UassistME Blog | BPO Insights & Useful Resources

How Can a Virtual Assistant Help Me?

Written by Uassist.ME Team | Oct 22, 2019 3:17:54 PM

If you are beginning as an entrepreneur or at an early stage of a startup, the key element to help you take off quickly is a virtual assistant. While almost every startup will make you feel like a superhero at the beginning, it is always wise to remember that no person can possibly do everything all by themselves. You may initially be required to perform as a jack of all trades out of necessity, but outsourcing work once you’re on firm footing in the business is an important step to progress.

When Should You Outsource?

If you begin as a sole proprietor, you will soon discover that there are at least a hundred tasks for you to complete before the day is over for you. From administration to bookkeeping to social media management, you have your plate loaded as a small business owner. It is at this point when, as an SBO, you should realize that additional assistance is required to manage the tasks so that your time can be invested in building on ideas for your business.

For reaching the pinnacle of entrepreneurial success, a virtual CEO recommends creating a list, which he/she titles as the list to achieve entrepreneurial freedom. This list features three columns, which, when sorted, tremendously boost business growth and productivity. They include:

1. When Administrative Tasks Consume Your Time

A lot of non core activities tend to distract you from you key tasks. You often end up investing so much time in the less important and mundane tasks that you fail to give sufficient time to promote and help your business grow. Such tasks include but are not restricted to; receptionist duties, email management, booking appointments, calendar management, database building, transcription, recruiting etc. Outsourcing such tasks to VAs will take a lot of load off your hands and allow you more time and energy to invest in building your business.

2. Things You Are Unable to Do Yourself

Enlist in detail all those tasks you don’t have any experience or expertise in but are key elements for the business growth. It could be anything from graphic designing to the marketing of social media.

3. Things You Are Not Supposed to Do

This item on your list is probably the most important one. Often, we’re so overconfident of our abilities that we forget not everything is our forte. We are not superheroes and should not even pretend to be one when our business is at stake.

Service of Virtual Assistants

A Virtual assistant can enhance your business productivity and also reduce your workload and working hours at the same time. As an entrepreneur, the list of benefits is endless; you will not have to incur extra employee expenses, not worry about maintaining an expensive physical office, and not be bothered about downtime. All you are required to do is pay your virtual assistant as per the conditions decided in the contract.

Primary Roles That You Should be Outsourcing to Your VA

General Assistance

Administrative costs are just as burdensome and expensive as labor costs, especially when they are measured in the resources and time needed to invest in them. Virtual assistants prove to be cost-effective and extremely helpful in handling all these little yet integral details of your business. General administrative services that can be assigned to virtual assistants include:

  • Updates, entry and database building ( contacts, sales, CRM and so on)
  • Taking care of banking needs ( transfers and bills payments)
  • Customer care and support( handling phone calls, messages, etc.)
  • Preparing and mailing invoices
  • Payroll and booking duties
  • Preparing, filing and providing weekly reports on deliveries, hours, sales and tasks
  • Handling and scheduling appointments
  • Providing chat support and organizing tickets for technical support
  • Launch and maintenance of accounts related to cloud computing
  • Secretarial services
  • Preparing graphs from given spreadsheets
Content Writing

One big illusion most people live in today is that content writing is a piece of cake for everyone. This idea is so mythical that it is one of the main causes of the failures of most marketing projects of content writing today. Like every other task, content writing requires individual expertise and can best be performed by a writer or a marketing professional.

Digital Marketing and Optimization of Search Engine

An attractive website to showcase the brilliance of your products is essential to make your future business plans fall into place. A virtual assistant, experienced in digital marketing or SEO will be an asset for your business. An expert VA will bring great web traffic for your business, will ensure your brand is ubiquitous, and boost sales numbers with their professional strategies and digital marketing skills.

Social Media Management

The year 2019 has claimed a social media spending growth of 70%, and most of it is owed to mobile marketing. You don’t need much to figure out that the budget most businesses are happily investing in this area far exceeds that spent on labor. A VA with a social media acumen equaling that of a celebrity will know exactly how to gain attention big time on social media, how to be shared, and retweeted like wildfire on the networks. They know more than just hashtagging and trust me, that is exactly the boost your business needs.

Web Development

With the tremendous evolution in web development in the last ten years, coding itself had become severely complicated, and the success of your business' web development is best left to a seasoned expert.

Audio and Video Editing

With the advent of Microsoft and YouTube, most simple audio and video recordings have become fairly easy and manageable by just about everyone. However, if you are aiming at the quality, then you need to employ the use of special software, equipment, and editing handled by an expert in the field. The result would be an amplified version of your podcasts and YouTube channel.

By hiring an expert VA to edit your audios and videos, then despite having weak and inferior-quality equipment, your podcasts and webinars will have the look of professionalism and still manage to stand out in your niche.

Assorted Tasks

There are important tasks, and then there are also important random tasks that need to be done for your office, but you don't have the time for it. A virtual assistant can easily manage those tasks for you and at the same time, save you from huge labor expenses. Some of those expenses include:

  • Recruiting potential contractors, team members, and freelancers.
  • Researching important statistics, data, facts, etc. for blogging purposes, meetings, presentations, etc
  • Recording minutes of meetings and then create detailed reports
  • Generic tasks such as online purchasing of necessary equipment, organizing company events, etc.
  • Preparing and proving slide show presentations
  • Observe latest market and industry pattern and trends and provide regular updates to SBO

Concluding

Compare the pros and cons of hiring a virtual assistant based on your specific case. Perhaps, the task you are outsourcing is more affordable to manage within your business premises. Last but not least, once you have found the right virtual assistant, retain him/her to make the most of this service.