7 Noteworthy Ways a Virtual Assistant Can Help Your Business Grow

Virtual assistants (VAs) are independent employees who work remotely to help a business with a wide range of tasks and operations.

If you want your business to prosper, the “do it all yourself” approach won’t help you in the long run. Sooner than later, you’ll come across a situation where you will have to delegate important tasks. And when you are a business owner in Australia, neglecting the need for virtual assistants can significantly hamper your business’s growth. And in the worst-case scenario, burnout becomes a real threat to your business.

The starting point for entrusting some of your business responsibilities could be as simple as employing a virtual assistant. Moreover, according to the data published by Outsourced Workers, 59 percent of Virtual Assistants have a college education. So there is a cast number of knowledgeable VAs who are well-equipped to handle significant aspects of your organization.

First, let’s begin with answering the question:

What Are Virtual Assistants?

Virtual assistants (VAs) are independent employees who work remotely to help a business with a wide range of tasks and operations. From basic administrative tasks to social media marketing, there are several critical tasks that you can assign to them. As a result, you get more time to focus on the ways that help you extend your business scope (while maintaining your social life and sanity).

Depending on your business requirements, they can work for you full time for just a few hours a week for a fixed hourly or monthly rate. Ever since working has become more accessible for both workers and employers, the demand for skilled VAs is expected to rise.



And this brings us to the following topic:

The Advantages of Hiring a Virtual Assistant

One of the most important advantages of employing a virtual assistant is that they provide a business with far more flexibility. For instance, if your business is already working with remote infrastructure, you can extend your team without worrying about finding a more suitable candidate for your team. Your VAs will be more than happy to continue operating from their workplace, which means you get additional human resources without someone upsetting your business arrangements.

The flexibility you get with VAs also applies to your budget. The other option – hiring an assistant in your organization – often results in a more expensive investment. When hiring in-house employees, you must consider employee benefits like paid time off, health insurance, and retirement contributions. According to some helpful infographics from Outsource Access, a full-time VA can help save you almost 80 percent of your financial resources compared to a full-time employee.

However, the most crucial benefit of hiring a good virtual assistant is that they help you substantially reduce your workload. With their help, business owners save more time and energy to focus on crucial tasks that will help you expand your business instead of trivial routine tasks like basic accounting and file management.

Below you’ll find seven noteworthy ways virtual assistants can help your business grow:

Accounting and Bookkeeping Services

Accounting is a significant reason many businesses seek help from a virtual assistant. They can help an organization in revising transactions to creating and sharing invoices. Consequently, there are numerous accounting-related tasks that you can assign. For this reason, thriving businesses that require Accounting Services in Australia are now opting for virtual assistants. With their assistance, the entire financial management of a company becomes flawless.

Also, with some training and templates, business owners can ensure that everything stays consistent with their brand identity.

Researching Products

Before you make a new investment, you can seek advice from your VA to find and research the most valuable products on the market. In this way, it will be much easier for companies to correlate the available solution so that you enjoy the benefit of purchasing the one that best suits your needs. Also, following this simple rule will help you save some hard-earned money along the way.



Customer Support

Employing a customer support representative is the answer to finding missing leads. A virtual assistant is available 24/7; therefore, they can answer and find solutions for every issue your clients face. Plus, outsourcing this particular task can provide your company with the assurance that trained and experienced professionals are helping your customers deal with their most prominent problems.

Social Media Marketing Services

Promoting your online presence helps business owners to find their targeted audience easily. Not to forget that social media marketing is now considered one of the best marketing strategies to expand. At the moment, more than 4.2 billion users are active on social media worldwide. Therefore, hiring virtual assistants who can promote your business is the rational thing to do if you want to grow your business.

Administrative Assistant Services

Your business needs administrative assistance to keep everything in order, from setting up business appointments to filling crucial documents. Fortunately, administrative assistant support is most common in virtual assistant services. It avails your business by supporting the management while taking care of non-core duties like booking travels, managing emails, and making official reservations.

Data Entry Services

When working with VAs, you can ensure that all your business data and information you are accessing is accurate. There is no reason to hire and train new employees to do clerical work for your company because you can outsource them online.

