With more and more businesses laying out workers for various reasons, many people now seek to employ themselves than to be employed. Accordingly, new businesses keep springing up with almost all having growth potential on paper. Statistics from Small Business Administration (SBA), show there are about 32.5 million small businesses in the US, creating about 1.5 million jobs annually. This shows how important small and medium-scale enterprises are to the US economy.
However, running a business is not easy, especially for startups. Entrepreneurs face lots of challenges including raising adequate funds, an inadequate workforce, less market experience, managerial constraints, and existing competition. For the financial aspects, you can rely on a small business loan provider, if you have a solid business plan.
After setting up the business, ensuring work efficiency and good practices becomes critical for business sustainability. Unfortunately, this also becomes a challenge for most business owners. Most startups are run solely by the owners, which creates a lot of inefficiencies. Missing out on deadlines, inability to reply to emails and calls, and sleeping on some administrative duties are inefficiencies some entrepreneurs deal with daily.
The good news is that you can solve all these challenges by hiring a virtual assistant. It is understandable that being a startup, it may be difficult to hire full-time workers, due to financial constraints. Why don’t you substitute that workforce with virtual assistants?
A virtual assistant (VA) is a person who discharges professional duties to clients remotely. A VA can offer administrative, technical, or creative assistance depending on the client’s needs at a fixed rate or per contractual agreement. Time Zone and location does not really matter when hiring a virtual assistant, because most of these professionals can work around the clock to get a job done. The most important thing is to create and maintain an effective work communication channel to prevent the lack of communication. You can hire a virtual assistant on an hourly, project, or retainer basis, depending on your needs.
Based on his/her skill set, a virtual assistant can provide one or more services. Some are masters in a particular field while others are versatile and provide a wide range of services. A virtual assistant can provide services like:
Below are some ways virtual assistants can help you achieve work efficiency.
Running a small business can be very demanding, especially if you are working alone. Taking care of your bookkeeping, contacting clients, responding to calls and emails, appointments, and arranging meetings are all tedious tasks. Mostly, you need to multitask to get things done even if it’s in an unhealthy way. By hiring a VA you can share these workloads, to enable you to concentrate on the most important aspects of your business.
Effective time management is critical in achieving work efficiency to improve productivity. But how do you achieve this when doing everything by yourself? A virtual assistant can help you complete tasks on time, so you can have enough rest for other important tasks. So, while you concentrate on reaching clients and business partners for a product launch, your VA can be engaging social media followers through awareness creation and others campaigns. Asides from this enhancing productivity, such activities also create brand awareness and attract potential clients.
As a business owner, sending emails, receiving calls, and doing social media campaigns, aren’t your core business duties. Yours is to plan the business, seek funds, look for clients and investors, and talk to suppliers among others. In order not to miss out on these important tasks, outsource all the minor administrative tasks to a VA, while you focus on the major ones.
Doing a little of everything or trying to be a jack of all trades can jeopardize your business. Allow experts to handle some tasks professionally for efficiency’s sake. For example, you will need an expert to run financial duties like keeping transaction records, preparing balance sheets, invoice processing, financial auditing, etc. Trying to do this and other important tasks all by yourself can create inefficiencies and errors that can be damaging.
Every virtual assistant’s dream is to have a reliable client who provides him/her with a consistent stream of income. However, they know that this can only be achieved through consistency and quality work delivery. As such, almost every VA work hard to create a positive impression among clients to have more work and recommendation. Therefore, the VA you hire will strive to meet deadlines, and deliver quality work.
Hiring a VA doesn’t stress your budget compared to hiring permanent in-house staff. Often, VAs are cheaper to manage, and their rates are very affordable. No need for extra office space, buying equipment like computers, paying pension, etc. Depending on your agreement, you can pay a fixed rate according to work done or reach a monthly deal, when you need a long-term service.
You don’t need to stress yourself with numerous tasks when there are qualified people who can help you achieve work efficiency and increase productivity. Don’t let your financial situation put you into an uncomfortable situation of having do to everything yourself. There are competent and self-motivated VAs out there whom you can rely on to handle all your administrative duties.
