60 Advantages for Businesses Using Virtual Administration Service

Cressida Johns Business Advice

Need to hire, but not sure if you can take on someone part-time or full-time? Virtual administration is ideal for small businesses – it can save employee-related expenses, time to focus on the bigger picture and much, much more.

Full article with thanks to: wishup.co/blog/60-benefits-of-hiring-a-va

Not many things take a toll on your life faster than running a small business. And when your venture is still fledgling, spreading its wings in a sky of fierce competition, you just don’t have enough hours in a day.

When you started up, little did you know you’d spend your days juggling entrepreneurial responsibilities with administrative errands? Not an ideal state of affairs.

When your business is thriving, you need more than an extra set of hands. You need to hire a virtual assistant.

With the right virtual assistant (VA), you can delegate daily tasks to someone who’s around to support you, at all times. Nurturing and growing your business doesn’t mean you have to drown yourself in a sea of (trivial) tasks. It means being smart about choosing areas that need your attention and letting your virtual assistant take care of the rest.

A VA takes care of your recurring, administrative functions while you handle core business operations. All you have to do is to hire the right person, communicate responsibilities, and kick the relationship off. This leaves you free to make strategic decisions and grow your business.

Not convinced? Here’s why you need to get yourself a virtual assistant right now.

Time is Money

1. More hours to your day

Struggling to grow your business because you just can’t extricate yourself from a jam-packed day of sundry tasks?  Hiring a virtual assistant frees up the time that you can put to more productive use. Imagine how much faster you could scale your business if you spent more time devising brilliant strategies? A VA can make your oldest wish come true – more hours in a day!

The amazing thing about working with a VA is that they quickly soak your painstakingly accumulated wisdom like a sponge. They know exactly how you want your emails answered, your tickets booked, or your social media managed. What does that leave you with? Time. Loads of it.

Especially if you’re working with a VA from a different time zone, you add more hours to your day and have enough time to do what truly matters for your business. Now that’s a great deal.

2. No time constraints

Unlike a full-time employee who will only be available during specific hours of the day, a VA will adjust their schedule to suit your hours. When your VA is on hand whenever you need help, you can focus on your business without worrying about resource availability.

3. Save time

Onboarding a VA saves you precious time that you otherwise spend on repetitive business tasks. Extract productivity out of the 24 hours in your day by hiring a VA. Get more done in less amount of time.

4. Take time off

Take the chance to step back once in a while to regain perspective on just your business, but your life in general. Hiring a VA frees up your schedule for other activities you were hitherto ignoring. Take some time off and re-examine your business with a calm mind.

 Save up to 70% Costs

As a business owner, making financially sound investments is perhaps the most important part of your ‘job’. Building a team is expensive – a cost your small business may not yet be ready to bear. By hiring a virtual assistant, you no longer have to pay fixed monthly salaries (which can run up to thousands of dollars). What’s sweetens the deal further is that you get to employ the expertise of a trained employee without having to pay for it.

A VA can take on the duties critical to your business – from planning and organizing your calendar to updating your blogs and handling your social media, there is little a skilled VA cannot ace. The best part – you only pay for the hours of their bandwidth. So say goodbye to hefty fixed costs.

6. Pay per use

You pay your VA based on the number of hours you use or the scope of work undertaken. Essentially, their productivity drives their compensation. This is a boon for any small business owner looking to reduce costs. You pay your VA only when you use their services and not for idle time spent taking breaks.

Hiring a full-time resource comes with a mountain of expenses that go beyond a fixed salary – health insurance, pension, and other employee benefits. Because your VA is an independent contractor, all you need to shell out is the agreed-upon compensation – typically an hourly fee.

7. Say goodbye to hefty salaries

When you see your VA’s monthly fee, do you break into a sweat? There’s really no reason to. But think about how much more it would be if you were paying a salary and the attendant costs – taxes, healthcare, and a whole lot of other expenses. Say, you hire an employee for your administrative tasks, but they have no skill for writing copy, social media or research.

Hiring another one is going to see your expenses go off the roof. Not if you’re picking your resources from a virtual assistant platform. If you don’t find one VA who can take care of it all, a platform with trained and verified virtual assistants is just the place for building a team (for the same price!).

8. Pay for work only

By hiring a virtual assistant, you save on employees expenses such as paying for their off-time – holidays and vacations. Nor do you have to bear expenses other than the compensation work.

As an entrepreneur, you’re not new to working from home and cafes. If high office rental threatens to burn a hole in your books, you can do without your team’s physical presence. Hiring a virtual assistant means you don’t have to bear the costs of office space. A penny saved is a penny earned!

