If you hire a virtual assistant, it means developing a relationship with someone you’ve never met in person. Some entrepreneurs are a bit squeamish about this. If I don’t meet her, how do I know she’s trustworthy, reliable, professional? If I don’t see her day to day, how do I know she’s doing the work?
You can hold yourself back with doubts. But let’s take a moment and think about this. A virtual assistant surely would not be your first virtual relationship. How many professional connections have you built up on LinkedIn? If you have a business Facebook page — which we would highly recommend — how many followers have you never met in person? We live in a virtual world in which the majority of the professional population carries a smartphone and interacts more on social media than in face-to-face meetings.
Even if you’re not much of a fan of social media, I bet you don’t call your staff into your office every time you have instructions to hand out. How often are you communicating solely by email, even when you’re in the same building?
So, you see, communicating with someone virtually is not entirely outside of your frame of reference.
As for reliability and trustworthiness — well, you can’t exactly watch over your employees non-stop, either. And that’s one of the benefits of a VA: You do not have to supervise their every move. They are paid for productivity, not for a full day of bathroom breaks and cruising the Internet. As long as you set clear parameters about how you want to be charged, when and how you’ll receive time reports and so forth, you’ll have far less to worry about than with office staff.
Benefits when you hire a virtual assistant:
- You lessen your workload at the fraction of the price of hiring a full-time or even part-time staffer
- You gain a partner who can help you reach for long-term goals
- You get more time for yourself to focus on the bigger picture, instead of the details you can hand off to your virtual assistant
- You don’t have to worry about recruiting and/or relocating someone to your physical location
- You have a much larger pool of candidates to choose from because location does not matter
- You pay only for productivity, so when business takes a dip, your expenses can follow suit
- You don’t have to worry about benefits, sick pay and so forth
Your VA can do almost anything an employee can do
So, if you hire a virtual assistant, what exactly can they do? In today’s age, almost anything a physical employee could do, short of meeting with clients in your office. They can
- Manage your schedule
- Manage your email
- Book travel arrangements
- Make calls on your behalf
- Manage your social media accounts
- Do Internet research
- Manage billing (be cautious about giving financial positions to virtual employees, though)
- Manage your website/online projects
Most likely, much of your business interaction takes place via phone and e-mail. Therefore, your clients won’t know that your assistant is not right there in house by your side; all they’ll care about is that they are receiving quality customer service via a prompt response. Don’t fool yourself into thinking hiring local staff is your only option: When you hire a virtual assistant, you open the doors to more options at a better price.
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