Document Design and Branding

Regardless of the industry your business functions in, it would help if you found creative ways to expand and grow your business. However, creativity is something that doesn’t come easily. Therefore, it is better to seek assistance from experts to accomplish different creative tasks for your brand. Your virtual assistant can help you design official documents, business cards, logos, website design, and much more. You need to find the best VAs who can quench your thirst for creativity.

To Sum it Up

Owning and managing a business in Australia is not an easy task. Administrators have to keep several things in mind, which is impossible. However, with the assistance of an experienced outsourcing company, business owners can assign their duties to a more capable individual. Moreover, employers benefit from hiring from a remote location which saves your business time and cost. So, if you are looking for ways to expand your business, outsourcing is the way to go.



Qualities to look for in a virtual assistant

A virtual assistant will help bring value to your company and take your business to the next level — one you simply can’t reach on your own or with your current team.

Deciding to hire a virtual assistant can be a stressful endeavor — but not when you know what to look for.

A virtual assistant will help bring value to your company and take your business to the next level — one you simply can’t reach on your own or with your current team.

When seeking out a virtual assistant, make sure to look for one with all of the top qualities needed to do the tasks you require. Blindly hiring a virtual assistant who doesn’t have the skillset to help with your tasks will leave you in a more challenging spot than before you brought them on board.

Here are the top four qualities to look for when hiring a virtual assistant.

Great Communication

Many virtual assistants take over customer service and communication tasks, so if you’re planning to put your virtual assistant in charge of client communication, it’s critical to hire one who understands your service and can communicate with customers.

Effective communication skills should be showcased — both written and verbal.

You’ll most likely be communicating regularly with the VA, so you’ll want to make sure you both have the same communication style and have an open line of communication.

Miscommunication causes inefficiencies and comes with potential revenue and reputation costs for your company.

Can Work Efficiently in High-Pressure Moments

In most industries, it’s inevitable to go through emergencies where “fires” have to be extinguished quickly.

When urgent situations happen and you’re a one-person show, it can leave you feeling stressed and overwhelmed.

When you hire a virtual assistant, your company will become more versatile; you’ll now have the ability to plug your VA in wherever you need them and fill in the gaps.

If it’s busy season and phones are ringing off the hook, or a client is in dire need of a report ASAP, a virtual assistant can help.

VAs also help meet deadlines and catch up on workload overflow.

These qualities make a virtual assistant almost essential to small businesses.

If your company is constantly using internal resources to handle in-house emergencies, leaving employees no time to get to their own work, you’re likely to see a decline in employee morale.



Trustworthy and Honest

Most virtual assistants will gain access to your sensitive files and client information, so they must be trustworthy.

If you get any off-putting vibes interacting with them or find something questionable in their background, hire someone else.

Of course, you should trust any new employee — but this is especially the case with a VA.

A virtual assistant should be able to communicate with you and tell you the truth openly. If they make a mistake, they should be able to talk to you rather than try to hide it or place the blame on someone else.

Virtual assistants must be trusted to complete their work. If a VA claims they will get something done but fall short, it will leave your business in a tough spot. The last thing you want is a virtual assistant who received their first paycheck, only to disappear. This nightmare scenario is rare, especially if you hire out of a reputable staffing agency, but be sure to vet your candidates thoroughly.

Organized

The point of bringing a virtual assistant into your team is to make your business more efficient and organized.

A virtual assistant is supposed to lighten your workload, not make things more complicated.

An organized VA will know how to manage their time and prioritize tasks. They’ll also have an efficient filing and documentation system. An unorganized virtual assistant is not what you want; that could leave you picking up the pieces after mistakes happen rather than getting tasks off your plate.

Leverage a Virtual Assistant for Your Business

When hiring a virtual assistant, it’s important to hire one with qualities that will benefit your business.

Remember that there are many virtual assistants to choose from, and finding the right one to help your business should not be rushed. Take the time to find one that you get along with and trust. They should have excellent organizational, communication, and crisis-management skills.

When you find the right hire, you’ll quickly see that the search was worth it.