all about how to train your VA. And if you’re interested in either of those options, be sure to check out our website www.moveforwardvirtualassistants.com

This is the Grow a Group Practice podcast. I’m Alison Pidgeon, I’m your host. I am excited to present to you this last part of our 3-part series where we’re going to be talking about onboarding and training your virtual assistant. Once again, I am joined by James Marlin, who is the COO of our virtual assistant company called Move Forward Virtual Assistants. And we have learned a lot over the past year and a half of owning the VA company, about everything that goes into training a VA really well and we’re excited to share with you what we’ve learned. So here is my interview with James Marland.

Hi, and welcome, to the Grow a Group Practice podcast. Today, we are talking about a very important topic that we get asked all the time about and that is, “How do I onboard and train my VA?” And if you’re interested in hiring your own VA, definitely go back and listen to the two other episodes that we’ve recorded in this series. The first episode was on the ROI of hiring a VA. The second episode, were all the things that you could do to sort of get yourself ready to hire a VA. We talked through the hiring process, and today we’re talking all about the onboarding and training of the VA. And I have with me, James Marland, who is the Chief Operations Officer of Move Forward Virtual Assistants.

[JAMES]: Hey, Alison.

[ALISON]: Hey, how you doing?

[JAMES]: Good. I consider myself the Chief Helper of Move Forward Virtual Assistants.

[ALISON]: Yes!

[JAMES]: I’ve kind of always been that way even when, like playing sports, I played basketball in high school, and I wasn’t the best at it, but I could set picks and paths and I really like helping, even back then I considered myself a helper. So, here, at the company. Yeah, my name didn’t get put in lights, you wouldn’t necessarily notice, you know, I didn’t make the stat sheets too much. But, I really enjoyed it when the other people scored. So, I worked really hard at doing that, and that’s kind of still what I do today, just helping people get the most out of their time.

[ALISON]:
Nice. Yeah, so I own Move Forward Virtual Assistants. It’s a company I started back in the fall of 2018. And I sort of took it as far as I could and then right before I went on maternity leave, I connected with James. James and I are actually old friends, and he was looking for a job, and I needed somebody to take things over while I was on maternity leave. So, he’s been with us for about a year and has really developed a lot of great tools and processes and we actually created a whole e-course around how to hire and train your own VA? Because that’s a question that I get asked all the time as a business consultant is, you know, “I want to hire maybe somebody who’s local to me but I don’t know how to train them, or how do I find them” or, you know, they don’t even know where to start. So, that’s kind of why we developed these resources in this e-course around that, which we’ll talk a little bit more about at the end of the episode. But, I wanted to get to our topic today, which is talking about, you know, how once you find a VA, how do you kind of start to onboard them? So, what are some things that you’ve learned, James? With running the VA company and we onboard, you know, new staff on a regular basis. So, what are some things that we’ve learned in that process?

[JAMES]: I think the first thing to think about in the onboarding process is really a retention process. Can you imagine going through all the struggles of interviewing the right people, and writing a job description, and holding interviews, and then deciding on somebody and making the offer and they accept it, and then you do nothing to prepare them for the job? And they basically feel thrown, well, I would say, thrown in an office, but if they’re working as a virtual assistant, they’re basically at their own home with nobody to help them or to clarify anything for them. And they, maybe because of the lack of work on our end around the business owners end with getting people ready, they decide, well, this isn’t the job for me, and I leave. So, onboarding people is really part of the engagement and retention process of your employee.

[ALISON]: Yeah, I’m really glad that you brought that up because I think it’s just, like, setting the tone for how that relationship’s going to go.

[JAMES]: Right, Oh, yeah. They’ll learn from your emails, like, they’re gonna be watching you too, like, are you getting back to them quickly? Do you have good details? Do you respect them and their time? They’re evaluating one of the main things when anybody enters into a new group is, “Do I fit?” You know, “Do I belong here?”

[ALISON]: Right, right.

[JAMES]: So, they’re asking those questions.

[ALISON]: Yeah, so um, I know one of the things that we figured out, and you like put a name to, is this concept of “progressive delegation”. And so, when you start training a VA, I think a lot of times, we encounter practice owners who wait way too long to hire an assistant. And then by the time they do they’re like drowning in work, and they just like, want to like dump everything in the VA’s lap.

[JAMES]: Yeah.

[ALISON]: But then yeah, so you can fill in the rest.

