How to Create a Signature Service for Your Virtual Assistant Business
As a Virtual Assistant, likely one of the best ways to describe your services is “flexible.” Especially as a General VA, flexibility is one thing that seemingly allows you to keep growing your business. Because you probably don’t specialize in one specific area, you’re able to keep adjusting and bending to your clients’ needs and adding more skills to your bucket.
However, another common theme within the VA world is one that we believe can become detrimental: hourly pricing. As you become more efficient in your work and take less time to complete things, this comes back to bite you in the rear.
The solution? Honing into a signature service that you can offer at a package rate. In this blog post, we’ll be diving into what a signature service is and how you can create one for your Virtual Assistant business!
What is a Signature Service?
A signature service is an offer that is valuable and impactful like no other. It allows you to hone into a specific niche and work with exactly who you want to work with doing exactly what you want to do. This means no more scope creep, which is an all too common experience in the VA industry, and you’re also able to stand out from the sea of other VAs.
PROVIDE A PREMIUM EXPERIENCE
Signature services focus heavily on the client experience, making sure your clients are feeling clear and confident in their choice to work with you through personalized touchpoints, clear expectations, healthy boundaries, and great communication.
CUT THE FLUFF
Another key aspect of a signature service is that there’s no extra fluff involved, and you focus on providing a service that will solve the whole problem for your clients. This doesn’t mean it necessarily needs to be a $5k+ one-and-done package. Many VAs have clients on retainer, so it’s still possible to keep, for example, $750 retainer clients.
WORK LESS WHILE MAKING MORE
Those example prices may seem higher than what you’re used to, and that’s another thing that sets apart signature services. They allow you to go from needing to work with 12 clients per month to only 3 or 4. In a nutshell, you’re able to work less while making more (our personal fav).
How to Create a Signature Service for Your Virtual Assistant Business
There are 4 key phases that play into creating a signature service, or as we like to call it in The Incubator, a High-Touch Signature Service™.
PHASE ONE: EXPERTISE
What are you an expert (or even just really good) at? What’s something you know like the back of your hand and could help others do? The first step is all about using your expertise to come up with a service you could provide to help others solve a problem, no matter how large or small that problem is.
If you’re struggling to identify your expertise, remember that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel here. This doesn’t have to be something that’s totally unique. As a VA, you probably consider yourself somewhat of a Jill of all trades.You’ve likely dipped a toe in all sorts of services, so what’s one that you find you really enjoy doing and, even if you aren’t perfect at it now, would love to get even better?
This also comes with somewhat of a rebrand. It’s time to shift your title, friend. A “Virtual Assistant” is very broad, but have you thought about trying out “Consultant” of some sort? We talk more about this title shift and how it could impact you over in this blog post.
PHASE TWO: SIMPLIFY
Now, take the service you’ve come up with and simplify it. Wrap it up in a nice, simple package to present to potential clients. You don’t need any fancy add-ons or a la carte items. The goal here is to eliminate decision fatigue for your clients, meaning they’re ready to sign and pay quicker because they aren’t presented with an overwhelming number of options and information.
Make it clear how you want to show up for them, what they can expect from working with you, how you’ll be helping them, and present that in a simple package (We know we’re using that word a lot, but we just really want to get the point across).
PHASE THREE: AUTOMATE
What can you automate to make your process smoother and more streamlined? Where can you free up time in your admin process? How can you start to deliver a really high-end experience without you having to be the main touch point in it all?
Personally, we love using Dubsado for the workflows, canned emails, forms, scheduler, and more that allow us to treat it as a literal Virtual Assistant that will take care of the mundane backend admin tasks. (Kind of ironic, huh?)
We’ve created an incredible automated process that we walk our clients through inside The Incubator! Just apply here if you want to learn more about it.
PHASE FOUR: GROW
The only way for you to truly scale and touch the lives of more people is for you to have amazing support. Support looks differently for everyone! You may only need one or two extra hands in your business, or you may end up scaling to a team of 10 or 20.
We help our clients identify the parts of their process that they can offload to a team member, so they get to stay in their zone of genius, deliver their services, and create a phenomenal client experience.
With the proper delegation, you can absolutely grow a 1:1 service-based business. We’d love for you to apply for the Incubator, so we can teach you exactly how to move through these 4 steps. Just DM us on Instagram @bossproject once you’ve applied so we can move you up in the queue!
