Do You Need to Hire a Virtual Assistant or Not?

Speak­ing of vir­tual assis­tant (VA), I find that most peo­ple do not really clear what a vir­tual assis­tant is. A vir­tual assis­tant is an inde­pen­dent con­trac­tor that per­forms across-the-board admin­is­tra­tive tasks as well as other tasks. VAs mainly com­mu­ni­cate via phone, fax, and email with their clients.

Almost any busi­ness can ben­e­fit from a vir­tual assis­tant (both large and small com­pa­nies) because they:

• Don’t take up space in your office
• Don’t require you to pay pay­roll taxes
• Don’t ask for ben­e­fits
• Don’t ask for a vaca­tion
• Don’t waste time on inter­rup­tions, office gossip/politics, breaks, down­time, inter­net use etc

More than that, a vir­tual assis­tant also pro­vides you with var­i­ous busi­ness sup­port ser­vices, but he or she is NOT your employee. You can pay them either on hourly or monthly retainer base.

How­ever, lot of busi­ness own­ers still say that there is more ver­sa­til­ity with what a vir­tual office assis­tant can do for them com­pare with a secretary.

Not to men­tion other micro and macro fac­tors, which causes lots of changes in today’s busi­ness envi­ron­ment, just the annu­ally cost increas­ing for pro­vid­ing health insur­ance, pay­roll taxes, hol­i­day pay, vaca­tion pay and equip­ment and the train­ing costs can really tighten a com­pany already lim­ited finan­cial bud­get and time constraint.

These taxes, ben­e­fits and other addi­tional costs can make the wage of your employee more than two times higher than the ini­tial wage.

As a sec­re­tary, most of the time, he or she works in busi­ness owner’s office, pro­vides admin­is­tra­tive tasks, focus on tasks-based projects, works with any clients, and doesn’t really need to under­stand the busi­ness in order to com­plete a task etc.

By hir­ing a vir­tual assis­tant, on the other hand, he or she works from a remote office, pro­vides clients NOT ONLY the admin­is­tra­tive tasks, also other var­i­ous busi­ness sup­port needs, which can be rang­ing from day-to-day admin­is­tra­tive tasks to a web­site design, mar­ket­ing, accom­mo­da­tion and meet­ing arrange­ments, call han­dling, event orga­niz­ing and etc, and with inter­net tech­nol­ogy they can also pro­vide you with blog­ging, email man­age­ment, con­tent devel­op­ment, tweet­ing, man­ag­ing and han­dling your social media mar­ket­ing cam­paigns etc.

A VA works with a small group of select clients toward the long term needs for their busi­ness, col­lab­o­rates with client to under­stand their busi­ness and charge per hour or monthly retainer, client DOES NOT pay pay­roll tax, sick leave pay, busi­ness leave pay, or hol­i­day, vaca­tion pay, client only pays for the time spent on project(s), and he or she pro­vides busi­ness sup­port on an “as-needed” basis.

Thus, incor­po­rat­ing a Vir­tual Assis­tant into your busi­ness model is a very effec­tive way to man­age your busi­ness, with a VA, you are cut­ting over­head and increas­ing productivity.

How­ever, things to bear in mind is that if VAs fails to con­firm that they are a solid match for the per­son­al­ity of a cer­tain busi­ness owner, and then dev­as­ta­tion could be left ahead.

About the Author

Random Posts