[JAMES]: Well, I just remember one hire I had, she was great, I’m gonna tell you about a mistake. Sometimes it’s hard to talk about mistakes, but I did hire somebody. And I gave her to a practice that was drowning. They didn’t really realize how bad they were drowning. But, they tried to delegate everything to the virtual assistant in the first meeting, and then the assistant quit.

[ALISON]: Because it was so overwhelming.

[JAMES]: It was so overwhelming. So as a new assistant, it was a perfect storm. I was new at the management, the assistant was new to the company, the client was new to the company. We all came together and it could have worked with a little bit of process and sort of starting slow. One of the things I recommend to practice owners is just when you’re teaching your virtual assistant, when you’re onboarding them, find the thing that’s the biggest pain point for you. For many, it’s scheduling, or insurance, and just get them to do that really well. And then, when they do that, you’re going to be building trust up and you’re going to build a relationship, you’re going to be working on your communication process, you’re going to work out the kinks. And then you can, you have that solid foundation, they’re doing it well, and then you move on to things and what I what I like to use, and you can use a spreadsheet, but I like to use a Trello board. I call it the progressive delegation Trello board and you can, there’s, I know it’s on Facebook and on our blog, Two Steps Forward on our web page that tells people about how-to, here are the list of things that practice owner wants to delegate. and then here are the stages that the virtual assistant is in those stages. Maybe they’ve just been introduced to it, or maybe they’re doing it on their own. You move through those stages, and finally it moves to the last stage where the virtual assistant is doing it, but the practice owner is just verifying in their weekly meetings or bi-monthly/bi-weekly meetings, just how are they doing? And these could be things like the call log, that we’ve talked about in the previous episode, where the practice owner reviews the call log once a month with them and says, “Okay, we scheduled 72% this month, that’s 3% higher than last month”, and then capture the winds like how, what led to that increase or what led to the decrease. So those, the delegation board or having some way to track what you’re delegating and so you’re not delegating everything at once is, it’s pretty important when you have a remote worker and somebody who might not be working for you full time.

[ALISON]: Yeah, I think it’s also really important to like, start out with one thing. And for so many practice owners, it’s hard to delegate, because you feel that, like, loss of control you’re like, “but no one else can do it as good as I can.” And so, you want to feel like, “Okay, I’m giving you this one thing, and I want to see if you can, like, if I can, like, trust you with my baby, right.”

[JAMES]: Right. Oh, yeah, I’ve had that very same phrase said to me several times by different practice owners. This is something that they’ve groomed, and their business is something they’ve spent hours on. Long nights and weekends, they just don’t hand it over to anybody. So, the delegation process is pretty hard. And I do say, I mean upfront, onboarding is work. Getting somebody who maybe was not, doesn’t know your practice, and maybe they know scheduling, but they don’t know you and your clients. They might be 50% as good as you the first time they try it. They have some room to grow. However, in the next week, can they get 10 or 15% better and then the next week, can they get 5% better and all of a sudden, they’re 80, 90% as good as the practice owner. And now maybe it just takes them five minutes longer to do it, but they’re doing it. Now, the practice owners gained, you know, an hour back of their time to do something else to grow their business or to see clients. So, the time aspect is, yes, it will take a little bit of work, but hiring the right person who cares about you and cares about your clients, they will get the scheduling process and the other processes done to where it’s almost indistinguishable between the owner and the virtual assistant.

[ALISON]: Yeah, definitely. What are some other things related to training that practice owners need to think about when they’re bringing on a VA?

[JAMES]: Yeah, some are high-level things. I like to clarify the win for the virtual assistant and I like practice owners to clarify the win. And, basically, that means like, what do we celebrate? What is the, what gets recognized because what gets recognized and what gets celebrated gets counted and it gets done. So, I think a baseball and, even if you don’t know sports too well, you know, the goal of baseball is to make it around the bases and to get home and everybody cheers when somebody gets a hit. And then they cheer even louder when somebody makes it to third base and then probably cheer the loudest when somebody hits a home run. And then the score ,you know fireworks go off and the scoreboard lights up and everybody goes crazy. Well, what’s that for your office? You know, like what would really get you energized? And if you can communicate that to the virtual assistant, like, what is, how can they help you win? You know, what’s a single, or a double, or a home run for your practice? You can motivate them to work hard in the work that it takes to get that win.

