[SGC-39] Hire A Virtual Assistant To Unlock Peaceful Productivity with Guest Anne Rajoo

Hello there, content creators. You're listening to the She's Got

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today's episode because you've got content to get out

there. Welcome back to the next episode of She's Got Content.

My guest today comes all the way from an island called

Mauritius, located in the Indian Ocean, just east of Madagascar.

You know, it always amazes me how we are able to connect with people so

far from us geographically. Anne

Rajoo has an incredible story about how she ended up

in Mauritius from a tiny East German village via

way of living in London for a time. She also has a brave and

audacious goal of reshaping the way women perceive productivity,

something she calls peaceful productivity, And I

like the sound of that. Anne is the founder and CEO

of VirtuFully, an e assistance hub where she

helps female entrepreneurs streamline and scale their

businesses through strategic outsourcing.

Welcome to the She's Got Content podcast, Anne.

Hello. Thank you so much. I'm excited to be here. Well, I'm

excited to have you. Please tell everyone here more

about yourself. Talk to us about how you ended up in this beautiful island

in the Indian Ocean. Yeah. Well,

I think it goes back to childhood dreams of living on an

island at some point in my life. And, yeah, I

lived in that small village and always wanted to see the

world. Ended up studying tourism and event management because I thought

that's the way I can travel the world. After uni, went straight

to London to work there. Was planning to stay there for about a

year or so, ended up being there for 10 years, really fell in love with

the city, and eventually fell in love with my husband

who happens to come from Mauritius. So then

we had our family and well, started

to have a family. My first first son was born in London,

and then London didn't feel that great of a place anymore where we didn't

really want to raise the family. And, eventually,

after a quick holiday in Mauritius, I just said to him, you know

what? We move there. And I said it, and he quit

his job. He sold the flat in London. And within the space

of a month or so, we were in Mauritius. And that's now 8 years ago.

It's the really wonderful, beautiful place to be. It's a wonderful,

beautiful story. You made that decision and you made it happen so

fast. Yeah. I think he's been working on it. He

always tells me he was planting the seeds over the years, and he was

waiting for that moment. And, yeah, as soon as I had said it, he

was on the go. I have never seen him like this before either. So,

yeah, he made it happen. I

see. So it sounds like it was the right decision for

you guys, and here it is 8 years later. And you have

a couple of different businesses that you

are founder CEO for. Is that right?

Yes. I am what they would call a multi talented, multi

skilled, multi passionate entrepreneur. I've got my virtual

assistant agency. I do some mentoring

and coaching. I also teach craft on the

side, and I don't talk about it a lot, but I create bridal

jewelry too. So I like to do all sorts of things. I like to be

very busy. And this is how the peaceful productivity came

along because it's not always good.

Actually, that's a good segue. Why don't you tell us about this peaceful productivity?

Because it sounds like you are one of those busy, busy,

multipassionate serial entrepreneurs. And

I always wonder, how do people keep it all together when they do all those

things? So tell us about this peaceful productivity.

Yeah. Very hard to keep it together, to be very honest. So

where to start? I mean, for me, it all goes back to a lot of,

my motherhood experience because as a mom, I was this,

like, 150 percent perfect mom. I

was pouring everything I had into my children, and eventually

ended up not feeling very happy and feeling very burned out because there

was not much left of Anne, and Anne wasn't doing anything fun

apart from motherhood. So I got into coaching

and learned a few techniques and practices and applied those and felt

much better and had a much better motherhood experience. But then I

started a business. And a couple of years down

the line, I recognized that I was repeating all these

patterns of overachieving, pouring everything I had into

it, ignoring my health, ignoring my needs,

ignoring my you know, the things that I enjoyed, and just

trying to make these businesses work with everything I had.

And I realized that doesn't work either. So I ended up burned out again

and really came back to these practices I had learned

through my coaching and the motherhood experience and applied these

again to business and really realized that

if I focus in a different way, if I focus my

energy on very specific things, and if I make sure that I

have energy, I'm much more productive. And my business works

in a much better way, is more profitable. I have

more opportunities coming my way. And so, that's when I started speaking

about that experience of, yeah, I love doing all these

things, but it's not always sustainable and definitely not as

a a mom of young children as well. So, yeah, this is how the peaceful

productivity came along, personal experience.

