[ALISON]:
Today’s sponsor is Move Forward Virtual Assistants. We are a virtual assistant company that specializes in helping therapy practice owners. We have US-based, highly trained VAs who are ready to help you with your small to medium size group practice. They are available during regular business hours to live answered calls and take all of those nagging administrative tasks off your plate. If you’re looking for training because you want to hire your own VA, we have an option for you as well. We’ve designed an e-course all about how to train your VA. And if you’re interested in either of those options, be sure to check out our website www.moveforwardvirtualassistants.com.

I’m your host, Alison Pidgeon. I am a group practice owner, a business consultant with Practice of the Practice and I own a virtual assistant company. This is the Grow a Group Practice podcast. Thank you so much for joining me today. This is the second of our three-part series where I am interviewing James Marland, who is the COO of Move Forward Virtual Assistants, a company that I own. And today we’re going to talk about how to get yourself ready, as the practice owner, to take a virtual assistant on in your practice.

So, I’ll tell you the story of how I got the virtual assistant company started. Back in 2018, I had an assistant at the time who needed more hours than I was able to give her, and so I started hiring her out to some other practice owners and it was going really well. And I could see how it could potentially be a good business. And so, in September of 2018, I made an LLC and we started making plans to launch a web site and hire people and I was able to hire James in April of 2019, to fully take over the company for me because I was going on maternity leave, and he has been doing an awesome job ever since. He is great at developing processes and systems and trainings. We have learned a lot over the past year about how to help the practice owners get ready, which is what we’re going to talk about today. And then also, we’ve learned a lot about how to train the VAs. So, by the time they’re matched up with the practice owner, they’re really ready to go. So, without further ado, I’ll give you my interview with James Marland.

Welcome to the Grow a Group Practice podcast. I am joined today with James Marland and I’m gonna let him introduce himself in a second, but today we’re talking about getting yourself ready to hire a virtual assistant. So, there’s a few different options when it comes to hiring a VA. You can certainly hire a VA from a company and that’s what James and I do – I own Move Forward Virtual Assistants. Or you could try to hire your own assistant. Maybe you want somebody local to you. And that is kind of what we’re talking about today, is how to get yourself ready to hire a VA, mostly if you were gonna look to hire someone yourself. But also, these are some good tips if you are going to hire somebody from a company. So, James, how are you doing today?

[JAMES]:
I’m doing great. It was a beautiful day outside today. I saw it from the window.

[ALISON]:
In the basement.

[JAMES]:
Yeah, well, I went upstairs once or twice, but yeah.

[ALISON]:
Nice. So, give us a little introduction on what you do for the virtual assistant company.

[JAMES]:
So, my name is James Marland. I’ve been with Move Forward Virtual Assistants about a year now. What I do is I do all the marketing and the sales and the hiring, training, and the podcasting, so.

[ALISON]:
Yes, excellent. And we have learned a lot about virtual assistants and how to help people get ready to have a virtual assistant. And you have a whole bunch of tips for us to share that hopefully will be helpful to some of the therapy practice owners in our audience.

[JAMES]:
Sure. I mean, over the last year, I’ve talked with many people who… they’re really looking for help, they’re looking for relief, and I’ve learned some things. We’ve learned some things on how to help and hire a virtual assistant. So, whether you hire from Move Forward Virtual Assistants or whether you go out on your own and go to a freelance site, here’s some things that we want you to consider when hiring a virtual assistant.

[ALISON]:
Yeah, so I think the one thing that sometimes people don’t think about is, they need to do some pre-work, before they can actually go hire somebody. And so, tell us what some of those things are. And why do they want to do that?

[JAMES]:
Well, I think one of the first things you need to think about is, are you going to hire a contractor or a W-2 employee, because they’re not quite the same thing. The big difference between the two is with a contractor they have a lot more freedom to decide when and where they work or how they do it. You give them the assignments and they do it. So that is a huge difference. They’re not the same. Basically, for a contractor, unless you pay them the eight hours a day, you can’t demand that they sit and are there at a certain time. So, there’s one of the first things is, are you hiring a contractor or a W-2 employee?

