SHOWNOTES
So often people tell me that they would love to hire a virtual assistant, but they are afraid they won't have enough work for them to do.
They dread the thought of having to stay on top of creating new work for the VA.
This episode shows you how recurring tasks lists erases this problem!
Take a listen and tell me what you think!
Don’t miss this episode and let me know your thoughts after you listen. I always love hearing from you. If you have any questions about this episode, comment below or DM me on Instagram @jen_lehner
RESOURCES
160+ Tasks You Can Outsource to Virtual Assistants
3 Secrets to Scaling your Business & Building Your Dream Team
TRANSCRIPT
[00:02.650] - Gary Vee Hey guys, it's Gary Vaynerchuk and you're listening to the Front Row Entrepreneur Podcast with our girl, Jen.
[00:10.790] - Jen Lehner Hey there. So last week we talked about the kind of mindset we need to have in place before we hire a virtual assistant in order to make sure that we're successful with the virtual assistant. And today we're going to talk about the magical effect of recurring tasks. And this is the answer to the panic that you feel when you just think about hiring a virtual assistant and you think you know what those busy days look like when you're just so swamped, so covered up.
Read more...
[00:42.970] - Jen Lehner And to think that you also have to be responsible for allotting tasks, it's a bad feeling. Maybe you've been there before, maybe you did hire someone and it required that you be on top of it, right? Like that you have a list for them of things to do every single day. And if you're so busy, then what happens is you just throw up your hands and just say, I'm just wasting money, they're not doing anything because I don't have time to stop what I'm doing to tell them what to do. So recurring tasks are the answer to this problem.
[01:18.470] - Jen Lehner Let me explain. So I figured the best way to illustrate this would be to just share with you some of the tasks, recurring tasks that we have in our business to get your juices flowing. So first of all, I'm looking down at my notes, you're going to hear pages turning.
[01:34.500] - Jen Lehner But okay, let's start with daily tasks. Scheduling, admitting new people into our Facebook Group. If you have a Facebook Group, then you know what I'm talking about. You have to screen those people and make sure that they are the right people for your group. And I know that there's Facebook offers an automated way of doing this. And athird-partylso there are third party tools, which we do use some of those, but really I prefer it when my VAs can one by one look at the people who are coming in and make sure that this is the right group for them and to make sure that they've answered all the questions that are necessary when joining the Facebook Group. And then also welcoming them once they do join the Facebook Group.
[02:15.310] - Jen Lehner Also adding posts to units. So right now we're just talking about Facebook Group management. But if you have a Facebook Group and you want to run it, well, you almost have to have help to do this because there's a ton of work. So keeping it organized, making sure the right announcements are pinned to the top, making sure your banners are relevant with your current promotions, making sure things get sorted into those guides or units as they used to call them, inside your group. Making sure events are created inside your Facebook Group. All right, so that's all like Facebook Group management.
[02:48.050] - Jen Lehner Social media stuff. Like that alone, if all you did was hand over daily social media tasks. You could keep a VA busy just about all day long, depending on how deep you want them to go, but at a bare minimum, posting on your social media, making sure that tweets get retweeted, anybody who tweets you that it gets retweeted. Keeping track of statistics of your social media posts, like, what was the engagement, what were your most popular posts, putting all of that on a spreadsheet for you.
[03:20.600] - Jen Lehner Repurposing everything that you have for social media, going back into the archives. Right. I'm sure you have a ton of content that you didn't stretch it like you could have or should have. And the VA can go back and do that as long as the content is still relevant.
[03:37.310] - Jen Lehner Your email inbox? Oh, yes, ma'am. Yes, sir, you certainly can. I think I have a podcast episode about this. If not, I know I have a YouTube episode about this that shows you precisely how your virtual assistant can manage your inbox. It was the last thing I handed over. I wish it would have been the first thing, because this is your business email account we're talking about. But it's so wonderful to wake up in the morning and see maybe four emails versus 40 or 400.
[04:07.370] - Jen Lehner Processing all of your content that is timely. For example, you live stream well, after you livestream on any of the social channels, it's going to sit there as a replay. But really you want to make sure that as many people see it as possible. So many things need to happen for that to be the case. So first, you might want your VA to download it and upload it into YouTube, or download it and cut it into bits and turn it into short form audio.
