Before I dwell into What Exactly Does a Virtual Assistant Do? You see ehn, in the battlefield that entrepreneurship is, two things are constant, no matter the venture:
- Every entrepreneur is in a tearing hurry to reach the top
- Every entrepreneur faces two constraints – time and resources
The secret to success lies in leveraging your resources such that you scale up and scale fast. This, however, is easier said than done.
As a business owner, you find hundreds of items to check off of your to-do list, every day. These vary in importance; from the core, crucial and strategic to mundane, recurring and repetitive work. When your focus is spread thin over the two categories, the result is a slump in efficiency, growth, and productivity.
What can a small business owner do? The answer lies in delegation. Once you realize this, the next step is finding a trained professional. This is where the Virtual Assistant (VA) steps in.
Who is a Virtual Assistant?
A Virtual Assistant (V.A) is a self-employed worker who specializes in offering administrative, technical or digital services to clients from a remote location, usually a home office.
VAs are usually a jack-of-all-trades, they can perform both basic administrative functions and jobs requiring in-depth knowledge and technical expertise with élan.
VAs are adaptable and versatile; this means you can find a virtual assistant online for almost any job – bookkeeping, scheduling appointments, web designing, web management, social media management, content creation, network management, graphic designing, digital marketing, SEO and so on.
Theoretically, a virtual assistant can do anything that another support staff might do. There are limitations, but technology is increasingly offering ways to work around those limitations. For example, they may not be able to physically bring you coffee in the morning, but they can place a coffee or lunch order through a food delivery service.
What does a Virtual Assistant do?
A virtual assistant will free up your time and allow you to focus on the essentials of business – growth, competition, and strategy – tasks that you, as Commander-in-Chief, can perform best.
A majority of the tasks small business owners perform can be inexpensively outsourced to a smart, qualified virtual assistant.
A VA can perform these tasks with the same degree of efficiency as a full-time resource but at a far more affordable price. Let’s look at some areas you can immediately outsource to a virtual assistant.
1. General administration
It doesn’t make sense for an entrepreneur to manage calendars and set appointments when they can instead focus on core business areas. VA can also perform all those mundane tasks that are essential to the smooth running of your business – website management, scheduling meetings, creating itineraries, organizing your days and booking your flight tickets.
2. Social media management
Can you survive in a digital age without a robust, active social media presence? Absolutely not.
While you simply cannot afford to ignore social media, you also can’t afford to spend your bandwidth managing your business’ handles. The solution? Hire a competent VA to manage and grow your social media accounts.
A VA can schedule posts and keep with daily news about you in the public domain. They can also create a roadmap of how you can grab your target customers’ attention after analysing current trends, gathering statistics and monitoring interactions.
3. Email management
Do you despair on seeing hundreds of unread emails on Gmail every day? An inbox filled to the brim with customer queries, supplier communications, job inquiries and spam can take hours to sort, answer, and delete. Wouldn’t bringing in a VA for task be a lifesaver?
A VA will organize your contacts list, answer routine emails on a pre-agreed format, and forward the important ones to you. Extricate yourself from the maddening trap of emails and get a trained VA to handle it for you.
4. Digital marketing
Planning digital marketing strategies is one of the top items on your priority list. Once you’ve done the strategic work, hire a digital marketing VA to execute your plans. Your VA can take over and track your marketing efforts – social, email, content – with ease while saving you time and money.
5. Customer support
Building a successful business means keeping your customers happy. But fielding customer grievances and queries is a job best handled by your virtual assistant. VA’s trained in customer service can deal with customers on phone, chat, email, and social media.
Your VA can solve issues, handle dissatisfied customers, deal with deliveries, communicate updates et al. You can even train your virtual assistant to identify opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling while interacting with customers.
6. Graphic design
Designing is a specialized (and creative) skill set not everyone can ace. A graphic design VA can tackle everything from your social media to blog post graphics. Delegate recurring design work for your marketing collateral, advertising banners, and social media copy to your Virtual Assistant.
7. Copywriting
This is another vital yet time-consuming affair which you can easily delegate to VA. Attractive, detail-rich and engaging content is crucial to growing your business presence online. Such content has to be SEO-friendly and valuable to your audience.