[ALISON]:
Yeah, I’m really glad that you brought that up. Because I think a lot of people just make assumptions like, Oh, I can hire a contractor, no problem. But you really need to check with a lawyer and see about the laws in your state and how strict or lax they are with contractors versus W-2 employees. There are some states where it’s virtually impossible to hire a contractor, like California, and other states where they’re very friendly towards contractors. So, don’t assume – definitely check that out with a lawyer.

[JAMES]:
I can include some links for you on… worksheets and things to help you determine, and just to get a ballpark. Are you hiring a contractor or an employee?

[ALISON]:
Oh, nice. Okay, cool. So, what are some other things that people need to think about when they’re getting ready to hire?

[JAMES]:
So, you need to have a job description. It doesn’t have to be too long or too complicated, but you would like to be able to advertise for the perfect job and how do you advertise for the perfect job? You write down a detailed job description. It’s sort of like a filter. You know? I drink a lot of coffee. How much coffee do you drink, Alison?

[ALISON]:
I drink as much as my body will allow, until I start shaking. That’s about two cups.

[JAMES]:
When I was a teenager that was about 10 cups, but now it’s a little less. Yeah, so yeah, coffee. So, with coffee, most coffees, all the coffee I make, you need a filter. A filter gives you the good stuff and it takes away the things you don’t want, the coffee grounds. I can feel it in my teeth, right now, coffee grounds in my teeth, because just talking about it. And so that’s like your first filter when hiring a virtual assistant. You need a good job description, and a job description summarizes the essential responsibilities, activities and qualifications and skills for a role. That was from indeed.com, but yeah, I didn’t just come up with that.

[ALISON]:
Ah, man, that sounded so good.

[JAMES]:
All right, well, you know. So, you need a good job description. What is your ideal candidate? Just think of your ideal candidate, in your mind; what they know, what experiences they’ve had, what education they’ve had, what success they’ve had. And then write down your roles and responsibilities. And then you can use that to solicit from… Well, you can use it to solicit from job sites. I wanna talk, just a second, about where you get virtual assistants or where to post these things. We use Indeed, and Glassdoor. But some of the success, if you’re not going to hire a company, is just your local network. If you know of therapists or you have a group of people that you can get references from and who would recommend people, that’s another great place to get a virtual assistant. Some of those work out very well. But you don’t just want to hire somebody’s aunt who has a little bit of free time at home…

[ALISON]:
Yeah, that’s a bad idea.

[JAMES]:
…because they’re not gonna… they might never have worked with mental health patients. So, they don’t know insurances, I mean, they might have a good pleasant voice on the phone, but they might not have the right experiences that you’re looking for.

[ALISON]:
Yeah, and I think we figured out that our most successful VAs have healthcare experience.

[JAMES]:
Oh, for sure. Without a doubt.

[ALISON]:
More specifically, we figured out that outpatient healthcare experience was really important, because that gave them an understanding of the flow of the patients and also, they usually had some knowledge of insurances.

[JAMES]:
The terms, they knew the words.

[ALISON]:
Knew… already knew HIPAA and all that kind of stuff. So, I mean, it’s like if you can find somebody that has that healthcare background…

[JAMES]:
Super important.

[ALISON]:
Yeah, we find that they don’t need as much intensive training,

[JAMES]:
Well, you’re going to have to train them somewhere. But those are the things that are really hard to train. Most people who’ve had that experience had an office manager and they learned it with an office manager, or they had a co-worker who was a lead co-worker. When you hire a virtual assistant, it’s them and their Google, you know, and they… well, with our company, we have six other VAs, plus myself, plus you, plus some other resources in our collection of knowledge that we’ve been saving, so we have a little bit in the way of training. But if you haven’t had this before, you’re just behind and one of my mistakes was hiring somebody who was a great person, had a lot of scheduling background, but they didn’t have the insurance background or the medical background and they didn’t last very long. So that’s…

[ALISON]:
It was overwhelming, right?

