Admin tasks — start here
The first 20 hours a week you should hand over. Inbox, calendar, CRM, follow-ups. The boring stuff that eats your day.
Your first VA should be doing admin. Not marketing, not strategy, not anything fancy. Boring, repeatable, soul-draining admin.
Two reasons. First, admin is the highest-volume, lowest-skill stuff you do — which means it’s the easiest to offload and the biggest time saver. Second, admin tasks have a clear right and wrong answer, so it’s easy to train someone and easy to spot mistakes.
The starter list
These are the first ten tasks I hand over to any new admin VA. In rough order of impact.
- 01
Inbox triage
Sort, archive, flag the 3–5 things that actually need you. Reply to the routine ones using your templates.
- 02
Calendar management
Booking calls, blocking out time, rescheduling, sending reminders, keeping the week clean.
- 03
CRM upkeep
Logging every new lead, updating contact records, moving deals through stages, adding notes after calls.
- 04
Lead follow-ups
Sending the second/third/fourth follow-up message you keep forgetting to send. The money is in the follow-up.
- 05
Invoicing and chasing
Sending invoices on the day. Chasing overdue ones with a polite scripted sequence.
- 06
Receipts and expense entry
Forwarding receipts into Xero/Hubdoc, tagging them, keeping the books current.
- 07
Client onboarding admin
Sending the welcome pack, kicking off contracts, setting up shared folders, booking the first call.
- 08
Document formatting
Tidying up proposals, slides, briefs, anything you'd otherwise spend an hour fiddling with.
- 09
Data entry and list cleanup
Updating spreadsheets, deduping lists, formatting exports — the genuinely mind-numbing stuff.
- 10
Travel and bookings
Flights, accommodation, restaurants, rideshares. Send them a doc with preferences once and they run it.
What “done” looks like
After 6–8 weeks of a good admin VA, you should be:
- Opening your inbox to ~5 emails that actually need you
- Walking into every call with the notes already prepped
- Never sending an invoice yourself
- Never chasing a payment yourself
- Getting back ~15–20 hours a week
That’s the baseline. Once that runs on autopilot, you’re ready for a marketing VA. Next section.