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This article is a part of series of interviews we conducted with different virtual assistants who work for Shopify store owners. We finally selected 3 interviews to publish them on our blog:
The reason behind these interviews is simple, we've come across many small/medium size companies who have a very limited resource, the most precious of them all, TIME.
Let' be honest, you can run a business and delegate/outsource tasks to different employees/people/companies but if you don't understand the first thing about these tasks you're assigning you'll be under-served.
When SoulCycle - a chain of indoor cycling studios - CEO tells the story about the kind of a person she looks for when recruiting new instructors, you immediately understand how success comes to be:
"we look for are people who are YES people. We understand stuff happens but the most important part of that is the turnaround; how do you leave somebody feeling, you have to leave them feeling great. Everytime someone walks into that door its because they choose to do it"
She knows why people came to her fitness center, and why they are coming back with friends. It is about the family feeling/atmosphere, about making people belong.
The point we're trying to make here, is that once you identify your business's success factors, you understand what would happen in the absence of these factors, and therefore you'd know the type of people that you should hire and what customers you'd like to attract.
So going back to SoulcCycle, if the CEO hadn't known that the 'Family aspect' of her fitness center is one of the main reasons of their success, she would have recruited the wrong people and/or marketed the wrong message. As a consequence they wouldn't have become the phenomena they are today.
Obviously Shopify store owners are like any other business owners, and once their business grows they'd require help in some/all of the following areas:
- Marketing.
- Blogging / content creation.
- Customer service.
- Design
- Tools and on-site functionalities.
- Off-site communications.
- etc..
Here is our conclusion from all the interviews we've conducted with virtual assistants
- They know about as much as you tell/teach them, the more precise you're the better they can serve you. Don't expect them to do what you'd like them without spending the time and effort first.
- Many of them learn from experience not from background.
- Try to find more than 1 VA to share the tasks, because you need backup.
- They may have insightful input to your business, especially if they worked for several Shopify stores before.