If you are bending over your backward trying to grow your business and you are doing it on your own, in the end, you will come to a standstill feeling exhausted, tense, desperately trying to restore your work-life balance.
You can’t do everything that is required of you alone. It’s impossible. There are only 24 hours a day. And as a business owner, your main focus should be set on your existing clients, on networking so you could extend a list of leads to nurture and then convert to future customers.
Your personal virtual assistant can ease your workload, but you may not always know which tasks to delegate, it can be tricky, whether you’re launching or growing your business. Most virtual assistants are either freelance or contract workers who do their jobs from home or remote office and focus on back-office tasks that are similar to those of an executive or administrative support assistant or even offer specific skill sets.
With the rising number of virtual assistants, their expertise now covers a wide range of areas, making it easier to find someone whose skills respond to your needs. Business owners use virtual assistants for everything from making customer service calls to optimizing social media sites or managing websites. It’s essential to build strong rapport, trust and all other social ties you normally create with permanent employees. ‘They become team members who just happen to work remotely,’ Bisharat says.
There are at least 10 ways you can benefit from a virtual assistant service to grow your business:
Web Research: Internet research tasks are usually delegated to virtual assistants. Common requests include looking for information on corporate websites, exploring new products and appraising potential employees or searching business contacts.
Data entry: Whether it’s an updated information for existing contacts or tedious accounts, keeping databases current is a suitable task for virtual assistants.
Preparing presentations: When preparing for meeting your virtual assistant may be a huge timesaver who will turn raw data into a vivid PowerPoint presentation or summarize research findings in a Word document.
Managing emails: Once you provide clear guidance on how to pick out key emails, your assistance will manage your email box. Virtual assistants will both filter your most important messages in your email box to save your time or respond to them on your behalf.
Social chores: You will not waste your time writing cards, sending thank you notes as social chores have become a very common assignment delegated to virtual assistants who know how to handle such tasks.
Scheduling: Virtual Assistants managing calendars, deal with event planning, schedule appointments with clients. Since many scheduling tools are available online it is time-saving to delegate routine tasks to a non-staff person working remotely.
Social Media Management: With limited time to keep tabs on industry news, some businesses turn to virtual assistants to follow the most important events, update social profiles, Twitter feed or bring up interesting developments in conversation with customers and prospects.
Travel Research: The assistants can take advantage of the growing number of travel research tools which are a great resource for finding hotels, booking airfares and mapping out trip itineraries.
In case you are a overwhelmed by your duties and long for more control over your time, the solution may be a virtual assistant.
