Top 10 Myths About Hiring a Virtual Assistant

10 common myths about hiring a virtual assistant by Alyssa.

1. It’s expensive – I can’t afford a virtual assistant. Hiring help does not have to be expensive. Yes, you can find VAs who charge $50 or more per hour, but this is typically for detailed projects needing more skills and experience. At the other end of the spectrum, you can hire workers overseas for around $2.50/hour. The nice thing about contracting with a VA is that you know the costs upfront – you don’t have any additional expenses beyond their hourly rate of pay.

2. You have to hire someone full time. You can hire a VA for as little as a 1 hour project or full time every week of the year – it is up to you and the needs of your business. Most VAs can work on a per-project or hourly basis and understand that you may not need them a set number of hours each week from the beginning. Start with a simple one time project or just a few hours per week if you’re just dipping your toes into outsourcing. You can increase the hours and number of projects you hand over to your VA as you become more comfortable.

3. You have to offer benefits. In reality, a VA is an independent contractor, responsible for his/her own insurance, taxes, retirement, etc. You are not obligated to offer any benefits to your VA, unless you’d like to, of course.

4. My virtual assistant needs to work in my office/workshop alongside me. VAs are, by nature, virtual. This means they don’t show up every day at 8 am ready to work in your office. They may work from their own home, a coffee shop, or from a beach in Bali – wherever they can get internet access. The beauty of cloud technology is that information can be shared and projects completed even if team members are thousands of miles and multiple time zones apart.

5. I’m a solopreneur – my business is too small to justify hiring a virtual assistant. Businesses of any size can benefit from hiring help, even at just a few hours per week. You don’t have to be (or have the hiring budget of) a major corporate giant to hire an assistant.

6. A virtual assistant will take more time away from my work, since I have to supervise him/her all the time. In the beginning, you will need to make the time to be available to your VA to train him/her in how your business operates, and how to compete the tasks you’re delegating. But a quality VA can quickly pick up on your teachings and require very little hand holding or supervision. You’ll need to regularly communicate with your VA, but if you’ve hired a quality worker, you won’t need to constantly be checking in with him/her or worrying that your tasks aren’t getting done.

7. The help I need (fill in the blank) is too advanced for a virtual assistant. Virtual assistants often get pigeon holed, with potential clients thinking they can ‘only’ complete simple, mundane tasks. This is far from the truth. I’ve worked with some VAs who are extremely skilled in coding, accounting, design work, research and writing, event planning and social media management.

8. I’m horrible at delegating, so hiring a virtual assistant wold be pointless. This is exactly why you need a VA. Practice delegation by handing off small tasks to start with. This will strengthen your delegation skills while demonstrating how much easier your business and life can be by getting some tasks off of your plate. Start slowly, and I’m sure that you’ll soon be delegating more and more work to your VA!

9. I can’t trust a virtual assistant with the confidential information in my business. Just as you wouldn’t hand the password to your bank account to a brand new employee on their first day, you want to establish trust with your VA before sharing confidential information. Ask a potential VA for references from other clients where they’ve had to deal with confidential information. Then ask the other client how the VA has handled that responsibility. You can also require your VA to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement and contract as another layer of protection. Most VAs can also get bonded. As with anyone, use your best judgement, go slow and build trust before allowing access to confidential information in your business.

10. A virtual assistant can’t really help with my handcrafted business. This is one of the biggest misconceptions – a virtual assistant can help with ANY type of business, and many VAs can assist with personal tasks as well. In fact, I’ve created ashort report with 108 personal and business tasks you can outsource. It can really open your eyes to the possibilities of working with a VA and how much help you can receive while still retaining the handmade aspect of your business.