I see. Yeah. I love this. So it sounds

like it's almost like the next natural segue

was to create this virtual assistance agency

where you can help other people outsource some of

these tasks that we all think, well, we've got to do it ourselves because it's

got to be perfect, and nobody else can do it perfectly but us,

which is not true, by the way. Right? Exactly.

Let's dive into this with how a virtual assistant can really help

us become much more productive because I think we've

heard that one of the first things you need to do is get yourself

some help, get yourself a personal assistant. And a lot of people

sort of get resistant to that idea. But sometimes

having somebody else well, it's almost like cloning yourself when you can have somebody else

doing some of the things that's not necessarily your zone

of genius, but it is for them. That leaves you more

time to do things that are your zone of genius. So talk to

us about how it came to be that you started this

agency. Yeah. So the

agency really was more by chance.

We all remember COVID coming along. And just before COVID, I was made

redundant because the company where I was working was in financial difficulties.

And so that was Christmas. So let's enjoy Christmas. And then we see what the

New Year brings and New Year brought COVID, and there were no jobs. So

I started working online because I needed to support my family

financially, and had the opportunity to support

a client who was running a virtual summit. I had zero

experience with it, but I was curious. I was happy to learn, and

turns out that I was quite good at it. And that's

how it started. And very quickly, I grew in

the sense that I had a continuous flow of clients. I

had a lot of recommendations, word-of-mouth, and so on.

And I started turning business down because I didn't have

the capacity. Back then, my kids were really small. The little one was, I

think, 6 and the other one was going to 4. So there was still a

lot of being hands on with them and very little time.

And so I was turning business down. I was like, there's something needs to be

different. I can't be turning business down. That doesn't make sense. Right. And,

was a bit reluctant to go into the agency model because of

managing different people. I actually really enjoyed being my own boss,

just working for myself. So I brought help on

for myself because I was also doing the coaching and

mentoring on the side, and I just didn't have time to do that

because I was being the VA for someone else. So I

started bringing someone on for myself so that I could

create 2 or even 3 businesses because of all the different things I

do. And realized, okay, this is the only way I can grow the

business because my capacity is limited. And one of my

big goals is to work in a way that I can

be with my kids for the maximum time possible. I don't

wanna work more to make more money. So the the

decision was okay. I have to bring people on. And just what you said

is that there are certain things that we are really

good at and certain things that we do with

ease and joy. And that's again the peaceful productivity where it comes

in. The easier and better it feels for us to work,

the better the output is and the more productive we are. But then we

tend to, as business owners, do all the things in the business, wear all

the 5 million different hats. Mhmm. And we get stuck in some

tech stuff. There's so many times the friend calls me, like, Anne,

I can't figure out this email thing. Like, I've been

on this for 3 hours. It's gonna take me 15

minutes to show you where you need to click and what you need to

do. So we try because we are in it and we

wanna make it work and all. But some things,

someone who has done this 20 times or 50 times will do that in

5 minutes when it takes you an hour, for example. So that's definitely

something where a VA can be super helpful because we do

things quite repetitively. Whereas, maybe

an entrepreneur will go on the website once a month and do

something in the back end. And the VA does that every day. So the VA

is gonna do that much faster and more efficiently.

And, also, what I've seen as a VA

for clients, the more my clients have given us

work, the more the business has grown. Because at the end of the

day, we take care of the things like the website or the

emails or answering client inquiries, sending

out invoices, chasing payment, all these things.

We do that for her, and now she has time to

refine her funnel, refine her messaging, put

her stories, her content out. We're speaking on the content podcast. So she

does a lot more content because she has more time to do that because she's

sending tasks over to the VA's. And with that, she's get generating

more leads, converting them, and obviously, the business

grows. And she's brought on more VAs, and the more

VAs she's brought on, the big the more the business has grown. So it's really,

for me, a correlation between the support you have and the growth

your business can experience. That sounds like a beautiful

thing. So let me just reflect that

back. It sounds like when we, as the entrepreneur, feel like

we've gotta do it all ourself, Even though that's not our

zone of genius, it's actually holding us back. Mhmm.

