How a Virtual Executive Assistant Can Transform Your Small Business

How a Virtual Executive Assistant Can Transform Your Small Business

Do you and your small business need to be rescued from a long list of ever-growing administrative tasks?  Managing your calendar, updating your social media, helping with client relations, invoice creation and invoice chasing, plus travel booking – it all takes SO.  MUCH. TIME!

A Virtual Assistant can come to your rescue.  Virtual Assistants are not superheroes…but they are darn close to it!

There are so many advantages to virtual assistant services for small businesses, all of which add up to less stress for you and more time to attend to growing your business. Just picture this:

1. A Virtual Assistant can be there when you aren’t.

If you were to hire help to work with you onsite, your new assistant would likely be from the same city and definitely the same time zone. 

Why not extend your ‘open hours’ and your ‘office locations’ by hiring a Virtual Assistant from another part of the country…another time zone?  By having a live body attend to your business before you start your day or after you call it quitting time, your business can be attended to for a longer time by a REAL person.  So great for customer relations!  And happy customers translate to business stability and growth for your small business.

2. A Virtual Assistant can fill in the gaps.

You are a fantastically talented professional (c’mon…brag a bit!), but you don’t know how to do it all, nor do you want to. 

By hiring a Virtual Assistant for small business owners, you can complement your skills by hiring an Assistant who has the skills to round out your business and help you take it to the next level. From recommending improvements to streamline your business processes, to creating forms and templates, to basic bookkeeping…a Virtual Executive Assistant can offer a set of complementary skills – or shall we say the crackers to your cheese?

3. A Virtual Assistant can be the second brain in your brainstorming.

As the old adage says, “Two heads are better than one.”  There is wisdom in that statement!  As a small business owner, you are used to working on your own. 

But wouldn’t it be nice to have someone to hash things over with every once in a while?  Virtual Assistants for small business owners have experience in being a sounding board and can offer the wisdom of their experiences or a fresh perspective on your ideas and business plans.

4. A Virtual Assistant is cost-efficient.

Maybe you have thought about hiring an Assistant but can’t justify the cost of adding another position to your company’s payroll.

Source deductions, benefits, and vacation pay are all costs you just can’t justify at this stage in the business life cycle.  Enter Virtual Assistant services for small businesses.  The savings are two-fold.  First, by hiring Virtual Assistant services for small businesses, you pay an hourly rate and are not obliged to pay a cent more. At VEA we cover the rest by contracting our Virtual Executive Assistants to you.

And second, you pay for only the time you need, varying from month to month as your business needs ebb and flow.  This gives you the flexibility to have help when you need it, without worrying about costly downtime or wage-related expenses.

Flowers

Conclusion

So…do you think it’s time for you to virtually go ‘plus one’ up?  By hiring virtual assistant services for small businesses, you will expand your open-for-business hours and get help to tackle your daily administrative needs. 

You will add an on-call administrative professional with skills that complement your own, and who can lend an ear to bounce off new business ideas and strategies. All of this, without formally committing another person to your payroll.  It’s the best of both worlds. 

Consider hiring a Virtual Assistant for your small businesses. After taking the time to train your Virtual Assistant you can start to take moments to sit back and enjoy life without worrying about emails, phone calls and scheduling.

 

Derek Burbidge
Manager of Sales and Marketing

The Work/Life Balance Conundrum (Part 2/5)

The Work/Life Balance Conundrum (Part 2/5)

The biggest issue with the self-help industry is the moulds that are created and the box that you are seemingly being forced into. I almost want to say “unfortunately” here but rather I will choose the word “thankfully” because thankfully there is no such thing as “one size fits all” when it comes to a solution.

If you have read our blogs you will see that we prefer to give advice coming from what worked for us. We leave it open for you to try it so you can take what works, and throw away the rest. Through trial and error, you can come up with a custom solution that works for you.

For example, when it comes to sleep habits:

  • You can read 2 blogs, one tells you to get 4 hours because that is what the most successful people do
  • The other says 7-8 hours where you go to sleep and wake up at the same time every day.
  • You try 4 hours, it doesn’t work so you go for 7 hours strategy from 10pm-5am and you feel refreshed.

We should never feel guilty if something worked for someone else but does not work for us, it just means we need to adjust and try something else. Work/life balance is not impossible, but each season may look different. When we think balance, we think 50% one way, 50% the other. As the Father of a newborn and a toddler, I can tell you that my life right now is not 50/50. It is more of a 70/30, family over work right now.

As we create routines and our newborn starts to settle in, that will come closer to 50/50. It may even have to sway to more work to make up for that time, maybe a 60/40.

We have a pie chart exercise in part 4 of this series that you can see what your life looks like right now and where you want it to be. DO NOT be married to those percentages for the rest of your life, be flexible and re-visit it in different seasons of life.

As always, if there is anything we can do to help you out, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Check out Part 3: “Life Is Like Riding a Bicycle.
See our intro to the series “Work/Life Balance – Introduction.

– Derek Burbidge
Manager of Sales & Marketing for VEA