[04:41.970] - Jen Lehner Or let's say you have a Zoom call with a client. Well, you need to send the client the replay in a lot of cases. Maybe you even offer them a transcript. Maybe you talked about resources during the live stream or the Zoom call that need to be found by your virtual assistant, whether it was a book and an author. And then they need to create a link to that Amazon, the book that you suggested. So if you've done any of these things before, you know that there's just a trail of tasks that follow each and every one of those activities.
[05:16.550] - Jen Lehner And I would just say client engagement in general, whether that's an email or messaging or whatever, your VA can handle that. As a matter of fact, your VA can take phone calls. You could set up a Skype number or a Google voice number for your VA, direct all calls that way, and your VA can answer the phone for you. All right?
[05:36.320] - Jen Lehner And so weekly recurring tasks, well, in our business, we have a and you could do this exact same thing. We have a list. It's called the Taco Guide, and Taco stands for Tools and Apps, Creating Opportunities for all. So in my Facebook group every Tuesday, people share their favorite tools and apps. And then what happens is on a weekly basis, my team gathers all of those tools and resources and puts them in this guide.
[06:06.920] - Jen Lehner It's now many pages long and we not only add the link to the guide, but we categorize it. We check out what the tool is first to make sure it's something that looks good, but usually they're fantastic, the things that our members share. And then we put them in this guide and we have it beautifully organized by category. Okay, so maybe it would be like free stock video apps and then we list them all there and then we have them hyperlinked. So it's very easy for people to click and download whatever the tool is.
[06:39.040] - Jen Lehner And so we do this weekly, 52 weeks a year. And then now when the end of the year comes, we have this awesome, really awesome lead magnet that people just love. And so I'll talk about this when we get to the annual recurring tasks, but one of our annual recurring tasks is to take that taco guide that we have been compiling weekly and promoting the heck out of it and gifting it to our community. And it's a wonderful list builder and it's just a really wonderful valuable thing that the members of our community really love and look forward to every year. Whatever business you're in, you can absolutely do something like this.
[07:20.380] - Jen Lehner You could collect books, and even if you don't have a community of other people sharing these items, this is user-created content, essentially. But even if you don't have that and you just make it a point to pick your favorite app or your favorite book or whatever in your industry, at the end of the year, you're going to have a nice little list and you could do the same thing.
[07:42.500] - Jen Lehner Also keeping all of our affiliate links straight. So on a weekly basis, actually, this is more sort of as needed. So anytime we sign up for a new tool, we have a beautiful spreadsheet that is beautifully organized by my team of all of our affiliate links.
[08:01.640] - Jen Lehner And everybody should have one of these because even if you don't have a big audience, we're always referring things to each other that we love, the things that we use, right? It could be a pair of jeans that you just love that you got off of Amazon, or it could be something in your business. But the point is, we're all like referring stuff to each other all the time. And now almost everything offers you an affiliate link. When someone purchases from your affiliate link, it doesn't cost them anymore, but you just get a nice little referral fee.
[08:31.470] - Jen Lehner It might just be a couple of dollars, but those couple of dollars add up over the course of time. And if you have a large online business and you're dealing with a lot of these tools, then you are probably like, like I am with several pages of these links. Some of them become obsolete, but you want to have them handy mainly because someone and this happens to us on a daily basis where someone will say, hey Jen, what's that email service provider you talked about? And I'll say, oh, you know that's Convertkit? Let me send over my affiliate link.
[09:03.500] - Jen Lehner ConvertKit gives you, I don't know, they get some sort of special extra free week or something. How they do or maybe there's no benefit at all other than it's a little thank you to you for providing the information. Okay, that was affiliate links.
[09:20.460] - Jen Lehner We use an app called GetBeamer. I love it. And it's like a little pop up on our website and our membership site that just shows like what's coming up on our calendar, things we don't want people to miss both inside and outside of our membership. And it needs to be updated. And so that's on our weekly.
[09:37.760] - Jen Lehner Checking broken links and our website in general. So that happens weekly. We have a checklist for that so that every week we can make sure we're looking at all the things we need to be looking at.
