What is a Virtual Assistant and what is Outsourcing?
Need a Virtual Assistant? If you are a small to medium business owner or entreprenuer, perhaps you have never heard of the term Virtual Assistant.
Well to put it in plain english, it’s really just a modern term for a personal assistant who works remotely at their home office rather than on site.
Outsourcing is a term that you may have heard used for bigger corporations i.e customer services teams or support etc
More and more small and medium sized businesses, entrepreneurs and internet marketers are hiring the assistance of a VA to help them grow their businesses.
A greatly known book from an internet marketer that made it big online is Tim Ferris who wrote “The 4 Hour Work Week” and introducing this concept to the mainstream has even brought the little guy, the local tradesman whether it be a plumber, electrician, builder, tiler, painter etc into the world of hiring help and outsourcing their accounts or marketing needs to a virtual assistant.
Hiring a local virtual assistant is not only convenient but also helps our own economy and keep people employed. Many VA’s could even be working mother’s from home while raising their school children so supporting ‘work from home mum’s’ too is great.
Outsourcing is nothing new, it’s actually been around for 20-25 years starting in the IT Industry then moving into staffing, interviewing, recruitment and HR work.
It eventually moved on to bookkeeping, accounting and marketing etc and now it’s a very ripe, growing industry.
Small to medium businesses and entrepreneurs should really be looking to outsource as much as humanly possible for the following reasons:
- Some business owners cannot do the skilled work
- Some business owners do not want to do the work
- Some business owners would rather be doing better things with their time
- Some business owners would prefer to spend their time focusing on growth strategies and building their businesses
When you utilise the power of outsourcing, this frees you as the business owner to concentrate on what it is that you do best.
So, what is outsourcing exactly?
Outsourcing is simply hiring and paying somebody to do the things that you don’t have the patience, the time, the skills or the energy to do.
Not only is it a cost effective way of doing business because you can earn far more money doing what you do best and what you are skilled at, especially when you look at it as your hourly rate vs theirs.
Have a think about what rate you can charge yourself out at OR your average hourly wage when you break down the income you are earning. Then take a fraction of that cost to pay your very own virtual assistant.
Imagine not having to do those mundane tasks again, and concentrate on your own skills and first and foremost focus on the growth and expansion of your business. It’s simply just good business sense.
You’ll have more time to focus on staff training & development, socialising with potential clients, providing great customer service and leveraging your time to be able to get more done and become more productive. Success will automatically follow.
Where do you start when hiring a virtual assistant?
Well, your end goal should to eventually have your own team of virtual staff.
The first starting point is to hire your first one. Usually this will be in the form of an executive assistant then you can even leverage this person in the future to help hire the rest of your team later down the track.
If you want to hire offshore, searching for good staff will involve a lot of research and be very time consuming sifting and sorting. Sure you might save some money hiring VA’s from some of the poorer countries but it will also come with it’s own set of challenges, language barriers etc
I think if you are a small business or tradesmen then hiring locally is good if you want general bookkeeping and administrative work done. Although so many things can be done over the internet now and simply shared through the likes of dropbox and email.
When it comes to the Entrepreneur and Internet Marketer it doesn’t really matter where you are based and I would be quite happy to work with any entrepreneur from any other westernised country or a country with good resources.
When hiring a virtual assistant you don’t have to commit to full time hours. You may even want to start off hiring your VA for only a few hours per week, build up a good relationship together and see if you are happy with their work ethics and skills.
You can project based outsource where you may just hire your VA for ‘one off’ projects until you get so busy you can increase their hours. In other words you are just delegating a project not an entire workload.
How this works is your VA will quote you on completing that one project, they will complete the work then get paid upon completion.
Another great reason behind hiring a virtual assistant is it will give you a sense of responsibility and also pressure you a little bit to get things organised to set that person up with work tasks. It can be so easy to put things off to another day, week or even month.
A virtual assistant will help keep you accountable and organised and on top of important upcoming deadlines and give you someone you can rely on.
There are several websites online where you can find virtual assistants from all over the world like www.upwork.com and but to find one locally simply search for a virtual assistant in your area.
If you are ready to get started in hiring your first virtual assistant then get in touch with me HERE so we can set up a meeting to discuss your needs and see if we would be a good fit.