As an entrepreneur, small business owner, startup founder, or business executive, you need all the help you can get to function on your job effectively. Managing a rapidly growing business is a lot of work. As your business grows and your responsibilities increase, hiring a virtual assistant to assist you is one way to improve your chances of success.
A virtual assistant is a professional who provides technical and administrative assistance to clients. As the name suggests, this individual works remotely, which means they can be located anywhere in the world and they don’t have to come with you to the office or follow you everywhere you go.
A virtual assistant’s job description and specific responsibilities depend on your specific needs. Since their core work is to assist you with your work, virtual assistants get to perform various tasks based on your responsibilities and what you’re willing to delegate to them.
Hiring virtual assistants comes with a lot of benefits in terms of time management and getting work done effectively. In this article, we’ll highlight some of these virtual assistance benefits, providing logical reasons for hiring a virtual assistant.
1. Get More Done in Less Time
No matter how organized and efficient you are, there’s only so much you can do on your own. Growing your company is a full-time job that requires your full attention. Most small business owners have to handle multiple responsibilities on their own. There’s a lot to do, from managing employees to performing administrative tasks, meeting with multiple clients, and managing your company’s finances. These activities ramp up even more during busy times or peak periods when you’re working on a major project.
Hiring a virtual assistant allows you to delegate your non-core tasks like managing your schedule, booking a meeting, and checking and replying to your emails. Delegating these routine tasks helps you save time so you can focus on other aspects of running and growing your business. By taking care of these seemingly minor details of your daily operation, a virtual assistant helps boost business productivity so you can get more done in less time.
2. Free Up Time for Yourself
Similar to the virtual assistant benefits stated above, a virtual assistant takes some responsibilities off you and completes tasks on your behalf. This helps you create more free time for yourself. This is one of the most underrated benefits of hiring a personal assistant. With a good assistant, you’ll get to delegate tasks so you can enjoy more free time to attend to your personal life and needs.
As a business owner or executive with a busy schedule, every minute you can spare to tend to your physical health, mental well-being, family, and relationships is of significant benefit. With the right virtual assistant, you get to enjoy a healthy work life balance and enhanced emotional well-being.
3. Get Help with Decision-Making
A virtual assistant can be a valuable sidekick for efficient decision-making. Virtual assistants offer help with market research, information gathering and analyzing data to gain valuable insights valuable for decision making.
You can delegate the task of researching your target audience and competitors to your assistant. The best virtual assistants will also pay attention to industry trends and present the information they gather from watching these trends to you when you need them.
It also helps when you hire a virtual assistant with a good knowledge of data analytics. Such an individual can synergize data from different sources, identify patterns, and leverage data visualization tools to create detailed reports to keep you and your team informed and aligned at all times.
4. Get Help With Project Management And Administrative Tasks
Most business owners and founders would rather not deal with day-to-day administrative tasks such as scheduling meetings, sending out emails, data entry, preparing documents, or making travel arrangements. These are tasks you can easily delegate to your virtual assistant.
Your assistant can handle these mundane tasks, helping you maintain an organized and productive calendar. Your virtual assistant will also send you necessary reminders so you don’t forget or miss meeting deadlines and other important information.
Administrative virtual assistants can also handle tasks related to planning and executing various kinds of projects. Project management can be tedious especially when you have to do everything all on your own. With the help of a virtual assistant, you can maintain project timelines, plan budgets, coordinate stakeholders, and complete other tasks needed to keep your project on track.
5. Cost Savings
Hiring a virtual assistant can help you save money on your business operating costs. This benefit is more about how the virtual assistance arrangement works rather than in how much you pay for the service. Virtual assistants work remotely. This means you won’t have to get an office space or worry about the day-to-day expenses of running that space.
A virtual assistant can also work with you on a contractual basis. You can negotiate to pay for the virtual assistant services per hour or pay for specific tasks instead of a fixed monthly salary with additional employee benefits like you pay full-time employees. This arrangement is more affordable than hiring a full-time virtual assistant that you may not even need all the time.
6. Gain Access to a Broader Range of Skills and Expertise
Virtual assistants don’t just take phone calls or handle calendar management. Most virtual assistants are generalists with a wide range of skills and experience needed to provide valuable administrative support.
As a business owner or executive, you’re probably an expert, with specialized skills focused on just one specific area of business. You will benefit from hiring a virtual assistant with expertise in different fields, some of which you cannot do yourself.
For instance, as a marketing executive, you may hire a virtual assistant with graphic design or social media marketing expertise. Such a virtual assistant can handle tasks that you simply do not have the skills to handle yourself, helping you get things done effectively without hiring an extra employee for the role.
7. Virtual Assistants Help You Maintain A Consistent Online Presence
Trying to maintain an online presence when you have a full business to run can be challenging. A virtual assistant can help manage your social media accounts and may even engage with your audience on your behalf while you focus on your core business services. Of course, a virtual assistant who will take up this kind of responsibility must fully understand your brand voice or identity and must be able to communicate it effectively.