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Calendar Management: Getting Control of Your Appointments and Meetings:

One essential element of any time management focus is getting control of your calendar. In my work, I am constantly balancing the multiple pressures of working with others, getting important items completed, handling a never-ending stream of urgent items, and working in solitude. Rather than letting the ‘tyranny of the urgent’ dictate each day, I get more control over each day by explicitly reserving time for important items, allowing flexible time to handle urgent items, and giving thoughtful consideration to how I should allocate my time amongst the many contending demands. This article contains tips that work for me (most of the time) in managing my calendar.

Actively Managing Your Calendar - Clear the Clutter & Focus on the Important

Some of my colleagues don’t need to actively manage their calendar – they find sufficient time in the day to get their own work done and are able to schedule, with relative ease, collaboration work sessions with others. If this describes you, then you can probably save 10 minutes and skip the rest of this article. However, if you find it a struggle to get your own work done, schedule time with others, or respond to the requests from others to meet with you then this article may have tip or two on calendar management that might be useful.

I'm not an advocate of being a slave to the calendar. Rather, I am a proponent of exercising control over my calendar to accomplish my goals and ensure that I am working on those items that are “most important now.” This control is primarily in the decisions I make on those items that I permit onto my calendar and the amount of time I allow for each of those items. In essence, I allocate time to my priorities, which are a composite of “the important” and “the urgent.”

I recognize that more time in my work day will never let me get to everything; prior to adopting an aggressive set of calendar management techniques, I found that even working as much as 70 hours a week still found me on Friday afternoon with an overflowing inbox, many important meetings missed, and my own work tasks incomplete. I've developed and constantly apply various filters to those items that are demanding my time; thus I’m not only deciding those items that will get some portion of my time, but also those items that get reduced amounts of time, or perhaps even none of my time. These are tough decisions to make, but in making those decisions I am able to focus more on the task at hand, and worry less about those other demands on my time that I just cannot (and don’t really need to) accommodate.

Quick Diagnosis – Are You Managing Your Calendar Adequately?

Take a glance at how well you are managing your calendar. Do any of these describe a typical experience people have when working with you?

1. You complain to colleagues that your time is double- and triple-booked or that you are constantly in back-to-back meetings – as a result, you are unable to participate and contribute as expected. 
2. A person needing to meet with you finds that your next available free slot is way off in the distant future.
3. You initiate a meeting invitation without any clear agenda or necessary preparation identified.
4. You accept a meeting invitation, but don’t attend the meeting.
5. You decline a meeting just because your calendar shows that you are occupied at that time. Basically, “first come, first served” (i.e., the first meeting proposed for a given time slot is the one that will be conducted at that time) is your approach to accepting meetings.
6. You respond to an invitation (involving many attendees) with a decline, but with no counter-proposal or other helpful information back to the originator.
7. You don’t respond to a meeting invitation that has come to you; you aren’t able to make a definitive statement (even to yourself) on whether you will attend.
8. You arrive late to a meeting, explaining that your prior meeting over-ran.

If you’ve found even one of these statements to be an accurate description of your situation, then there’s a chance that the use of some calendar management techniques can be helpful. If most these behaviors describe you, then you are probably having an adverse impact on the effectiveness of others, as well is on yourself – for you, improvements in controlling your calendar can be of benefit not only to you and but to your colleagues as well.

Tips for Managing Your Calendar

Much as we’d like to think so, being overbooked and persistently unavailable is not a badge of honor. To the contrary, it is a call for some first-aid on calendar and workload management.

These tips are oriented towards project managers and individuals who manage a group (or multiple groups) of people. You probably find yourself frequently proposing meetings with team members – these are typically collaboration sessions that bring project members together to work through project work items or review progress. As well, you probably have categories of meetings (e.g., quarterly executive status review, annual feedback to group members) that can be planned long in advance.

Deciding What Should be on Your calendar - Only “Most Important Now” Remain on Your Calendar

If you don’t schedule time for your most important items, your risk having these displaced by urgent items.