[ALISON]: Yeah, I’m glad that you brought that up because my assistant Brittany knows exactly what the win is, like, her priority is to keep the schedules full. And if she’s doing anything else and the phone rings, she knows, “You got to stop doing that thing and answer the phone because it might be a client, a new client looking to schedule.” And when we have our check-in meetings, she’ll even bring up like, “I’m really worried that the schedules aren’t as full as they could be.”

[JAMES]: She’s worried about it.

[ALISON]: Like she somehow, like, has control over that, right? Like, beyond just answering the phone, I’m like, “Well, I am the one who’s in charge of the marketing. I’ll make, I’ll see that, you know, we start doing some more things just to make sure like, you know, more calls come in.

[JAMES]: Yeah. But she’s so identified with it.

[ALISON]: Yeah. And she’s like, you know, taken so much ownership over it.

[JAMES]: Right. Right.

[ALISON]: That she, you know, like, she doesn’t have any control over the if the phone rings but like, she’s, you know, she knows it’s the priority, the number one priority. Yeah.

[JAMES]: She knows the scoreboard and yeah, awesome.

[ALISON]: Yeah. So, what other things do we need to think about training a VA?

[JAMES]: I like two things and they both revolve around tasks. One is “set and measure your standards.” So, you can’t improve what you don’t measure. So, if you really care about messages returned to people communicated. So, you can measure that and just have them report on it. You can’t improve what you don’t measure and they will automatically spend more time on what they’re reporting on. The other part of that is you can’t measure everything. So only measure, you know what’s important, and if it stops becoming important, don’t waste time on it. So, set and measure standards and things like that could be you know, call logs and people scheduled, and maybe something like incorrect appointments scheduled that, you know, if you want to get to 0% or 1% or 5% of that you, you measure that. And then the second thing about tasks and things like that is “defining done”. How do they know when the task is done? And, how are you going to know when the task is done? If they don’t, if they don’t know when it’s done, your assistant could spend hours on something that you thought would take 15 minutes. So, especially when you can’t see them, and they might, they can’t see you, and there’s no feedback that way. They need to know when they’re done and, and then I always like to put in my assignment, like, when I assign something that they tell me when they’re done so I can stop worrying about if it’s done. If I have them, communicate with a client or reach out to a client. I ask them to include me, include me on that as well. So, I can stop worrying about it because it’s not done until it’s done in my head.

[ALISON]: Yeah, yeah. And I think too, like, I’ve had a lot of assistance in my private practice, but I had an assistant once, who was, like, so determined to get people to, like, pay their past due balances. Like, we have a good system in place to make sure people are paying at the time of the appointment, but it’s not perfect.

[JAMES]: Right, sure, sure.

[ALISON]: So, we had to, you know, that was part of her job, she had to, like, chase people down to pay their balances. And, like, she would spend three hours chasing down like $15. And I said to her once, one time, like, do you realize I paid you more than $15 to chase down that $15. I was like, you know, try once or twice if it goes beyond 10 minutes, like, just forget it, like, yeah, um, you know what I mean? Like, and I don’t think she thought about that.

[JAMES]: Oh, no, yeah.

[ALISON]: Because, you know, why would you? You just, you’re given a job and you just think like, “Oh, I have to complete this task.” But I think like, even those types of things, it’s good to, like you said, like, “How do I know when I’m done?” Well, you’ve reached out twice, it took you, you know, 10 or 15 minutes like now you’re done.

[JAMES]: And you know that intrinsically in your head like, you know it, it’s part of you, you know, you wouldn’t spend, you know, as the owner, you wouldn’t spend that much time on $15. They don’t, they don’t have that. So, if you don’t define it, it could wildly, it could be wildly different than they’ve presented.

[ALISON]: Yes. Yep. So, that was a good lesson for me.

[JAMES]: So, do you want to talk about what to do before day one?

[ALISON]: Yeah, that’d be great.

[JAMES]: So, you know, retention and hiring and onboarding starts before day one. You’re gonna want to send them, after you send them the job offer letter, you’re gonna want to send them another letter with, “welcome”, a welcome letter and the time of your first video appointment. Most likely, it’s probably a video or phone call. And you want to send them an I9 form, and if they’re an employee, it’s a W4 form. I think also the employee, W, you don’t need an I9 for a contractor. Is that right?

[ALISON]: Right. Yeah.

[JAMES]: So that’s, yeah, that’s just for the employee.

[ALISON]: Right. Yeah. And if you are hiring a W2 employee, what I found to be really helpful is hiring an HR company, even just to like help get you started. Because they’ll, they’ll tell you all of that, you know, what’s required and fill out this paperwork, you know, have the person fill out this paperwork before they start working for you. And all of that, like really varies by state. So, it’s good just to check-in either with a lawyer or an HR company about that.

