What does a VA do?
Any entrepreneur or start-up knows that time is money, especially when both are running low. In a world where a million things happen every day, certain mundane tasks often get pushed to the side. That can lead to decreased productivity and failed strides when the rubber meets the road.
This is where a virtual assistant comes in.
Like the name implies, a virtual assistant (VA) is a contact made over the internet that assists in day-to-day tasks. Yes, like an assistant, only virtual!
Furthermore, these assistants don’t just help your business run smoothly, they help your life run smoothly. Whether it’s sending a thank you card to a friend or researching potential investors, a virtual assistant can do just about anything. They take charge of not only the day-to-day business tasks, but can even take hold of day-to-day personal tasks so you can keep focused on what’s at hand. They can send flowers, arrange appointments, or even just schedule an Uber so you can go from one venture to the next without a single hiccup.
However, it is just about anything.
There are certain limitations to what they are allowed to do legally, and what the internet allows them to do. Certain tasks are perfect, but others can be deemed rude or could be legally wrong to ask. Much like a physical assistant, there are certain limitations to tasks that can be performed and often a virtual assistant cannot take the place of an employee. They can, however, take some tasks that other employees would be doing in order to spread the work load and make sure those employees are focused on growing the business instead of focusing on upkeep.
With all of that, it’s hard to pin down what exactly a virtual assistant does because they often do so much, barring only a handful of limitations. While these limits are in place, there is certainly a grey area that most virtual assistants can meddle in, often performing certain tasks instead of full-out jobs.
So let’s start at the top to figure out what a virtual assistant does, how that can impact your business, and where you can find one.
What you need to know
Now, before money is laid on the table, it’s important to know exactly what your virtual assistant is going to do.
A virtual assistant covers the gamut in terms of different tasks they can accomplish from travel to personal life to scheduling to social media. However, there are a few key areas that they focus on in particular.
Research
One of the largest areas that is a huge time-saver is getting research done. Virtual assistants can do the ground work of researching for your business, brand, or start-up, to save countless hours of time and energy. Whether it’s identifying potential investors, finding events or office space, or gathering market data, a virtual assistant can do it. This is huge because not only do most business experts have the time to do research, but they often can’t focus on the ever changing environment that research must adapt to while still running a business.
Furthermore, they can do a lot with this information. Virtual assistants can research and plot competition, goals, market share, etc. and compile the information in a presentation that you can share in with potential investors (that they probably helped find), clients, or your own team.
Manage Finances
A lot of people go in with the notion that virtual assistants can help with taxes. While they can help manage it, virtual assistants cannot do actual accounting. However, they can maintain budgets, make purchases, and keep track of expenses so tax session is a breeze when it rolls around. You’ll make a very happy accountant having all of the information stored and organised.
Social Media
What they can operate (and operate well) is social media. For any modern business, start-up, or brand, social media is one of the most vital aspects for growth and a virtual assistant can not only manage your accounts, but help grow them. In addition to scheduling posts and keeping up with daily content, virtual assistants can gather statistics, create reports, and monitor interactions to help grow social media presence.
The reason this is so important is due to how content is consumed now with social media and how you can get the attention on you. Often, business leaders can become detached from what is going on in the world because of all the things they must manage in order to not only keep their business on track, but grow it. Having a virtual assistant report back with statistics and current trends, can help you in taking the right direction and making the right decisions. This helps grow your social media, opens up doors for clients and makes you more aware of what is going on in the world so you can stay on top of it.
Content Creation
In addition, virtual assistants can deal with writing content for a website, blog, and more. They can ghostwrite and edit to maintain a constant stream of content on a particular website. Content creation can be one of the biggest tools for growing the presence of a business overall. Having a constant stream on content can lead to people finding an article in a search engine, clicking on the page for valuable information, and converting.
Manage Emails
Riding on the back of web-based tasks, virtual assistants can help manage inboxes of emails in a company. As a business owner, I cannot tell you how useful this is, with about a billion different email addresses and no one to keep track of them. Virtual assistants can answer contact e-mails, job inquiries, general questions, and even more through email. It should be noted that they generally cannot do full time customer service, though. They can, however, answer e-mails, create filters, organise e-mails, and respond to a limited number of customer service inquiries.
Organisational Tasks
Much like a regular assistant, virtual assistants can also handle all scheduling tasks. Whether they are scheduling meetings amongst a team, organising a calendar, or making daily itineraries, a virtual assistant can focus on the nitty-gritty so you can get back to work. Waking up every day to a full schedule that you didn’t have to create is one of the most liberating things in the world, and makes sure that you are utilising every moment of the day to accomplish as much as possible.