1. Reserve time on your calendar for your important items – many of these can be planned and scheduled months in advance. Think about the next few months and how you want to be spending your time. Here are some items that I put onto my calendar because they are important to me:

• One-on-one meetings with my direct reports and other key people in my organization. I know with absolute certainty that I need and want to allocate time to this activity. By putting these meetings onto my calendar (generally many months in advance) I make it more likely that these important activities will take place.
• Vacation time. Getting this onto my calendar prevents me from scheduling other activities during this period. I also put an ‘On Vacation’ event onto the calendar of people in the organization who need to know of my planned absence – the event information is for the duration of my planned absence and indicates my delegation of responsibility, emergency contact information and rules for engagement during my absence (sometimes I welcome calls and may be checking email; in other instances I wish to be undisturbed).
• Solitude. This is my think time, away from the hectic activities of each day.
• Training. Nearly everyone I meet tells me they have no time for training. My approach is to reserve training time onto my calendar.

2. Review your calendar at start of each week. A quick scan can help you discover meetings that don’t necessarily require your time, so take action to remove these meetings or shorten their duration. Discover any double bookings, making priority calls on which meetings to attend or rescheduling those that must be moved. Search for any incoming meeting proposals still awaiting a response from you and respond appropriately to meeting organizers.

3. Hold some open time on your calendar that is similar to a college professor’s office hours. Let people know that you will be available for ad hoc, impromptu discussions. This is particularly helpful if you are typically unavailable and difficult to reach.

Scheduling the Meeting – Getting It On Everyone’s Calendar

1. Schedule meetings in advance. Some meetings are easily foreseen, and it can help all attendees to have these meetings scheduled well in advance. Early scheduling helps everyone reserve the time, thus ensuring full attendance. Knowing the need for a meeting but delaying the meeting invitation will surely make it all the harder to get acceptances from all of the invited attendees. 

• Here’s an example situation familiar to project managers: If you are creating a project plan you could take steps (on your very first day of working on the plan) to schedule the various information sharing sessions, planning sessions, commitment sessions, etc. Those meetings might span several weeks, and your meeting invitations would help clarify the actions and time commitments you need from project participants as you go through your planning phase.
• For directors of organizations: If you periodically conduct an all-hands meeting, then you are asking a large population of individuals to reserve a specific date/time time on their calendar. Scheduling these sessions in advance can help. If your personal schedule is sufficiently stable such that you could schedule these meetings across the next several months without any noticeable risk of changing the date/time, then locking those dates/times into the calendars of everyone in the organization can help drive attendance up.

2. Don’t delay in scheduling a meeting. Today’s calendaring systems make it almost trivial to propose a meeting. It makes clear sense (to me, anyway) to act almost immediately once the need for a meeting has been identified and validated – in most instances, this scheduling task consumes under a minute of time.

• If you are in a conference call and someone mentions having a follow-up meeting or other detailed working session, take the sixty seconds while on that call to get the new meeting onto everyone’s calendar. This helps everyone reserve that time for your meeting and increases the chances of getting the required attendance.

3. Check the availability of your required attendees. Within an enterprise, MS-Outlook gives you a method of checking a person’s availability. Make good use of this capability when initiating a meeting proposal for a small meeting (perhaps up to three or four participants).

• Abandon the practice of sending an email that says ‘when can we meet’ – this just creates a valueless transaction that should be replaced by an actual meeting invitation for a time when your other participants show as ‘available.’ 
• If a person is fully booked and thus has no availability for a meeting that is needed, here’s what I do: I proceed with a meeting proposed for a time that is convenient for me, accompanied by an explanation (in the meeting invitation) that I couldn’t find a free slot, I recognize that the person is busy and I’d like their help in identifying and counter-proposing a suitable time to meet – this almost always works and results in a scheduled meeting.

