Why & When Do You Need a Virtual Assistant for Your Business?

Suppose you are an entrepreneur & just opened a new business corporation. You will soon notice that the responsibilities are climbing up the stairs every day, and suddenly, a straightforward task will start to feel like a burden.

Attracting more clients or making the old ones stay interested in your business operations is tricky for every entrepreneur. Suddenly, you will feel there are not enough employees in the office. But, judging by the office space, can you hire someone new?

Have you ever heard of the post called virtual assistant? Yes! They are one step closer to the solution to your problems. Now, the real question is, when do you need a virtual assistant for your business?

In this article, we will talk about virtual assistants, why we need them, when is the right time management and what are the expectation levels from virtual assistants. Make sure to read the whole article!

What Are Virtual Assistants?

As the name suggests, a virtual assistant will work remotely for your business firm. Though the location is remote, they are able to handle any type of corporate task you throw at them.

They are ready to make business calls for you, set appropriate client meetings, and manage your business skills daily. A business owner can also contract a virtual assistant as their personal assistant.

They can also make phone calls for you or set up a to-do list of the day for you. Virtual assistants work very efficiently to ensure they do not mix their personal life with corporate ones.

Virtual assistant services are remotely controlled; they can stay online anytime you want, and some even claim to serve you 24/7. Most virtual assistants consider themselves independent workers or a freelancer.

When you do an internet search to hire virtual assistants, you will find many websites and individuals with tons of experience with virtual assistants. Now that you know what a virtual assistant is, it is time to understand why should a business firm hire a virtual assistant and when is the right time to do that. Follow the later section for more details!

Why Do Business Owners Need A Virtual Assistant?

Therefore, why do we need to hire a virtual assistant for our business firm? Here are some key points that will serve as a nice debate:

• Reduced expenses
• Increased efficiency on the core competencies
• Scaling business operations
• Room for strategic thinking
• Offers 24/7 service

Reduced Expenses

Hiring a virtual assistant also helps you reduce your business corporation’s annual expenses. How is that? Let us clarify for you by dividing the employee expense into two parts- operating costs and training costs.

Operating costs include the potential costs related to employees’ overhead costs, such as internet bills, electricity, or other stuff. Furthermore, virtual assistants are ready to get paid over the course of work or hourly basis, which is cheap compared to an all-time office employee.

On the other hand, training costs will be a significant burden on an entrepreneur’s shoulders. For example, when you hire an employee, an owner needs to spend a considerable amount of money and time on training such an employee to handle multiple clients. But, while handling virtual assistants, speaking from their experience and virtual skills, they will not demand payment during the training period.

Increased Efficiency on The Core Competencies

Sometimes, when you have a growing business, suddenly, you will not get enough time to figure out which area of business needs more attention than usual. Hence, a new virtual assistant will help you set up a perfect schedule for every meeting. Moreover, virtual assistants can create a time space to focus on your area of expertise in the business.

Scaling Business Operations

Virtual assistants can also help you scale business operations. These types of procedures include finding potential clients for business growth, managing other tasks for the clients, and so on.

Even so, virtual assistants can find out specific processes to increase the demand of your business in the corporate world. They can even schedule daily tasks for the whole office plan so as to run an efficient work environment.

Room For Strategic Thinking

What is the prime benefit of hiring virtual assistants? They can carry out all the non-core tasks, such as email management, setting up business meetings, and applying cost-effective techniques to the business.

Business owners will hire a virtual assistant for the tasks mentioned above so that they can have enough time for strategic thinking. This type of thinking is mainly done by an owner, which gives them new ideas about business growth.

Moreover, you can also hire an executive assistant to take part in strategic thinking alongside you. After a long meeting, you and your virtual assistants can sit with your full-time employee to represent the new strategic plan for the business.

Offers 24/7 Service

All international business corporations have clients all over the globe situated in different time zones of the country. For example, if your headquarters is in New York and you have your clients in Melbourne, they have a significant time zone difference.

If your business is based on digital marketing and sales calls, hiring the best virtual assistant with specialized skills and who is ready to serve 24/7 is a requirement in the job description.