[JAMES]: Absolutely, yeah. And, I like to ask for a short bio, and a picture because I put them on the web page. So, if you have them your virtual assistant on your web page, you’d want that as well. And then, before, before they start, a few days before they start, you’re going to want to send them an email, you know, “I’m getting excited to introduce you to the team, and this is what you can expect from your first day.” So, that all happens, you know, all that time and attention and preparing them happens even before they ‘walk into the door’. Walk-in through the door.

[ALISON]: Yeah. Yeah, the one thing to I think we wanted to talk about was communication, which I think is so huge, especially when you’re not working in the same office.

[JAMES]: Right.

[ALISON]: You have to be, like, so much more intentional about communicating and maybe even, like, over-communicate.

[JAMES]: Right.

[ALISON]: So, do you want to tell us a little bit about kind of how we have the systems set up to make sure we have good communication?

[JAMES]: So, we use texting, email, and meetings, and also Trello and sometimes Slack. So, we try to communicate, if it’s urgent, or we need an answer through text, we use email for communicating information. And some flow back and forth. If you can’t understand what the person wants in two emails, you need to escalate it to a phone call or some other way. Found six emails, six emails is not efficient when one two-minute phone call would have solved it all. Then we, I really, really stressed to my practice owners. I mean, I don’t require it, but I stress to them that frequent meetings with a virtual assistant, maybe 10/15 minutes a week, just to review the projects you’ve delegated, and the results that you’re going for, and then to fix or course correct any issues. That’s pretty huge. Like, it’s really hard to course, the time to stop a car from going in the ditch is when it’s still on the road. If you’re falling into the ditch, the momentum is gonna carry you, it doesn’t matter how hard you stomp on those brakes. So that’s the same principle of course correction is for with your employee, or your contractor, is just frequent communication so you can figure out what they’re doing right and support that and then what might need some, some help, or some little bit of correction and then get them back on the road. It’s not, it’s not like you’re doing anything, you’re not doing them any favors by holding back, and holding back, and hoping it gets better. You’ve just gotta get it, tell them and get it done because they want to, if you communicated the win, and you’ve communicated and you’ve hired the right person who cares about you and your business, they’re going to correct when you tell them.

[ALISON]: Yeah, that’s the same thing I was gonna say was, you know, I always tell practice owners like, “The VA’s want to make you happy, and they want to do a good job. And so, if you, you know, if they do something wrong or just because they’re new and they don’t know any better, like, they want to be told, like, that they made a mistake and how to correct it because they, they want to do a good job.” So, you know, they actually appreciate when you do give them, you know, constructive feedback like that.

[JAMES]: Right. They always, the assistants are always telling me when they get praise, right? They’re always sending to me, “Oh, did you see this email from this practice?” Or, you know, “Oh, I feel so good because they, they told me what I was doing,” you know, they love the feedback and they really want to do a good job and, and we, here at Move Forward, we hire helpers. We hire people who have your same values, and they consider themselves part of your practice, and they want you to succeed. That’s, it’s part of what we do.

[ALISON]: Yeah, that’s awesome. , maybe now is a good time to sort of transition to talking a little bit more about this e-course that you created.

[JAMES]: Yeah. So, we have a e-course on the platform “Teachable”, you can find the course on our web page, under “Resources”, we are calling it “E-Course”. That will take you to the links for the e-course. And in it, there’s about four hours, maybe four and a half hours of video and audio, where we talk through hiring a virtual assistant, we go in stages. Basically, we talk about preparing yourself for a virtual assistant, which is basically defining your role, defining their role and getting that process in motion. We also review, in the second step, getting your practice ready for a virtual assistant, and that’s all the steps you need to take with getting your email set up, and what phone system do you use? And have you thought about writing out who your therapists see? And what to do when there’s scheduling problems? And how do you write a phone script? And do you take a call log? And, like, you know, it’s that’s just all the steps in preparing your practice and things you need to think about. And then finally, we talk about onboarding and how to make that first week matter, and the first day matter, and the first month matter, and meeting with them frequently for constant course correction, and all through this, there’s links and tools. I think there’s about 15 I didn’t count them before we recorded but about 15, like, worksheets and things throughout the, throughout the course that you can either look at and follow along or fill out yourself.