Responding to Meetings Scheduled by Others

1. Respond promptly and helpfully to a proposed meeting. Help the meeting organizer know your willingness and availability to participate in the meeting they have proposed - let your 'Yes' be 'Yes,' and your 'No,' 'No'. No fair giving a “tentative” response that means “I don’t know if I am attending;” such a response makes it all the more difficult for the meeting organizer to effectively assemble all of the participants. (Many teams have a modus operandi in which a ‘tentative’ response means “I’m not attending buy still want this meeting to appear on my calendar.”) If you cannot attend, decline the meeting along with a proposal back to the originator with a helpful approach – this might be an alternative meeting day/time or an alternate participant.

2. When resolving a schedule conflict, give thought to resolving these contending demands. You obviously can’t be in two meetings at once, but don’t automatically conclude that the first meeting to arrive on your calendar is the meeting that you should attend (which you would signal by declining, with little thought, the more recently proposed meeting). Surely the importance of the contending meetings is a consideration, but here’s another: if the first meeting is an easily rescheduled meeting (say, a 1:1 meeting) and the newcomer is a meeting with a group of people who can all attend at that time, then take these factors into account.

3. Ensure an appropriate duration. When a meeting proposal arrives to you, recognize when that proposed meeting duration is not appropriate and take the initiative to suggest a with a more suitable duration. Just about every meeting proposed to me is 30 minutes (or a multiple of 30 minutes) in duration. But there’s nothing magical about our time system that makes these proposed meeting durations correct. Consciously limit meeting duration for those topics that are less important or complex – time box the discussion. Likewise, if a proposed meeting on a complex topic is too short, then you run a risk of not completing the goals of that meeting. 

Executing the Meeting – Starting and Ending as Scheduled

1. Put valuable meeting into the meeting invitation, not in separate email messages. Make it easy for your meeting participants to locate information about and for the meeting. Follow the typically recommended practices for effective meetings: have an agenda, be clear on roles in the meeting, alert people to required preparation, and make reference information readily available.

• Your meeting invitation should be the location for all of this valuable information: put the agenda right into the invitation and include a link to a project repository that holds reference documents needed for the meeting. 
• Abandon the practice of sending the agenda or actual documents in a separate email – separating the meeting invitation from this other information unnecessarily introduces a chore upon the participants of coordinating various information streams; I’ve rarely encountered a meeting in which this coordination was easily accomplished, and instead it just delays the actual start of the meeting as people search for the proper email.

2. 5 minutes left on the meeting clock, but over 45 minutes of discussion remain; another meeting is needed. Recognize when your scheduled meeting duration is just not long enough. When only a few minutes remain in a scheduled meeting and there is still much material yet to cover then it is time to change your approach. Don’t try to cover all the remaining topics, it just frustrates everyone as you rush, inevitably causes the meeting time to over run (probably delaying everyone from their next meeting), still doesn’t allow you to cover all the agenda topics, and probably gives an ambiguous close to the meeting. Instead, immediately switch gears to briefly cover any extremely urgent items and then agree that a follow-on meeting is needed. Determine how urgently that meeting must be conducted and get it on to everyone’s calendar right away.

Reducing Disruptions and Checking Work Completion

Here are two calendaring ‘tricks’ I use to manage expectations:

1. Pre-empting the Urgent Request for Information on an Assigned Task. Suppose your boss asked you to get something (complicated) done. You’ve made some progress, but if your boss asks you today to give an update you won’t really have a good story to tell. Instead of waiting for that request (which might come in as an urgent request for an update, thus disrupting your day), take the initiative to schedule a meeting, for a week or two from now, for the purpose of briefing your boss – then work like crazy to get the task done so you will have a good report to give. Now if your boss asks for an update you can reply “I’ve already scheduled time on your calendar for us to go over that information.” I’ve had only a few instances where my boss said “no, let’s not wait for that meeting; please brief me today.” Of course, if members of my organization adopt this strategy, I’m wise to them and occasionally will insist on a briefing today or tomorrow.

