If you’re a CEO or business owner looking to grow your company to scale, you need a skilled and efficient team that can help achieve this goal. Hiring employees, however, can be tricky, time-consuming, and maybe even unaffordable. Creating a job description, reviewing candidate profiles, shortlisting a few for interviews, and finally selecting one (and hoping they say yes!) is a lengthy process. Not to mention, paying a salary and benefits can eat into your company’s budget.
An alternative worth considering is to hire a virtual assistant (VA).
They are trained professionals who can perform a variety of administrative and creative tasks, taking the workload off your plate and giving you more time and energy to focus on business strategy. You can hire VAs who are skilled in accounting, data entry, market research, web development, graphic design, content creation, social media, and much more. If you run a medical practice, real estate agency, or law firm, you can find an assistant who specializes in these fields — and many more!
VAs work remotely and are based in different parts of the world, namely Latin and Central America, the Phillippines, and South Asia. They are usually much cheaper to hire than a full-time employee — you can find a VA for as little as $5/hour on professional marketplaces. Several VA agencies offer bespoke matching services, pairing your company with an ideal assistant. Here, reputed agencies will charge between $2,000 and $5,000 for a full-time assistant, depending on where they are located.
If you’re interested in hiring a VA, here are 10 reasons why they would benefit you and your business:
Hiring a VA can be significantly cheaper than hiring a full-time employee. You can hire an assistant for specific tasks on a per-hour, part-time, or full-time basis. Moreover, since VAs work remotely and are usually based in countries where the cost of living is significantly lower than in North America, they charge much less. VAs based in South and Southeast Asia charge as little as $5 per hour. If you opt to staff with a VA agency, you can expect to pay between $2,000 and $3,000 for a skilled assistant. Using this hiring model, you can hire multiple VAs for limited periods to do specific tasks, saving you money. Hiring several full-time employees, paying them benefits, and leasing office space would be much more expensive.
Running a company often means taking care of repetitive administrative tasks. These can include invoicing, sending payment reminders, responding to customer inquiries, posting on social media, entering data, sending routine emails, and more. These tasks eat into your work day, giving you little to no time to focus on the big picture and strategic activities needed to grow the company. Delegating these tasks to assistants skilled in these fields will give you time to deal with more pressing issues and peace of mind knowing that trained professionals are helping your business.
Not just you, but other team leaders and employees part of your company can also benefit from hiring VAs. Project managers may have too much on their plate and need help delegating tasks, allowing an assistant to step in and make life easier. For example, social media managers can benefit from having assistants skilled in content writing and graphic design work with them on a per-project or part-time basis to ease their workload, giving them more time to create a social media strategy.
VAs work remotely and are available when required. You can scale their involvement up or down involvement based on the workload available. You can hire a VA who works with you or a particular department for a few hours, days, weeks, or even full-time. Similarly, you can hire as many VAs as needed to complete pending tasks and help execute a project. This is especially helpful if you run a company with varying workloads. For example, a travel agency may need to hire additional staff during the holiday season to deal with additional enquiries and bookings.
VAs work remotely and in different time zones; they can accomplish many tasks after your organization ends its work day. If your working hours are in Pacific Standard Time and hire VAs based in the Philippines, the time difference is 15 hours. Tasks you delegate to your VAs will likely be done during your night and be ready when you wake up, allowing you to begin your work day in an organized manner. Additionally, remote VAs in different time zones can be quite helpful for customer service tasks. They can respond to incoming inquiries at all hours and can ensure a customer will have their call answered and issues resolved promptly.
When you hire remote talent, you get access to professionals living and working in Central and South America, India, and the Philippines, apart from those in North America and the U.K. These VAs are skilled professionals with college degrees and speak fluent or near-fluent English, giving you a large talent pool to find someone who suits your needs.
Hiring a new employee can be tedious: you create a job advertisement, respond to queries, shortlist candidates, and finally select one. After that, you hope your chosen candidate fits well into the company culture and collaborates effectively. When you hire an assistant through a staffing agency, professionals make sure the VA assigned to you is a good fit. Usually, you have to answer a survey about your company and your needs; this information is used to shortlist candidates whom you can interview. Additionally, many agencies offer free trial periods and backup VAs in case your first choice does not work out.
VAs take care of administrative tasks for your business, freeing up your work day. Similarly, you can hire an executive assistant who helps with personal tasks, giving you more time for leisure and with your family. An executive VA can plan holidays for you, book tickets, remember birthdays, shop for gifts, manage your calendar, make reservations, and much more, organizing both your professional and personal life.
Depending on your needs, you can hire VAs for specific tasks without the hassle and extra costs involved in onboarding a full-time employee. YOu can hire VAs who specialize in web design, coding, content creation, video editing, bookkeeping, graphic design, marketing, email management, data entry, and more. You can even find VAs who specialize in sectors like medicine, law, and travel, to name a few.
Hiring a VA can, with time, make you a better manager and delegator who runs an efficient company. You will learn how communicate your expectations from a task better, give constructive feedback, prioritize tasks by distinguishing between what is time-sensitive and what isn’t, and to trust your VA and others working under you to do a job properly with minimal supervision.
Founded by serial entrepreneurs, Leverage Assistants is a white-glove service that helps you find 1% assistants and then teaches you how to build leverage with them. If you're interested in a strategy session to learn how to use an assistant, click here.
Stephen is one of the founders of Lumiere and a Harvard College graduate. He founded Lumiere as a Ph.D. student at Harvard Business School. Lumiere is a selective research program where students work 1-1 with a research mentor to develop an independent research paper.
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