As a business owner, you want to focus on the most important aspects of your business. There are more important things about your business that you should be concentrating on instead of time-consuming tasks like cold calling, accounting, copy and content writing, and others. Entrepreneurs should zero in on growing their business. But turning these tasks over to your in-house staff can leave them overwhelmed and burned out.
You and your team are better off outsourcing these types of tasks to a virtual assistant. Hiring a virtual assistant will take the load off your shoulders so you and your team can focus on the tasks that you need to accomplish. Maybe you have second thoughts about outsourcing tasks to a virtual assistant due to budget constraints. In this article, we shall take a look at the benefits of hiring a virtual assistant.
Benefits of Hiring Virtual Assistant
- Saves You Time & Money
- Focus On Your Core Skills
- Makes Your Business Efficient
- Access To Experts
- Increased Quality
- Streamlined Operations
- You Can Scale Up or Down
- Hire According To Needs
- Improve Customer Service
- Increase Return of Investment
Let’s discuss each.
Benefits of Hiring Virtual Assistants
Hiring a virtual assistant may be one of the last things on your mind right now because you think that it is an additional expense for you. You may want to be hands-on with some of the business tasks yourself or delegate some to your staff. But additional work can become overwhelming for you and your team. Outsourcing to a virtual assistant offers huge benefits for your business.
1. Saves You Time & Money
Tasks like preparing financial statements, bookkeeping, writing content, booking hotels & airlines, and others can be time-consuming. Time is of prime importance when running a business. You need all the time to foster and strengthen client relationships, but when you are tied up with crunching numbers, cold calling, and other administrative functions, you may no longer have time for the tasks you should be focusing on. For you to be successful with your business, you need time for strategic thinking, forging new relationships, developing new ideas, and others.
In addition, hiring a virtual assistant will also save you the usual expenses associated with employing an in-house team. You won’t have to pay for taxes and benefits, office rental, utilities, and other expenses. The virtual assistant will have their own equipment and pay for their internet connection and electricity bills. Hiring a VA could save your business as much as 78% in operating costs. A virtual assistant will only charge you for the time they worked either on the number of hours or the scope of work required.
When running a business, you need all the time and resources in the world. Outsourcing to a virtual assistant frees up your time and helps you get more things done without sacrificing quality. Hiring a VA can help you spend more time on being “IN” the business instead of “ON” it.
2. Focus On Core Skills
Time-consuming tasks can prevent you from performing your core skills. You ought to be focusing on growing your business and getting more clients. However, doing administrative and back-office tasks may drag you away from doing that. Administrative tasks can be easily delegated to a virtual assistant. These are process-driven and repetitive tasks so outsourcing to a VA will help ensure that your tasks will be done on time so you and your team can focus on core tasks.
There are many tasks that you can outsource to a virtual assistant. Anything that can be done in a traditional office can be handled by a virtual assistant. Whether it’s managing emails and scheduling appointments, taking incoming phone calls, or updating website content, you can assign them to a virtual assistant. You can remove these time-consuming tasks from your plate to focus on the bigger stuff.
With the virtual assistant handling tedious and repetitive tasks, you can leverage the skills of the VA so you can set your sights on the more important tasks at hand. This way, you can be flexible in how you run your business. After all, you should put your business first. Maximizing VA skills will help alleviate the feeling of being overwhelmed and stressed out.
3. Makes Your Business Efficient
Hiring a virtual assistant will help expedite processes and get things done more quickly. Inefficiencies cost businesses between 20 and 30 percent of revenue each year. Maybe you are too busy and don’t have the time to work on making your business efficient. When you or your team is overwhelmed with tasks, it will be hard to stay efficient. VAs know what tools to use for their tasks and how to integrate them into your processes to make them more efficient.
With the VA focusing on tedious functions, you can focus on what you do best. Whether it’s software development, digital marketing, or any other task, you can throw all your time and resources into those functions. Also, you do not have to wear multiple hats at once and handle only those activities that you like to do best. However, for the arrangement to be effective, you must give the VA your full trust. Guide them in the direction you want to take but let them do things their way.
VAs can help you become efficient because they can complete tasks you struggle with. You can work on the things you are good at. This will give you a better opportunity to work on growing your business rather than being stuck on your day-to-day operations. This way, you do not have to be a “jack-of-all-trades” and ensure efficient operations.
4. Access To Experts
Virtual assistants excel at what they do. You can utilize their expertise depending on your field. For example, if your weakness is in accounting or other number-related functions, you can find VAs who are good at crunching numbers. If you want to develop or enhance your website, there are VAs who are experts in web design or development.
Assess areas in your business where you are not an expert and not comfortable with and outsource it to a VA. By working with VAs, you get to broaden your network of industry experts. You can make them your business partners and realize your business goals with them. VAs work on niche tasks like content writing, accounting, and others. You can hire them as executive assistants, community managers, podcast managers, or social media specialists,
However, you must also remember that the VA cannot do everything. There is no one-size-fits all solution. That is why you first need to assess which tasks you will outsource and set aside a budget accordingly. At least one-quarter of a knowledge worker’s activities could be eliminated or delegated. So look at the activities of your employees and see where your time is going. Once done, proceed with finding the right virtual assistant.
