Ever wonder how the big guns of the entrepreneurial world seem to skyrocket their success without blowing up cash flow? There's no secret sauce you're missing out on--but there's a formula for it!
The key component in this equation involves leveraging offshore outsourcing and hiring virtual assistants. Without these two items, executing other steps could be hard (unless you've got cash raining down from heaven)!
So let's delve deeper into the benefits of hiring a virtual assistant today!
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Why Hire a Virtual Assistant?
Hiring virtual assistants has many benefits. They're generally cheaper than domestic and full-time employees, and they can offer the flexibility to multi-task across many aspects of your business. There are also various virtual assistant companies that can attract the best talent, find virtual assistants, and help make the hiring process easier.
Top 10 Reasons Why Successful Entrepreneurs Hire Virtual Assistants
You can click on these links below to jump on a specific reason:
- Time Is Your Goldmine
- You Need Cost-Effective Business Scalability
- You Need to Maintain Entrepreneurial Sanity
- You Need to Escape the Admin Jungle
- You Need to Streamline Your Business Operations
- You Need to Improve Your Products and Services
- You Need to Provide 24/7 Business or Customer Service
- You Need to Maintain a Killer Online Strategy
- You Need to Avoid Selling Your Soul to Your Business
- You Need to Increase the Asset Value of Your Business
1. Time Is Your Goldmine
The most valuable asset anyone has today is time, and money only comes in second.
Successful businesses recognize that time is the best asset to keep a tight grip on. Without time to think strategically, forge strategic partnerships, and develop ideas, all you have is a business that refuses to grow regardless of how much you work at it.
Most entrepreneurs who spend their days locked in low-level administrative tasks like email management and customer support are kidding themselves that they have any chance of growing a successful company.
To reclaim your time, you need to hire people and learn to delegate. But hiring staff can really rip into your bottom-line so it’s a catch-22 situation that plagues a lot of businesses…unless you follow the clever herd and embrace offshore virtual assistants.
Hiring a virtual assistant solves the catch-22 and allows you to break out of the deep crevice that exists between startup and growth…without blowing up your cash flow.
2. You Need Cost-Effective Business Scalability
Business growth requires capital. By hiring virtual assistants, you can substantially reduce your capital needs. Not only is the cost of hiring the right virtual assistant substantially less than hiring a full-time employee domestically (for most Western nations), but the management, development, and training costs are also less. In addition, you won't need to worry about office space or employee benefits when you hire a virtual assistant.
By embracing the offshore virtual assistant model and making a commitment to making it work, you can really ramp up your team without blowing up your balance sheet.
Additionally, you can utilize any domestic staff you have for more high value, localized work. It’s a win-win! You lower your costs while simultaneously building up your team and increasing the value of the work produced per dollar spent on salaries.
3. You Need to Maintain Entrepreneurial Sanity
One of the key things for entrepreneurial success is mindset, but we don’t all do the mindset thing very well!
If you find your other tasks or to-do lists piling up so you’re ending up scattered and achieving less and you’re getting a little too overwhelmed with the things you need to do for your business, then here’s an insight: The best virtual assistant can help you with all of that!
Delegating daily tasks to someone reliable and able to manage several duties and responsibilities is one way to avoid becoming overwhelmed. You can divide or handover the items on your to-do list to a virtual assistant.
You can prepare a detailed list of tasks to outsource to a virtual assistant–things you need to get done and help you grow your business. Trained virtual assistants are very organized and can help you prioritize which specific tasks to do first. Some of them have had training and years of relevant expertise in assisting small business owners.
Remember, your sanity is important to your business success. Hire a virtual assistant and stay sane!
4. You Need to Escape the Admin Jungle
If anything will drag you away from growing your business, it’s the admin vortex. This could potentially be one of the best reasons to hire a virtual assistant.
Administrative tasks can be easily delegated to a virtual assistant, because they're process-driven and repetitive. Having a virtual assistant on your team can ensure these non-core tasks are done on time, leaving you to focus on other, high-level tasks.
Some of the most common administrative support that a virtual assistant can do are:
- administrative and office support activities for multiple supervisors
- receptionist tasks such as answering phone calls and managing appointment bookings
- scheduling meetings
- responding to emails and helping to filter them for easier management
- Word processing, creating spreadsheets and presentations
- organizing your Dropbox and Google Drive folders
- conducting internet research
- doing data entry
- file sharing
If you’re assigning your first virtual assistant these admin tasks, try to be as detailed and specific as you can. Skill sets of virtual assistants vary, and while most virtual assistants can easily breeze through your task list, it’s still important to be clear on what duties and responsibilities you want your virtual assistant to take on.
