What’s one of the hardest things about being an entrepreneur? For most people, the answer is managing your time efficiently.
When you’re running a business, it seems there aren't enough hours in a day (or week) to get everything done. Is it some type of curse that entrepreneurs must endure to become a success?
Or are you just doing things all wrong?
Well, it’s important to point out the fact that many entrepreneurs are just horrible at time management. In fact, one study shows entrepreneurs are wasting nearly 22 hours a week.
Where is this time going? Let’s take a look:
3.4 hours spent low-value emails
3.2 hours spent on low-value interruptions (that could be handled by someone else)
1.8 hours spent handling low-value requests from co-workers
1.8 hours spent dealing with preventable issues
1 hour spent on non-productive meetings
But it’s not just your time that’s an issue for entrepreneurs. When you’re consistently struggling with getting things done and reaching goals, you’ll inevitably end up battling with mental problems.
Roughly 45% of entrepreneurs admit to being stressed. And it’s found that 72% of entrepreneurs are affected directly or indirectly by mental health differences. Nearly half of these individuals had personal mental health history, while 23% had family mental health history.
Some of the other mental health problems that arise among entrepreneurs include:
Depression: 30%
ADHD: 29%
Addiction: 12%
Bipolar diagnosis: 11%
So what can entrepreneurs do to help ease these tensions? If we tie these disorders to stress and lack of time, then there’s a plausible solution – hiring virtual assistants.
Imagine having more time to grow your business and still have time to spend with your family and friends. You can make it happen.
Not sure what to delegate to them? Then here are 20 duties and responsibilities you can assign to a Virtual Assistant.
As an entrepreneur, you can’t go a day without checking your email. After all, this is how you connect with clients, co-workers, and prospects.
Ignoring your email could be potentially devastating to your business. But constantly checking and replying to emails can be rather time-consuming.
With the help of a virtual assistant, you can ensure your email inbox doesn’t become backlogged. And it’ll ensure you have time to handle more important tasks involved with running a business.
Some of the tasks they can handle include filtering your emails, managing spam, customer service emails, chat support, updating your contacts and CRM, and so on.
The more successful you become, the more hectic your schedule will be. But you don’t have to live your life constantly staring at your schedule book (or app).
Instead, hire a virtual assistant to manage it all for you. A VA can help you with scheduling meetings and appointments, sending you reminders, managing your calendar, and making travel arrangements.
This way, you can focus on doing what needs to be done without wasting time planning your schedule.
Things can get pretty hectic when you have a lot of work on your desk. Organizing it all can be frustrating and time-consuming, especially if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Your role in the company is to drive forth growth, whether it’s reaching out to new clients, managing customer relations, or attending conventions. This means you don’t have the time to sit around organizing all of your files and folders.
With a virtual assistant, you can get assistance with organizing your Google Drive, Dropbox, or other cloud storage service. Plus, the VA can create and manage your spreadsheets, prepare Powerpoint/keynote presentations, conduct data entry, and convert documents into PDFs.
Content is a necessary tool to have in your business marketing arsenal. Without it, you’ll struggle with building your brand, visibility, and trust. These are all essential for gaining the trust of your core audience.
However, content management can take up a lot of your time. For instance, you have to come up with topic ideas, conduct market research and analyses, write and edit the content, engage with users in the comments, and so much more.
Again, all of this is handled for you when you hire a virtual assistant who specializes in blogging and content creation.
While most entrepreneurs have their own desk (and office), this doesn’t mean you should be in it all day. Unless, of course, the service you offer requires you to do so.
The idea is that business owners should spend their time performing the duties necessary to keep the business operating. Yet, many spend many hours throughout the week doing mundane tasks, such as transcribing video and audio files, conducting online research, creating document templates, checking voicemails, and sending out invoices.
Administrative duties are essential to running a functional business. But allow this to be done by a virtual assistant instead.
Your marketing efforts should extend beyond blogging and paid advertising. It’s also important to meet prospects and customers where they spend many hours throughout the day – on social media.
Having an active business page and regularly engaging with your followers is critical to building your brand, authority, and trust. With a virtual assistant on your squad, you can ensure your business pages are active, engaging, and effective.
Some of the tasks a VA can perform include writing and scheduling posts, tracking analytics, promoting profile pages, engaging in conversations, and uploading videos.
There’s answering emails for customer service purposes and then there’s email marketing. With the latter, you’re sending out emails that help turn prospects into customers and customers into return buyers.
