What if you could hand someone your least favorite task every day? Or the one that consumes the most time. Or the one you struggle with the most?
This is exactly what a virtual assistant (VA) wants to do. They want to take your daily schedule or your to-do list and take care of the low-value tasks that are a waste of your high-value time. Which are also often the tasks you hate the most.
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“When you hate doing one thing, it’s going to take you longer than it should,” said Sebastian Gonzalez, Sales and Client Success Manager of Virtue Ally.
“If you hate answering phone calls, or if you hate replying to messages or emails, that's going to take longer, because you're going to do it without the motivation. And you’re probably not going to be good at it.”
Virtue Ally specializes in helping overworked and understaffed medical practices offload some of the non-medical tasks that are currently weighing down their medical staff, and matching them with enthusiastic and reliable VAs that can have an immediate impact on their practice.
We recently sat down with Gonzalez to discuss the benefits of hiring a VA, and where practice owners most often see the return on investment (ROI).
Here’s a summary of our conversation.
Many clinics and practices will start as small one or two-person teams. This comes with an all-hands-on-deck mentality where it’s not uncommon for the founder/ chief MD to spend a lot of time answering phones, responding to emails, or even doing the payroll and bookkeeping.
For many early startups, this is a great way to keep costs down. However, as your practice grows, it can cost you a lot more money than you think. Your focus should be removing any tasks that keep your physicians from seeing clients.
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“If you’re spending 8 hours a week on administrative tasks, that’s 8 hours you could be meeting with patients. That’s where your time is best spent and what makes your practice the most money,” said Gonzalez.
“It’s not always easy for them to ask for help. But when founders realize they’re not good at billing, or not good at bookkeeping, or not good at answering phone calls, it’s a big step forward for them.”
Entrepreneurs, in general, often have difficulty letting go of certain tasks. They've worked incredibly hard to build their business, and they may have a tough time trusting these tasks in anyone else’s hands. At the same time, they may be hesitant to outsource tasks to a non-US-based employee.
“I think the first hesitation is hiring someone from El Salvador to handle their business. So there's often trust issues in the beginning,” said Gonzalez.
“That’s why I think it’s so important for the founders to meet the candidates. We do a video call and the founder can meet the candidate and ask them questions. This is the first step in building trust.”
He added that once a practice experiences the benefit of a reliable VA in place, they quickly want more hours, or perhaps even a second or third VA.
“Once they start working with a virtual assistant, and start working with our Virtue Ally, they quickly realize, ‘I can trust them to do more,’ and that's when they increase. We've had a client that actually went from 10 hours a week to full-time within a month.”
Oftentimes, a founder will meet with Gonzalez with a list of tasks they want delegated and a list of skills they believe their VA should have. They may have a very specific idea of what they need, but the Virtue Ally process begins by looking at the root cause of their struggles.
“I focus a lot on the pain points. Maybe you're telling me, ‘I'm stressing too much with handling bookkeeping.’ But when we dig a little deeper, we may learn your actual pain point is taking phone calls, or answering those messages in the portal,” explained Gonzalez.
“We may learn that delegating those messaging tasks will free up more time than handing off bookkeeping right now.”
At the same time, he also encourages founders to look beyond the traditional hard skills and focus on soft skills such as attitude or coachability.
“When founders meet our candidates, they can see that they're grateful. They can see they’re hard-working. They have that resilience. They have a willingness to learn and they’re open to accepting feedback,” said Gonzalez.
“That's what we focus on because the other things can be learned and the hard skills can be taught.”
When asked about the key to successfully onboarding a new VA, Gonzalez said that Virtue Ally focuses on end-of-day reporting in the early stages of a match.
“We've identified that having those reports is reassuring for the client. They know what their virtual assistant is working on and how they’re spending their time,” said Gonzalez.
“But it also helps the virtual assistant stay organized because they know what they've worked on. They know what needs to be done the next day. So those end-of-day reports help a lot.”
Video calls are obviously the backbone of your relationship with your VA. It’s how business is discussed and tasks are assigned.
However, Virtue Ally’s virtual assistants will typically record these calls. Playing these videos back is a particularly effective difference-maker in the early stages.
“We always suggest recording the meetings at the beginning of their relationship. Because it's a resource that the virtual assistant can come back to if they need to double-check something. It also means they can pay closer attention during the meetings, without having to worry about taking notes.”
“Many of our VAs do take notes, but they also have a video so they can find answers to a specific matter that they talked about during the meeting.”
We’ve already discussed the high-level ROI/ benefit of working with VAs, which is taking your time back so you can focus on patient care. However, there are a few other benefits that you may not be aware of.
First of all, if you had a traditional office assistant, and they suddenly took ill, you would have to find a replacement and onboard them yourself. This would cost you a lot of valuable time and Bamboo HR estimates it can also run you between $7,500 – $28,000 in hard costs.
However, if your VA has a medical emergency, Virtue Ally will find you a replacement and get them onboarded ASAP at no extra cost to you.
“We don’t want the client to have an interruption in coverage. So we will do another matching process. We will handle the training work and handle the transfer from one VA to another,” said Gonzalez.
“Because it takes time. And our clients are not human resource experts and they're not recruiting agencies. They're doctors.”
At the same time, Virtue Ally will also take care of the time and expense required to upskill your VAs.
“We have workshops here at the company. We just had one on working with automation, because automation is at the head of the corporate world right now. We have workshops like that when there is a skill our VAs want to learn or something that can help them in their work.”
Gonzalez added that Virtue Ally takes a tremendous amount of pride in managing their VAs’ happiness. This includes a recent focus on helping them maintain their mental health.
“We have partnered with a psychology clinic and therapists that provide some therapy to our virtual assistants as well. We take care of our people. Because we know that if they are comfortable and they feel safe in their life, they are going to be working better.”
Gain actionable insights from our practice management tips to streamline your workflow.
If you and your team are feeling overworked and overextended, we highly recommend you reach out to the team at Vitue Ally as soon as possible. Don’t wait until you’re feeling burnt out, or noticing your waiting list growing longer!
We provide a do-it-all EHR, practice management, and patient portal solution that helps you slash the time spent on administrative tasks, freeing up your time to work ON your business instead of being trapped by tasks IN your business.
“While it takes a while to customize Cerbo to fit your practice, it is well worth the investment and ultimately saves time and money. The best part is that this translates into successful patient outcomes while minimizing the burden of charting, educating, and day-to-day administrative tasks on the practice team.”
— Dr. Kristann Heinz, MD, RD, Red Hill Medical + Wellness, Pennsylvania.
