As a busy entrepreneur or business professional, you’ve got a lot on your plate. Most small business owners, entrepreneurs, and other independent professionals end up working over 50 hours a week to make sure their business is running smoothly. Many work 60 hours or more each week!
If you’re a professional working hard on developing in a small business or creating your own business from scratch, you’re going to have to work long hours. However, you also know that work-life balance is essential to maintaining your physical, mental, and emotional health. How do you effectively develop both your business and your personal life?
This is where hiring a virtual assistant comes in handy. You have likely heard of virtual assistants, but you may not know exactly what they can do to help you. In fact, there are many tasks you can delegate to professionally-trained virtual assistants to ensure that you have more time to focus on the balance of personal and business needs in your own life. Let’s take a look at how you can get ready and get started with a virtual assistant.
30 Tasks Your Virtual Assistant Can Do
Most often, you’ll want to hire a virtual assistant to help you with a mundane task or something you don’t specialize in. For example, you might hire a virtual assistant to help with paperwork, billing, or creating and posting social media content. Virtual assistants come in all shapes and sizes, trained for a variety of tasks. Here are some of the common tasks your virtual assistant may help you with:
- Office Administration
- Bookkeeping
- Data Entry
- Email management
- Appointment scheduling
- Social media management
- Personal and executive assistance
- Transcription services
- WordPress development
- Marketing strategies
- Cloud services
- Content management
- Web research
- Answering phone calls
- CRM management
- Responsive theme web design
- SEO optimization
- Content creation or content editing
- UI theme web design
- Custom coding
- Website and plugin updates
- Website and blog post revision
- Spam management
- Performing competitive analysis
- Database optimization
- Facebook Ad marketing
- Social media communication (answering messages, replying to comments, etc.)
- Call tracking
- Lead generation
- A/B Testing
Most of these tasks are fairly easy to complete but are also boring and technical. If you’re like most professionals, you aren’t fully trained in all aspects of web design, social media, marketing, coding, writing blogs, creating and editing videos, and managing leads. And while you may have expertise in many of those areas, you may not enjoy them at all.
This is why you should hire a virtual assistant to help you with these tasks. A virtual assistant can take over mundane tasks and save you the time and effort of trying to do them yourself. A virtual assistant is a highly trained professional, so if there’s a service you don’t quite know how to manage, your virtual assistant can help.
However, you may be unsure whether it will be worth your while to hire a virtual assistant. You will have to pay them, after all. Here’s how to decide whether you can and should hire a virtual assistant for your business.
Consider How Much Your Time is Worth
There’s a common saying that “time is money.” To some extent, this is true. How would you rate it in your business? There’s not necessarily a formula for figuring out how much your time is worth. But there are two basic factors, according to Forbes, that you should consider:
- What is your time literally worth (i.e. how much are you paid per hour for the hours you work)?
- How much value do you place on your time?
If you’re like most business professionals, you probably make a lot “per hour” in your daily work. But what kind of value do you put on your time? Is it worth it, for example, to work 12 hours a day and miss your daughter’s piano recital? Or to work seven days a week and stop going to church?
Each person has to make an individual evaluation of how much their time is worth. But if you, like most, want to spend more time doing things outside of work, a virtual assistant is a great resource to take over some mundane, time-consuming tasks so you can leave the office a little earlier.
Consider the Value of the Tasks You Perform
In your business, you’ll be performing all sorts of tasks. However, as mentioned, some tasks will be more in tune with your skill and natural abilities, while others may be more difficult for you. For example, if you’re great at talking to people, you’ll probably do well with answering phone calls. But if you hate computers, you won’t do well at maintaining your website.
Consider how much the tasks you perform to keep your business running are worth. If these mundane tasks generate a lot of revenue, you may want to keep doing them. However, you may find that the need to do them overwhelms you and depresses you whenever you think about it. If so, you may want to consider a virtual assistant.
A virtual assistant will perform valuable tasks like maintaining your website and creating blog content without you having to worry about getting involved. You’ll still make money by seeing these tasks completed, but you won’t have to worry about having to take the time and effort to do them when your time would be better spent on tasks you’re good at (such as chatting with clients, creating products, etc.).
Create Procedures for Your Virtual Assistant to Follow
If you’re convinced that you want to hire a virtual assistant, there are just a few more steps to take in the process. First, you must make sure you have some standard operating procedures (SOPs) in place before you hire someone. You will need to share these SOPs with your virtual assistant to make sure they work how you want them to.
All virtual assistants will be trained in a specific skill set like web design or financial management. However, that doesn’t mean they know your business inside out like you do and know exactly how you want certain things handled. That’s why you must develop and maintain SOPs so that your assistants can get the job done how you need it to be done.
Your assistants will also need some training when they first join your team. It’s natural and expected. Just as you can’t hire a new employee and leave them alone their first week or so, you can’t hire an assistant and expect them to do everything right the first time. Invest at least a week in going over your SOPs with them. Watch them while they work so that you can see what they’re doing right and what they need to improve on.
While you’ll be getting a highly skilled individual in a personal assistant, you won’t be getting a perfect one. Invest time into training your virtual assistant so that they make your business the very best it can be.
Are you ready to get started with a virtual assistant? Give us a call today and we’ll help you get started with your own virtual assistant in no time!