Who do I hire first - design assistant or virtual assistant?

I had a chat with another designer recently who was feeling totally overwhelmed by work.  She knows she needs to hire help, and her main question was, do I hire a design assistant, or admin help?  

My answer is - Yes!  But not necessarily in the order you might think.  My answer now comes from hard-won experience, and it’s not based on how I did things myself, but how I wish I had done them.   

Let me explain. Before I ever hired help, I remember hearing that you should hire admin help before hiring a design assistant.  I couldn’t even wrap my brain around that - it made zero sense to me.  I mean, I was drowning in design work, not administrative work - obviously I needed design help, right?

 And anyway, design work is billable, which means a design assistant would be billable and therefore pay their own salary, whereas an administrative assistant would be “out of pocket” - purely a non-billable expense.  

 So… obviously I should hire a design assistant, not admin help. 

Since I knew better, I proceeded to ignore the advice I had heard and hired my first design assistant.  And then a second.  And that’s when I found myself drowning in administrative tasks.  

Because the reality is, no matter how busy you are right now, when you hire help, you’re going to increase your capacity.  You’re going to take on more work to keep your new helper busy.  So that means more proposals out to potential clients, more emails, more invoices, more… administrative tasks.  

Because I hired design help first, I kept increasing my workload to keep up with my employees and that meant more and more administrative work - for me.  All for me! Yippee! I was offloading all of the billable (fun) design work to my team, and I was left with all the non-billable (tedious) admin tasks.  Ugh. 

Finally, at this point, I cried uncle and hired my first virtual assistant to take on a lot of the admin tasks that were filling my days and sucking the life out of me.  What I discovered is that it is SO much easier to train a virtual assistant how to do your billing, or how to get out a proposal, than to train a design assistant how to make a design presentation or create construction documents.  I mean, like, worlds easier.  

 And the thing is, when you have an admin taking all of that stuff off your plate, it frees up your time to do the design work you love.  It frees up your brain to think on higher level tasks. It’s really about being clear about how YOU want to spend your time, and offloading the rest.   

 So if you’re thinking about hiring help, I would have you start with making a list of the tasks that you do every day in your business. Think about the administrative tasks that could be easily offloaded to a virtual assistant.  Consider building your foundation first and getting a virtual assistant going with the admin tasks, even though it doesn’t seem like there is that much to do in that area right now. 

 To begin with, it’s only going to be a few hours a month - no big deal!  But the key here is that when you do hire your first design assistant soon after, your time and your mind will be freed up to train them, and to work with them to get them going.  

 When they get up and rolling and you find you need to take on more work to keep them busy, your handy virtual assistant will already be on board, taking all of the increased administrative tasks off your plate:

• You’ll be able to move up to the next level with a minimum of headache. 
• You’ll be able to continue to focus on design work as you grow instead of finding yourself suddenly overwhelmed by administrative tasks. 
• You’ll be able to increase your workload with systems already in place and a minimum of stress. 

That’s a big win!  

 If you want more help with hiring a virtual assistant, I’ve got just the thing - I’ve created a step-by-step guidebook with helpful tips and to-do’s for finding the best virtual assistant and delegating tasks to them. With this kit, you’ll never go back to the overwhelm of admin tasks again. Happy hiring!