[JAMES]:
Yeah, it was like, Oh, they could do it, but it was like getting the syllabus all at once and they got shocked out of the job. So that was a mistake. And that’s… we learned. We learned from that.

[ALISON]:
We learned a lot of hard lessons.

[JAMES]:
That’s kind of the first filter. Oh, go ahead.

[ALISON]:
Yeah, I was just gonna say, I think too, when I… Many years ago, when I ran my first ad to try to find an assistant, I was just shocked at the number of applications that I got. I literally had to… Yeah, hundreds. I had to turn off the ad after like, 24 hours because my email was blowing up. And so, I think the more you can be really clear in that job posting and the more you can… Like, indeed will let you put those questions in that says, like, do you have this many number of… years of experience doing this? Or do you have…? You know, whatever it is that you want to set there, but, setting it up that way will help you, like you said, filter people out. Because it can be really overwhelming, all the applications.

[JAMES]:
Yeah, the whole job hiring process is not to say ‘Yes’ to somebody; it’s to say ‘No’ to the people… So, you can say yes to anybody, you know, you can offer a job to anybody. You gotta filter it down to just the right people; to the people that are the ones that… so it’s hard for you to choose between the right ones. So, well, I was gonna say, Oh, the checkboxes for the filtering. So, if you put those there, some people will self-select out. So, then you don’t have to review them. And then there was one time I did an interview, and we’ll talk about interviews in a little bit, and she didn’t quite have the medical background and I gave her our training manual. And the next week, she said, you know what, I don’t think this job is right for me, because I could do this, but it would take a long time. So, filtering out, getting the right person, it’s just key for finding somebody who’s going to represent your business.

[ALISON]:
Right, right. Yeah, I think it’s really telling too, just paying attention to how they handle things in the interview process. Like, do they pay attention to the details of what you’re asking for? Do they get back to you quickly? Or does it take them like a week to send an email back to you? You know what I mean? Like those? Yeah.

[JAMES]:
Right. I send out an email with a couple instructions. This is to do the interview. And they have to choose a time – they go to a web page and choose a time and then at the end of the acceptance, they get another email that says, you’re scheduled, please fill out this application, and you would be surprised by the amount of people who schedule the appointment but don’t read the email without getting that detail. And I want the people who are going to read those emails and do the extra detailed work because that’s what the admin job is. It’s very detailed, very… you got to pay attention to everything, every little detail when you’re talking about scheduling and when you’re working with… in our company, they work with five or six other practices. So, they have to get all their details down. So, pay attention to those little details. If they get it right in the interview, they’re probably going to get it right later on too.

[ALISON]:
Right. Yeah, definitely. So, what are some other things that practice owners can do to get themselves ready to hire a VA?

[JAMES]:
Once you’ve filtered down to the candidates you want to interview, I would create some interview questions that highlight the responsibilities that you’re giving them. You can use interview questions that… behavior interview questions, like, tell me a story about a time when you had multiple competing deadlines and how did you… what was the outcome? What did you do and what was the outcome? And see how they can tie their story and what they did to the quality of person that you’re looking for. Now, if they… did they negotiate their way out of it? Did they get the extra help? Did they stay longer? Like, what are you looking for? And see, what are some of those responses. Then I like to score my interviews. I like to use the same questions over and over again, and I think I have like 20 or 30 that I choose from, and then just get an average. Like, if they answered one to five, and I like their answer, or if it was a superior answer, I give it a five. If it was a good answer, you know, an average answer, it’s a three and if it’s a bad answer, it’s a one. And then I add those up and then I divide it by the total and I get the average and then I have a track. You know, I interview four or five people for a position and then I can compare their numbers and the scores together so that I’m not biased; I am not, give one person a long interview and one person a short interview, I give everybody the same interview and then I can compare. And if you interview with a team, they can all do the same interview or they can listen to the recording, and score, and then you can compare the person to other people’s scores. Now you all have the same reference point, you’re not recreating it and you’re like, well, I really like them. Well, what did they say that you liked? And you could point back to the question and say, well, I gave them a five for… What extra thing they’ve done or what have they done to go out of their way? You know, they answered that question really great and you gave them a five, and then you can compare and talk about the interview process in a systematic way rather than, Well, I felt they were better than the other person.