2. Ensuring Satisfactory Completion of a Complex Task. Suppose someone is working for you on a task that is complex or important. You’ve agreed on a completion date/time. Go ahead and schedule a ‘completion review’ or ‘turnover review’ meeting for that very date and time. Having that meeting on the calendar meeting will reinforce the importance of completing as agreed, help eliminate communication errors in the turnover, and just might eliminate any need for additional ‘recovery’ meetings (which would be needed if the work item was not completed as needed).

What’s Next?

Assess your own situation. If you find that management of your calendar is lacking in some areas then assess whether you are willing to try some new techniques. Select a couple of tips from this article or invent a few on your own, and try them out for a few weeks until they become second nature. If they work for you, then share your results (and this article) with your colleagues. Good luck!

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Beginner: How to Create, Manage, and Share Calendars in Outlook 2013:

Unless you’re living a life free of responsibilities, the sun probably rises and settles on your daily calendar. If you don’t know what’s going on a daily basis, you can quickly find yourself lost in a maze of missed appointments and surprise meetings.

Let’s talk about Outlook’s Calendars because outside of e-mail, (perhaps even more so at times), being organized and productive relies on the ability to manage events and get stuff done. One of the things that Outlook does with great aplomb, perhaps better than most other applications, is calendaring. Outlook’s calendar functions are second-to-none when it comes to creating, modifying, and sharing events.

This article will focus primarily on the simple stuff. We’ll show you how to create and manage your calendars, add appointments, meetings, and also share them with others in your address book for easy collaboration. By the time we’re done, we’ll show how beyond using Outlook for the basics like e-mail or contacts and address books, you can incorporate the calendar into your busy life and improve your home or small office.

Calendar Basics

Whenever you use Outlook, you’ll have its calendaring capabilities at your disposal. Even if you don’t have an email account set up, you can still use Outlook for the rest of its features. The calendar works best, however, if you can take advantage of its collaborative capabilities, so using an email account assures you’re able to send meeting invites and receive attendee notifications.

Regardless, here’s your basic, everyday calendar, i.e. the default calendar associated with your default Outlook profile. This is the monthly view, but you can use the functions on the Arrange tab to change the view.

                            

For example, below is the work week view (versus the whole week view). It’s very simple, with the weather (you can set it to your town), and a search box. If you have any meetings or appointments, you’d see them here, and you can skip to the previous or following week by clicking the “Previous Appointment” or “Next Appointment” buttons, respectively, along the calendar edges.

Let’s move on a bit and focus on how to change your calendar’s arrangement to better suit your specific or particular needs.

Flexing Your Calendar’s Muscle

You can do quite a bit to change your calendar’s arrangement and appearance. If you check out the View tab below, you see a whole assortment of styles that you can employ for a calendar that suits your organizational needs.

Check out the following calendar. We’ve made some minor changes to its appearance. For one, you can change the color, which is a subtle but nice touch.

The View tab lets you add several other views to accentuate the mode you’re in. For example, there’s the To-Do Bar, which lets you add calendars, people, and tasks to the right-hand column (see above). This To-Do Bar is customizable to the mode you’re in, so even if you’ve got the tasks and calendar enabled, as in the above screenshot, if you switch to your inbox, you will need to re-enable the To-Do Bar.

It’s a good idea to play around with the View tab in each mode because they’ll not all be exactly the same. For example, the Reading Pane isn’t much use in the calendar view, but it’s definitely a great addition to you inbox.

Similarly, check out a daily calendar view with the Daily Task View enabled. You can see here you daily calendar with your due tasks below.

We’ll talk a great deal more about tasks in an upcoming article, but now let’s focus on everything you might want to know about appointments and meetings.

Adding Appointments and Meetings

Let’s look at setting up appointments and meetings. In the following example, we’re organizing a pizza party. The subject of course, is the nature of the appointment, and while a pizza party isn’t necessarily an “appointment,” you get the idea. You can then add other specifics such as where the pizza party is taking place, and its start and end times.