[09:51.770] - Jen Lehner Our YouTube management and our podcast management. So I'm not even going to go into that. I'm just going to tell you that if you're doing YouTube videos or you're doing a podcast or you're doing a blog for that matter, there's a recurring list of tasks that go underneath that that are a mile long. So if that's all you hand it off, you're not going to have that dread feeling that we talked about earlier of like there's nothing for them to do and I need to get out in front of them so I could show them what to do and I'm too busy to do that. Nope, that's not going to be the case because there is plenty, plenty there.
[10:27.190] - Jen Lehner Monthly tasks. Well, on a monthly basis, this goes back to our Facebook group. Our team finds the people who are most engaged in the group and recognizes them with a beautiful little post and a nice little message. We do that publicly. And the thing is, Facebook gives you those analytics. They tell you exactly who is most engaged in your business. I mean in your Facebook group.
[10:50.920] - Jen Lehner Anniversaries. So if you have a membership and you want to recognize people for their one year, two year, three year anniversary for being in your membership, we have a system for that. So our team is keeping track of that. So everybody's dates and then all of their dates. So they check the anniversary list once a week and see who has anniversaries coming up.
[11:16.060] - Jen Lehner They go on a spreadsheet. And then we have different routes we take depending on the year of the anniversary or whether they're a charter member. Right. So some people, I shouldn't go down this rabbit hole, but I'll just tell you we have this really cool automation we set up.
[11:30.730] - Jen Lehner It's a link and we send it to people via messenger. And we're like, hey, it's your anniversary. Pick one of these things that you'd like to receive. And we give them a choice of depending on their level, they get a choice of three gifts. One of them is, this is for our big anniversaries is a 1 hour, one-on-one, consult with me or strategy session with me, which I don't even offer anymore. So that's one thing.
[11:54.340] - Jen Lehner And then another one is like, merch, we've got a hoodie and like a Front Row VIP tumbler. And then everybody all of our charter members every year get something in the mail every single year. And I don't want to say what we're sending out this year because I don't want to be surprised, but that's all done. That's all powered by the virtual team. I don't have to do that.
[12:17.990] - Jen Lehner They create a content planner every single month. And really they just are replicating the calendar from the week before. It's a beautiful template that they created. They pick all the special holidays for that particular month and add it to the calendar and they send that out to our membership.
[00:12:37.370] - Jen Lehner That's real value. That I can say to my members, like, when you join this membership, you're going to get monthly content calendar sent to you every single month. And they love it. It's one of their favorite things. And I don't do that. My team creates that.
[12:52.510] - Jen Lehner And then an affiliate report. So if you work with affiliates, then you obviously need to keep track of who needs to get paid. And so my team keeps track of that on a monthly basis and sends me an affiliate report. I just remembered I didn't stick on this list.
[13:07.170] - Jen Lehner But also weekly we have someone who compiles on a beautiful spreadsheet. All of our social media statistics, everything like, what was the content that got the most engagement? How many new followers do we have? How many followers did we lose? So we're looking at our growth.
[13:24.290] - Jen Lehner And also like, YouTube has broken down very specific. We have a whole YouTube spreadsheet that shows like how long did they watch, how long was the average video watched? How many new subscribers? Did we lose any subscribers? What was the most popular video this week? So all of those statistics.
[13:44.360] - Jen Lehner Then annually cleaning our email list. I actually might move to doing this twice a year, but basically we want to clean our email list to make sure that we don't have any dead weight in there, honestly. Because as you know, if you have people who aren't you have a lot of cold subscribers who aren't opening up your emails. It really affects your overall open rate and like whether or not your emails are going into people's spam folders, not to mention the fact that it's expensive. Like once you get over 20,000 email subscribers, it costs. We use ConvertKit and it's expensive, so you want to keep an eye on that. And we have the same email sequence that we send out and I don't have to touch it. My team is able to take care of that.
[14:30.700] - Jen Lehner Another annual task, recurring task is organizing our Google Drive folders, or I should say we have a system for organizing our Google Drive folders. And then the team right around, I would say November, duplicates all of those folders and renames them for the new year, and they're sitting there ready to go on January 1.