[ALISON]:
Yeah, I was super impressed when you came up with that because I had no… I had never seen that before when it came to hiring, and I realized how, when I was doing the hiring, how I was pretty loosey-goosey about it.

[JAMES]:
Yeah, that’s how most people do it though.

[ALISON]:
This person seems nice. I had a good feeling about them so let’s hire them. Yeah, this seems good.

[JAMES]:
Yeah, I had a good feeling. Ooh, right.

[ALISON]:
Right. But that’s not the best way to do it.

[JAMES]:
Yeah. The questions force me to ask some hard questions. It forces me to dig a little deeper and just get down to what I’m looking for. And it keeps evolving; it’s not a set process. I learned this… Quint Studer, I did some training with the Studer Group, and they scored their interviews, and I just really liked the… I like charts. I like charts. I like numbers. I want to know why I like somebody, and this can tell me, in a week from now when I’ve done five other interviews, why I liked this person more than somebody else.

[ALISON]:
Yeah. Cool. So, I know you were telling me, you have this whole concept around the right system. Do you wanna explain that to us, what does that mean?

[JAMES]:
For scheduling?

[ALISON]:
Yeah, I wasn’t sure what that was in reference to – if it was in general, like…?

[JAMES]:
So that’s for teaching your virtual assistant to schedule the right way. Okay. We have a few other nuts and bolts to get to if you want to.

[ALISON]:
Did I jump too far ahead? I’m screwing it up.

[JAMES]:
It’s a little bit far, but… I’m like, rifling through my notes here. Where is that? Oh, man, it’s down far.

[ALISON]:
Yeah, what else is just some of the highlights that you wanted to share with us before we get to that part?

[JAMES]:
Okay. So, I was going to talk about preparing your practice for the virtual assistant. I mean, we talked a lot about the hiring process. But we have like systems to get into and scheduling process and talking about insurance. Do we have time for that?

[ALISON]:
Yeah, I think we have a few more minutes if you can give us the [unclear]?

[JAMES]:
So, I think one of the main things when preparing your practice for your virtual assistant is… you don’t want to skip this step. You don’t want to skip writing things down or writing your process down because it might take you an hour or two to write everything down and maybe you could make a video or two to train your virtual assistant on your process and systems. But if you don’t do that, it’s gonna take 30 emails and six hours of your time later. Because they’ll be asking you questions and just sending you… they’ll get stuck and then they won’t be able to move and that just wastes time. So, I would not skip this step.

[ALISON]:
Yeah, I think you and I have seen practice owners who have wanted to hire you know, have come on board want to hire a virtual assistant. And they, unfortunately, have nothing written down or are so disorganized, that they just don’t end up following through with the service because they don’t even have enough of their stuff together to even hand it off to the VA.

[JAMES]:
And they don’t get the benefit of it, either.

[ALISON]:
Right, and that doesn’t feel good to anybody, because the VA is like, I’m ready, I’m here, I’m ready to help you. And they are so, either overwhelmed, or disorganized, they can’t even get enough of…

[JAMES]:
Right. And the virtual assistant can help you get organized, but you got to give them some place to start.

[ALISON]:
Right. Right.

