How to Grow Your Business With Virtual Assistants

I’m always on the lookout for articles about how virtual assistants help grow your business, and I found this. I’ve taken out some highlights:

Once an entrepreneur has successfully navigated the first few months of his or her startup phase, the focus typically shifts to a larger but more exciting challenge, “How do I grow my business?”. In various ways, business development represents another kind of startup phase, but this time with different goals, objectives, and risks. Most entrepreneurs will not have the financial capacity to take on big risks at this stage and must, therefore, be more strategic and purposeful in his or her approach. The best option? Integrate virtual assistants into the plan to provide several advantages.

1. Realign your budget - The number one reason people hire virtual assistants is to reduce their cost of business. Compared to a regular or full-time employee, a virtual assistant costs less because the business owner does not pay benefits. You don't have to allocate funds for additional Internet bandwidth, power, and rent. It's estimated that hiring virtual assistants can save you as much as 40 percent in business expenses.

2. Scale your business - If your financials show that your volume of business has been steadily and constantly increasing, but turnaround time for deliverables has markedly slowed down, it may be time to scale up your business.

Scaling requires additional man- and woman-power to accommodate the increasing volume of work. At this point, the last thing you'll want to do is to impede your momentum due to poor service or inventory shortfalls. So, you'll be adding more people, but, due to wide cost differentials, full-time employees will likely be out of the question. When scaling up your business, working with a virtual assistance agency is your best option because its personnel has been selected for their experience and reviews from past and current clients. They can easily replace your current virtual assistant if that engagement does not yield productive results.

3. Organize your business - A glaring weakness of most entrepreneurs is their lack of organizational skills. That's not necessarily a shortcoming; it's just that with so much work to do, the need to organize often takes a backseat to more essential tasks. Yet, the organization encourages greater productivity. Fortunately, what may be your weakness in the organization is a virtual assistant's strength, especially if he or she has the experience to help you find the best frameworks for a system that will organize your business. If you are not tech-savvy, a virtual assistant can set up a virtual workplace where everything from project management and file-sharing, to time-keeping and communication, can be accomplished.

4. Delegate non-essential tasks - The next good reason for hiring virtual assistants is to free you, the entrepreneur, from nonessential tasks. These include:

• Phone call coverage
• Email filtering
• Calendar management
• Appointment setting
• CRM updates
• Social media management
• Payroll preparation
• Bookkeeping

While you probably have the skills to do all or most of these tasks, you will definitely not have the time. And even if you do, your available time is better spent on functions that require your core competency or are directly related to generating revenues for your business.

5. Capitalize on specialization - Virtual assistants are no longer limited to personal assistant "secretarial" services. Over the years, as the need to streamline costs has grown, and the Internet has increased its significance in the global business environment, the virtual assistance industry has likewise undergone a transformation. Specifically, the industry opened its doors to more specialized and technical skills to accommodate demand across a wide spectrum of services. 

6. Build a strategic partnership - A common misconception of people not familiar with virtual assistants is that these are merely “hired guns”: Once they have completed the assignment, they will leave you for the next one. But that is far from the truth. Keep in mind, for instance, that virtual assistants own their own businesses. Like you, they too want to grow their enterprise Therefore it's in their best interest to consistently perform above and beyond expectations in order to maintain your account. A virtual assistant is not just a person contracted to complete a project from a remote location using the Internet. Properly utilized, a virtual assistant can become your “secret weapon” in building your business, by being one side of your double-edged sword. A virtual assistant is an asset guaranteed to lower your business costs significantly without compromising your productivity. In fact, your assistant will increase productivity exponentially.

Interested in knowing more? Find the full article here and let me know what you think. You can also direct any questions to my email [email protected], or call me on 0488 548 854 if you want to discuss!

Thanks,

Jess