Finding a Virtual Executive Assistant in Canada: About VEA
How awesome would it feel to take your to-do list from “overwhelming” to “complete” and keep it manageable forever?
How relieved would you feel in knowing that the things that keep you up at night are now being addressed and managed?
Manage Your Tasks More Effectively
VEA is a virtual executive assistant (EA) and bookkeeping company. We help business owners and executives free up their time so they can focus on what matters most – working on (not in) their companies!
You probably have a number of administrative tasks that are taking up too much of your time. VEA offers a solution that will help you focus on the most impactful tasks to grow your business while delegating other jobs to a trusted partner.
Administrative Tasks
In many cases, checking email, booking travel, managing expenses, and scheduling appointments is not the best use of your time. We call these items administrative tasks, and offloading work to an executive assistant is a great step toward focusing solely on the biggest projects that help scale your business.
When deciding what to hand off first to an EA, a good rule of thumb is to pass along the tasks that drain your energy, you don’t enjoy, and drain your time.
For example, many of our clients have told us that they spend hours a day sifting through endless emails, many of which do not even provide valuable information. A skilled EA can help you achieve Inbox Zero, which is the idea that you spend less and less mental energy on managing your emails as your EA oversees that task for you. Can you imagine waking up one morning with no emails in your inbox? Miracles can happen.
What Tasks Can My Virtual EA Perform?
All of VEA’s EAs are highly experienced and possess a broad professional skill set. Here are a few of the top ways you can work with an EA to lighten your daily workload and refocus on the things that generate growth.
- Email Management: Productivity and mental well-being improve when your inbox isn’t cluttered with hundreds of unread and un-categorized emails. Your EA will not only help you manage incoming emails but also establish filing protocols that will ensure you can stay on top of emails well into the future. Inbox Zero is possible with the right executive support.
- Document Processes: Make employee and customer onboarding a more successful and rewarding experience when you can easily share your tried and true business processes with stakeholders. Your EA can draw up detailed descriptions of how to execute processes and outline the exact steps needed to complete a task from start to finish.
- Calendar Management: Ensure important meetings and deadlines don’t fall through the cracks. Your EA will manage appointment setting, reminders, and even help you get ready for appointments so you are always prepared and in control of your workday.
- Travel Booking: Have you tried to change or cancel your travel arrangements in recent years? An experienced EA can effortlessly navigate the world of flights, hotel reservations, and rental car bookings. They also know all the tricks for transferring vouchers, using your points cards, altering itineraries – so you can be on your way without losing years of your life to on-hold music in meantime.
- Vendor Management: If you run a business, or even head up a department within a larger organization, chances are you contract out for various vendor services on a regular basis. Your EA can communicate with vendors, track and place orders, and stay on top of contracts. There is a lot to do, and nobody should be expected to manage it all on their own.
- Research: Similar to vendor management, an EA not only keeps tabs on all current vendors, but they can also help research and vet potential vendors, suppliers, product research options, software, etc. If you give your EA the parameters, they will be happy to find relevant options.
- Data Entry: It may feel tedious to some, but accurate data entry is essential to knowing your customers and building valuable relationships. A good EA has an eagle-eye for precision, and fast typing fingers don’t hurt either, so your databases are always up-to-date and working for you.
- Appointment Setting: How often do you set a meeting, only to have someone change or cancel it? Or, perhaps your unpredictable schedule oftentimes leads to scheduling gymnastics in order to accommodate you and the team? Rather than risk missing meetings or feeling frustrated over the amount of time you spend on rescheduling, let your EA take over this menial, yet critical, task, so you can be sure you are showing up to the right things at the right time, and not stuck in renegotiating times and schedules if something changes on the fly.
- Transcribing: Yes, there are a host of tools and apps these days to turn audio into text. However, no technology is foolproof, and transcribed audio still requires some heavy editing in order to make it understandable. No surprise here that a good EA is happy to take on this transcribing challenge. Also, not all conversations can be perfectly recorded by a speaker. An EA can also transcribe what is said during key meetings or presentations so you have a long-lasting record of what was discussed, and when.
When is it Time to Hire an EA?
How do you know if you are ready to hire an executive assistant? Ask yourself – what is one hour of my time worth? Calculate your current hourly rate by dividing your salary by 48 weeks (assuming you take vacation) by 40 hours/week.
$125,000 / 48 weeks / 40 hour = $65 hourly rate
Or, calculate your intended future salary by dividing your desired salary by 48 weeks by 40 hours/week
$250,000 / 48 weeks / 40 hour = $130 hourly rate
Once you have learned your business and you become profitable, start handing off tasks that drain your time and energy so you can focus on the highest-value jobs. If you are taking out a business loan or bringing on a VC, you can start to build your team and outsource faster.
Free up Your Time and Grow Your Business
VEA offers a range of executive services to support busy business owners. We find passionate, creative, experienced, and dedicated talent in many of the departments necessary to run a successful company.
In addition, our staff is 100% North-American based. Our specialty is long-term partnerships that come at a fraction of the cost of traditional, in-house employees. There is only a 20-hour minimum requirement per month for our EA services and no minimum requirement for bookkeeping and fractional controller services. And, we’ll never ask you to sign a long-term contract. Set up is quick and easy, and your EA will become a vital part of your team in a short time frame.
As a business owner/executive, you should be spending your time on the things that only you can do – the tasks that provide true ROI to your company.
In a lot of cases, that isn’t checking your email, booking travel, managing expenses or booking appointments. This is where a virtual executive assistant comes in.
We have passionate, creative, experienced and dedicated talent in many of the departments necessary to run a successful company. In addition, our staff are 100% Canadian. Our specialty is long term partnerships that come at a fraction of the cost of traditional, in-house employees. VEA has low minimums of 5 hours a week and only requires 30 days cancellation. You pay only for the time that your virtual executive assistant is actually working on your tasks. Set-up is quick and easy and your virtual executive assistant will become a vital part of your team in a short time frame.
Contact us to learn more! Visit our EA services page to see some of the ways we can help you & see our blog post on how VEA can help you with our Virtual Bookkeeping services.
Lanna Thompson
President, VEA