10. Say goodbye to employee benefits

Forget about paying gratuity, pension and, over time. Get your work done at a fraction of the expense hiring a full-time employee entails.

11. Value for money

Why hire a qualified professional on a full-time basis when you can hire a VA for a lot less? It’s just smart business sense. Also, every VA brings specialized skills and their own experience, invaluable for an entrepreneur.

12. A workaround for your budget constraints

Scour the internet till you locate a VA that fits your budget. Outside the digital environment, an endless search is not just expensive, but also impractical. But with a vast pool of trained virtual assistants available online, you can do what it takes to spot the best one.

Achieve up to 3X Business Growth

13. Build a customer base

While the VA takes care of repetitive jobs, you can focus on the most important lever of your business – customers. And you know how well focusing on building customer relations pays off. Delegate business tasks to a VA and use the time to build a stronger customer base.

14. Focus on core business areas

You can prioritize the crucial areas of business – product/service design and improvement, effective delivery, customer relationship management enhancing competitiveness and so on. The VA can handle mundane administrative activities.

15. Focus on profitability

The metric of a business’s success or failure, profit is among the chief factors that motivate you. Focus on long-term profitability and growth as your VA handles other tasks for you.

16. Grow your business in your sleep

All 24 hours of the day are at your disposal when you hire a virtual assistant from another time zone. Let them work and make you money even as you sleep!

17. Move fast

The number of VAs you hire depends on the short term goals of stability or growth. You can hire more or let them go as needed. With such a flexible resource system in place, you can move fast and move cheap.

18. Scale your business

If you temporarily need more hands for a rush job or seasonal demand, hire a VA. If you’re taking the first steps towards business expansion, hire a VA. And if you’re cutting costs to improve margins, it’s so much easier to let go of a VA than an employee. In a nutshell, hiring a virtual assistant is a sound strategy for scaling your business – either up or down.

19. Work with a lean team

You can choose highly qualified, effective professionals and build a small but incredibly competent team. Such a team will also be easier to manage, coordinate, collaborate and communicate with. In the early stage, contract a VA to perform non-core business activities.

20. Exponential growth

Don’t stop to let the traditional time-consuming hiring process run its course. Hire a VA instantly and grow your business fast.

21. Improve profitability

By hiring a virtual assistant, you experience reduced employee-related costs which soon add up to boost your profit margins. When you don’t have to pay for benefits and sick leaves, you’ll find your bottom line rising at a steady pace.

22. Higher retention

A trained VA is an employee in all but name. As with employees, it’s only natural you worry about retention. Once you train your VA(s) and establish a great professional relationship, it’s likely they will stay with you instead of looking for other opportunities.

23. Work towards your vision

As an entrepreneur, your vision for your business is what fuels you each day. But when you’re bogged down by admin tasks that don’t directly advance your vision, it’s easy to feel demotivated. Hire a VA to do the leg work while you focus on making strategic decisions that take you closer to your goal, one day at a time.

24. Boon for startups

Startups typically thrive on their cobweb-like team of professionals, who collaborate on remotely. VAs can add to this ecosystem by providing robust support, irrespective of their physical location. And when you can hire them at a fraction of the cost of full-time employees, you can advance towards profitability quicker than competitors.

25. Stay one step ahead of the competition

How do you beat the competition? By focusing on core tasks and building processes that are hard to replicate. While doing so isn’t easy in the first place, a lack of focus make surviving even more difficult. By hiring a VA, you can bring the focus back to staying ahead of the curve. More time to focus on strategy can really give you an exponential advantage in a competitive market.

26. A support system for your business

Apart from offering emotional support to you, a VA effectively acts as a support system for your business. You can create several teams of VAs who perform business-critical activities. The best part? If one team is unavailable, another one is at hand.

 Be as Flexible as you want with Virtual Administration

27. Operational flexibility

As an entrepreneur, the world is your oyster, literally! You should be willing and able to provide a product or service anywhere in the world, at any time. This is where a VA can help you. For example, if many of your customers are located in a different time zone, you can hire a VA in that particular time zone itself to field their queries.

28. VAs are low maintenance

While you do have to maintain a good working relationship with your VA, you don’t have to take them on fancy lunches and office parties. You can keep things purely professional. VAs work remotely and mostly communicate strictly work-related updates.

29. Be a digital nomad in the true sense

If the nature of your work doesn’t need you to work out of an office every day, why should your employees? If you’re a 21st-century digital nomad that believes the future of work is remote, start with your business.