There’s a lot of space (technically unlimited) to add notes, instructions, or directions to the event. Of course, it’s not much of a party if you don’t have other people there. So we’ll need to invite some attendees. Once you invite people, it’s no longer considered an appointment. Instead, Outlook changes it to a meeting. In the following screenshot, we see our new appointment turned meeting.

You can type in names by hand, or click the “To” button to add attendees from your address book. If you haven’t set up an address book yet, we can tell you how to add and manage contacts as well as import contacts from other sources, like Gmail.

You can cut straight to the chase and simply click “New Meeting” from the Ribbon’s Home tab. When you’re inviting attendees, you have the option of requesting further Response Options.

If you request a response (rather than simply putting the word out and leaving it at that), then invitees will have a chance to RSVP. Note, this works wonderfully with a Microsoft product such as an Outlook.com e-mail account, where you’re given response options directly in the message.

In Gmail, you’ll be able to act on an invite in pretty much the same way. However you respond, it will be sent to the event organizer and automatically added to their Outlook.

Now that we’re clear on appointments and meetings, we’ll move on to modifying and canceling them because change is inevitable, and sometimes our best laid plans fall through.

Modifying or Canceling Meetings and Tracking Responses

Something has come up, and we need to move our pizza party to Saturday night. This is no problem for us but what about our attendees? Well, their plans are entirely up to them, but Outlook at least makes it easy to alert them to changes.

To modify a meeting and alert your attendees, first open the event from your Outlook calendar and make the changes you need. In this case, we’re just moving the meeting back one day. Note, that you can click “Send Update” and your invitees will be updated on the change.

At this point, if any attendees had previously accepted your invitation, they will need to re-accept it.

Now might be a good time to show how to track your meeting’s progress. Click the “Tracking” button and from here you can see your meeting’s progress. Right now, only one invitee has accepted so maybe this Saturday isn’t such a good time.

Uh oh, again something has just come up and we need to cancel the meeting. Simply click the “Cancel Meeting” button. Your invite will now change and you will get a “Send Cancelation” button to click and send out the bad news.

It’s as easy as that, your previous invitees will receive an updated email and the event will be removed from your Outlook calendar.

Events

With your appointments-turned-meetings entered and saved, you’ll see it on your calendar. When you hover over it, you’ll see the pertinent details. At this point, if everything is good, you can leave it and move on to other things.

If, however, you want to change or delete it, you can open it by either double-clicking it or using the appropriate action on the Ribbon, which here is the “Open” button.

You can also access many of the same ribbon controls from the right-click context menu.

With your meeting or appointment open, note the Options tab, which will let you affect some changes such as changing your status (Busy, Tentative, Out of Office, etc.), set a reminder, change the time zone, and finally set the event as a recurring one.

Recurring events are common, such as a weekly meeting or quarterly earnings event, or just lunch with a friend, so it’s good to know how to set them. As you can see from the screenshot, this should be pretty easy to work out. You can set the time of the appointment, the pattern, and of course the range or how long the recurrence will occur.

You see in the following image, we’ve set up a recurring event for every Monday at 1:00pm, which will continue indefinitely.

It’s important to remember that while meetings and appointments do have several key differences, they still look and can be modified the same way, so all the options you see for appointments will be the same for meetings.

Attaching a File or Document to a Calendar item

Let’s imagine you’ve made an appointment, such as to take your pet to the vet, or to get your oil changed, and in either case, you have a document or image you want to attach to it so you don’t forget.

In the following example, we’re getting our oil changed finally, and we’ve got a coupon for it. You could print out the coupon and try to remember it beforehand, or you could simply attach it to the appointment so when Outlook reminds you, the coupon is right there so you can print it while you’re thinking about it.

In order to do this, you want to click the “Attach File” and then browse to the location where it is saved. You can either insert the file as is, paste it inline as text, or insert the location of the file as a hyperlink. In this instance, we’re just going to attach the PDF as is.

Of course, this is going to be a highly useful feature if you need to share documents for a business meeting, send out study materials to students, or whenever the situation might call for supplementary information.