An experience copywriting VA can help you create SEO-optimized and well-formatted blog posts, website content, and social media content after conducting thorough research.
8. Data entry
Ask an entrepreneur about the one task that bothers them the most, and they’ll likely respond with data entry.
A data entry virtual assistant is a boon for your business, saving it both time and money. Be it entering data in Excel or adding content to a presentation, your VA can help you deal with a mountain of data. So don’t break into a sweat every time the prospect of data entry stares you in the face. Just sign up on Our VA platform and get yourself a qualified professional.
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Benefits of Hiring Virtual Assistant for Your Business
When your business is thriving, you need more than an extra set of hands. You need a virtual assistant.
With the right virtual assistant (VA), you can delegate daily tasks to someone who’s around to support you, at all times. Nurturing and growing your business doesn’t mean you have to drown yourself in a sea of trivial tasks. It means being smart about choosing areas that need your attention and letting your virtual assistant take care of the rest.
A VA takes care of your recurring, administrative functions while you handle core business operations. All you have to do is to hire the right person, communicate responsibilities, and kick the relationship off. This leaves you free time to make strategic decisions and grow your business.
Not convinced? Here’s why you need to get yourself a virtual assistant right now.
1. Hiring a virtual assistant saves your time
Onboarding a VA saves you precious time that you otherwise spend on repetitive business tasks. Extract productivity out of the 24 hours in your day by hiring a virtual assistant. Get more done in less amount of time.
2. Reduce employee-related expenses
As a business owner, making financially sound investments is perhaps the most important part of your ‘job’. Building a team is expensive – a cost your small business may not yet be ready to bear. By hiring a virtual assistant, you no longer have to pay fixed monthly salaries (which can run up to thousands of naira/dollars). What’s sweetens the deal further is that you get to employ the expertise of a trained employee without having to pay for it.
3. Pay for work only
By hiring a virtual assistant, you save on employees expenses such as paying for their off time – holidays and vacations. Nor do you have to bear expenses other than the compensation work.
4. Value for money
Why hire a qualified professional on a full-time basis and be paying hefty salaries when you can hire a virtual assistant for a lot less? It’s just smart business sense. Also, every VA brings specialized skills and their own experience and invaluable for an entrepreneur.
5. Focus on core business areas
You can prioritize the crucial areas of business – product/service design and improvement; effective delivery; customer relationship management; enhancing competitiveness and so on. The virtual assistant can handle mundane administrative activities.
6. Focus on profitability
The metric of a business’s success or failure is profit, among the chief factors that motivate you. Focus on long-term profitability and growth as your virtual assistant handles other tasks for you.
7. Exponential growth
Don’t stop to let the traditional time-consuming hiring process run its course. You can choose highly qualified, effective professionals and build a small but incredibly competent team. Hire a VA instantly and grow your business fast.
8. Stay one step ahead of the competition
How do you beat competition? By focusing on core tasks and building processes that are hard to replicate. While doing so isn’t easy in the first place, a lack of focus make surviving even more difficult. By hiring a virtual assistant, you can bring the focus back to staying ahead of the curve. More time to focus on strategy can really give you an exponential advantage in a competitive market.
9. VA’s are great at time management
Because a virtual assistant earns by the hour or per project, they’re far better at time management than employees who draw a fixed salary. You can imagine how great this can be for your business.
10. Improve emotional well-being
The psychological price of entrepreneurship is now a well-accepted reality. Happy and excited as your public face may be, we know you’re struggling to retain your sanity through the day.
The secret trick powering successful entrepreneurs isn’t so much of a secret – delegation. Delegating work is proven to increase productivity, energy, and happiness. Apart from an actual decrease in your workload, delegating is good for your happiness as you psychologically feel less overwhelmed.
11. No background check hassles
Hiring a virtual assistant saves you from spending time, money and effort on verifying a prospective employee’s credentials. The virtual assistant’s testimonials and references will speak for their calibre. Moreover, a VA company like Panelict Technologies and Consulting Limited will have conducted proper due diligence on each individual.
As any successful entrepreneur will tell you, striking the right balance is key and prioritizing is the smartest way to build a business. So hire a virtual assistant today to fuel your business and embrace a stress-free entrepreneurial journey.