Virtual assistants can also assist with online reputation management. This means tracking conversations about you or your brand online and responding to them as appropriate. For instance, your virtual assistant can look for reviews and mentions of your brand or business and respond to customer questions or queries. This helps to maintain a consistent and positive brand image.
8. Content Creation Help
Creating high-quality and useful content is one of the ways to build your brand and attract patronage to your business. However, business owners who also want to create content often have trouble doing so consistently due to their busy schedules.
Writing a blog post, email newsletter, or creating video content for your online audience consistently requires significant investment in terms of time and effort. While you’ll still have to do certain things like recording videos or writing content yourself, your virtual assistant can help with several other content and social media management tasks.
Some content creation tasks your virtual assistant can do for you include researching, generating content ideas, creating a content calendar, editing, posting, and tracking the performance of your content. By assisting you to produce high-quality content, your virtual assistant can help boost your online presence and achieve your content goals.
9. Manage Relationships
Running a business often involves maintaining a solid relationship with various stakeholders both internally and externally. This includes your employees, investors, and business partners. It helps to have someone to help you navigate your relationship with these people.
In dealing with the day-to-day demands of running a business, many business owners have a difficult time maintaining a relationship with their employees. This makes it difficult to lead effectively and communicate the company’s values to workers.
Virtual assistants work with the various departments or teams within your organization and relay key updates to you so you’re in the loop at all times. This is also beneficial to your relationship with employees, ensuring their convenience and job satisfaction.
The same applies to external stakeholders such as partners and investors. Your virtual assistant will perform tasks like scheduling meetings, checking or replying to emails, taking phone calls on your behalf and preparing reports to keep key stakeholders in the know at all times. A virtual assistant’s calendar management activities will also help you maintain your schedule in a way that prevents schedule conflicts or delays that can put you in a bad light with important stakeholders.
10. Improved Customer Service
Every good business owner knows the value of good customer relationships. Unfortunately, it’s difficult for most small businesses to maintain great relationships with their customers especially when they do not have a dedicated customer service team yet.
If you have a virtual assistant, you can delegate customer service assignments to them as part of their day-to-day tasks.
- Responding to customer inquiries through phone calls and other communication tools
- Social media management
- Lead generation
- Creating responses to frequently asked questions
- Manage and respond to website contact forms
- Your virtual assistant can follow up on leads, prospects, and customers
- interacting with customers on your social media accounts
- Handling basic complaints and customer requests
- Sales and marketing
These specialized services are important but time-consuming. Having someone to assist you with them ensures that you can deliver the level of quality service that your customers would like, keeping them satisfied at all times.
11. Hire Virtual Assistants To Scale Up With Less Stress
Are you planning to scale up your business operations, increase your reach, or transform your business model? You’ll probably have to handle multiple projects at the same time to achieve the desired result. It’s a good idea to have a virtual assistant to help with this.
Your virtual assistant can take up some administrative responsibilities at this stage of your business growth so you can focus more on your expansion projects. In some cases, the virtual assistant can also provide more direct help for your expansion plan by monitoring markets, listening to online conversations, and researching industry trends. The information you get from these activities can help you refine your plans and streamline business operations.
12. Focus on Activities that Drive Business Success
Ultimately, the biggest benefit of hiring a virtual assistant is that it frees you up to focus on more important and productive activities while still maintaining a healthy work-life balance. According to a ServiceNow report, business executives spend up to 16 hours weekly on administrative and clerical tasks.
These are tasks that do not require their expertise, authority, or presence. Spending time on tasks that you can easily delegate to a virtual assistant is a huge waste of productive hours.
Offloading all these time-consuming tasks to a virtual assistant helps you reclaim several hours of your time so you can focus more on executing strategic projects and building relationships that benefit your business directly.
Conclusion
As highlighted above, hiring a virtual assistant to work remotely with you is a great way to improve your productivity and efficiency. As a business leader, you’ll set your business up for success when you hire remote assistants to handle mundane but vital repetitive tasks while you focus more on building and growing your business. From getting more tasks completed to enjoying a healthy work-life balance, hiring efficient virtual assistant service comes with a lot of benefits.
It’s even better when you find virtual assistants instead of hiring full-time employees because you get to enjoy all of these benefits while saving costs. Platforms like Cloudhire.ai make it even easier to hire virtual assistants and other remote workers for your team.
With Cloudhire, you can simplify talent search using AI-powered technology that matches you to vetted talents from a global talent pool. Cloudhire helps you find the most qualified virtual assistants, and screen them to select the right fit for your company. Hiring remote assistants and other virtual employees with this platform is a breeze.
Cloudhire also helps with onboarding your virtual employees to ensure productivity and streamline the process of working with them remotely from anywhere. Contact us to learn more about Cloudhire and hire a virtual assistant for your business.
