(And What to Do About Them)
You've finished your last client session. Dinner's done. You've finally sat down.
And then you remember the email you didn't answer.
Or the invoice you didn't send.
Or the website update that's been sitting on your list for three weeks.
So the laptop comes back out.
For therapists, physios, yoga teachers and other wellness professionals, it's often not the actual client work that stretches the working day. It's everything that comes with running the business around it.
And none of these jobs necessarily looks enormous on its own.
That's part of the problem.
1. The inbox that never really closes
A couple of enquiries. An appointment question. Someone needs information. A client replies to something you sent yesterday.
Each email might only take a few minutes.
But when you're seeing clients or teaching throughout the day, those emails often get dealt with in the gaps or saved until later.
Before long, your inbox has become another job waiting for you at the end of the day.
This is also one of the easiest areas to start handing over.
For some of my clients, I monitor their inbox, answer routine enquiries, send information, deal with straightforward admin and flag anything that genuinely needs their attention.
They don't need to be involved in every single email just because it's their business.
If your inbox has become a job in itself, I've also written about how to stop your inbox running your small business.
2. Appointment and booking admin
Online booking systems can automate a lot, but they don't magically remove all the admin around appointments.
There are still enquiries, cancellations, changes, diary updates and the occasional bit of booking-system weirdness that somebody needs to sort out.
I work with booking and practice-management systems including Cliniko and Acuity, managing the practical bits behind the scenes so my clients don't have to keep dipping in and out of them between appointments.
3. Invoicing and payment admin
It's very easy to put off invoicing when there are clients waiting and more urgent things demanding your attention.
Unfortunately, invoices are fairly important if you'd quite like to be paid. 😂
Depending on the business, there might also be payments to keep track of, information to organise or additional admin around insurance-funded appointments.
This is exactly the kind of recurring job that can be handed over instead of repeatedly appearing on your own to-do list.
4. The newsletter you keep meaning to send
Newsletters are a classic important-but-not-urgent job.
You know you'd like to communicate with your mailing list regularly.
You have things you could tell them.
And yet somehow it's been three months since the last email went out.
Often, the problem isn't coming up with something to say. It's everything around it like putting the newsletter together, formatting it, adding links, checking it and actually pressing send.
That's all work somebody else can help with.
5. Website updates that are always waiting
A new service.
A change of price.
An updated team member bio.
A class that needs adding.
A page that still contains information from six months ago.
Website updates have an annoying habit of being small enough to postpone but important enough that they eventually need doing.
I regularly make website changes for clients so those little updates don't have to become another evening job.
6. Social media admin
Social media is another area where the actual task can involve far more than simply writing a post.
There's formatting content, creating or resizing graphics, scheduling posts, adding links and keeping things ticking over when you're busy elsewhere.
You may want to stay involved in what your business says without necessarily being the person who has to physically prepare and schedule everything.
That's where support can come in.
And then there are all the tiny jobs
This is the bit that doesn't fit neatly onto a service list.
Uploading something.
Changing a form.
Finding some information.
Updating a system.
Sorting out a document.
Working out why something isn't behaving the way it should.
None of these jobs sounds like a reason to hire a Virtual Assistant.
But when you've got twenty of them scattered throughout the month, they take up a surprising amount of time and headspace.
Quite a lot of my work falls into this category.
Occasionally the entire brief is basically:
“Rachel, can you work out how to do this?”
Usually, yes!
You don't have to wait until the admin is completely out of control
There are often signs much earlier that your business is ready for some extra support and there's a tendency to think you should only outsource when you genuinely can't cope anymore.
I don't think that's true.
Your inbox might be under control.
Your invoices might be going out.
Your website might eventually get updated.
The question is what it's costing you to keep doing all of that yourself.
If you're regularly using evenings, weekends or time between clients to keep the business running behind the scenes, you might simply have reached the point where your time is better spent elsewhere.
And you don't have to outsource everything at once.
Even a few hours of regular support can take a collection of recurring jobs off your plate.
What could you stop doing yourself?
I'm Rachel, a Virtual Assistant specialising in supporting established wellness and health businesses.
I help with the practical work that keeps businesses running behind the scenes — including client and patient communications, bookings, invoicing, websites, newsletters, systems, social media support and general admin.
You don't need to create a perfectly organised list of everything you'd like to outsource before contacting me.
Tell me what's taking up your time, what's forever sitting at the bottom of your list, or simply what you're fed up with doing.
We can work out the rest from there.
I currently have space for 1–2 new ongoing clients, so if you'd like some of those 10pm jobs to become somebody else's jobs, let's have a chat.