Ultimately, having someone take on the recurring admin tasks in your projects will help the growth of your business.
5. You Need to Streamline Your Business Operations
Having well-documented processes and systems in your business spells success when hiring a virtual assistant. If you don’t have these processes in place yet, a virtual assistant can help you set them up and make your operations more streamlined.
Because virtual assistants work in a remote location, it forces both sides to increase the focus on efficient processes and effective reporting and communication channels. This is how you can really use virtual assistance to help grow your business.
6. You Need to Improve Your Products and Services
As a business owner, you need to know the needs of your customers or prospective clients. You do this by monitoring the markets you operate in, listening for conversations on social media accounts about your brand or industry, watching what competitors are doing and saying, collating feedback from current and past clients, and generally staying abreast of industry news.
While this helps your business a lot, this also takes time and energy. These tasks can be outsourced to a virtual assistant. They can collate this information and document the data you need.
The best virtual assistants can help improve the product and services you offer in the market by being your eyes and ears in the market and throughout your customer base. Having quick access to this data can be a game changer in your business, especially if you’re not the one tied up doing it. Your virtual assistant can gather this data on a continuous basis to help you improve your business.
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7. You Need to Provide 24/7 Business or Customer Service
One way to widen your market is to be available 24/7 for customer support. This is particularly important for online stores that work on a global scale.
This can be achieved by hiring a team of virtual assistants who can provide business support for customers in a different time zone. A virtual team can even provide service during official holidays! They're also the quickest solution to temporary manpower shortages.
Some things that you can have your virtual assistant do are:
- responding to customer questions
- creating email responses or frequently asked questions
- checking on multiple clients, especially long-term clients
- dealing with complaints or requests for refunds or discounts
- create a welcome pack for new customers
8. You Need to Maintain a Killer Online Strategy
In this age of mobile technology where social media management is important, it’s expected that every business has an online presence. But there are two issues in this area:
- A strong results-focused strategy is needed for effective implementation.
- The work involved in implementing and maintaining an effective online strategy is extremely time-consuming.
Virtual assistants are a fantastic resource in this area! All things digital are, by nature, online and ‘virtual’, so the concept of having a virtual person implementing and maintaining this strategy for you is easier to get your head around. You no longer need to spend all day creating images on Canva, collecting quotes, and sharing tips on social media–your virtual assistant can do these things for you!
Your virtual assistant can also save the time you spend on creating new content to feed your digital marketing strategy by taking whatever podcasts, articles, webinars you already have and repurposing them into other types of content–infographics, SlideShares, blog posts, Ebooks… the list goes on!
Remember, you need to be online, but you don’t need to get bogged down in the work involved!
9. You Need to Avoid Selling Your Soul to Your Business
Let’s be honest, hiring a virtual assistant to help manage, oversee, and do all the tasks on your list helps ease the workload and stress you face in the day-to-day operations of your business. At the same time, it also allows you more leisure time with your family and friends. So, you're basically taking back your social life.
Also, by giving your virtual assistant responsibilities and tasks from your list, like those repetitive tasks, you improve business productivity.
Getting more free time allows you to function better and avoid suffering from burnout. It allows you to focus on what really matters in your business. More free time also means more time for people who are important in your life.
We must remember, other than being an entrepreneur, we also play different roles at home. We also have personal life which needs care and attention. Having someone to help organize schedules and tasks (and do some small personal errands, as well) frees up more time for us. And, free time means more time for ourselves, family, and friends.
10. You Need to Increase the Asset Value of Your Business
When done right, working with virtual teams forces you to develop very strong, efficient processes and to utilize communication tools in more creative ways. Once you hone each of these areas and ensure tasks can be delegated to anyone who steps in, it means your business is systematized. This creates a far more valuable asset if you ever decide to sell the business.
Final Thoughts
Virtual assistants are a fantastic asset to you and your business, especially when integrated correctly.
So many people think they need a virtual assistant for just a few hours here and there, but the truth is, there are so many tasks we can delegate to a virtual assistant, and there are so many things our virtual assistants can do for us!
The Virtual Hub's Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants will teach you all you need to know about what virtual assistants can do to help you grow your business. It's well worth the investment to bring someone on more permanently and build them into your growth plans.