Does Hiring A Virtual Assistant Benefit Your Business?

There was a time when the terms “work-at-home” and “freelancer” had negative connotations. Not anymore! These days, you will find many independent contractors or freelancers working as virtual assistants. They work online from a remote location and handle specific tasks for a company.

According to Investopedia, “a virtual assistant is an independent contractor who provides administrative services to clients while operating outside of the client's office. A virtual assistant typically operates from a home office but can access the necessary planning documents, such as shared calendars, remotely.

Hiring a virtual assistant for your business is one of the most crucial business decisions you make as a business owner, especially when looking to delegate work in order to have more time for running your business. Its importance is highly important that it can make your business if you hire the right virtual assistant or destroy your business if you hire the wrong one.

Now that you understand this, the next question is: when should you hire a virtual assistant. While there’s no rule cast in stone or a one-size-fits-all answer to this, we can say hiring a virtual assistant is determined by certain factors.

In this article, we would be looking at various factors that would help you decide the need to hire a virtual assistant as your business expands.

1. You hire a virtual assistant to reduce costs — Hiring a new employee can be pretty expensive. Imagine this scenario: You probably pay to post on a job board or hire a recruiter to get you a great personal or executive assistant.
And when you finally get one, think of additional expenses such as data allowance, office space, laptop, phone, salary, training expenses, etc.
In fact, a report by Best of Budgets further corroborates this: “A virtual assistant can save up to 78% in operating costs per year.”
Depending on your company’s finances, especially if you are a small business owner, keeping a full-time employee and on payroll can sink your company’s finances to the ground and end your business.

Fortunately for you, we have a solution for you. You can simply hire a virtual assistant to get the job done and at a reduced cost. You don’t have to pay for office space, training or professional developments, and laptop or data allowance.

Additionally, you can book them on Bookings Africa without stressing yourself — so, whether you want to hire a social media manager, digital marketing executive, and graphic designer/illustrator, amongst other services; simply visit the Bookings Africa website or log in via the app on your mobile devices and hire one today.

2. You hire a virtual assistant to increase your business’ efficiency — You can’t do it all on your own as a business owner. From bookkeeping to marketing and advertising the company, networking, pitching to investors, product/service manufacturing– there are tons of tasks to do. And the truth? You can’t do them all.

An efficient business is a successful business. Hiring a virtual assistant will increase your business’ efficiency and effectively. Virtual assistants can do the following:

• Bookkeeping and payroll duties: calculating hours, adding expenses, updating salaries.
• Receptionist duties: answering calls, leaving voicemails and checking messages.
• Database building, entry and updates (sales, contacts, CRM, etc.)
• Performing banking needs, like paying bills and transferring funds.
• Writing and sending invoices to clients.
• Creating, filing and presenting weekly reports on sales, deliverables, hours and tasks.
• Do Amazon and eBay Marketing.
• Checking email, responding to customer inquiries and managing spam.
• Organizing technical support tickets and participating in chat support.
• Creating and sending out greeting cards, invitations, newsletters and thank you notes.
• Establishing, updating and managing a calendar of important events.
• Scheduling appointments with clients, businesses and salespeople.
• Launching and maintaining cloud computing accounts.
• Converting, merging and splitting PDF files.
• Preparing training manuals for new staff members or remote workers.
• Composing documents from handwritten drafts, faxes and dictations.
• Create forms or surveys for customer feedback.
• Proofreading documents and other office materials.
• Producing graphs from your spreadsheets.
• Handling the management of your social media accounts.

3. You hire a virtual assistant when you need expertise on a particular task/project — For example, let’s say a lot of time is spent answering customer inquiries, reading and replying emails and delivering items to customers/clients, you can hire a virtual assistant to fill in an administrative role, while you focus on the core responsibilities of your business.

This same example can be applied to other tasks or projects, especially those you aren’t an expert in. For example, people love to see stunning images and designs on social media. If you sell products, you could hire a photographer on a virtual assistance basis to take the product pictures for you.

The same holds true for say, hiring a graphics designer to create stunning visuals for you as opposed to personally creating images that would look shabby and posit your brand’s perception in the minds of its target customers as cheap or tacky.

4. You hire a virtual assistant to achieve fast business scaling — When it comes time to scale your business, doing so in a fast and efficient manner is critical.
If you head too far down the wrong path, it could result in a mistake that sinks your business. And that’s not a risk you should be willing to take.

How long does it take you to hire and onboard a new employee? Several days? Several weeks? Longer? There’s no more worrying about when a new employee can start. There’s no more rushing through the recruitment and interview processes, hoping you don’t make a mistake.

When it comes to scaling quickly, the flexibility of virtual assistants will work in your favor.

In Conclusion, as your business starts to grow, you keep facing too much workload. At the end of the day, you think: “How can I manage that pressure on my own?” If you analyze this situation well, you would understand that you need a better alternative to hiring a full-time employee. The best option for you is hiring a virtual assistant.

According to Value Walk, “companies that hire virtual assistants benefit from lower costs because they are not required to provide any benefits, equipment, paid training, or bonuses.”

With a virtual assistant, you’re not saddled to a 9–5 workday. They work around your schedule and are there when you need them. Even if you’re in different time zones, that can work to your advantage, too. Rather than assigning eight-hour shifts, you can develop a schedule that maximizes output while keeping costs in check.

And, in the event that you’re dissatisfied with your assistant’s work or effectiveness, you can simply end the contract and hire a different assistant; which wouldn’t be easier if it were a full-time employee.