Build a team of virtual employees, and you no longer need to worry about a strategically located office where employees can commute to. If you’re a freelancer that works from home/cafes, you don’t have to get an office just because you’re expanding your team. How cool is that?

Up the Productivity quotient by 40%

30. Delegate non-core activities

As a business owner, you’re all too familiar with repetitive tasks that aren’t ‘core’ to your business but must be dealt with anyway. Think social media management, conducting research, following up on payments, etc. Instead of taking these tasks upon yourself, you can benefit from the expertise of a trained VA while you focus on the actual business of running a business.

31. Reduce your workload

There is a difference between being in control and having to attend to every single detail yourself. While you should definitely be on top of what’s happening in your business, you definitely don’t need to (and shouldn’t) do everything yourself. Outsource work to a VA and reduce your workload.

32. No politics and gossip

Workspaces are notorious for stoking gossip and politics. With a team of virtual employees, there’s no scope of gossip at the water cooler or office politics that create discord and hamper motivation. You will be able to focus better on motivating your team and increasing business productivity.

33. Increase your productivity

As an entrepreneur, you know how crucial it is to focus on the task at hand. This is difficult if you have a mountain a pile of responsibilities vying for your attention. Delegating non-core tasks to a VA reduces your workload, allowing you to increase your productivity in areas critical to business growth.

34. No more micromanagement

Once you explain how you want things done, your VA will fulfil responsibilities independently. You don’t have to look over their shoulder all the time. Since their payment is contingent on delivery, you can expect results without fretting or spending your time micro-managing.

35. VAs are great at time management

Because a VA earns by the hour, they’re far better at time management than employees who draw a fixed salary. You can imagine how great this can be for your business.

Take care of your Emotional Well-Being

36. Live stress-free

Most small business owners go through the day stressed out, shouldering the responsibilities of running a business. When you get some help on hand, you can rest assured an expert is taking care of things for you. By hiring a virtual assistant, you can weed out non-essential activities from your to-do list and reduce your stress in the process.

37. Work-life balance using a virtual administration service

Find your life consumed by work? If you nodded yes, you’re like most entrepreneurs. Your business definitely needs your undivided attention, but so do your life and relationships. If you’re spending all waking hours immersed in work, you’re clearly missing out on a lot – moments of uncontrolled laughter with friends, watching your kids grow, a lovely dinner with your partner.

A virtual assistant allows you to take some time off of work. While they handle the day to day, you can go about relaxing and spending some quality time with your family.

38. Focus on yourself

Having a VA that handles day-to-day business operations gives you the luxury of alone time. So if you’ve been neglecting your physical and mental health, you can use this time to focus on yourself. Join a gym, exercise daily, and meditate to keep yourself not just fit but also sane.

39. Help at hand

If you need help with your business, it’s a great sign! Don’t let it get out of hand before hiring a virtual assistant. Maybe you’re doing perfectly fine at the moment. But what happens when you acquire another 10 clients? Would it be humanly possible to do it all on your own?

We know it can be tough to let someone else take over something you’ve nurtured with so much passion. And placing your trust in the wrong person will do more harm than good. But as an entrepreneur, there’s something you need to realize. Eventually, you’ll have to stop doing it all by yourself. You have to let other people take some control. And you have to trust them.

40. Feel happier

The secret trick powering successful entrepreneurs isn’t so much of a secret – delegation. Delegating work is proven to increase productivity, energy, and happiness. Apart from an actual decrease in your workload, delegating is good for your happiness as you psychologically feel less overwhelmed.

41. Improve emotional well-being

The psychological price of entrepreneurship is now a well-accepted reality. Happy and excited as your public face may be, we know you’re struggling to retain your sanity through the day. Hiring a virtual assistant will allow you to step away for some time, take a peaceful walk or just get away from the madness that entrepreneurship is. Just knowing someone’s around to help you can drastically improve your emotional well-being.

When you hire a VA, you’re essentially hiring a support system – both for your business and yourself. When you’re running a business, it doesn’t take too long before a feeling of panic and tension sets in. Your VA is around to lend a sympathetic ear and cheer you up, easing anxiety and pressure. As someone who’s making it through the day with enormous mental stress, you know how invaluable that kind of support is.

Hassle-Free hiring using virtual administration

42. No training headache

VAs are extremely qualified for several roles. Because they’re already trained in both technical and soft skills, you don’t have to spend time and money on prepping them for the job. Save on training costs and start realizing an ROI as soon as you onboard your VA.