Most business leaders need to travel, and they need to travel a lot. Booking flights, reserving cars, arranging pickup, and booking hotels can take huge chunks of time to get done, especially if you’re traveling all of the time. A virtual assistant can cover all of these tasks for you. That way you can roll up to the airport with a suitcase and rest assured that everything has been taken care of.
Outside of work, virtual assistants can still be on the clock. They can maintain daily tasks of your personal life like scheduling appointments with your doctor, sending gifts on your behalf, and answering phone calls. This can be great to send a last minute thank you card, or make sure your personal schedule is up to date since so often personal and work life overlap as a business leader.
What can a Virtual Assistant NOT help me with?
Most virtual assistants do not do full time call answering or operate a call centre environment. Whilst many can make simple changes to your website they don’t do web development. They can usually arrange couriers or help you find a fulfilment service but they do not store or send goods. They can’t act as a consultant to advise on critical company decisions. A VA can’t rebrand your company or sketch graphics. or help with cold calling or spam email campaigns.
What can a Virtual Assistant do for My Business?
Everything that a virtual assistant can accomplish is impressive. It’s really nice to look back and see the massive workload that can be lifted off of your shoulders by hiring a VA, not just in your business, but in your personal life as well. However, in a world of return of investment, the question becomes; what can a virtual assistant do for my business?
Thankfully, the answer is that a virtual assistant can do a lot. They can relieve huge workloads of monotonous tasks like social media, e-mail marketing, answering phone calls and more. This doesn’t mean that you suddenly have less work to do, it just means you can spend more time on focusing on things like innovative strategies and pushing the business forward and let them handle the day-to-day tasks.
Ultimately what this works out to be is more productivity in your business. Even while having a social media manager, accounting team, etc. a virtual assistant can offload some day-to-day tasks to get the teams thinking more creatively and thus driving business forward. The responsibilty of scheduling social posts, answering emails, and tasks that must be completed in order to keep a business operating can be handled by the virtual assistant. Your teams can then start putting their heads together on how they’re going to expand whatever department they’re in, to ensure that it is running at peak efficiency.
The major upside to all of this is that virtual assistants are long-term contracted work. This means a lot of costs being saved as opposed to hiring an actual assistant. Hiring virtual assistants can initially be a little more expensive than hiring a physical assistant, but it can mean a lot of money being saved further down the line, which is an important aspect to think about. Often, virtual assistants only work for 10-50 hours over the course of an entire month. The great thing is, that you get to choose. Whilst it may seem like you’re paying a little more per hour than employing a permanent member of staff to get tasks done, you’re actually paying for logged highly productive hours of work. Often physical assistants are clocking the same hour as those they’re assisting and not always completing tasks in that time. A virtual assistant gets rid of that hurdle.
Being contracted work, it's very easy changing from one virtual assistant to another. If, for some reason, a virtual assistant is not working out, then you can easily move on to a new one after the contract is up. The agreement is already put out there so there is never that awkward firing hurdle to overcome if something isn’t working. A virtual assistant can also be hired for specific tasks that are not long term. This means you can hire them just to research potential investors, or just to gather data on social media presence and reach and report back to you. That kind of flexibility is paramount for an effective business.
Furthermore, it opens up options and helps you find the assistants that best fit your needs. Since an assistant is often considered a 'personal role' within a company, having one virtually, allows you to find the one that best suits the needs of your business. This again helps increase productivity and output, as you can maintain focus, instead of worrying about the problems or tensions between leaders and employees. This means that you can hire a virtual assistant for very specific tasks to test the waters with them before putting a long term contract in place. That kind of freedom is something seldom experienced in a traditional hiring process.
Wrapping it up
Overall, a virtual assistant can be an invaluable tool to a business, startup, or brand. Virtual assistants can handle mundane tasks like scheduling, researching, social media, and more to make sure your business is more productive. Furthermore, they can help teams that already handle these tasks to start thinking more creatively, thus driving the business forward. Keeping your teams focused and enthusiastic about the future can help develop a business beyond what is happening in the day to day.
The idea of offloading tasks like this can not only make you more productive, but can free up head space so that you and your teams can think more clearly and drive the business forward. In all reality, a virtual assistant can help run the business and give you vital insights so you can steer it in the right direction.
If you’re caught up in the day to day and not focused on the future, then you run the risk of your business falling off of a cliff or running into a brick wall. A virtual assistant alleviates that problem and allows you to steer whatever you’re running in the right direction and avoid potential train wrecks. Whether your VA is scheduling meetings, sending emails, running social media, or even sending flowers, virtual assistants can be the extra grease that allows a business, start up, or brand to run smoothly.
Author: Greg Digneo
Greg Digneo writes for TimeDoctor.com, a time monitoring and productivity monitoring software designed for tracking hours and productivity of remote teams.
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