Virtual Freedom Book Summary - Virtual Freedom Book explained in key points

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Name: Virtual Freedom
Author: Chris Ducker

Chris Ducker

How to Work with Virtual Staff to Buy More Time, Become More Productive, and Build Your Dream Business

(5 ratings)

13 mins

What is Virtual Freedom about?

Virtual Freedom is a fully fledged manual on the art of virtual outsourcing. It covers in detail all the things you’ll need to consider while assembling your virtual team, while also providing solid advice on how to circumvent the common pitfalls.

Table of Contents

Virtual Freedom
summarized in 7 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 7

What’s in it for me? Discover how to hire Virtual Assistants and free up your own time for real work.

Being a business owner is a pretty demanding job: there is a team of staff to run, costs to keep an eye on, business strategy to decide and investors to meet. Finding time for it all is not easy, and even if this time is found, summoning up the energy to complete each task is just as difficult.

Luckily, the modern, technologically advanced world has provided a solution: Virtual Assistants. These are members of staff who work for you but are located elsewhere – in another city, state or even country.

If you hire a team of effective Virtual Assistants you will find yourself with the time to plan and lead your business. But if you get the hiring wrong, you could find yourself with even more work to do. These blinks show you how best to recruit, train and manage a team of Virtual Assistants.

In these blinks you’ll discover

the best way of training someone in another time zone;
why you should hire Virtual Assistants for the role but not the task; and
the one job you simply cannot outsource.

Outsourcing your work to staff in other locations allows you concentrate on what matters.

Life as a business owner in our modern world is not easy. Often, we’re expected to be jacks of all trades, doing a myriad of jobs, each of which is time-consuming.

Before you can even think about spending some time creating innovative new products and services, or even selling those products and services, you have to first grind through a schedule packed full of other stuff: there’s staff to be managed, checks to write, budgets to review, contracts with suppliers to go through, and the list goes on and on.

It’s no surprise that so many struggle! In fact, the author’s own attempts to manage his business led him to a complete burnout; he simply didn’t have any time or energy left to succeed.

That’s when he decided to do things a bit differently: he outsourced some of his work to Virtual Assistants (VAs).

VAs are staff who do work for you, but who are not in the same location as you. They can take on a huge range of tasks, from accounting to office management, thus allowing business owners and leaders to concentrate on the work that they’re best at and that matters most. By hiring VAs, they can enjoy what is known as virtual freedom.

There are two main reasons why VAs present such a great opportunity:

First, the internet allows constant communication across thousands of miles between you and your VA. No matter how far apart you are, you can work as if you’re in the same room.

Second, there’s a huge pool of available talent. More than 42 million Americans currently work as self-employed consultants and freelancers – all of them are potentially available for part-time, full-time or even project-based work.

So, if you’re struggling to keep afloat in a sea of tasks, virtual freedom may be your life raft.

No single VA can do all your outsourced jobs, and there’s one job you should never give them.

Just as business leaders can’t do everything themselves – no matter how hard they try – neither can VAs.

Simply put, you can’t ask a single VA to do all of your outsourced work. While it’s tempting to find one superhero VA to dump all of your work onto, the unfortunate truth is that we’re all human, even your VAs.

Working with virtual staff is a learning process, but there are tricks to make it easier.

Working with VAs may seem easy – obviously all you have to do is search for and hire the right people, right? Well, there’s more to it than that. In fact, you’re likely to make many mistakes on the path to the perfect VAs.

The author himself had to learn a few tough lessons through trial and error. For example, in the beginning he found it difficult to judge how much authority and independence to give his VAs. Some of them he gave too much, and they ended up working against his wishes. Others he gave too little to be able to do their jobs.

Hiring a VA requires just as much attention as hiring a normal employee.

Even though you may never see your VAs face-to-face, they’re still people. Thus, a lot of the things that hold true for hiring “normal” employees also hold true for recruiting VAs.

The main thing to keep in mind when you’re hiring VAs, as with normal employees, is that you have to hire for the role, not the task.

It is not enough to simply hire VAs, you have to train them as well.

No business leader can expect their new in-house hires to know exactly what to do without some sort of guidance. They need training, and the same holds true for your VAs.

There are three things that you should remember when hiring VAs.

Once you have trained your VAs, your main task is to set up a management system to keep their work efficient.

After the training is complete, you’re that much closer to finally achieving virtual freedom. But this freedom will only come if your VAs are able to work in an organized way. In other words, you need a management system.

The best management systems revolve around FAQ sheets, or IFTTT cheat sheets – the acronym stands for “if that happens, then this has to happen.”

To motivate your VAs to do their best, make sure that they feel like part of your team.

As you’ve learned, your VAs are regular people. VAs, just like your regular employees, like being part of a team. Consequently, it’s important that you make sure that your VAs truly feel like they belong.

A good place to start is with fair pay. Pay them what they are worth according to their experience and above market value. Be sure to also take market conditions and location into account, as the going rate in certain countries is considerably less than in others where average incomes are higher.

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Best quote from Virtual Freedom

Rome wasnt built in a day – it also took more than one person to build it!

—Chris Ducker

About the Author

Chris C. Ducker is founder and CEO of three businesses, and is widely regarded as a leading authority on outsourcing. He is a popular international speaker, blogger and podcaster, and has written a number of e-books.

Who should read Virtual Freedom?

Anyone who wants to grow their small business
Business leaders who want to devote more of their time to innovation
People who aren’t afraid to try out new hiring practices

Categories with Virtual Freedom

Corporate Culture

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