Top 6 Benefits of Hiring a Virtual Assistant

Small business owners and entrepreneurs invest in their companies because it’s a fruitful and enriching experience, but that doesn’t mean it comes without its day-to-day challenges.

Addressing various business needs can be overwhelming, especially for startups that need to prioritize their core business initiatives over all else.

To help streamline the more time-consuming and repetitive tasks businesses face, leaders should consider hiring a virtual assistant (VA).

This article will cover virtual assistants' service offerings and the top 6 benefits of onboarding one.

What is a Virtual Assistant?

A virtual assistant provides administrative, creative, or technical support to clients from a remote location.
Their services often look similar to that of an executive assistant or personal assistant responsibilities. The main differentiator between virtual assistants and their counterparts is remote working.

Virtual assistants do not function in your workspace but work remotely. This means you can hire help from a different time zone and never have to worry about accommodating your hires in your office space.

6 Benefits of Outsourcing to Virtual Assistants

While you may be hesitant to engage in the hiring process for a remote assistant, there are plenty of ways that they can aid you in growing and scaling your business. Here are our top picks for the benefits of hiring a virtual assistant for leaders of small businesses:

1. Cost-effective
2. Time savings
3. Increased productivity
4. Broad skills
5. Scalability
6. Improved work-life balance

The reason most people choose to hire a virtual assistant is to cut back their workloads dramatically. Instead of managing admin and logistical tasks for themselves, they can hand them off to an assistant experienced in these matters.

1. Virtual Assistants are Cost-effective

Hiring a full-time employee can be expensive, particularly for a small business that is trying to keep costs low. However, virtual assistants typically work hourly or on projects, which can be more cost-effective in the long run.

Source: Outsource Access

Hiring assistants to work remotely rather than an in-house employee that will require office space and employee benefits will save you money immediately. It’s estimated that choosing a virtual assistant will save companies 78% of the expenses required for an internal hire.

Further, because virtual assistants are experienced in their craft, the time they’ll save you with their work will also amount to cost savings, allowing you to focus your work on core operations.

2. Virtual Assistants Save Time

Small business owners often find themselves swamped with administrative tasks, such as scheduling appointments, responding to emails, and managing social media accounts.

These little things add up, and you don’t want them to distract from your main focus. Still, you shouldn’t have to sacrifice something as important as a social media presence in order to get your work done.

By delegating these tasks to a virtual assistant, business owners can free up their time to focus on what matters most, such as business growth and development.

Further, the vast majority (around 87%) of virtual assistants work on an hourly basis, so you can scale up or down depending on your needs.

This will help you flexibly save time without demanding you to commit to a certain set of working hours for your VA.

3. Virtual Assistants Bring Increased Productivity

Virtual assistants are trained professionals who are skilled at managing tasks efficiently. Additionally, studies have shown that VAs may be particularly productive because of their remote setting.

Without the distractions and noise of a typical office setting, assistants can focus on their work. An experiment by Stanford found that working from home boosted the overall productivity of workers by 13%.

Virtual assistants are trained to exhibit exemplary communication and organizational skills, meaning they can get the job done within tight deadlines and manage multiple tasks at once.

In choosing to delegate tasks to a VA, business owners come to rely on prompt and accurate deliverables. This helps take effort and worry off your plate about things getting done correctly.

4. Virtual Assistants Have Broad Skills

Small business owners didn’t likely start their business because they have a product or service that will better the lives of their customers, not because they’re really good at administrative tasks, web design, content creation, or social media management.

Still, these tasks become more and more necessary the more business owners grow their operations. Things like travel plans and keeping up an online presence may not feel core to your company’s success at first, but you may find that these tasks add up unexpectedly quick as you begin to scale.

This is where a virtual assistant comes in. Once you start to feel stretched to manage these budding aspects of your business, you will find that a VA has the potential to take a wide variety of tasks off your plate.

What Services Do Virtual Assistants Offer?

Depending on a virtual assistant’s skill sets and industry knowledge, they can do everything from administration work to digital marketing. This is all to say that assistants can likely cover more core tasks that impact your bottom line than you initially realize.

Here are some of the essential tasks that a virtual assistant helps with:

• Administrative tasks: scheduling meetings, handling data entry, answering emails, followup with clients, making phone calls, making travel arrangements, and managing calendars.
• Customer support: answering customer inquiries, responding to complaints, and providing information about products or services.
• Social media management: managing social media accounts by creating and scheduling posts, responding to comments, monitoring analytics, and other social media marketing tasks.
• Content creation: helping with content creation by writing blog posts, creating infographics, SEO, and designing marketing materials.
• Email marketing: Creating and managing email marketing campaigns, including creating newsletters, managing mailing lists, and analyzing campaign performance. These efforts can also support lead generation pipelines.
• Bookkeeping: bookkeeping tasks such as invoicing, accounts payable, and accounts receivable.
• Website management: managing websites by updating content, optimizing for search engines, and online presence management.
• Project management: creating project timelines, tracking progress, and communicating with team members.

5. Virtual Assistants Offer Scalability

As a business grows, workloads do too. You may be surprised how easily growing your business can overwhelm your resources. This is a good problem to have, and virtual assistants can take some of the weight off your shoulders by taking on communication and organizational tasks.

What’s more, virtual assistants provide consistent flexibility that allows growing small businesses to discover just how much support is required over time.

Daily tasks that seem repetitive or grueling can be passed onto a VA as an independent contractor or freelancer. Generally working hourly, they can take on work full-time or part-time.

As the client, you can choose to be conservative with the hours given to VAs at first, knowing that you can still scale up later if needed.

Business owners can hire a virtual assistant on an as-needed basis, without worrying about the costs associated with hiring a full-time employee.

Also read ‘10 Benefits of Hiring a Virtual Receptionist’

6. Virtual Assistants Help Foster Better Work-Life Balance

For small business owners, it can sometimes seem like the term “work-life balance” couldn’t be in their vocabularies. Because of the great investment business owners have in their work, it can be challenging to set the boundaries necessary to achieve a work-life balance.

Just because you’re responsibility is greater as a business owner, doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be afforded a life outside of work. Virtual assistants are one way that repetitive, administrative work can be handed off, granting owners a bit more free time in their days.

Find the Right Virtual Assistant to Streamline Business Operations On-Demand

It’s not difficult to think of ways that a virtual assistant can be a valuable asset to small business owners. Whether a company needs help with booking travel arrangements or responding to customer comments on LinkedIn, virtual assistants can jump in to support.

Plus, VAs are proven to save companies time and money while demonstrating flexibility in their management of administrative tasks.

The contributions VAs bring to the table boost workplace productivity and introduce must-needed work-life balance into the current culture of small businesses.