Managing and Sharing Calendars

Managing calendars will let you accomplish two things. You can open calendars from various sources, and you can create and save calendar groups.

If you click the “Open Calendar” button, you can create a calendar from several sources including from the Internet, or you can create a blank calendar. One advantage of creating a blank calendar is that you’re able to keep your work and home life separate.

In the following screenshot, you see several calendars have been created, and we’ve also created a special group for work. You can actually drag events from one calendar to another; you see how we have an entry for a weekly meeting in the two calendar we’ve selected to show.

Being able to drag events across calendars means that if you’ve spent time adding an appointment or meeting, if you later decide it needs to be on a different calendar, you don’t need to recreate the events.

Finally, you can share calendars, which should be pretty self-explanatory, of note though is the ability to e-mail a calendar. We covered this briefly in a previous article, this is simply another way to accomplish it. Here in the following screenshot, you see what happens when you use this option.

You can specify which calendar you share, the date range (from a single day to the whole calendar), level of details to share (simple availability, limited, and full details), and then there’s a few Advanced options you can use.

Sharing in this way means that you can quickly, easily, and seamlessly disseminate your calendar information with other Outlook users, as well as integrate calendars sent to you.

Calendar Options

There’s quite a few calendar options to sort through (though not quite as many as with e-mail). Most of these options are intended to configure the calendar to work more effectively with your professional and personal needs.

For example, you can change your work hours and work week, add holidays, change the time zone, set the default color, and even choose between Fahrenheit and Celsius. Work your way through them at your leisure and try out what works best for you.

The calendar features in Outlook are top-notch and if you work in an organization with a central Exchange server, then you’re likely familiar with how you can collaborate on shared calendars, see events, and more. All of this seamlessly works within your own local Outlook installation for added power and convenience.

At home, it’s nice to have a calendar with so many features in the same program. There’s no need to switch from an e-mail app to your calendar app, you can schedule events and quickly invite participants with just a few clicks of the mouse button, and much more.

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What to Know When You Hire a Virtual Assistant:

Your business is growing, and you are busier now more than ever. You could use an extra set of hands, so someone suggested that you should use a virtual assistant. However, you have no idea what a virtual assistant is or for that matter, how they can help you. If that is the case, small business owner, it is time for you to become virtual and hire a virtual assistant.

What is a Virtual Assistant?

A virtual assistant is a highly skilled professional who offers business support services virtually. This can consist of an individual or a team of virtual assistants with virtually meaning they are located off site and work remotely. They are independent contractors and entrepreneurs who specialize in providing an array of services such as administrative, creative, technical, and legal support.

So if you’re still on the edge and not sure if you should allocate payroll funds for a virtual assistant, let’s go through some of its benefits.

Benefits of a Virtual Assistant

• Valuable Skill Set – Virtual assistants are highly skilled independent contractors, including administrative assistants, website administrators, and senior level executives, all of whom have had a broad range of experience. Most virtual assistants work in a specific niche, meaning they’ll understand your industry better than someone who doesn’t focus on a particular niche.

• Saving on Hiring a Full-Time Employee – A key benefit to using a virtual assistant for your business is the saving aspect. By working with a virtual assistant, you will save on the expense of hiring a full-time employee. This includes the amount of time and money spent on interviewing and training a new employee. This also includes the cost of employee benefits such as health insurance, employee-related benefits, and tax savings. As independent contractors, virtual assistants are responsible for their own bookkeeping and taxes. You will not have to worry about incurring such costs.

• Save on Office Space – Since the contractor is virtual, they work off site. This allows you to save on expenses such as ordering a new desk and purchasing a computer. As a matter of fact, they use their own resources. So you save on the space that a new employee would incur. This is a win particularly if you happen to work remotely or independently yourself. You can work remotely and at the same time have the additional assistance you need.

