4 clues that you’re ready for more than a VA in your creative business

Editor’s Note: We’re excited to welcome a new contributor the Dear Handmade Life team… Leah Wechsler who is the content strategist, designer, and writer behind Creative, She Wrote. If you missed her first post you can check it out here: How to create a newsletter that you (and your subscribers) love. -Nicole S.

Just like humans, most businesses go through an awkward phase. Somewhere between the blogspot blog and the 20,000-subscriber list, there’s a weird period where you need help and insight … but you’re not quite ready to hire full time employees. You need more than your virtual assistant (VA) can give you, but you don’t really need tech or marketing support on retainer.

Most of us resist this phase because it’s, well, awkward and we’re not quite sure what to do or who can help us.

Here are some clues that it’s time for more than a VA:

You’ve reached the end of your VA’s skillset
This is not meant as a dig at virtual assistants; I couldn’t run my business without mine! That said, there is a ceiling on everyone’s skillsets – VAs included.

You can reasonably expect your VA to schedule social media updates, format and upload blog posts, put together newsletters, and source potential opportunities for you. It’s not realistic to expect them to connect your LeadPages account to your Mailchimp account and set up your landing page. They probably can’t format and schedule your entire ecourse.

And that’s okay! That’s not why you hired them. But if they can’t do it, that means you’ll have to do it or find someone who can.

You need help implementing your business strategy
So you spent a lot of money hiring an online strategist. They created an impressive and probably-very-effective plan for you … and you haven’t done anything with it. There are lots of reasons why you might be stuck; maybe you don’t know where to start or you’re intimidated by the techy bits.

There might be parts of this plan that you can hand off to your VA, but if your VA isn’t familiar with code, you probably don’t want him/her messing around in your html. And if he/she’s never used LeadPages, he/she probably won’t know what to do with that section of the plan.

You’re ready to uplevel your business
After years of playing small, you’re ready to take things more seriously. You’re ready to start doing the things you know you need to do – content upgrades, webinars, SEO. You’re ready to start doing what you’ve always done – better.

A VA can take some work off your plate and free up time but they can’t necessarily do any of that technical, high level work for you. It’s probably time to stop bootstrapping and googling and bring in an expert.

You want to enjoy work again
You started your own business because you enjoyed the work you do, whether that’s coaching, designing, or coding. But the reality of running a business might look a lot more like edits, invoices, coding and less like, well, the work you love.

When you hand off work – to a VA or an expert – you’re making time for the work that only you can do, the work that you really love doing.

Are you in that weird space where a VA isn’t quite enough? Need help implementing your business strategies? I can help!