How an EA Transforms Businesses

How an EA Transforms Businesses

by | Nov 22, 2023 | Business Growth, Executive Assistant

If you’re a business owner, hiring an Executive Assistant can be a game changing addition to your work life. You might not have an Executive Assistant yet, but there will likely come a time when you should consider investing in one.

Are you able to perform many daily tasks efficiently and on your own? Of course you can. After all, you’ve probably been doing them all since the early days. But your company is bigger now, or you’re trying to grow it, so it could be time to consider the opportunity costs of going it alone.

A skilled Executive Assistant can be the backbone of your more efficient operations. Their primary purpose is to perform a range of administrative tasks, like managing schedules, making travel arrangements, and organizing your inbox–so you can focus on strategic decision making and other higher-value responsibilities. More specifically, a virtual Executive Assistant can swiftly adapt to your changing needs, because they are skilled at using digital tools to handle tasks, manage schedules, and provide crucial assistance without needing to be in a physical office.

Butterfly in Flowers

Curious about what jobs you should hand off first? Here are some guidelines about what we recommend you outsource first to a virtual Executive Assistant.

Case Stories

Rather than talk about the benefits of hiring a virtual Executive Assistant, the following case stories exemplify how two of our clients at VEA have incorporated these skilled practitioners into their businesses in the real world.

 

Case Story: Improving the Intake Process

One client regularly sends multiple intake forms to its customers. For years, these forms were attached to emails and sent to individual users. Not only did customers often forget to attach and send back completed forms, but gathering was a manual process, leaving the door open for human error.

Using a combo of Microsoft Office Suite, Power Automate, SharePoint, and Power apps, our VEA Executive Assistant created online forms that could be updated in real-time and sent out as a simple link. Fewer attachments translated into fewer mistakes and a welcomed uptick in customer compliance.

Versioning issues are a thing of the past. Information is digitized, eliminating all that copying and pasting that was eating up employees’ time. An error-prone system was cleaned up, and since all data is stored in one place, our client can run reports and learn more about customer behaviour. With just a few small changes, so much was gained.

 

 

Case Story: A Better Billing System

Our professional services client needed to streamline its time tracking system and invoice clients more efficiently. Under its legacy system, they were still creating all invoices manually. It took two whole days to compile information and send invoices!

Working in partnership with a VEA Online Business Manager, the virtual Executive Assistant successfully implemented new digital tools to improve processes and meet newly formed goals.

Using a mixture of Clockify, Excel, and business analysis, this virtual Executive Assistant was pivotal in reducing the billing process from two days to just two hours, saving the client 14 hours per month in labor. Freeing up time by creating better processes enabled the business owner to grow without a lot of added administrative muscle to make it happen.

 

Business Gets Personal

Do you ever feel like your personal life seeps into your workday? It happens to the best of us. At VEA, our virtual Executive Assistants not only handle administrative jobs, but they are also happy to take on personal assistant duties, like arranging social plans, ordering household basics, and even sending flowers and gifts, all in the pursuit of giving you more ways to stay in the game rather than getting yanked to the sidelines throughout the day.

 

An Executive Assistant can even drop work blocks into your schedule, giving you permission to simply focus rather than be pulled into last-minute meetings that sabotage your flow. They can also help you strive for “inbox zero”, a productivity strategy and philosophy that seeks to declutter your mind by decluttering your inbox through methodically deleting, sorting, and clearing incoming emails.

Is it Time for an Executive Assistant?

The right virtual Executive Assistant can truly transform how you structure your week and make it more productive. VEA prides itself on hand matching business owners to their Executive Assistants to ensure a good fit from the onset.

Give VEA a call to talk about your virtual Executive Assistant options. Our team can explain what to expect and then walk you through our tried-and-true onboarding process that ensures you and your virtual Executive Assistant work together as an indispensable team.

Book a Call or email me directly at  [email protected]. I am always happy to help.

 

Derek Burbidge
Manager of Sales & Marketing

Utilizing Your Virtual Executive Assistant as an Online Personal Assistant

Utilizing Your Virtual Executive Assistant as an Online Personal Assistant

by | Nov 15, 2023 | Executive Assistant, Task Management

If you are looking to find an online Personal Assistant and getting frustrated by the lack of options, you will be happy to know that our virtual Executive Assistants can take on the role of an online Personal Assistant as well.

On top of corporate responsibilities like email and calendar management, travel booking, data entry, research, meeting assistants and the many other tasks they take on, they can also take on personal to-do lists.

It is one thing a lot of our clients ignore delegating for months into their relationship with VEA’s virtual Executive Assistants (EA). Our clients mainly focus on their business-related tasks and don’t utilize their virtual EA as an online Personal Assistant. Once they have the epiphany that their personal tasks are taking too much time and are not necessary for them to complete the tasks start falling off their plate and on to their EA’s.

