Have you nearly missed a deadline in any delivery or project for one of your clients? Are you wrestling with a mounting pile of paperwork? Have you updated your customer database in the last two weeks? Is your tax return deadline tomorrow?
If you are getting lost in repetitive administrative tasks and feel that you are making no progress with your small business, it means only one thing: it is time to consider finding a reliable virtual assistant. What is a virtual assistant? Virtual assistants are independent contractors, or hired by specialized agencies, who work from their homes. They have flexible working hours and can be hired to work on a part-time basis, or whenever you need the help, and at the end of the month the virtual assistant will send you the bill with the total worked hours.
How Virtual Assistants Help Small Business Owners
Virtual assistants are a great help especially with those boring and repetitive tasks which you hate doing, hamper your creativity and keep you from planning new products and the growth of your business. These tasks need to be done, however. They are, among others:
⦁ Answering emails
⦁ Keeping customer databases up to date
⦁ Proofreading documents
⦁ Bookkeeping
⦁ Preparing various reports, price quotations, other written documents
⦁ Monitoring the payment of bills, sending notifications to clients
⦁ Monitoring the social media, and updating the blog or the website content
Taking a glance at this partial list of tasks which a virtual assistant can do you must surely identify one or two which you are always trying to postpone to the last moment, because you are neither good at them, nor do you enjoy doing them. What are other reasons why you should hire a virtual assistant? Here are a few of them:
1. Virtual Assistants Are Better and Faster at Solving Administrative Issues
Just as you are a pro at building your products or developing innovative services and business ideas, virtual assistants are skilled at typing and formatting documents, recording the daily sales in the accounting ledger and wording a quick email in answer to a customer’s enquiry.
Thus, all those tasks which take you a lot of time and are never done perfectly will be left in the competent hands of your virtual assistant and you will be able to focus on the core activities of your business.
2. You Learn How to Delegate
Growing your small business in a successful company involves a painful phase for most business owners: delegating tasks. When you first started your business, you used to do everything by yourself and had every task and aspect under your control. Relinquishing control by delegating tasks to someone else is difficult for many newbie entrepreneurs and the lack of ability to do so prevents many businesses from growing and becoming successful.
By hiring a virtual assistant you start small – delegating non-critical tasks which you really do not enjoy doing and you do not feel like monitoring every moment of the day. Once you get to the point of hiring employees, it will feel easier and more natural to delegate various tasks.
3. You Learn People Management Skills
A skilled company manager is not only good at the core business activities, creating innovative and best-selling products and services, but also great at managing people, coordinating them, inspiring them and creating a team which works well together.
As you start working with a virtual assistant, coordinating tasks where your input is needed and having weekly meetings to set up the schedule and follow up on ongoing tasks, you learn valuable people management skills.
4. You Conceptualize Your Business beyond Its Start-Up Level
When you start explaining to a newly hired virtual assistant what your business is about, how it works, what principles it is based on, you are in fact preparing the path for growth, by documenting processes and operations. Thus, when your business is ready to expand to more locations or to more complex operations, you already have a blueprint of its core operations for your team of employees and managers.
You must remember that it takes some time before a new virtual assistant learns the ins and outs of your business and gets used to your style of working. But patience is yet another must-have skill for a successful business owner, so you should learn it as soon as possible.