• Only Pay for Time Spent on Projects – This is a great benefit for your business budget. When you utilize a virtual assistant, you only pay for time spent on projects. So you can budget for the projects that have a high priority for your business. For example, Creative Business Assistants offers discounted monthly packages, which provides savings to their clients. Their clients know consistently what they will be billed for on a monthly basis or what they can allot for based on a project.

Virtual Assistant Tasks And Jobs

Now that you have a clear understanding of a virtual assistant, let’s talk specifically about some tasks that a virtual assistant can provide to your business.

• Administrative Services – Most businesses need a good administrative assistant. A virtual assistant can handle all types of administrative services, which include managing company email, scheduling and confirming appointments, managing business correspondence, entering data, and assisting with bookkeeping. They can also take on additional administrative projects that you don’t wish to handle. Thankfully, you will find that many virtual assistants are Microsoft Excel experts.

• Social Media Assistant – Handling social media for businesses can become time consuming for business owners and other staff. This is time that can be spent on other revenue-generating tasks. However, because of its importance in a business’s marketing plan, it can be delegated to a virtual assistant. According to Chris Ducker, every business should have a social media plan. And this is an area where a virtual assistant can help out. A virtual assistant can plan and schedule your social media marketing on your Facebook business page, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google pages as well as on any other social media site that you use. They can research content, monitor and engage the users, and assist in building your network. This is a great task to outsource to a virtual assistant, as most business spend anywhere from five to 20 plus hours per week on social media.

• Web Site Designer/Administrator – You will find a pool of virtual assistants who specialize in website design and management. You will find a lot of virtual assistants in this arena who are experts in web creation using software such as WordPress and others like it. Specifically, you can easily find virtual assistants who promote WordPress as their niche. If your company needs assistance with its website, which includes a blog, using this type of virtual assistant would be great for your business.

• Marketing Assistant – Similar to the function of a social media assistant, a virtual assistant is a great tool for marketing. This would include assisting with launching any marketing campaigns and tracking their success. A virtual assistant can be used to assist implementing your marketing plan by helping with email campaigns. They can assist you with this by first scraping your email list to ensure that all the addresses are updated and do not include any errors. This can include helping you segment your lists as well source them. Secondly, they can help you implement and track the analytics of the email campaign itself. Another great way to use a virtual assistant in marketing is to have them promote any blogs that you may have. This is a much needed aspect for any business that has a blog. It must be promoted, updated, and managed. So all these tasks are great to delegate to your virtual assistant.

• Customer Service Representative – For a busy entrepreneur, customer service is a great task to outsource to a virtual assistant. You can forward calls to your virtual assistant, and they can become a virtual call center designated specifically for your business. With the enhancement of technology, there are companies such as RingCentral that make this an easy option for small businesses. Additionally, the virtual assistant can handle any follow-up calls as needed.

How to Hire a Virtual Assistant

Now that you have a feel for what a virtual assistant is and the benefits of using one, how do you go about hiring one?

First, there are great resources out there that can assist you with finding a good virtual match for your business. Two good sites that specialize in matching virtual assistants are Elance and oDesk. There are also organizations that provide helpful information and house directories of virtual assistants by skill such as the International Virtual Assistant Association.

Second, once you have a list of candidates, you should start by interviewing them. Decide first what tasks you would like to delegate to them, and decide what skill set you would like them to have.

Third, once the selection is made and you contract with the virtual assistant, you will have to come to an agreement of terms. This should include the fee, billing, and payment terms that you have agreed to pay the virtual assistant, the work that has to be completed, cancellation terms and procedures, and processes for sharing of information. Once you have agreed on the terms, some type of agreement should be drafted and signed by both parties. This is done to protect both the business and the virtual assistant.

Lastly, virtual assistants can be a great resource for all phases of your business ownership. In some cases, businesses contract with virtual assistants for short term projects. In other cases, businesses have chosen to have a virtual assistant on standby or provide ongoing services over the life of the business. Whatever your particular need is, a virtual assistant can be a great benefit to your business.

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