Virtual Assistant for Coaches

Let’s think about the day-to-day life of a business or personal coach, and what that day might look like if you were to hire a virtual assistant to help you get your work done. Specifically, let’s examine some of the tasks that will make your life easier as a coach:

• Scheduling follow-ups: One of the most important things for a coach is to offer a personal touch. That is, after all, what your clients are paying for. A virtual assistant will make it possible for your clients to hear back as to scheduling changes and approvals, even if you’re not in the office. For example, if a client wants to cancel a session but you’re using a vacation day, a virtual assistant can still handle that work while you’re doing something else. A virtual assistant can also handle appointment follow-ups and seamlessly integrate them into your calendar.
• Marketing management: If you have a full client roster as a business or life coach, it’s fair to expect that you don’t always have time for managing your marketing efforts. Whether that means managing an email list full of potential leads or not being able to update your social media accounts regularly, it’s important that you still carry out these tasks to keep a healthy amount of client leads coming into your business. Outsourcing this work to a virtual assistant can make your Internet marketing presence much more consistent without you having to lift a finger.
• Bookkeeping and expense tracking: Let’s say you’re using a business card to buy some new equipment to help you stay in touch with your clients. Are those expenses effectively tracked? How will you access them come tax-time? A virtual assistant can take some of your least favorite tasks off your hands, which in turn means you’ll be free to focus on the growth and quality of your business.
• Travel arrangements: Need to book travel to meet with a client in person? Attending a conference but don’t want to deal with the nitty-gritty of making all of the necessary reservations yourself? A virtual assistant can handle your travel arrangements with ease, carving out a schedule that’s much more manageable than if you were to take on each detail yourself. That includes:
  
  - Dinner reservations
  - Cars and transportation arrangements
  - Catering
  - Client meetings
  - Finding directions
• Other general tasks: Need testimonials to be written? Responses to online reviews? Someone to scroll through social media to find what people are saying and respond professionally? Creating onboarding documentation for new clients? Anything that needs to be done around your office--and can be done with a computer--can be included.

Even if you take it on its face value that having a virtual assistant will make your life as a coach much easier, what are the tangible benefits to hiring an assistant? As it turns out, there are more than a few:

Saving Money

One of the most important tangible benefits of hiring a virtual assistant is that it means you can save money over hiring a full-time worker. According to BestOfBudgets.com, “it is three times cheaper to hire a virtual assistant than a full-time employee.”

Why? A full-time employee comes with deep financial commitments: benefits, a full-time salary, and much more. A virtual assistant is more flexible, taking on as many hours as you require throughout the day. Virtual assistants can take care of their own benefits when they perform contract work, or these benefits can be offered by the agency employing them. Everything on your end is not only much less expensive, but it’s much simpler.

Faster Communication

Since business and personal coaches work in one-on-one situations with their clients, personal service is paramount. The problem is that you don’t always have the time or energy to keep up on all of the personal communications that your clients should expect. A virtual assistant can smoothen out the edges and make sure that your email inbox never gets so dense that you don’t know who to respond to next.

Wider Communication

As a coach, you’re probably used to having a single medium for communication—with clients, with leads, with everybody. But adding a virtual assistant to your company means that you’ll be able to handle communications across multiple media channels. While you focus on speaking with clients one-on-one, your virtual assistant can help other clients and leads feel that they’ve been heard.

More Productivity

It’s tempting to think of a virtual assistant as something as being “less than” a salaried assistant—after all, you get what you pay for, right? Not exactly. As it turns out, remote workers have some of the best productivity rankings of home-based workers, according to data from Canada Life Group. The work-from-home arrangement for virtual assistants is not only flexible and comfortable for them, but it results in being more productive in the virtual workplace. That translates to tangible benefits for your business.