But you’ll need a virtual assistant who’s an expert in building email lists, segmenting subscriber lists, analyzing data, and crafting emails that convert.
If you’re in the business of creating visual and audio content, then having someone who can edit it is key. The last thing you want is for your videos to look unprofessional or for your audio to be too high, too low, or muffled.
Thankfully, there are virtual assistants you can hire today who are experts in video and audio editing.
Your content will only perform as great as the optimization efforts put into them. Without proper SEO, your blog posts, guest articles, and other digital content won’t be visible on search engines like Google.
With an expert SEO manager, you can ensure you’re implementing the right keywords and keyword densities for your content pieces. An SEO expert can assist with keyword research, website analysis, sitemap submissions, on-page optimization, webmaster submission, competitor analysis, backlink building, and more.
When you’re creating content for your blog, 3rd party websites, or social media, it’s good to have visual content. Stats show content that contains images every 75 to 100 words get double the shares on social media.
But rather than getting stock images for your content, it’s better to create your own. A virtual assistant with graphic design skills can craft these photos for you.
This includes making infographics, landing pages, logos, e-book covers, product photos, and more.
Your website is your digital storefront so you want to make the best first impression you possibly can. If your site is unprofessional, difficult to navigate, or slow to load, then you’re going to lose more traffic than you can count.
A virtual assistant with web development skills can help ensure this doesn’t happen to you. They’ll design a site that’s functional, fast, and user-friendly. Plus, it’s great to have someone on standby who can offer support.
Once you find the right virtual assistant, your recruiting days could be over. You can find a VA who can assist with scouting and interviewing potential contractors, virtual assistants, or employees.
Just let them know the skills, requirements, and qualifications you demand and the virtual assistant will begin the search. This includes publishing job ads and reaching out to professionals on platforms like LinkedIn.
There are many ways you can promote your content and your brand on the web. One area you don’t want to overlook is forums.
These come in different shapes and sizes – your own personal virtual assistant can help you find the best message boards to sign up to. Then they’ll handle engagement with the community.
This includes asking questions to drive conversations and answering questions to demonstrate expertise.
Small business owners sometimes handle all of their tax prep on their own. But as you grow larger, you’re going to need help keeping track of all the finances.
You may need a virtual assistant to help with both your accounting/bookkeeping and your tax filing. Having someone who can scour over all your financial documents is a time-saver so you don’t have to do it all on your own.
You’re looking to expand your business to larger audiences and maybe even a new market. In either case, you’re going to need help with sales.
A virtual assistant can generate hot leads via cold calling, cold emailing, and other outreach methods. Social media, chatbots, and other platforms are excellent ways for virtual assistants to capture and convert leads.
Interviewing experts can help spice up your blog posts, videos, and podcasts. But finding and convincing them to be interviewed takes time you may not have.
A virtual assistant, on the other hand, has all the time to scour the internet to find the most ideal candidates to interview for upcoming content.
When you’re looking to recruit new talent, you have to be careful of who you hire. Not doing so could lead to issues down the road you could’ve avoided with a simple background check.
Staffers and employees need to be thoroughly checked before being hired, which requires time, effort, and good judgment. A virtual assistant will be able to handle all background checks, criminal checks, credit checks, and so on.
Meetings are a necessary evil in the world of business. Unfortunately – as we learned – a lot of meetings are unproductive. If you can help it, try to minimize meetings and only hold them if absolutely necessary.
Then during these meetings, you can have your virtual assistant write down minutes so its documented for personal reference and business purposes.
Thinking about offering a new product or service but don’t know if there’s a market for it? Then research needs to be conducted.
Don’t have the time or know-how? Then a virtual assistant has got you covered. Hiring a VA with experience researching consumer markets, competitors, data, stats, etc., can make it easier to make business decisions.
You’ve already got your emails covered – what about your business calls? Having a virtual assistant on hand who can answer calls, take down information, and schedule appointments are key.
In business, you don’t want prospects, clients, and other important people getting nothing but your voicemail. Speaking to a live person makes your company appear more professional.
Plus, it puts them at ease in doing business with you since you now seem accessible.
Sure, you may not need help with all of these tasks. However, there are likely one or more items on this list you could use assistance with.
If you’re having trouble pinpointing which duties to outsource, then just do this: write down all of the tasks you hate doing, don’t know how to do, and don’t have the time to do.
These are the tasks you need help with. Now, it’s time to start looking for virtual assistants. Reach out to Uassist.ME to learn about our top-tier VAs!