Their EA is obviously still virtual, but they can handle many of the various tasks on your personal to-do list. An online personal assistant can’t go to the grocery store for you, but they can order groceries or meals and have them delivered to your door.

Typing on a computer

 

Here are a few common tasks our virtual EA’s do for their clients that fall under the umbrella of an online Personal Assistant:

 

• Reservations

• Any appointment booking for things like the doctor, dentist, massages, or chiropractors.

• Scheduling house cleaners, maintenance people.

• Buying gifts for birthdays, anniversaries, Christmas, etc.

• Family vacation booking including flights, hotels, excursions, and rental cars.

Keep in mind they are not travel agents but if you give them your choices, they can book directly for you or give them the area you want to go so they can research the top places and run it by you in your 1:1 meeting before going ahead and booking.

• Time blocking

This is usually the focus of productivity in your workday but if you need an hour to hit the gym, want to pick up your kids from school or can’t find time for that hobby, let your EA know. They will make sure there are blocks in your calendar for activities that recharge and are important to you.

 

 

Your virtual Executive Assistant can perform many other various tasks to ease your workload. The easiest way to utilize them as a Personal Assistant is to look at your to-do list. You can easily decide what is something an Online Assistant can do and delegate it to them.

 

Tasks of a Virtual Executive Assistant for Business Owners

In many other blog posts, we discuss at a high level what a virtual EA can do for you, but let’s be a bit more specific with examples.

 

Tasks your virtual Executive Assistant can perform:

 

Meeting Assistant – Imagine going from one meeting to the next without having to book them yourself. While at the meeting you will have the notes in front of you so you don’t skip a beat and the minutes taken to review afterwards if needed. Having a meeting assistant will make your meetings more productive and make more space in the rest of your day.

Travel Booking Assistant – Before you travel your virtual Executive Assistant will act as your travel assistant booking flights, hotels, and rental cars. Using your rewards points and preferences for seat location on a plane, type of car to rent and any musts for your hotel. Once we have the information on file, your dedicated EA will never have to ask your preferences again. You give them your travel dates and they will get to booking. Taking yet another time-consuming, tedious task off your plate.

Calendar Manager – Most business owners are sick of booking meetings, being stood up and accidentally double-booking meetings or appointments. With your virtual Executive Assistant taking over your calendar management, all you must do is wake up in the morning and review your day. Pairing your virtual EA’s calendar management abilities with their meeting assistant role, you can move through your day at a steady, flow-like pace, not wasting precious hours on small, administrative tasks.

Email Manager – Email management is the number one task that all our clients hand off to their virtual Executive Assistant. Instead of adding a new email management software to your ever-growing list of new software, having an EA take it over is a much more productive choice. Your EA will delete spam or unwanted emails, respond to emails as needed on your behalf and keep only what is urgent or needs your attention. Instead of waking up to 100 new emails, you will start your day with only what matters.

 

Conclusion

Many Business Owners, C-suite level Executives and Entrepreneurs look for a Corporate Assistant who can do email management, calendar management, book and manage meetings, and become a travel booking assistant. As the role evolves, they get stuck on the executive-level tasks an in office Administrative Assistant would normally do in person. However, they don’t expand the role to their personal lives. If you are missing date nights, buying gifts last minute or living off a fast-food/convenience diet, talk to your virtual EA to learn how they can support you more in these areas.

 

Derek Burbidge
Manager of Sales & Marketing

How a Virtual Executive Assistant Can Transform Your Small Business

How a Virtual Executive Assistant Can Transform Your Small Business

by | Jul 19, 2023 | Business Growth, Executive Assistant

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

Why Your Business Needs a Virtual Executive Assistant

Why Your Business Needs a Virtual Executive Assistant

by | Jul 18, 2023 | Business Growth, Executive Assistant

Before we even get into this, you might be asking yourself, what exactly is a Virtual Executive Assistant? The answer is simple! They are highly valuable and experienced team members that can access the necessary tools and data that a traditional in-office Executive Assistant does. Only remotely.

Before you argue that you need someone in-house to be able to truly get the job done, let me give you some insight into why your business needs a Virtual Executive Assistant.

A cup and a laptop on a table.

1. Your day is filled with monotonous tasks leaving you no room to focus on growth.

Your time is valuable. You are the head of your company. The visionary. The creator. Therefore, you need time to be in your Zone of Genius. To be able to grow your business to new heights. To be able to focus on the bigger picture, not the day-to-day tasks.

Common administrative tasks such as, booking meetings, answering emails, or even making travel arrangements, can be time-consuming, daunting, and ruin your creative flow. You don’t need to use up your energy with these tasks, a Virtual Executive Assistant can handle all of these with ease.