And when you get to the point where you say, I've gotta get some help,

and maybe that's not even when you're overwhelmed and burned out,

please don't wait until it happens to you to be burned out because I

know all about the burnout as well. Then when

we hire the first virtual assistant and we see how much that frees us

up to do what is our zone of genius, where we can coach more people,

when we can make more digital products, where we be can be more

creative, and that brings in even more income.

And then the business continues to grow. We can bring

even more people into our team and create

a next level for our productivity, all the

while maintaining peacefulness in the

interim. I think that is just this is sort of

the cliff notes version of your

peaceful productivity. Yeah. I

love that. Perfect. Yeah. I love that. For those people

who are now listening to this and being excited about, oh, my gosh, I've

been doing everything myself. I really would like to get some help, but they're

really hesitant because they just don't know how to go about it. What

would you say someone should be looking for in hiring

their first virtual assistant? Yeah.

This is definitely a question I get a lot, And I

think from personal experience of being a VA, but also

hiring VAs through the agency and for myself, I think

the first step is to really get clarity on what are the tasks that you

want to outsource. What makes most sense? What are

especially when you're starting out, what are the lowest hanging fruits, the easy things that

you can hand off to someone so that, first of all, you

practice delegating because delegating can be sometimes quite challenging.

Like you said initially, we have often the belief, like, only

I can do this really well. Someone else does not know my business

as well as I do, or my business is my baby, and I'm scared to

actually let someone else put their fingers into it. I

experienced that too in the whole process. But really, it's

knowing what are the tasks you wanna outsource. And then understanding that

you've got to find the person with the right skills.

So quite often what I see is an entrepreneur comes with

a variety of tasks. And obviously, it's difficult then to say,

okay. I will need someone who is very

experienced in administration. I need someone who is really good with social

media, and I need someone who's really good with

websites or funnels, for example. So in the beginning, it's quite difficult to

say I need three people because, obviously, that's, you know, a

chunk of money that comes there. But I think it's very important

to understand that an admin

VA does admin really well. A tech

VA does tech really well. But what a lot of people are trying to

do is find that one all rounder person.

And especially the way the online business is shaped

these days, finding an all rounder who knows

everything is really hard. The important part is to understand

that the expectation should be to think about what

are the main tasks that I want to give a VA, and find the

VA who's specifically trained and experienced

in that area. So, like I said, there's tech VAs. There

is general admin VAs. There are social media VAs.

There are launch VAs. There are marketing VAs. Social media and

marketing, I see that differently because sometimes there's also the expectation

that the VA creates the content, but also creates the

strategy Right. Which is not always the case for

the same person because it requires different skills and experiences.

So I think that the the main parts are know what you wanna outsource

and really understand what are the skills that person needs,

and dig into that when you have conversations with them.

Make sure they have done these kind of jobs and that they understand what

is required in the role. But try not to

go for that person who will promise you, I can do it all. Give me

anything. I will do it for you. It doesn't work most of the

times. I hear that. And I think, yeah, many of

us probably wanna just hand off a whole stack of things to one

person without really thinking about, strategically, is this

a tech task? Is this administrative? Is this social media like you

mentioned? And so many times, I've heard people complaining that

they hired somebody as a VA to do their strategy for social media, but

that they expected them to do all of the content creation, but they

didn't. And that wasn't part of that other person's zone of genius

was. So I think you're right. You have to be clear on

what you are looking for and have that conversation

ahead of time about what are the expectations. And I love that

you threw in there also about the experience because you want somebody who's

done this before. If you're starting to delegate some things, and you may

not know how to do these things yourself, trying to delegate and hand off

those tasks to somebody else who hasn't done it before either

is like a recipe for disaster, I think.

Exactly. Exactly. Totally agree. Yeah. Yeah.

