Overseas VAs

0:00 Hi, welcome to the podcast that explores what virtual assistants want business owners to know when they start asking themselves the question, Hey, do I need a VA? I'm Rachel Davila. And after 18 years as a virtual assistant going it alone, I experienced the steep learning curve from the other side of the VA client relationship when I hired my own assistant. Joining me on this podcast is a group of friends and colleagues who all have their own take on what busy entrepreneurs need to know to find, hire, and work with a virtual assistant and mindfully answer the question, Hey, do I need a VA?

0:44 Let's get this episode started. Hey everyone, welcome to Hey, do I need a VA? The podcast. We're on episode number five. I'm your host, Rachel Davila, and with me is Bree Bebe, Leanne Ermele, and Sydney Hubbard. And today we're going to be discussing overseas VAs. So ladies, when the term overseas VA comes up, what does it mean to you? How have you heard it and what brings to mind? I think my idea of overseas VAs has always been the agency stuff. So a group of people overseas who are just churning the tasks.

1:28 So it's just a bunch of people. They have some kind of supervisor that you sometimes get to communicate with them and someone else is doing the tasks. Sometimes it's just a person in a thing, but it's always, to me, it's always been a somebody in our room working on task after task after task. They're not like just you, just for you. They have a large amount of people and the clients that they have, if they get stuck, I kind of feel like it, they always, your project always ends up at the bottom until it rises back to the top where they work on it again and it goes back to the bottom when they get stuck. So my feeling has always been that the VAs overseas are, they're just churning tasks. They're not really working with the client.

2:09 It's just like, hey, I have this thing in my inbox. Now it goes to my pending and it just keeps going back and forth. I know there's other VAs out there that are overseas that are like self-employed and that kind of stuff, but all the ones I've worked with have always been more of the agency task oriented kind of thing. So my view of overseas VAs has always been the lower cost, how fast can they do it because they have their dumb piecemeal. In other words, they're paid by the piece that they are doing. I'm assuming there's other, Bri, you've probably worked with other people who are not quite the agency type. Yeah. With some of my clients, they've had previous VAs that were overseas that when I came on, we just kind of combined forces.

2:52 And my experience was that it has been that they're really great. The ones that I've worked with have communicated directly with the client. And some of the things that we found are the time difference and things like that play a factor. But other than that, we've had really good experiences. We've had where they communicated with us directly. The only kind of parts that we've had is where that delay in time thing. Sometimes you can't get things, something came up last minute or you notice something that maybe there was a mistake or something that sometimes there's troubles with the glitches getting sorted out right away. But other than that, yeah, the other version of an overseas VA that I've come across are people from Canada or United States or other places who've moved to say Bali or somewhere like that and are working as an overseas VA, which is also a different version of it.

3:41 Overseas VA's kind of get this wrap of being outsourced, more task driven VA's, more of that doer type versus more of the business partner collaborative executive level type. When we hear the term overseas VA's, I think we automatically go to that $5 VA or the lower end of the price spectrum. But I think it's fair to say that there are pros and cons to working with an overseas VA. So it sounds like if the things that you want to hand off are more task oriented, they're easy, quick or repetitive tasks, those can be good to hand off versus those bigger picture things.

4:32 And I kind of feel like most people immediately think the lower cost VA's, the task oriented, throw it over to Fiverr or whatever and that kind of concept, which is not always what a VA is, but then there is a good reason to use them also. Yeah. Why don't we shift into talking about the pros and cons of working with an overseas VA, knowing that in our definition, it kind of tends towards the doer side. So in my experience, the things that they're good with, they're really good with. One of my clients worked with an agency VA, but they worked together.

5:15 So it wasn't, he didn't have a number of clients. He did work with my client and so they did interact back and forth. And he was amazing with social media. He was very interested in the technical side, the learning, how to build apps and programming and things like that. Things that I was like, I'm so glad you like it, because I do not. And he was really great at it. And so I did not work with him directly. My client worked with him directly. So in my mind, that was kind of a pro because they could go back and forth.

5:59 What are some pros that you've run into with working with an overseas VA? I found the same thing that they really like, any of those techie pieces, connecting programs using Zapier or any of that kind of stuff, working with email marketing platforms and compiling those together. Generally when we're doing that, we're giving them the copy and doing that kind of thing. Because sometimes some of the cultural language barriers can play in a little bit, but it's been really good that way. Getting them set up things ahead of time so that they're ready to flow out, working through some processes and workflows on email sequences and stuff like that. I've had a lot of experiences in some with the social media stuff as well.