[14:54.560] - Jen Lehner Also our holiday cards. So the team puts together all of the labels and I like to hand write my holiday cards so they print out all I mean, they format all of the labels and deleting any people who maybe are not part of our community anymore. And adding all the new people, I mean, that's kept up on a regular basis, but that's kind of automated. Once people sign in with us, sign up with us. But formatting the labels is really just such a wonderful thing. I just print them out on my end and then I go back home. I sit by the fire with a cup of cocoa and I send love letters to my members.
[15:31.740] - Jen Lehner And that's the kind of thing you just can't do when you're doing all this stuff yourself. You can't do that fun kind of stuff. Let's see here we have a Ginormous wall calendar that is really cool that instead of those blocks for each month, each month is one horizontal line across this giant wall calendar. Like giant.
[15:53.000] - Jen Lehner It takes up almost my whole wall. And one of my friends and colleagues, Leanne Weller Smith, creates a special branded one for my community. So I always have to make sure and get the link for that and share it with the group so the team takes care of that. And then I told you about sending out the Taco Guide and promoting it at the beginning of the year, and we call it like the Best Apps for Entrepreneurs for 2022 or 2023. As the years change, that changes.
[16:23.380] - Jen Lehner And then another annual recurring task is a Black Friday promotion, which everybody can participate in that to some degree, I'm pretty sure a podcast episode on that and a blog post as well on how you can think about incorporating that into your business.
[16:39.720] - Jen Lehner And then we do annual planning. So it's like a full day workshop, sometimes two days, where we get together as a team and we plan and then occasional as needed sorts of tasks are like if someone cancels from if you have a membership site and they cancel that needs to be processed, we have an exit email that gets automatically sent to people. Like if someone automatically goes to PayPal and disconnects PayPal and cancels that way, then Zapier, we get a notification. I mean, it connects to Zapier, which then sends an automated email that's like, all good things must come to an end, but we'd love to know why you're leaving us. It will help us be better and all of that. And people respond to that and it really helps us to improve our programs.
[17:30.170] - Jen Lehner Failed payments. So that happens sometimes. People lose their credit cards or whatever and you get those failed payment notifications, so the team takes care of that.
[17:40.260] - Jen Lehner And in fact, I could probably do a whole podcast episode on this. But having someone else to handle financial conversations is such a benefit in your business, right? You don't want to reach out and be like, hey, Sally, your credit card failed. It's like awkward. I don't like to talk money with my clients. I don't have to. My team can do all that. Not just fail payments like, hey, it's time for renewal, or those kind of conversations. You don't have to have them.
[18:13.550] - Jen Lehner Adding new links to Linktree. So if you're using Instagram or really any social media channel or TikTok, and a lot of them Twitter, same way, where you're only allowed one link in your bio, so you use something like a Linktree. Well, every time we do a podcast episode, every time. So this really, I should say, is a weekly task, not an occasional one, but any time we have new content, new blog posts, new YouTube, whatever, that link tree needs to be updated. And also making sure that things that have passed, like things that are outdated, get removed from your Linktree.
[18:50.690] - Jen Lehner Updating all the headers and banners in all of the places on social media to correlate with whatever it is you're promoting at that time. And so you want to definitely trick out all that real estate that is available to you in your Twitter banner and your LinkedIn banner and all of that to really highlight what it is you're talking about. And for us, that can change so much, that can change so often. And so it's really nice knowing that I've got that covered.
[19:21.420] - Jen Lehner So that's honestly just scraping the surface of recurring tasks. And this is the secret for getting rid of that anxiety of feeling like you can't hire someone because you are afraid of having to just constantly be worried about what it is you're going to hand off.
[19:41.150] - Jen Lehner Not to mention the fact that I have a free list of 160 tasks that you can outsource to your team just to get the ball rolling for you. And that is going to be on the shownotes page. Also, I want to make sure you know about our free workshop that is starting on Monday, August the 15th, Solopreneur to CEO Secrets, all about how to hire and train your perfect match virtual assistant. And if you're listening to this and the workshop has long passed, don't worry if you go to ceoscretstraining.com and that secrets with an S. It will redirect you to some other similar training that we'll have on the subject.
[20:18.960] - Jen Lehner Okay, you know why we can do that? Because I have an awesome team that makes all that magic happen. And I want you to have that magic in your business, too. So thanks for listening, and I'll see you next week. Bye.