Signs When You Need a Virtual Assistant to Manage Your Business

Below are some signs that business owners should observe that will help them identify that they need a virtual assistant. Read them carefully and find out if any of the below signs have ever haunted you or not.

Your Business Needs Different Skills You Don’t Have

While running a business, a different situation will arise where an owner needs to set a different strategy within the business for more profit or to cope with the corporate world.

In that case, you need to establish different skills in the business that you and your employee need to become more familiar with. This is the first area where a virtual assistant will shine very well.

For example, you have a finance firm where you need more economics sector to run your business. Therefore, you can hire a suitable virtual assistant with a degree in Economics that can assist you with his field in your particular business area.

You Can’t Manage Personal Time

An entrepreneur sometimes needs to control more than one business at a time. Even after hiring many employees, their presence in conference meetings, making business proposals to the clients, or critical decision-making is significant to the companies.

In between these hectic moments, an entrepreneur or an owner demands some personal time to spend with their families. Why take all these troubles on your own when you can assign a virtual assistant to do the job for you?

Yes! Hire an assistant of your choice who can take some burden off your shoulder and arrange conference meetings on your behalf or even make excellent and suitable proposals to the clients.

You Are Working All Day

As mentioned earlier, company owners must concentrate on various tasks during office hours. While handling such pressure, they might stress themselves.

Therefore, hiring a virtual assistant can take some simple burden off your shoulders, such as scheduling client meetings, making phone calls for your next day appointment, arranging business travels to a restaurant or other countries, and even checking emails and figuring out the time to represent them to you.

When you get your mind refreshed, you will notice that your company is running smoothly thanks to the virtual assistant you hired right on time. After that, you can consult with your assistant and check out all the tasks they have listed for you.

Can’t Spent Time on Core Business

The core business is termed as the primary source of the business that handles the company’s profits and successes. In such an area, giving total concentration is a must job if you want to take your company to the peak of success.

If you can’t manage your time in these core areas, it may be time to hire someone reliable who can. And yes! We are talking about a virtual assistant.

A virtual assistant can set up a weekly meeting with the company owners to discuss the company’s profit and loss statement and take necessary measures accordingly.

Make sure to hire someone skilled and experienced because handling a company’s profit or loss statement is not everyone’s piece of cake.

You’re Ready to Scale Up Your Business

While setting up business growth, certain factors exist, such as hiring new employees to manage the additional responsibilities. Other than hiring office employees, we recommend hiring some virtual assistants.

Why is that? Because they can work remotely to help you in your business growth. As we mentioned earlier, they are available 24/7 at your service.

Moreover, while handling online meetings, they can consult with foreign clients at their convenient hours to set up the meeting without you taking all the hassles.

You Can’t Do Any Marketing

This section is for those owners who have organized a small business recently and hope to develop it as time passes. Therefore, you need to set up good marketing skills to advertise about your business.

Apart from offline marketing, there are also virtual marketing strategies that every business owner should consider. Therefore, you will need to hire a virtual assistant to help you with this stuff.

You Can’t Train New People

As we discussed business growth, you may need to hire some office employees for additional paperwork. But, before, you may need to train them for a significant amount of them before they work in your office full-time.

In such scenarios, if you have a virtual assistant, they can set up the training session after office hours, which is both beneficial and economical for your company.

Here Are Some Tasks a Virtual Assistant Can Help You With

While running a company, many additional works arise, such as graphic designing, back office support, web research, data entry, admin support, and many more. When it comes to graphic design, a virtual assistant can assist you in designing logos, flyers, templates, illustrations, and other templates as well.

Furthermore, virtual assistants can also take part in marketing. Once they gain a full idea of your products or projects, they can help you pitch them in the market to account for the desired sales or attract clients.

As we already mentioned about virtual assistants checking emails, they can filter those emails according to your needs and preferences, delete or archive all the old emails jamming your inbox, and perform other email management tasks.

A virtual assistant can also help you with Search Engine Optimization (SEO). They will research related keywords and add canonical links to the less important pages. This will add an index to your website, thus improving its SEO.

