A Tale of Two VAs

Getting the most out of your employees

Welcome back!

It’s been a while since I wrote a post that isn’t my P&L reports or me shilling something - and one of my goals for next year is to turn that around.

As of today, I have 4 full-time virtual assistants from the Philippines that help me with sourcing products. In this post I wanted to contrast how I initially approached working with VAs against what I do now, and what you should take into consideration if you decide to hire one for your arbitrage business.

My First VA

When I was getting ready to hire my first VA, I decided that I wanted to hire someone who already had experience in product research. I made a job posting on onlinejobs.ph and within 24 hours had around 30 applicants - I took the 3 most promising candidates and sent them a Keepa test (a document with 5 graphs and they had to explain why they were or were not good products). From there, I hired the one who did the best after an interview. For the sake of this post, let’s call him Jeff.

From the beginning, I had set some harsh expectations on Jeff (unknowingly). I asked him to find me 8 leads per day, which isn’t exactly impossible but it leads to a lack of quality in the items found. I gave him no additional training other than my sourcing criteria and expected him to do well since he had experience.

While he didn’t do a terrible job, the results were far from what I was expecting. I wasn’t buying most of the items he found, and half of the items I did buy ended up tanking pretty hard.

To try something different, I hired an agency called Fast Track FBA - they hire VAs with no experience in product research and train them specifically to source arbitrage products. The VA I got from them was slow at first, but after her first month was doing far better than Jeff. After 3 months of disappointment, I fired Jeff with a month of severance pay.

Sourcing arbitrage products on Amazon isn’t exactly a popular skill to have. I thought to myself, “If someone has experience doing this and doesn’t have a job right now, there’s probably a reason for that”. To an extent I still believe this, but in the future I think I would be able to hire someone similar to Jeff and turn them into a high level performer.

My Fourth VA

Let’s fast forward 3 months. I’ve just hired my fourth (including Jeff so I have 3 now) VA, and like all the two VAs before her she came from Fast Track FBA. A new routine I’ve developed with my VAs is to do daily calls with them for their first month so I can give them feedback on the items they found, as well as answer any questions and give advice.

It’s her second week, and two days in a row she comes to the meeting with zero items on the spreadsheet. She apologized for her poor performance, and I could tell from looking at her that she was really frustrated with herself. Had this been my first experience with a VA, I may have fired her on the spot. By this point though, I understood that there was a better solution.

For the next couple of days, I had her watch me source for an hour and explained my thought process when it came to what kind of things I was looking for: What websites I wanted to source, How to look for discount codes, and why certain items may not be as good as they seem when you take a closer look at the Keepa chart. I was training her to source like me, and think like me.

The month after she joined the company, I started tracking how much inventory spend each VA is contributing. Here are the results from September and October (she’s marked in blue):

September Inventory Spend

October Inventory Spend

If you exclude myself (the big green slices), she has been the top performer in the company the last two months. By investing extra time into her, I’ve been able to transform her into an awesome sourcing VA who is worth her weight in gold. Had I treated her like Jeff and not done those extra sessions, who knows how long it would’ve taken her to get this good?

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The takeaway from this story is that your employees are only as good as the resources you give them - whether that’s your time or fully written SOPs, you can’t just expect them to figure it all out on their first day. If you plan on hiring a sourcing VA in the future, keep this story in mind - be willing to show patience, and give them the time / resources they need to accelerate their growth.

As for some updates on what else I’ve been working on, I’m more than half-way finished on my course - there’s currently 33 videos done, totaling up to about 3 and a half hours of content. More information on the course will be released once I’m close to finishing it and I’ve worked on the branding.