And, you know, I've heard a lot of people say that, oh my gosh. It

takes so long to train or onboard a VA. But

it sounds like what you're saying is if you know exactly what you're

outsourcing to somebody and specific about it and you're

looking for somebody with experience, it sounds like the

onboarding or training part should be pretty short circuited. Is

that right? Exactly. Yeah. Totally agree. Exactly. I think

the thought that training is is hard and takes long comes from

that place of, okay, I'm finding that one person who knows it

all. And it's just not how technical business has

become these days. So then, how many email sending platforms out

there? How many website builders are out there? How many

funnel builders out there? It's hard to find someone who has worked on

all of them. So, yeah, there's probably always an

element of training, but I've done this for 4 years now, and my specialties

are funnels and things like that. So while I haven't worked

on all the systems, I've worked on enough of the

systems to understand how another system is

likely to function. Mhmm. Because I have seen

varieties and there is always similarities. But

this wasn't the case when I started out. When I started out, I had

touched maybe 1 or 2. And that's when then you as

the entrepreneur, you end up training the person on your system because

she hasn't or he hasn't used it, but also the experience is

not there to make it easy for them to grasp

the new system. They come from okay. They've been doing admin

for you because that's how you started out because admin is

tends to be the easiest thing to hand off. And now you've grown, and

you've given them more and more things, but they are not they're not a tech

person or they're not a social media person. They're learning it as and they're

learning it as they're going, but you're providing them a lot of training

because it's not their background, it's not their skill, and that's what I see happen

a lot. So Mhmm. It's again yeah. Knowing knowing

that valuing. I think it's really for me from

the other side of being a VA, valuing the

skills and experience of a VA and understanding that this is

something quite crucial in the process, and that

this is really what helps to not having

to train them, to not having to correct mistakes, to

not having to find another VA after 2 months, because the first

VA didn't work out. It's really understanding that

from the start and taking a little bit of time for initially

to find that person who really fits the criteria. Right.

I hear that. Well, we're mostly talking about adding a person to

your team, somebody who's going to continue to do

whatever these tasks are that you've delegated month after

month in a certain number of hours per week or per month or

whatever. But there's another way that you could

tap into peaceful productivity that I just thought of, and that is to hire

someone for particular events or something that you're

doing that's maybe once a year, like a virtual summit

or a launch of some kind or a bundle. That's

pretty specialized when you're looking for a VA who is, in

particular, skilled at helping you do a launch. Can

you speak to that? Yeah. Absolutely. For me, a

launch is always that big project that most online

entrepreneurs have on their list at least once a year, if not more

than once a year. Mhmm. And the experience that I've

seen, and I've done launches myself too, by myself,

is that it can be really hard work. It is a lot

of moving pieces, And a lot of times, I think, especially when

it's the first launch, it's underestimated how many things

there are to be done. I just had a call with someone yesterday. She

had a launch. It didn't quite go the way she wanted it to go.

And she was like, if only I had met you before, because I was scrambling

to write these emails every single day. And if I had someone

who helped me to plan them out and to schedule them out, I would have

felt so much more relaxed and more at ease showing

up. And it's like, exactly. This is it. A lot of times entrepreneurs

are trying to put these big events together because, obviously, that's

supposed to help their business grow their audience, bring in new

customers, but then they struggle in the

process. And for me, it affects their

efficiency and effectiveness of the launch because they're stressed

and our energy comes through. What we do comes through an

email because if we're writing it at 1 AM in the morning to go out

at 5 AM, and it's just . . . people can feel it. And for

me, it's not necessary that we have this experience of the

launch being really stressful and being hard and we forgot

something. Or then I don't know if the website crashes and you have no

one to turn to because you've built it yourself. But now there

is something so technical that you spend again 5 hours in the

middle of the night trying to fix your cart or

whatever it is. Worst thing that can happen, but it does happen. It does. If

you have someone in your corner, it it just feels so much

more relaxed. But, also, I I oftentimes have great

fun with my clients because we're in it together, and we're, like, building

each other up, and we're, like, Come on, you can do it. Like, cart open.

And maybe there wasn't the hype that we were looking for, and

we didn't get as many sales. But we're we're there

together, and we're like, no. Okay. We we're gonna do this instead, and

let's brainstorm. It's also this whole not

doing it alone because doing it alone can also be quite,

yeah, quite grinding and and just really joyful.

So, yeah, I think these events are perfect to have

at least one person with you. Yeah. Mhmm.

Actually, I've heard recently from someone who teaches

how to do virtual summits that she won't even work

with somebody about how to do the logistics

unless they're working with a VA. So she recognized

that this is just gonna be extremely stressful for everybody

unless there's a virtual assistant who's working to help the

person put this together. So true. Yeah.

Yeah. My goodness. We've talked about so many different things. I'm getting very

excited about about getting help

myself. There's just so many different ways.

