How a plumber can use a virtual assistant
I had a plumber come to my house on Friday. No, no…this is not a metaphor for anything…I literally had a plumber come to my house.
He fixed my leaky pipe and informed me that I had really high pressure. He told me that he would send me an invoice for fixing the leaky pipe and a quote to fix the high pressure and left. On time, great communication fixed my problem, beautiful!
But…it is now Thursday the week after he came and I have not received the invoice. Not a problem for me…but a potentially big problem for him.
You see as they say in business “Cash flow is King”. By deferring sending an invoice (until who knows when) he is jeopardising his cash flow.
Plus as I have not received his quote for fixing the pressure problem I can’t spend more money with him. And if he is not sending his quotes on time…I would guess he would not have an efficient system for collections. I get it, I don’t want to be doing all the boring (but so important) finance stuff in my business either.
So let me paint you a picture of how it could be. The Plumber (let’s call in Andre) leaves my place and starts driving to his next client.
He calls (or leaves a voice message with) his Virtual Assistant (let’s call her Mary) and says something like:
With this short message Mary would have all the information she needed to send me an invoice and a quote without Andre doing anything further.
In her first few weeks working with Andrew he would probably quickly check the invoices and quotes before they go out, but once Mary is up to speed and accurate he would drop this step.
Mary would then follow me up if I didn’t pay in time and also to see if I wanted to book in time to have my high pressure thingie fixed.
For this role Andre would only need Mary to work half time which means that the benefits would far exceed the financial investment.
- Way better cash flow
- Less outstanding payments (as Mary will be actively following up overdue accounts)
- More time for Andre to do the actual plumbing (and bring in more revenue)
- Increase in repeat customers (as we all know it is easier to sell to an existing customer than get a new one).
Unfortunately Andre is not utilising this competitive advantage. Not sure why, perhaps he doesn’t see the possibilities.
And that is why I told you this story.
Even if you are not a plumber, hopefully from this story you can start to see possibilities for yourself.