Benefits Of Hiring A Virtual Assistant

Benefits Of Hiring A Virtual Assistant

Up until recently, businesses would hire freelance virtual assistants to attend to the excess work that was non-essential.

By delegating work to their freelance virtual assistant, they could save on costs and get more work done. Thanks to the evolution of digital technology, the Internet, and social media, things have taken an interesting turn.

Due to recent global events that forever changed the foundation of many businesses, more companies than ever before have begun to outsource services in an effort to streamline costs and increase production.

But there are 5 specific benefits of hiring virtual assistant services.

5 Reasons To Hire An Experienced Virtual Assistant Now

Global outsourcing has grown exponentially from about $45 billion dollars in 2000 to a $15 billion dollar industry by the year 2014.

In 2014, Elance reported over eight million freelancers alone on their platform. These freelancers serviced over two million clients in over 180 countries. They generated over $750 million in earnings on just one virtual assistant platform.

In 2012 Reuters reported that one out of every five people are telecommuting or working from home. India had the highest rate at 50 percent of the workforce, followed by Indonesia at 34 percent. From their perspective, Elance reported that one-eighth of the freelancers, or roughly one million, are from the Philippines.

Freelancers, virtual assistants, and telecommuters have found their niche in business operations regardless of their size. Any business owner who has used a virtual assistant for administrative tasks knows how much value they gain to increase their business productivity.

Here are the five main benefits of working with such an independent contractor.

1. Lower Your Cost Of Doing Business

The main reason for hiring a virtual assistant is to reduce costs. It’s long been estimated that a virtual assistant will save a company as much as 78 percent in their operating costs vs. an in-house assistant.

Why?

A trained virtual assistant is a self-employed person that is hired directly or by an outside agency like RealEstateVirtualAssistant.com. This means that you’re not responsible for many of the expenses associated with employees, including employee benefits, operational costs such as office space, vacation time, sick pay, and superannuation.

By hiring a virtual assistant, you’re going to save by not having to pay additional benefits. You won’t have to rent office space or the equipment to run the office. You’ll save on bandwidth, and you’ll save on your utility costs.

Your virtual assistant may work from as far away as the Philippines or India, yet you’re not going to have to worry about the overhead costs that a local person would incur by coming to your office.

You can hire a virtual office assistant on a full-time basis for as low as $7 per hour. And there is a lot of flexibility that means you won’t have to pay fixed monthly salaries.

That flexibility and the ability to reduce employee related expenses make a virtual assistant possibly one of the most cost effective ways to gain efficiency.

2. Increase Your Productivity

When you delegate business tasks that are time consuming and monotonous, you can increase productivity significantly.

Several studies have shown that 13 percent of employees actually work better when they work from home. This has encouraged many large companies to use telecommuting as a routine workforce strategy to save on costs and increase productivity.

There are two very good reasons for this:

– A virtual assistant with excellent time management skills will have more time to focus on your requirements and fewer distractions.

– The right virtual assistant will be highly skilled in technology and administrative services, allowing you to outsource a lot more support services.

There is very little a skilled VA can’t do to help your own business prosper in a competitive market.

The more time you free up with your core business team to allow them to focus on dollar productive tasks like building customer relations, the more you will realise that you’re making financially sound investments with your VAs.

3. Improve Efficiency

By hiring a virtual assistant, you’ll improve the efficiency of your core business areas as you’ll be completing more work at less cost. Most virtual assistants are paid by the productive hour. This ensures that they’ll only be compensated when they are reaching specific milestones.

In comparison, regular full-time employees are paid at a fixed rate by the hour as required by law. On a typical 8 hour day, they’ll have to be paid for a full 8 hours whether they were working or not.

Another major advantage of outsourcing workers is that virtual assistants have plenty of experience in a variety of settings.

With the right hiring process, they require minimal training and can typically take on multiple project tasks to help with your business’s success.

And by handing time-consuming admin tasks over to a virtual assistant, your team will be in a much better position to focus on dollar productive tasks and contribute to your company’s growth.

4. Add Business Flexibility

Most people that make the transition to using virtual assistants do so for flexibility of not needing another full-time employee. Most virtual assistants choose to be virtual assistants for the same reason.

They want to be more in charge of their time to spend with their family and to enjoy a better work life balance. It’s a perfectly mutual benefit situation.

The small business owner benefits because they can get the work done without having to pay all of the high overhead costs.

The virtual assistant benefits because they have a job that they can telecommute to, and they can work it into their lifestyle and schedule.

Hours are flexible, and by setting up your virtual assistants in a remote location, you can cover every hour in a 24 hour day without stress. Time zones differ, and it can all work in your favor. You’ll always have customer service available, even when you’re sleeping.

You can also extend this to other aspects of your business. You can hire people from different time zones for your social media accounts, perform data entry, manage digital marketing campaigns, handle telephone calls, and even email and calendar management.

Imagine waking up to your email inbox full of work that has been sorted and categorised for you to get started on all the tasks in a priority order.

You can have filing done virtually, and you’ll achieve more with less when you hire virtual assistants to handle mundane administrative activities.

5. Achieve More Balance In Life

You’ll gain more time to achieve balance in your life when you hire a virtual assistant. With your trusted virtual assistants in place, you can live the life that allows you to take more time off for leisure and family time. All while your business grows without disruptions.

Perform business critical activities without wasting your time on the mundane stuff that bores you. Enjoy complete social media management or have your meetings scheduled while you’re enjoying some family time.

When you ask yourself how you can find more hours in the day to do what you enjoy, the answer is to hire a virtual assistant. If you’re only working so that you can pay your bills, if you’re only existing, you’re not enjoying your life.

Common Tasks That You Can Outsource

While most people tend to hire a VA to take care of their boring and mundane tasks, once they experience all the benefits and skills of their new team member, they quickly realise that it’s possible to outsource so much more.

Here are some typical things you might want to consider:

  • Data entry
  • Online real estate listing management
  • Email management
  • Social media management
  • Customer relationship management
  • Answering phone calls
  • Booking and scheduling meetings
  • General office administration
  • Project management

Once you build a good working relationship with your VA, you can then gradually expand their workload to other tasks. Or, what many of our clients do is expand their team of VAs to cover other areas of administrative assistance.

This is a great way to drive towards business expansion while keeping costs down and the rest of your employees focused on dollar productive tasks.

Find Out How Quickly You Can Hire A Virtual Assistant

If you’re seeking a virtual assistant to make a difference for your business, you can contact our team Real Estate Virtual Assistant.

We’ve designed the best virtual assistant service team to give your small business a hands-off experience with hiring a new VA.

Instead of having to go through weeks of sorting through potential candidates, you’ll find the right person with the right skill set when you call us.

We can allocate a highly trained virtual assistant from our existing team. Or, if you have special requests for tasks that a virtual assistant takes care of, then we will go through the screening and hiring process for you.

We will take care of the training requirements and ensure that you have the right assistant for your business needs.

Call us today and find out how quickly we can have you up and running.

Take your business to the next level today! ENQUIRE NOW

Click to access the login or register cheese