[ALISON]: Yeah, that’s awesome. And I wanted to say, too, we created this course because, you know, we got, I get asked a lot as a business consultant about hiring a VA. And there are a fair number of people who want, for whatever reason, to hire a VA themselves. And obviously, then they’re not going to become a client of the virtual assistant company, but we wanted to create something because even if they were hiring a VA themselves, they were still asking me a bazillion questions about, “How do I hire a VA? How do I train them?”

[JAMES]: “What do I train?” Yeah.

[ALISON]: Yeah, like, even, you know.

[JAMES]: “How do I keep them?”

[ALISON]: Just wanting to make sure like, right. They want to make sure like their training, confidentiality, and HIPAA, and all that kind of stuff. So, yeah, so that’s kind of the reason we created this e-course because we recognize that, you know, some people just maybe don’t want to hire from a VA company. And that’s totally fine, but they also needed some resources to be able to figure out how to hire and train a VA themselves. So that’s kind of how this whole e-course came about.

[JAMES]: And it records our lessons, you know, we’ve taken some of the lumps, so you don’t have to.

[ALISON]: Yes, yeah. And I think we’ve been doing this long enough now that we kind of have, you know, uncovered all of the little pieces of things that you may not have thought about when you, you know, maybe started, you know, thinking about hiring your own VA and, for me, as a business owner, I like consulting with, you know, experts who have done it before. And, you know, I can use their knowledge to help my own business. And so, I feel like that’s what we’ve put together here, in the e-course.

[JAMES]: Yeah. Time and time again, whether we’ve invested in an HR person, or an accountant, or consultant for the virtual assistant company, every time we put money in, it’s really paid off for us.

[ALISON]: Yeah, and I think, like we talked about in Episode One, like having the right VA in your practice is, like, such a game changer could be such, you know, not only like increase your revenue, but bring a lot of peace of mind and allow you to really be the CEO of your group practice.

[JAMES]: Absolutely.

[ALISON]: Yeah. So how do we, how can people get in touch with you, James and also remind us again, how they can find the course?

[JAMES]: Sure. My email is [email protected]. You can also schedule a call with me on the web page, moveforwardvirtualassistants.com, top right, it’s a contact and you can just schedule a time, you can just pick your own time. I really love that the Acuity Scheduling add-in to the web page. And then to find the e-course, this will be under “Resources”, there’s a tab at the top “Resources” and click “E-Course.”

[ALISON]: Nice, and if anybody is interested in hiring a VA, through our company, that is how you would get started, just schedule a call with James. We are a really good fit for small to medium size group practices, especially that take insurance so all of our VAs have background, and knowledge, and training in insurance and the lingo and all of that, you know, verifying benefits, all those types of things. So, if you’re a small to medium size group practice, that takes insurance, we, that is our sweet spot, I would say. And yeah, and also, I think when one thing that kind of makes us stand out from other VA companies is that we do try to answer calls live as much as possible. So, we do provide that level of coverage. Like, we had mentioned in one of the other episodes, you know, clients tend to call around and whoever answers first, that’s who they schedule with. So, it is really important that you have somebody who is who is really responsive to calls and emails for new client inquiries. And so, we took a lot of the feedback that we got from practice owners and we developed that type of package for people so that they were capturing those new clients right when they were reaching out to schedule.

[JAMES]: Yeah, it’s been very successful.

[ALISON]: Yeah, I think the practice owners have appreciated that, that kind of set up and then we’re able to have just, you know, four or five clients per VA, which also helps them sort of keep everybody straight.

[JAMES]: Well, it allows them to give the time and attention to all their clients, rather than having to switch around from 10 or 15 different clients and feel just stressed, they can give their time and attention to just a few clients they have, and really deliver good service. In fact, one practice owner said, “You know, I feel like you’re, you, I feel like you’re just my employee” to one of the virtual assistants just because she was just always rotating through the emails and the phone. So, just some really good feedback.

[ALISON]: Nice. Well, James, I really appreciate you taking the time to come on the podcast for these three episodes. I feel like we covered a lot of ground here with just all the things related to virtual assistants so thank you so much.

[JAMES]: My pleasure, Alison.

[ALISON]: If you have hung in there and listened to all three episodes in this three-part series thank you so much, I hope it was helpful. If you want to find out more about our virtual assistant services, please visit www.moveforwardassistants.com and I’ll see you next time.

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This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regards to the subject matter covered. This is given with the understanding that neither the host, Practice of the Practice, or the guests are providing legal, mental health, or other professional information. If you need a professional you should find one.