6:43 If you have some repetitive topics and things like that that are easy to recreate, but then just shift a little bit, that's been really good. In my experience, those are kind of like the biggest areas that we've dipped in for that. This is a one-off experience with a website builder and stuff, that they did it on a little bit of a predated way of doing it. If somebody else was going in to do it, you would have to have coding knowledge to be able to go and change anything in there instead of some of the more common platforms and things that would be used now. That was just one thing, but that was a one-off. I don't know how, but it would be a question I would ask is the types of things that they do that way, just to make sure you're not having those things. Most of the pros I found are more of the, hey, can you do this and then use the time difference to help you continue the process along.

7:32 It's like, hey, I worked until five o'clock and I'm now going to go do other things, but I'm going to hand this off to you so you can do all these other pieces. When I come back, all those pieces that, yeah, I could have done, but you can do them too, are ready for me to go for the next workday. You can actually keep your workday longer without having to work a longer day. That of course works only if you've got a good communication. If they're a task person that they only do it a certain way, it doesn't always work, but you can do it for certain things like the workflow for MailChimp kind of thing. You're sending out emails, so you're writing them all, but now it's like, oh gosh, now I got to load them all in, but I can hand that off.

8:17 Those kinds of things, if you've already written everything, use the time that you want to go do personal stuff and use them to continue the workflow, take advantage of the time difference. Yeah. Pros are great. Sometimes cons do come into play and I think that our audience, our potential clients looking to know what they're looking for. So what are some cons that you can think of to working with an overseas VA? My biggest one has been language barrier. I had a client who went to an overseas one and didn't let me know this ahead of time, which was hilarious because she didn't think about the way she uses language and she asked them to find edgy pictures.

9:06 She was referring to, in the American language, edgy kind of modern type pictures that were a certain look she was looking for. They gave her edges of cliffs, edges of tables. It was hilarious what they gave her. I got to give them credit. The word edgy clearly means multiple things. It was not what she was looking for. So those kind of language barriers that you don't even really think about until someone gives you back exactly what you're not looking for is the biggest con I've run into is just the whole, that's not what I meant.

9:46 Let's try again. Those of us who speak English as our first language, we tend to really butcher it when you're talking to somebody who is using a translator. So they're like, oh, that is not what I meant. Those are the biggest ones I've run into. Sometimes it's platform things like Brie brought up that they use a more antiquated or something we don't use. So then when you go back to edit, it's like, oh, I need to know this programming language versus hey, it was in WordPress and I'm good. Those are the biggest ones and that's just asking what are they using. Yeah. One of the other things I've found is sometimes you're getting into a flow of something that you want to have a conversation about things and keep that in the go while you're in that flow.

10:35 So sometimes that time difference where it can be a benefit can also be a detriment where you have to try and send a bunch of messages and then hopefully they get the flow of what you're saying when they see it later on and then having to wait till the next day to continue the conversation. Sometimes that can play a little bit of an issue, not all the time. And like I said, we try, I know as a virtual assistants and as a team and stuff to try not to work in last minute things. Sometimes life happens and that happens. So in those moments as well, then it can be a bit of a struggle, but those are things that hopefully don't happen as often. And another thing is cultural differences.

11:19 Like I'm in America, the things that I think about are different in other parts of the world. And so understanding the cultural ideas and ways of working. I had an experience that came out of left field for me, but I hired somebody, it was kind of a fiverr type thing to teach me a program that I didn't know. And they said yes, and they took my money and then disappeared. And I came to find out later that that's kind of normal when they don't understand something or they're not sure about something.

12:04 And so it's just something to consider and understand that cultural differences can come into play. But for the most part, if you have your systems, if you have your things, then you can kind of smooth over some of that. Or you find somebody who can step in and help out with that. Anything else that we want to talk about in terms of knowing what you're getting into when considering it overseas? Something that I kind of want to make explicit about our definition of overseas is that our perspective is exclusively North American, coming from America and Canada.

12:50 So what we consider to be overseas is not what someone who is overseas to us, they would probably see us as overseas. So I think that's something to keep in mind. And something else that I also thought of is the currency exchange. Because the US dollar, its value varies from country to country. And so that's why if some VAs wouldn't cost as much because of that currency exchange. And that's not to say that their work is less valuable, because it can be just as valuable and fulfilling.

13:35 That's true. Good points. If you have any questions about what we brought up today in this episode, please drop us an email at kbapodcast at gmail.com or reach out to any one of us on our social platforms. We'll put those in the show notes. And thanks for joining us today on this episode of Hey, Do I Need a VA? The Podcast. Thank you for joining us on this episode of Hey, Do I Need a VA? The Podcast. If you found this episode helpful, please leave a like, comment or review. And feel free to join our Facebook group, Find, Hire and Work with a VA for more tips and tools.

14:16 If you have any questions, please email them to heyvapodcast at gmail.com. And we'll see you next time.