How to decide what Virtual Assistant services to offer

When you first start out as a Virtual Assistant, you need to have a good think about what services you want to offer. If you don’t already have a specialist niche, here’s how to figure out which services make the most sense for you, based on your experience and skillset, what you’re good at, what you enjoy, and what clients will happily pay for.

Questions to ask when deciding what Virtual Assistant services to offer

Because the answer to “who do you want to work with and what can you do?” isn’t actually “everybody and everything”, it really helps if you know what it is you do and who you do it for.

Here are a few questions to help you clarify your offering.

What are you good at and what do you like doing?

Because these are two very different things!

You probably decided to become a Virtual Assistant because your job wasn’t making you happy, and you wanted a more flexible work-life.

So don’t take on work you don’t enjoy doing or that prevents you from having the lifestyle you want.

Many VAs need to start earning money, so they say yes to everything that comes their way – even if they don’t have the inclination or skillset. But if years of work have taught you anything, unenjoyable work always ends up leaving you despondent and unmotivated.

So, while you may have income coming in, you won’t only be unhappy; you’ll be so busy juggling unenjoyable, low-paying work and family responsibilities, you won’t have the time to fix the situation.

Not good

Of course, you need to bring home the bacon, but taking on work you enjoy doing from the start will ensure you end up loving your new career, which is the reason you went freelance in the first place.

How do you want to work?

Have a think about whether you:

• Want to go to clients’ offices or be 100% virtual.
• Prefer working with very organised people who know what they want, or you love whipping chaotic “creative” types into shape.
• Want ongoing tasks that need doing every day (such as diary and email management) or prefer non-time-specific project-based tasks. Or a combination of both.
• Want to be deeply involved in helping your client run their business day to day (almost like a traditional PA – thinking for them and helping them plan), or if you’d prefer clients that just dole out tasks and don’t require much hand-holding.
• Have any niche skills or experience (such as event/project management, graphic design, travel coordination, board-level experience, etc) that you can charge a project or very high hourly rate for.

I personally like highly organised people and only work virtually. This means I only take on tasks that I can do remotely. Knowing this makes it much easier for me to filter out unsuitable clients.

You may think that everyone can be a client, but I’ve learned over the years that this isn’t the case.

Most businesses/personality types will not be a good fit, and you’ll be far happier working on tasks and with people that are.

Obviously, the tasks you decide to take on will depend on your circumstances and other factors such as:

• Family obligations such as childcare and/or caring for elderly relatives.
• Whether you own a car or know how to drive.
• Your skillset and experience.
• Your existing client work.
• The income you’re aiming for.
• The number of hours you want to work.
• Your health.
• A million other things.

Make sure that the tasks you take on work for you because versatility really is the best thing about being a Virtual Assistant!

Keep it simple

When you first start out, it can be really tempting to offer every service under the sun.

But if you can help everybody, you’re suddenly competing with every other VA that claims to do the same, and you’re then only competing on price, which you’ll never win without bankrupting yourself.

I recommend offering a niche service in addition to your regular admin and business support services, as you’ll not only see a much better rate of return, but you’ll also enjoy your job more.

When you specialise, clients understand what you actually do, you’re seen as the go-to specialist in that particular area, and when someone needs that service, they’ll come to you.

Most new Virtual Assistants offer what they think clients will want, but that’s the wrong way around.

If you offer things you know how to do, are good at doing, like doing, and want to continue doing, then both you and your clients will be very happy bunnies.

Suck it and see

I actually didn’t keep it simple when I first set up. I offered services that I thought people would want, but what they actually wanted was different – so my services developed over time until I eventually found a niche.

It was a backward way of doing it, and I recommend the niche approach from the start, but if you’re still not too sure of your niche, offer the things you know how to do and general admin/organisation/lifestyle tasks and adjust them depending on the response.

You don’t have to set a fixed timescale for this – just try stuff out, see what happens and remain flexible to change.

There’s a great book called ‘How to get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be‘ by Jack Canfield (I read this then set up my business within a week) where he likens starting projects to firing an arrow.

Everyone spends so long agonising over the ‘Ready, Aim’ bit that they never get around to Firing! He says to just shoot at the target, then re-adjust if you’re slightly off the mark – and I completely agree with him.

If you wait until everything’s perfect, then you’ll never set up your business.

Revise and refine

As one of my first clients hired me to manage their financial records, I included expense management as a service.

I’m not a trained bookkeeper, I wasn’t advertising myself as such, and I wasn’t telling clients that I was qualified. Clients simply needed their expenses organised into some kind of system, and I either created this system or maintained the one they already had.

The problem was that I didn’t particularly enjoy doing it.

As mentioned, over time I’d discovered that I prefer projects rather than ongoing tasks, and I also liked to work remotely – so this task wasn’t floating my boat AT ALL. So I stopped offering it as a service, removed it from my LinkedIn skills and removed the testimonials from my website.

Even though I might have lost out on some work, I didn’t like doing the task, and money isn’t a big enough motivator for me when I can get paid to do things that I do enjoy.

Try new things

Occasionally, a client would ask if I knew how to use a certain system or do a specific task – and I didn’t. This was never a problem, and they just showed me how to use the system or do the task – then suddenly…

BOOM! I had a new skill.

Sometimes this new skill turned out to be something I loved doing, so I learned more about it and then became really good at it – and then I was able to offer it as a service or even turn it into one of my niches.

Download my free list of 100+ Virtual Assistant services you could offer. There’s no need to spend time and effort brainstorming potential services when I have over 100 examples to get you started!

Conclusion

When it comes to deciding which Virtual Assistant services to offer, you might already have a good idea because you’ve been working in that industry or niche area already.

However, if you’re not sure, then I suggest that you start out by offering general business support and then move into a niche later on once you have a little more experience under your belt.

Just make sure that your services work for you because if you hate the tasks you’re doing, you’ll be no better off working for yourself as a Virtual Assistant than you were in full-time employment.

Remember, you run the show now, doll, so you get to decide what you want to spend your time doing!

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