TRANSCRIPTION

Hey, everybody, welcome back to another episode of Win It With Willy Lin. And today I’ll be talking about “How do you manage the administrative tasks for all of my virtual assistants”.


So you guys know that I’m running two businesses. Number one is my eCommerce business. And number two is WAH Academy itself. And both businesses use the same tools, or rather the model to manage our VAs and to supervise them. So the thing is that what kind of tools to use. Number one, I use this app called Asana. So Asana have this function called Kanban chart, where you can post your To-Do (tasks) every day. And once your VA has done certain things, you can move the To Do section – okay, there’s this little card they can place in the column itself. And once the VA has completed the task itself, he or she can shift the card from To-Do (column) to Completed (column). So it’s different columns. So we can actually shift the whole thing around and you can actually comment and you can literally monitor the whole progress. So whether your VA has done that or not.


So the thing is that after running these businesses for so long, for example, for my eCommerce business, since 2012, that means it’s about nine years. And for WAH Academy, it has been around for six to seven years already. Our team has grown. So in Asana, you can actually create different departments for your team itself. So my eCommerce business, we have four teams. Number one is the Product Team, number two Sales and Marketing Team, and number three Financials and Planning Team, and number four is the Customer Service or rather Account Maintenance Team itself. So using Asana, you can change or rather you can migrate your team members from team one to team two, team two to team three, or team three to team one. So it’s very, very simple for you to actually do that. And it’s very easy for you to invite members into your current team itself and to monitor the whole thing overall.


But some of the alternative tools out there, you can use things like Slack to actually maintain the communication with the team and also to assign tasks. Slack do that also at the same time, but I prefer to use Asana. But if you think that Asana is too complicated then you can use Trello. So how to spell Asana is A-S-A-N-A. Trello is T-R-E-L-L-O. Slack is S-L-A-C-K. So you can use that to manage your tasks, to see how your team works, and you can actually manage your managers over there. So on top of that, we are using Flock to communicate also. So Flock, you’re able to segregate different departments with different teams and you can talk to them individually. So Flock is more towards communication. Asana is more towards task allocation and monitoring.


So of course Asana and Flock, you can integrate Google Sheets. So let’s say, for example, if your team finds a product for you, they consist of a product researcher, or if they find influencers for you and they need to use Google Sheets to tabulate all the data, then you can use Google Sheets. And Asana, Trello, Flock, they can integrate Google Sheets, they can integrate apps, they can use Zapier to integrate or rather combine everything together. And these are the tools that I use to manage my Vas.


But you may say that, “So how do you actually keep track of whether your VAs are doing their job or not?” Because you only hire them online and you can’t really see them, you can’t really see what they are doing real-time. You guys are not sitting in an office and you can’t actually just look out your office window or rather your office door and see your team working. So, honestly speaking, I don’t like to do that because even though they are typing away at a computer, that doesn’t mean that they are working on the task that they are tasked to do. So I prefer – for my companies, we don’t have X number of leaves, X number of medical leaves, X number of paid leaves, and this kind of things.


So my team, my virtual assistants, they can go as many leaves they want, they can go for as many days of ‘off’s they want, just that they need to complete their KPI. For example, if the product researcher says, “Hey, I’ve completed your 20-products-a-day research already. So can I go for my leave or can I go for my off?” Sure, you can do that. So the rule of thumb is that they must complete their job and they can just enjoy life. I don’t care. Because if they give me what I want, I’ll give them what they want, which is more free time for our family and all that. So of course they must help the company to grow. So individual KPI, or rather individual teams’ KPI will meet the company’s KPI. And when they meet the company’s KPI, everybody’s happy. And I believe that’s the way that a successful eCommerce company or rather a successful company should do.


So this is what I want to do also because when I was working for somebody else, I wish that I can just hit my KPI and I’ll be done for rest of the day itself. So I prefer to do that. So yeah. Long story short, this is how I manage my VAs using Asana or Trello, Flock, Google Sheets. And sometimes they come up with, let’s say, for example, the logistics guy, they have their own customized data studio using Google data studio or something like that. But sometimes your team, they can use SQL and this kind of stuff. Then let them go into it. But basically, if you are new in eCommerce, then you can use Asana, Trello, Flock, Google Sheets. And don’t really need to monitor your team real-time. Don’t need to do that.


So, yep, that’s it for this episode, and stay tuned for my next one. Cheers.