[JAMES]:
And our assistants can help you write these things down. But you just can’t skip it. So basic information they’re going to want to know from their provider is who your providers’ names are, if you’re in a group practice, their names, their email or contact information. And who are the clients that they see, their specialties, the age range, maybe a list of what they don’t treat. You know, what is beyond their expertise or what they don’t want to see on their schedule. Maybe, scheduling quirks they’re going to want to know, for example, maybe they’re in every day, except for the third Friday of the month or something. Those types of things. Because if you don’t tell them, they’re not going to know. They’re not in the office, they don’t see it. They don’t hear the chatter. They just follow whatever you tell them. If it’s in the schedule, if it’s on the list, if it’s on the process, that’s what they know. So, you’re going to want to fill them in on the quirks and of course, the insurances that the provider takes, and I have… I know it’s on the Facebook page, and it might be in the blog too – the provider quick-glance chart. So, if you wanted to fill out a chart for each provider, it just has four rows and three columns. Or it’s the other way around three rows, four columns. Yeah.

[ALISON]:
And that’s on moveforwardvirtualassistants.com, on the Resources page?

[JAMES]:
On the Resources page, the blog, Two Steps Forward.

[ALISON]:
Okay, nice. We’ll put that in the show notes, hopefully. The VA who’s listening to this.

[JAMES]:
Yeah, there’s a VA out there who’s gonna do it.

[ALISON]:
Yes. In South Africa. She’s gonna do it for us.

[JAMES]:
Yeah. Well, they’re wonderful. Yeah, they make it happen. VAs make it happen. So, when you’re scheduling, you’re going to want to document your new client process. You know, how are they going to respond to the email inquiries, how they track it. I think in our first session or first recording, you mentioned the call log, right? That call log is super valuable because it helps you… so you’re not scheduling, you know, the practice owner isn’t scheduling. But you can check and see who’s getting scheduled, who isn’t, how many times did somebody get called back? Did somebody slip through the cracks?

[ALISON]:
Yeah, I look at the call log all the time. It helps me, as the practice owner too, to see if different types of marketing are working.

[JAMES]:
Oh, yeah, the referral source, right?

[ALISON]:
Yeah, where those referrals are coming from but also, like, oh, did the calls slow down? Okay, great, I’ll put up a Facebook ad or whatever I need to do.

[JAMES]:
Oh, so you use it as a decision-maker?

[ALISON]:
Yes. For marketing, for sure.

[JAMES]:
And then one of my assistants during the slow time, I’m not sure if it was her idea or the practice owners, but they went back through and called the people who declined to be on their waitlist because she kept really good notes. And she was able to get a few more clients when they moved to telehealth and said, Hey, did you find… you know, we’re just checking in, did you find a therapist, we now have telehealth? And they were able to get some clients. So, keeping good records in the call log can help with all sorts of things.

[ALISON]:
Yeah, yeah, definitely, that’s… No matter what kind of practice you have, I think you should have a call log. It’s pretty invaluable.

[JAMES]:
And then you might want to videotape for your… videotape – that’s an old word. You might want to, I don’t know, what’s the real word, though? Screen capture. That’s the new word. You might want to screen capture, with a tool like Loom or Zoom, your scheduling process and where to click. That might be helpful. Or just do a live video session with them and show the assistant how to do that. I often find explaining it is one thing and then showing it, they get a lot more and then doing it they get the most. But just having that backup there is very important.

[ALISON]:
Yeah, I just used Loom for the first time the other day.

[JAMES]:
Yeah, isn’t it great?

[ALISON]:
Yeah, it’s cool.

[JAMES]:
L-O-O-M, loom.com. And right now, the pro version’s like, $5 a month. And the free version, they took away the restrictions. You used to only be able to do 24 videos or something. And now you can do unlimited. So right now, is a good time to get in. I use it at least once a week to record something and send it to somebody. There’s a lot of other scheduling issues and payment issues to talk about. Crisis conversations, you’re gonna want to have that documented. You as a therapist, you know your crisis process and you know how to get some… determine whether something’s a crisis or not. You’ve had that training, but your assistant hasn’t. So, what are you going to give them to help them through potential crisis situations? And most of the time, this doesn’t happen for our clients, they say it doesn’t happen. But you know, there’s always gonna be one out there.