5. Increased Quality
You might think that because the fees of virtual assistants are relatively lower compared to your full-time employees, the quality of their work will be compromised. On the contrary, virtual assistants are known for delivering quality work. They strive to perform at a high level and know that their reputation and success ride on delivering value to their clients.
VAs understands that client satisfaction lies in ensuring quality output on their end. Also, they know that for them to get more work and clients, they need to be reliable and ensure that they provide the best output. Pricing is not an issue for them because they either have another full-time job or a side gig. It is the quality of their output they are after because it is their ticket to getting more work.
VAs works with the highest standard. They ensure that they meet deadline requirements and that it meets your expectations. They want to reduce the number of corrections or modifications as much as possible. By doing quality work, they can be assured of getting more clients. On your end, this contributes to enhanced productivity and helps you achieve your business goals.
6. Streamlined Operations
Most virtual assistants are not only good at what they do, they are also tech-savvy and have experience in using different software, thus can help improve your office processes and make your services leaner. They know some time-saving hacks and automation to speed things up and make things better.
Since most VAs work remotely, their focus is on increasing the efficiency of the processes, effective communication, and enhancing advanced reporting channels. Virtual assistants can streamline your workflow so you won’t forget or overlook important tasks. VAs will ensure that these tasks will be handled each day accordingly.
At the end of it all, VAs can help you stay productive. They can help you improve task organization. With the VA helping organize your tasks and schedules in a proper manner, you will find yourself running into fewer difficulties than otherwise.
7. You Can Scale Up or Down
Hiring a virtual assistant is substantially lower than hiring an in-house employee which can result in a huge reduction in your capital needs. They are highly skilled, so they can take over extra workload with minimal supervision. VAs are also flexible regarding working hours depending on your needs. For example, they can add working hours during your peak seasons or decrease it during quiet times.
You cannot control the market situation so it is understandable for you to scale down your business to cope with the changes in the situation. Unlike with your in-house team, you do not have to worry about paying them separation pay and getting into trouble with the law if you don’t. VAs work as independent contractors so you don’t have any legal obligations to them just in case you let them go.
In the same way, VAs can help ensure business continuity. You can hire them anytime to ensure your business is going as smoothly as it used to be. Virtual assistants can help your business evolve and scale without delays.
8. Hire According To Needs
You can hire virtual assistants based on your needs. For example, you can outsource them if you require assistance for certain tasks. In addition, you can hire them on an output-based setup and end their contract once the project is completed. They need not work the usual 9-5 working hours. You can negotiate the schedule and not stick to the regular hours. You can also hire VAs based on your budget. VAs will charge you per use. They can bill you based on the number of hours or scope of the work required.
VAs can work flexible hours, part-time, or full schedules, depending on your need. You may need them for short-term tasks or for long-term ones. Most of the time they handle other clients so work out with them which is the best time they can work for you on certain tasks. This way you can set a budget and pay them accordingly.
The most important thing is to always have a contract in place, no matter how small or short-term the project is. Always read the fine print of the agreement before signing. It is important to ensure that you will also benefit from the partnership.
9. Improve Customer Service
If you have a website or ecommerce store, you need to be always available to customers in different time zones worldwide. When customers reach out to you with a concern, they expect an immediate response. 75% of customers expect a fast response time to have a positive customer experience. In addition, 70% of customers say they will advise their friends not to buy a product or service after a negative service experience.
In today’s digital world, the traditional 9-5 business hours is not enough to respond to customers. Also, having just one or two persons handling customer service is not productive. They still need to sleep, eat, and manage their personal lives. If you have thousands of customers to attend to, it can become overwhelming for your in-house team to handle all that at the same time.
This is where a virtual assistant can help you. They can work round the clock to ensure they have customers inquiring beyond the traditional working hours covered. This will give you peace of mind that customer service is being delivered regardless of the time of day. You can hire a virtual assistant who works simultaneously as your customer in a different time zone while you are asleep.
10. Increase Return of Investment
Hiring a VA can help your business grow and increase its profit. The money intended for the salary of the virtual assistant can be diverted to other income-generating investments like marketing or improving your product and services. Investing in a VA can help generate returns for your business. They help you increase your social media presence which in turn can bring website traffic and possible conversion.
Most business owners spend 40% of their working hours on tasks that don’t generate income. Delegating some of those working hours to a VA can help free up some of your time for tasks that will bring in money. By determining the number of hours you spend yourself on these tasks and the number of hours you can save, you would see a significant return on investment.
A virtual assistant can help you maximize your ROI. Before hiring a VA, create a list of all your tasks and determine which ones can be delegated to a VA. Do follow the Pareto principle when hiring a VA by focusing on the 20% of tasks that provide 80% of results. Concentrate on your revenue-generating tasks and delegate the non-income generating ones to the VA.
If you are still having second thoughts about hiring a virtual assistant to do some of your work for you, maybe these benefits will convince you to search for the right VA for your business.
Outsource Your Virtual Assistant Needs To airisX
Outsourcing allows you, as a business, to focus on your main competencies and operations and forget the hassle of sharp learning curves when the task falls outside your company’s core area of business.
By outsourcing to a leader like airisX, you will be able to scale up quickly by getting the right resources, processes and technological infrastructure. No matter what your scaling requirements are, airisX will give you the best optimised solution and you will be able to focus on making your customers happy. Your back office operations will be simplified, giving your users a high-quality experience. Contact us at contact@airisx.com to get the right solutions tailored for your needs.