43. Virtual administration assistants are excellent at communication

Most VAs are highly experienced and educated, having worked in important corporate roles in the past. This naturally translates to superior communication skills. They’re also available on different channels – email, phone, video. This means your VA takes no time in understanding what you want and producing quick results.

44. Global talent pool

Hiring international employees is a hassle your business can do without. On the other hand, hiring international virtual assistants is a piece of cake. All you have to do is identify a qualified and competent person for the task without having to worry about relocation, tax, and other issues. In fact, hiring from a global talent pool gives you access to a more diverse and qualified set of candidates. This brings us to the next benefit.

45. VAs can perform complex tasks

Don’t take the word “assistant” at face value. VAs are trained in specialized skills which require a certain degree of education and experience – managing social media, transcription, copywriting, email marketing et al.

46. Fill gaps in your workforce

Working with a VA is easy. You can hire or terminate their services according to your business needs. Instead of going through a long-drawn-out process of recruitment each time you face resource gaps, quickly hire a VA to perform the service and get your business going.

47. Access to diverse skills

No matter the task you want to be performed, you’ll find a trained VA to take it on. Be it general administration, travel planning, in-depth research or client communication, most VAs hold a diverse skillset that you can tap.

48. Get a fresh perspective

Interacting with VAs, who can be from different parts of the world, can really broaden your horizons. They can offer you insights that have the dual advantage of being fresh while based on insider experience. We all need a fresh perspective now and then, especially if we’re running a business!

49. VAs are reliable

You can depend on your VA to deliver work on time. Their remote location has no bearing on either their professionalism or trustworthiness. Well-trained and qualified, your VA will prove to be a reliable investment.

50. Happy workers

Because your VA saves a couple of hours on travel each day, they have more time to focus on life outside of work. When workers are able to strike a work-life balance due to a flexible arrangement, it reflects in their work in the form of higher productivity and job satisfaction.

51. Learn to build rapport

This is an essential skill if you see yourself as a future business titan. Managing and directing different VAs can help you learn how to build rapport and get people excited to work for you and your vision.

52. Easy communication

While your VA isn’t physically available to talk, there are a host of ways you can communicate with them – email, phone or Skype. This means business never stops because communication channels are down. In a hyper-connected world, long-distance communication with your international VA is as smooth as it gets.

53. Future-proof recruitment

Once you’ve put in the time and energy in training your VA, you’ve essentially future-proofed your HR function. This can serve as an excellent opportunity for you to work together and grow. Your VA can soon transition into the role of the project manager or business manager. As your business grows, you will need to fill in the many roles that arise. Instead of hiring afresh, it only makes sense to promote your VA to a senior role. In doing so, you’ll be hiring someone who’s already steeped in your company’s culture and knows exactly how you want things done.

Ease of Hiring using Virtual Administration

54. Get an expert at the click of the mouse

No matter what you need to be done, you can depend on an expert VA for the job. Most VAs are incredibly qualified at what they do. You can leverage this expertise through a single search online.

55. No background check hassles

Hiring a virtual assistant saves you from spending time, money and effort on verifying a prospective employee’s credentials. The VA’s testimonials and references will speak for their calibre. Moreover, a VA platform will have conducted proper due diligence on each individual.

56. Establish immediate contact using virtual administration

Your VA is only an email away, any time of day or night. No more waiting for employees to show up to work. When your VA is only a phone call away, you get done work a lot faster.

57. Quick hiring

VAs are abundant online, and locating one who is adept in a specific skill is easy as pie. Just sign up with a VA platform and scroll through qualified profiles till you find the perfect fit. Negotiate and finalize employment terms online, and you’re open for business!

58. Ease of replacement

For a small business owner looking to build a team, the internet has truly opened doors. Now, both hiring and firing workers is easy, especially if you’re dealing with VAs. If your VA must leave for some reason, you can find a replacement in no time. If you’re using a VA platform, a replacement (with a similar skillset) is arranged for in no time!

59. Re-hire on demand

Once you have worked with a VA who impressed you, you can rehire them later. Whenever you need a worker, you know exactly where to find the best person for the job.

60. Begin immediately

Hiring a virtual assistant is undeniably a great investment. If you devote time to building a strong relationship with your VA, you’re certainly going to see the results. If you’re worried that the time and effort you spend training your VA is all going down the drain if they leave you, a virtual assistant platform is just what you’re looking for. If your assistant happens to move on to another opportunity, the company will offer another trained assistant as a replacement. This means you don’t have to do it all over again. Hire your perfect VA in a matter of minutes.

Full article with thanks to: wishup.co/blog/60-benefits-of-hiring-a-va

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