A virtual assistant is just that, an assistant that works remotely. While an assistant working remotely may not be able to “walk” in your office for a meeting, thanks to technology, they can do almost anything else. Virtual assistants are used mainly by three groups; entrepreneurs, executives and managers. While there are many others that use virtual assistants we’ll focus on these three groups here.
Entrepreneurs – This may seem the most obvious. Think of the typical entrepreneur, they’re generally don’t have venture capital money or a fancy office. Most businesses today are started out of the house with a team of 1, themselves. I can speak from experience here, if your business grows you need help quick. The main problem is growth takes cash. So if growing your business is consuming the cash you’re making you generally don’t have money for an office or staff. However what you do have is a mounting pile of administrative, marketing, reporting … all kinds work and no one to do it. It is extremely easy to be stuck in your business working in it, instead of spending that time working on it. Virtual assistants are an elegant bridge to get access to educated, talented professionals with none of the employment obligations or costs. You gain all the benefits without the overhead and drama. This can help you scale much quicker.
Executives – While executives have been using assistants for a very long time companies are quickly realizing that you do not have to be local to be effective. Assistants in corporate companies are able to demand a strong wage for the work they do and they are often compensated with bonuses as well. With a virtual assistant you don’t have these demands. Virtual assistants are paid to do the work we’ve hired them for and can offer a corporate customer a substantial savings for a similarly educated virtual assistant. It does mean a different communication style for sure, in-person office meetings are swapped for phone and video conference but for those us that are willing to adapt the advantages can be huge.
Managers – More and more managers are beginning to use virtual assistants instead of hiring more employees. Let’s say you need someone to handle your social media, respond to website chat messages and handle web leads that come from your website. Great news, you don’t need a listing on indeed you don’t need to go through 100 entry level resumes. You don’t need to pay an employee a large salary because they were told in college this type of job pays x (I hear that alot). You don’t need to pay benefits of a 401k. What you need is someone that you can train to hold those functions down. A virtual assistant is the answer. As your business grows that may become a true business process that you need outsourced and it may take a large team to handle it, we do that as well.
As you read this page no matter who you are I’m sure you thought of ideas of what you could “delegate” to a virtual assistant. Keep in mind a virtual assistant is just that a person that you need to assist you with some tasks. Don’t take that in a trivial way we have virtual assistants doing extremely high level work for some extremely high level professionals. However it’s 1 person handling the task assigned. Once you need multiple people to handle the same type of work that is when you’re talking about business process outsourcing.
