Getting The best ROI on a Virtual Design Assistant
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Interior Designer
One of the best parts of my job is getting to visit with interior designers daily. Many of them use our service and many of them call to pick my brain on how they should be using my service when they are ready.
Billable Hours
The key to using a virtual design assistant is to be organized. Before you can hire an assistant, you need to know what you want that assistant to do. To get the best return on investment (ROI) some of my clients start using their assistant to do the things they hate but are still billable hours to a client. For example, I have clients who hire a virtual design assistant to do their 3d renders, mood boards, furniture sourcing, floor plans and other tasks that are billable hours to the client. My clients are getting more done per hour and are able to make more money.
Let’s look at this example:
You work for Client A and you put in 10 hours of billable hours at $75 per hour. You made $750 in that 10 hours.
Or you hire an assistant to work for Client A for 10 hours and charge $75 per hour and pay your assistant $30 per hour. You make $45 per hour or $450 but in that same 10 hours you worked on Client B for 10 hours and made $750, therefore the total you made in the same 10 hours is $1200 making your hourly rate for that block of time $120!
Does that make sense? This is how you can get a great return on investment by using a virtual design assistant. You are able to take on more clients and make more money without having to pull more hours out of a hat. Remember, we all get the same number of hours in a day and the only way to increase your income without working an insane number of hours is to increase your hourly rate.
Marketing
Another great way to increase your ROI is to hire your virtual design assistant to do your marketing. This could be your social media posts, blog posts, engagement, etc. The marketing is what drives clients to your business. Hiring someone to post and engage consistently and persistently will really help keep the pipeline full!
I’ve got another example:
You are too busy working on 4 clients this month that you slack on your marketing. You make $1500 per client or $6,000 total for the month. Now that your client work is finished you spend the next two weeks marketing and trying to drum up more clientele. Finally, after three weeks of marketing you drum up another 4 clients. That first $6,000 technically got you through 7 weeks – 4 weeks of client work and 3 weeks of marketing.
Or you hire an assistant and pay her $600 per month to do your marketing and keep your pipeline full. As soon as one client is finished you are able to jump to another – so after 7 weeks of working you’ve now worked on 7 clients and made $10,500 (considering $1500 per client) minus the $600 for your assistant doing your marketing and you’ve made $9,900.
Administrative
Do you spend a lot of time on admin? Admin works similar to marketing – if you hire someone to do your admin and pay them less than you make per hour working on clients it’s a great benefit to you! Let’s say it takes you 8 hours per week to create proposals, send invoicing and schedule appointments. You can pay a virtual assistant $30 per hour to do that while you use that time to work on your client’s projects and bill $75 per hour. You can work 8 hours per week for free or hire an assistant for 8 hours per week at $30 per hour and pay her $240 while you work on a client for 8 hours at $75 per hour and bill $600. In the same 8 hours that you used to make zero dollars you are now making $360 after you pay your assistant.
Those are just three of the ways you can get a great ROI on your virtual design assistant. Please feel free to reach out to me with more questions!