How to grow your business with the right team members (Virtual Assistant? Online Business Manager? Some other marketing-digital-tech kind person?)
If you’re a business owner who’s feeling a little stretched right now, you may be wondering who you need on your team in order to move the business forward.
Virtual Assistant? Online Business Manager? Some other marketing-digital-tech kind of support that you can’t quite define?
It's confusing. It's frustrating. It feels time-consuming before you've even started. And you figure it's just easier to keep going as you are because your business is far from dreadful... it's just not quite as slick as it could be.
I regularly talk to people who have literally put off getting help for years, because they haven’t been able to figure out exactly how someone could best help them.
And today I’m starting with two roles that are often confused: the VA and the OBM.
Both can help you manage your time and keep your business running smoothly, but they have v-e-r-y different scopes.
Scope of the role
Virtual Assistant
Contrary to popular belief, this is more of an industry rather than a job title. Not all Virtual Assistants come from an executive assistant or personal assistant background. And not all VAs focus on administrative support.
VAs bring a whole range of backgrounds and skills to the virtual business table and are, in my opinion, vital to the success of any business that's aiming to be profitable.
A VA is assisting and is often task-driven and working in silo; meaning they don’t need to know what’s going on in the rest of the business in order to do their role really, really well.
Example tasks for a VA might include more traditional admin-y things like diary management, travel (it’s coming back, I think!), and research. And specialised VAs might offer social media support, bookkeeping, website maintenance, lead generation, to name but a few.
Online Business Manager
Online Business Managers also come from a variety of backgrounds and usually have a business-related qualification and/or extensive experience in business management.
For example - I had been running my business for three years before qualifying as an Online Business Manager in 2019. I have since gained a coaching diploma and become a certified coach in line with global standards set by the International Coaching Federation (ICF).
An Online Business Manager needs to understand all of the other moving pieces of a business at a strategic level in order to complete their role. That often involves strategic project planning, plus hiring and managing team members (including VAs) to see goals through to completion.
The exception
Of course, there’s always a lovely little exception! And this is the stretched business owner who doesn’t yet have anyone on their team and needs strategic support to figure out exactly how they can run a more efficient business to improve profitability and productivity.
In this case, an OBM is onboarded and they roll their sleeves up to do ALL the things (including a VA-style role) for a short-term basis in order to:
Understand the scope of the role so that the right hire can be made quickly and efficiently
Create standard operating procedures so that high standards are maintained across team members
Implement systems and processes so that there’s the transparency of tasks and workload to enable capacity planning across team members in the future
Ultimately hire and then manage team members to step back from #AllTheThings and into the business management role
Pricing models
A VA often charges by the hour - either on an ad-hoc basis (maybe just one hour per month) or as a recurring block booking for clients who recognise the value of having regular support. Or by the project (where there’s a defined scope and agreed outcome) which has a fixed price.
Research tells me that the average rate for a VA in the UK is £27+ per hour, and in the US it’s around $30+ per hour.
Due to OBM’s role being strategically involved, they have higher rates (upwards of £55/$60 per hour), higher minimum block bookings (it’s impossible to do an OBM role for one hour a month), and can price with a base rate + a percentage of sales during a launch they're involved in.
A contractor will never be offering all-day availability for the fraction of the price of a full-time employee. They're offering part-time hours for a part-time role. And, regardless of title, you can always expect to pay more when you need more access/ responsiveness/ availability.
I have lost count of the number of times I’ve advised someone to either adjust their expectations or hire a full-time dedicated employee. Failure to do so will always lead to disappointment and massive frustrations on both sides.
Strategic partnering
VAs typically need to know what’s going on in their immediate world to do their role well.
OBMs plug into that big picture vision: they need to know everything that’s going on within the business to bring their proactive management expertise to the table and gain the business intel to offer well-considered insights and recommendations.
Managing projects and systems: OBMs work with the client to understand the business goals and then they turn that into projects with tasks, milestones and the right people (which often loops back to a stellar VA's involvement), and managing the team of contractors.
Managing metrics: OBMs keep an eye on the data so that business decisions can be made on reliable facts and logic (rather than a knee-jerk emotional reaction) so the client can work smarter to gain more web traffic, get better quality leads, have improved open rates, increase the lifetime value of a client, etc.
Summary
VAs and other freelancers are a great option for solopreneurs and businesses who need help completing tasks they don't have time to tackle themselves. This might be a relatively new business owner who wants to outsource non-billable tasks so they have more time available for revenue-generating work.
OBMs are perfect for profitable businesses that are growing and need managerial support to keep up with demand while maintaining a brilliant client experience.
Based on what you've read - which will be the next hire on your team?
Ready to explore coaching?
If you’re curious about what coaching could help you achieve, why not book a discovery chat with me to see if it’s right for you? No pressure, commitment or obligation. Just a conversation about where you are versus where you want to be and how we can bridge that gap.