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Virtual Assistant: How using a Virtual Assistant Can Benefit Your Business
Nikki Dale • 5 May 2020
In these uncertain times, accessing marketing, admin and social media help for your business is easy with a Virtual Assistant.
In the last few years, technology has advanced to the stage where we can meet business needs without having to have an office. Many of the biggest tech companies in the world work virtually, with employees all over the globe logging in from home, a local café or wherever they have good internet access.
If you are a small business owner in need of some support, delegating tasks to a Virtual Assistant can help you to take advantage of technology to increase your productivity – without the overhead costs of employing someone.
1. Better Work-Life Balance
As a business owner, your most valuable asset is time. Spending your time on the areas of your business that are profitable is what you should be doing as much as you can.
Whether you have a family, or just want to get some down time away from the business, the worst thing you can do is bring your work home. However, the need to do everything means that you are getting bogged down in low-level tasks that may be essential to the smooth running of your business, but don’t need to be completed by you.
Have a look at your to-do list. What tasks on there are menial and process driven, that you could delegate to someone else? Delegation is a skill in and of itself, but it is essential for the entrepreneurial mindset. You are your business, and your time is valuable. You shouldn’t be spending it on data entry or receipt logging.
Hiring a Virtual Assistant can take away those process-driven admin tasks from your evenings and weekends, allowing you to ‘clock off’ and enjoy your life.
2. Scalability
If you are looking to scale your business and eventually employ people, a VA is a good place to start. As a freelance contractor, a VA is an invoiced cost that is based on either an hourly rate, or a project cost. There are no additional costs to working with a VA that you would get from an employee – you don’t need to have employer’s liability insurance, provide a pension or pay NIC.
As a quick scale, adding a VA will help to increase productivity, and (contracts allowing) hours can be added and decreased as your business needs change.
3. Expertise and Availability
With the best will in the world, you can’t be the best in every facet of business. You are excellent at what your customers want – whatever your offering, your customers are buying that.
However, other tasks in business still need to be done.
Hiring a Virtual Assistant can give you a pair of hands to help with the menial tasks, of course, but they can also be a valuable resource for expertise in various areas. A VA can be the key to a better online marketing strategy, can help you create cornerstone content that is valuable to your customer (and to your online presence), or teach you to use better software to streamline your processes.
Having a strong process for all your tasks makes sure that there is no ‘fluff’ or unnecessary steps that you are taking in dealing with customers. Whether that means upgrading your CRM or your invoicing system, it is important that you are constantly looking for ways to streamline your business.
You can’t always be there to answer a customer query, and an email inbox that is bursting at the seams is not a good way to run a business. Hiring a VA to monitor communication, answer phones and/or emails and just generally be available will make your customers happier and reduce the pressure on you.
Who to Choose for Your Business?
There are so many Virtual Assistants available - you are spoilt for choice in finding the right person for your business.
Thinking of the ways you will utilise a Virtual Assistant will inform your decision on who to choose.
If you are looking for a tech-savvy Virtual Assistant who has experience in marketing, general administration, social media content creation and curation, access to databases as well as bookkeeping, then I suggest Laura-Jayne from LJB Business Services.
With her varied experience from creating marketing strategy to implementing business changes, Laura-Jayne offers great value for money.
How can you bring more value to potential customers and demonstrate that you should be the go-to expert in your field? Well, by sharing your expertise, of course.
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