What tasks can a virtual assistant do for a photographer?

Booking, confirming and rescheduling shoots, lockbox codes, invoice follow-up, sending the gallery and a two-day follow-up. Later, culling, outreach and past-client calls. Never pricing, never the agent relationship.

How much does a virtual assistant cost for a real estate photographer?

About $4 to $5 an hour raw on onlinejobs.ph, and $7 to $12 an hour once trained. One trained VA covers what three part-time hires would.

What should I give a new VA on day one?

One page: the two booking windows you offer, in what order, and the exact wording. That's a decision they can run without texting you at night.

Answers › Running the business

Ask the agent

What should a virtual assistant do for a real estate photographer?

I’m hiring three people: social, outreach, past-client calls. Someone said one VA does all of it. What does a VA do?Asked by a photographer on Abidur, Riverside County (strategy call)

The calendar first. What’s breaking you isn’t the photos. It’s coordination: confirming Tuesday, rescheduling Tuesday, the lockbox code, chasing the invoice. Hire three people for social, outreach and past-client calls and you’ll pay three people while you still confirm Tuesday’s shoot at eleven at night.

Your first hire takes the calendar, not the camera

Scroll back through a week of texts on your phone. Confirm. Reschedule. Lockbox code. Invoice. Not one of them is a photo, and every one of them landed on you, usually after dinner.

That’s the first job a VA takes. Booking, confirming, rescheduling. The lockbox code and the invoice chase.

Then delivery: gallery out, and a follow-up two days later asking how the listing’s going. That follow-up is the one you never send because you’re editing. A VA sends it every time, and it’s the message that gets the next booking.

None of this needs your judgment. It needs your calendar, your two booking windows and the wording you’d use. That’s why it’s the first thing to go, and why it goes cleanly.

Your first hire doesn’t touch a photo. They take the calendar.

Your three hires are one VA

Abidur was about to hire three people. He needs one.

Once the calendar runs, you add culling, outreach and past-client calls to the same person. Those aren’t three jobs. They’re three hours in the same day.

$4 to $5 an hour raw on onlinejobs.ph. $7 to $12 an hour once they’re trained. One person, one set of instructions, one set of questions you answer once.

Agents can tell, by the way. For ten years I could: the photographers who had help answered at nine in the morning, not eleven at night. From her side of the table, that’s the whole difference between a company and a guy with a camera.

I could tell which photographers had help: answers at nine in the morning, not eleven at night.

Two things never leave you

A VA can take almost everything. Two things they never touch, and one of them is the whole business.

The agent relationship. Hand that off and your VA has the client, not you. Pricing. Nobody quotes for you, ever.

Everything else goes over as a written decision, not a task. "Handle the calendar" is a task, and it comes back as questions at 10 p.m. "We offer 9 a.m. or 1 p.m., in that order, in these words" is a decision. A VA runs it without asking.

The written decision is what makes the VA cheap. A VA who has to ask costs you the eleven-at-night texts you were trying to get rid of. A VA who has the page just sends them.

The big lesson

A VA runs your decisions. They can’t make them for you.

Do this

This week: write one page: the two booking windows you offer, in what order and what wording. Hand it over on day one.

The delivery checklist

What she actually needs when the files go out. Free. Then take the sixty-second roadmap quiz and I tell you what to fix first.

Get the checklist Get my roadmap

Straight answers

What tasks can a virtual assistant do for a photographer?: Booking, confirming and rescheduling shoots, lockbox codes, invoice follow-up, sending the gallery and a two-day follow-up. Later, culling, outreach and past-client calls. Never pricing, never the agent relationship.
How much does a virtual assistant cost for a real estate photographer?: About $4 to $5 an hour raw on onlinejobs.ph, and $7 to $12 an hour once trained. One trained VA covers what three part-time hires would.
What should I give a new VA on day one?: One page: the two booking windows you offer, in what order, and the exact wording. That’s a decision they can run without texting you at night.