2. You know you need help but not enough for a full-time assistant.

Your business is growing but you don’t have a big enough workload to fill 8 hours of the day that a full-time assistant would require. You don’t want to pay someone to stare at a computer screen for 6 of the 8 hours in a typical workday and hiring a part-time employee is no easy task. It’s hard enough trying to find a full-time good fit these days. That pool gets even smaller when you are looking for a part-time person.

Most Virtual Executive Assistants work with multiple clients, so you get the expertise of a full-time employee that has worked with various executives for a variety of different organizations. But you only pay them for the time you need them.

3. You don’t have time to hire and train an employee.

Listing the job posting, sorting through thousands of unqualified resumes trying to find the diamond in the rough, interviewing multiple people only to have to do a second round and possibly lose your top candidate to another company because you didn’t have the time to offer them a position before they got scooped up by someone else. Sounds like a long, inefficient, and arduous process, doesn’t it?

VEA has a large team of Virtual Executive Assistants which means you don’t have to sort through a pile of resumes and take the time for monotonous interviews. We do it all for you. After our initial call we hand-match you to the best fit or let you interview between the top two we think will be a great fit for you and your business. No AI or “next up”, everything is done by our experienced Onboarding Concierge to make sure the fit is right for you.

VEA’s home base is in Calgary, Alberta, Canada but has contractors all over Canada to choose from. Virtual Executive Assistants in Calgary, Toronto, Vancouver or surrounding areas from coast to coast.

Each of our Virtual Executive Assistants has years of experience already and if there is something they need help with? Well, they also come with a whole support system ready to help. VEA can provide training on certain software, assist with problem-solving, and even provide a backup EA if needed.

4. You’re a creator, not an organizer.

Let’s face it, we are all built differently. It has been proven that many of us only operate on either the right side or the left side of our brains most of the time. This means if you are a creator, a designer, or an entrepreneur, you more than likely are not the most organized individual. If you happen to be an individual that is both, congratulations! You are an anomaly! But still, your time could be better spent than doing administrative tasks.

However, if you are more like other right-brain entrepreneurs, you may need some assistance with your organization and administrative tasks. Executive Assistants thrive on organization and structure. They are wired to take on the tasks that you may normally find a constant struggle. They love to help and make your life easier.

Conclusion

Bottom line: Virtual Executive Assistants can offer even more than most traditional EAs because having a whole team of support and resources constantly backing them up makes them an endless bucket of knowledge. Some that maybe even have a few organization tricks you never even thought to help streamline your processes helping eliminate time-wasting clerical errors.

Virtual EAs cost you nothing in equipment or office supplies. No need to pay for an office space for them and no need to provide traditional employee benefits because they come with their own. They are independent contractors that have already taken care of everything they need.

A clock with averlay text "Looking for more time to do what you love? Hire a Virtual EA."

So, is the question really, why your business needs a Virtual Executive Assistant or is it, how can you afford NOT to get a Virtual Executive Assistant?

If you are ready to join thousands of business owners that have already realized that Virtual Executive Assistants are a smart investment in your company’s future, give VEA a call today!

Derek Burbidge
Manager of Sales and Marketing

Finding a Virtual Bookkeeper in Canada: About VEA

Finding a Virtual Bookkeeper in Canada: About VEA

by | Sep 25, 2019 | Productivity, Task Management

Watching your dollars and cents doesn’t have to cost you a lot of dollars and cents!

Many small to mid-size companies are discovering that they don’t require the services of a full-time Bookkeeper. In-house Bookkeeping can be costly and there are often wasted hours if you do not have enough work to keep your Bookkeeper busy 40 hours per week. This is where a virtual Bookkeeper comes in!

Hire an Experienced Virtual Bookkeeper

What does a Virtual Bookkeeper do?

VEA is a virtual Executive Assistant and Bookkeeping company with 100% Canadian staff. We offer full-cycle Bookkeeping services including:

 

    • Accounts payable (entering invoices and recording expenses)
    • Accounts receivable (invoicing your clients and receiving payments)
    • Bank reconciliation
    • Credit card reconciliation
    • Payroll and payroll liabilities
    • Intercompany transfers
    • Budgeting and budget reporting
    • Monthly accounting processes
    • Monthly reporting

We have reliable, experienced and dedicated virtual Bookkeepers available. Our specialty is long term partnerships that come at a fraction of the cost of traditional, in-house employees. There are no minimums and no guarantees with VEA. You pay only for the time that your virtual Bookkeeper is actually working on your tasks. Set-up is quick and easy and you will be amazed at how quickly your virtual Bookkeeper becomes a vital part of your team.

Contact us to learn more!

 

Lanna Thompson
President, VEA
1.833.VEA.PROS (832.7767)