Here's a question. This answer from you could probably go on and on,

but what are some of the most common things that you see

people come to you and say, I would love to hire a virtual

assistant to do just so that we can get an idea of some of the

tasks that can be outsourced to a virtual assistant.

Yeah. So, again, my specialty is quite tech related. So

I don't do a ton of admin things. I would definitely out source

them to my team. But I think the most common things are

really things like website updates, adding a blog post

to your website, updating the price on a product, putting in

a promo code, things like that. If it comes to a summit,

creating unique links in your website. Then

also funnels, you're launching a new ebook or a new

lead magnet. We build the funnel for that. Email

marketing is one of my favorite things to do. So I do a lot of

automations, email funnels, and that kind of thing. Social

media scheduling. Obviously, social media content creation. But

I think even the scheduling is the bigger part because it can be such

a time sucker that, you know,

it's easily done by a VA because it's literally just

copy and paste and put it in the right platform and make sure it's going

out at the right time. Graphic creation. If

you're launching a product, you need a little mock up that makes

your product look nice. Yeah. These kind of things are, I think,

are quite typical. Yeah. And if you wanna host a a

bundle, I know that there are people who specialize in that where they

help Yeah. Basically set up the website, put all the products in

for you, help pop in the descriptions, maybe even

write the emails. And just because they do it all the time, they go from

one bundle to the next to the next, and they help you with that. And

the other thing that I just thought of is podcasting. You can have

somebody do your editing of your audio and maybe

even you like doing your own editing, but you

could have a virtual assistant do

all that social media outreach after you get your episode published. So this is

really exciting to me. Very

exciting. Yeah. Put your podcast episode on your

website and everywhere else and putting it in your email

newsletter and all these little bits and pieces that help you

reach more people. Mhmm. But they add up to a lot of time where

you can then go out and find that next wonderful speaker.

And, yeah, all these things have new ideas for, I don't know,

a special theme, all of that

stuff. It's Yeah. Exactly that. Yeah. There's it just really

starting to blow my mind. Okay.

So here is the question. Let's just address this as the elephant

in the room because a lot of people, like me, may

be getting very excited about hiring somebody or starting a team

and growing it based on what they need help

with at the time. The elephant in the room to me

is, how much does something like this cost? Yeah.

I think what a lot of people think is, oh, I'm I'm hiring a VA,

and then I have to give her a lot of work, and it has to

be so many hours. But, really, it doesn't

have to be many hours. It can start small. Let's say,

10 hours a month is something that definitely works for some

VAs. Not every VA would take a client on for that,

but a lot of VAs do. And then, again, it goes

back to the skill set of the VA. So an admin

VA generally is probably the lowest tier in

pricing. And then I would say the launch

VA, marketing VA is the highest tier.

Obviously, you can find very low rates available on the market,

but I always feel we've got to be a little bit careful with

that because, again, the skill set, the experience,

all of these things, they should be valued, and they come at a

certain price. So for me, if you have an admin rate that

charges you between $25 to $35 per hour, I think

it's a good rate. Then a tech support, I

would think something between $45 and $60 per hour

is a fair rate. Mhmm. And a marketing VA

could be something $50 to $60. And then, obviously, if you have a launch

or a bundle or something like

that, it should be a package. It should be a project based

fee that you negotiate with all your deliverables and

all of that. And that depends on the scale of

your event. But yeah. So anything between $25 to $60,

again, depending on the skills and experience. Yeah.

I think we've already addressed how one could afford

that because we talked about that already. When you hire

somebody on your team, and that actually frees up time for

you to go out there and get a new coaching client or do more

coaching or create more packages or

digital products or whatever it is that brings in the

income, then you're in your zone of genius.

And that creates more income for you to pay for

your virtual assistant. So it's it's just a

beautiful kind of a loop, isn't it? Yes. I mean, just

remembering my friend who was stuck with her email system, and she spent

2 or 3 hours on it. Mhmm. If she coached her client for

2 or 3 hours, how much money would she have earned from that? And I

went in and took 15 minutes to fix it. So let's say my rate is

$50. 15 minutes of $50, it

is very much smaller than what she would have earned. So this is

always something that we need to remember. It's sometimes the

investment initially feels maybe especially when we're starting

out, it's scary, but the potential to

make that money back is is just it's given because

Mhmm. Your time is more valuable

than fixing an email issue for 2 hours. Yeah.