[ALISON]:
Yeah, I think these are all the things that, when you’re hiring an assistant, you don’t necessarily think about. I think the practice owner is just so used to doing it themselves that they don’t think to like, Oh, I need to record how I do this or write down how I do that or what they should do if somebody does call and is in a crisis. So, I really like that you have put these resources together and we will talk about this a little bit more in the third episode, but we put together a whole e-course for practice owners who want to hire their own VA but they want to go through a training and have resources for, not only how do you hire them and how do you get yourself ready, but then like, how do you train the VA and onboard them? And how do you make sure you’re…

[JAMES]:
Delegating the right things?

[ALISON]:
Right. Yeah, there’s just a lot that goes into it that I think that a lot of people don’t think about and I think too, just because you’re doing it every single day, you’ve built up this body of knowledge of like, okay, ideally, how would you hire and train a VA? And that’s how we came up with this e-course.

[JAMES]:
Yeah, it’s come through some success and mistakes, you know, and pain, and pain. But I don’t want the therapist to make some of these same mistakes and if I can help them make better decisions, and hire the right person, so their practice is more successful and they can have better peace of mind, I just want to help.

[ALISON]:
Nice. So, anything else about what practice owners need to do to get ready when they’re hiring a VA?

[JAMES]:
The last thing, I suppose, was it just make sure they know your collection policy, how do they… how do you get paid? Your rates? The scheduling? Do you have a sliding scale? Do you have a cancellation policy? Do you have insurances that sound like insurances you take, but really you don’t? Because those can get into your schedule, and that’s no good. So basically, I ask the practice owners to help the virtual assistant schedule the right person with the right symptoms, the right payment method, with the right appointment time, at the right place – because some people have multi-sites – with the right provider and then the right paperwork. So, we go through that in our training.

[ALISON]:
Nice. So that is the right system that I brought up way too early in the interview.

[JAMES]:
Only 15 minutes ago. It’s alright.

[ALISON]:
Yeah, it’s fine. It’s fine. Okay, well, good. Yeah, I think that’s really helpful. And I think we hit a lot of the highlights there. Things that people need to think through. Yeah, so if you’re in the process or thinking about hiring your own virtual assistant, definitely stay tuned to the next episode. We’re gonna be talking about onboarding and training a virtual assistant. So, thank you so much, James, for joining me today.

[JAMES]:
My pleasure, Alison.

[ALISON]:
Yeah. Do you want to tell folks how they can get ahold of you?

[JAMES]:
Oh, sure. The best place to get ahold of me is on our webpage. It’s moveforwardvirtualassistants.com. There’s a scheduling link all the way at the end. For contacts, if you want to set up a call with me, or my email is on the contact page as well. We’re also on Facebook, just type in move forward virtual assistants. And, I didn’t mention this last time, but we do have a YouTube page. I know, a YouTube page with some of the videos and tools on our YouTube page… we will have to link it in the show notes. I think it’s Virtual Assistant or Move Forward Virtual Assistants. I normally just click Google, and then YouTube, and it comes up for me.

[ALISON]:
Nice. I had no idea that you did that.

[JAMES]:
Yeah, that’s where some of the hosting… Do you know where you can do hosting? It just comes up My Video. So, sorry, I brought it up, and then I failed on the dismount.

[ALISON]:
No problem. I’m sure we can figure it out. All right. Thank you so much, James.

[JAMES]:
Thank you.

[ALISON]:
Make sure you stay tuned for episode three in this three-part series and we’ll see you there.

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This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. This is given with the understanding that neither the host, Practice of the Practice, or the guests are providing legal, mental health, or other professional information. If you need a professional, you should find one.