Why did you set up your business?
My guess is you have a skill set that matches a passion and you hoped somewhere along the line other people would pay good money for your product or service. I am also pretty sure it was not because you just love all the admin that goes with running a business – unless you too are a virtual assistant of course!
If you are self-employed, freelance or own a small business you may have resigned yourself to evenings of paperwork or social media marketing. You may find the creative side of your working day is being squeezed into ever less hours by book-keeping and that slightly panic-inducing overflowing inbox.
By hiring a virtual assistant to take away those bits of the job you haven’t got time for, don’t have the skills for, or just plainly dislike, you can concentrate on getting back to the exciting stuff that drove you to start your business in the first place.
Small businesses need nurturing
They have to grow and evolve and they need constant marketing and customer relationship management (CRM). We all know the most important customers are the ones you already have so they need lots of attention and TLC. Existing clients will hopefully buy your services again, which would be great, but what you also want them to do is refer you on to their friends and family. Keeping your customers up to date, reminding them who you are, connecting on social media, newsletters, sending thank you and Christmas cards all takes time, but is vital for keeping your business profile high in their minds.
A virtual assistant can do all this and more, leaving you to concentrate on face to face networking with prospective new clients. Oh, and when you have got pockets full of new business cards, why not let your VA input all the details into a database and connect with them on your behalf on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.
Do you really want to have to share your space?
Of course you could actually recruit someone to do these tasks but, even after advertising and finding the right person, along with a shiny new employee comes tax, national insurance, sickness, annual leave, maybe new equipment and do you have room in your office for another person?
Virtual assistants work remotely. We can of course meet up for a coffee and chat if local, or we can just communicate via messaging or Skype. We generally work from home, although that’s not always the case – it could be a co-working office, or the local library or café. However, unless you want a specific service such as minuting meetings, we don’t tend to clutter up your working environment. Virtual assistants are self-employed so we sort out all our tax, NI and pensions so no employee overheads to worry about and you only pay for us for the actual time we are working.
In short, virtual assistants have a huge and varied skill set that matches our passion to help others. It’s why we set up our businesses and why we make absolute perfect business sense.
*Why not also read my LinkedIn article – 5 Tasks You Could Outsource to A Virtual Assistant Today