How Can We Find Virtual Assistants?

When do you need a virtual assistant for your business? Now you will know when the time is right, but the main problem may arise while searching for a suitable website to look for virtual assistants.

You can post your company’s job description on various websites like Linkedin but finding some of the dedicated websites will help you find the required virtual assistant faster. Here is the list of the websites you can visit:

• Upwork
• Fiverr
• YesAssistant
• Freelancer
• Toptal

Upwork

While talking about the network of Upwork, it is a freelancer marketplace that globally helps many business owners find a suitable virtual assistant.

Many freelancers on Upwork share their project works and skills as a part of their portfolio. Entrepreneurs will look at their skills and hire the most suitable virtual assistant of their choice.

Fiverr

For those who want to efficiently find a virtual assistant without relying on an agency, Fiverr is the most efficient place to find a reliable assistant.

The best part of Fiverr is that you can post your job description, and the freelance virtual assistants will knock at your inbox with their qualifications.

YesAssistant

One advantage of getting a virtual assistant from YesAssistant is that they carefully listen to the requirements and will hook you up with the most customized virtual assistant for your business.

This website has been assisting many well-known companies over the years. The provided assistants are always ready to take on any challenges the hired company throws at them.

Freelancer

Freelancer is an Australian freelance marketplace that helps many companies hire virtual assistants that are most suitable for job categories like software, sales, and telecommunications.

The process of hiring from Freelancer is straightforward. You need to post a project based on your needs. Freelancers will complete that particular task and place it in your bid.

You can then check their profiles and hire them according to your preferences.

Toptal

Toptal claims that they provide the top 3 percent of virtual assistants that are ready to be hired by many company owners. It is the top marketplace for hiring experienced assistants that are suitable for any task.

Many renowned companies choose Toptal freelancers for their initiatives with long-term projects.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is there a necessity for virtual assistants in business firms?

A virtual assistant can help your company in a variety of ways. They can assist with administrative tasks that a receptionist or any other full-time employee performs in a typical business office. They may also assist with more complex tasks that would typically be performed by specialists such as a marketing or finance assistant.

Which business firms contain the most important virtual assistants?

The following is the list of the firms that have the maximum importance of virtual assistants:

• Small businesses
• Medium businesses
• Digital marketing companies
• Website or Blog writing agencies
• Customer care service agencies

What are the disadvantages of becoming a company’s virtual assistant?

The disadvantages of working as a company’s virtual assistant are as follows:

• You need to consult very frequently, at one point hustle, with the clients to set up the desired deals
• As it is a work-from-home job, it does come with lots of distractions
• As per complaints, work from home job can also be lonely sometimes
• Remote workers will not receive any bonus from the company
• Working from home can also rise to many technical difficulties, such as laptop malfunction, no electricity, and many more.

What is the biggest fear of a virtual assistant?

As a virtual assistant, one has to communicate very frequently with outside clients, which can be troublesome for some people who need more communication skills, English speaking skills, and many more. Basically, social skill is the key parameter of becoming an excellent virtual assistant, and according to our research, there are many assistants with these lackings.

What are the necessary actions before hiring a virtual assistant?

The following steps are the to-do list of a business owner before hiring a virtual assistant:

• Make a list of what tasks the assistant will carry out
• Set a budget according to your preference level
• Search for a suitable website to look for virtual assistants
• Write a post on the website and provide a detailed job description
• Based on the response, take scheduled interviews individually
• Do a trial run on different websites to look for more applicants

Conclusion

Therefore, when do you need a virtual assistant for your business? To answer that, first, you need to know the importance of hiring virtual assistants in your business. Apart from providing 24/7 service from a remote location, VAs can also provide an efficient way to scale your business operations, help you with strategic thinking, etc.

Now, when is the right time, you ask? It would help if you always looked for the moment when your business traffic is high. Additionally, you can also account for a new hire of VA when there is more online writing, business meetings, and many more official works.

After reading this article, you can search for virtual assistants on the websites mentioned above. Next time someone asks about the right time to hire a virtual assistant, remember to mention our article to them.

Have fun making plans for your business growth!