Or maybe not even getting anywhere after that many hours, so you

kinda wasted that time because you didn't actually solve the problem.

Wow. This has just been a great discussion. I'm just very excited about this

whole possibility. I'm sure that there are listeners here

who might wanna have a conversation. How can people get in touch with

you? And I think you have a special offer for the

listeners as well. Can you tell us about that? So

anyone who is obviously interested in starting to

work with a VA, outsourcing some,

tasks. I am happy to offer a free consult call where

we can actually go through what could be these tasks. I think this is

often a question that feels a bit daunting in the beginning. We can

talk about what's going on in your business and what would be these tasks that

are easy to outsource, and what kind of VA probably would be a

good fit. So, yeah, people can book into my

schedule. The easiest way is probably go on my website. So the website is

virtue fully.com. So v I r

t u f u l l y dot

com, and you find several buttons there where you can book

that. And then maybe we can share that blog post

about the different types of VAs. I think this can be very

helpful. And Right. It's all written out in terms of what pricing to

expect, what are typical task that these VA's

do. So I've got that little blog post, which I think can be very, very

helpful for someone who is thinking to outsource.

Okay. So I'll be sure to include Anne's website

and the link to look for that free consultation

and the blog post for the different types of VAs. It's all

gonna be in the show notes, so make sure that you go over there and

get that. Where can people find you, Anne, on

social media? Which platforms do you like to hang out

on? Yeah. So I think my favorite are either LinkedIn,

and there's Anne Rajoo, or Instagram. And on

Instagram, I've got 2 accounts. So there's the virtufully account,

which really speaks about outsourcing and business tools

and things like that. And then I have, underscore (_annerajoo_)

underscore, which is the peaceful productivity part.

There, I speak more about the elements of being

productive and finding ways to enjoy

your business, and to integrate mindfulness, and

to find the right things to focus on. I think this is

a big one for me. We get very distracted, which is hindering

us to be productive, and that's where I speak on Instagram about these

things. That's so important. I like that. I just think that

you've kind of wrapped it all up to help all women

really become more productive and remain peaceful.

I know we talked about a lot today. If you could make sure everyone

takes home the most important nugget from today,

Could you Yeah. Sum it up in one golden

nugget? Yeah. I think for me, it's really we

don't have to do it all and not all

alone. I think we tend to wanting

to do so many things because there's so many possibilities

and so many ways of doing it, but we don't have to

buy into all these things that are being taught on the Internet

have all these funnels and products, and keep it

simple. I think this is one thing. Keep it simple, and don't do it

alone. Find someone who helps you and who takes

away the tasks that are just not your zone of genius. I think this is

also key. Work in the zone of genius, and the output is

greater, and the return on investment is greater, and your

business will thank you. And also if you have family, your family will thank you

because you're just not that burned out, grumpy,

entrepreneur, mom, parent, wife. You

will be happier. Your family will be happier, and the world will be

happier. Alright. That's great.

Thank you so much, Anne, for sharing all of your wisdom here with

everyone. Thank you so much for being on the She's Got Content

Podcast. Huge pleasure. Thank you.

And thank you listeners for tuning in to this week's episode of

She's Got Content Podcast. Make sure you get your content out

there, and we will be back and see you the next time.

If you got value from today's episode, I would be so grateful when you

leave a 5 star rating wherever you listen to podcasts. It only takes

a second, and it really helps me get my message out to impact even more

people so they can in turn keep the ripple going. If you're listening

on Apple Podcasts and leave a review of the show, it would

really make my day, and you just might receive a shout out on the show

as my content creator of the week when I read out your review.

And last but never least, if you want an endless supply of just right

ideas for content you can write about for your blog post,

your emails, your videos, podcast episodes, all the content

things, then you wanna head over to my website at She's Got

Content dot com forward slash content, and pick up your free

workbook. Never run out of content ideas. Look for that link in the

show notes today along with the other links mentioned in today's

episode. Until next time, content creators. You've got an

audience waiting to hear from you, and you've got content to share with them.

Stop being the best kept secret and make a bigger impact when

you've got content out there in the world.