Category Archive: Virtual Assistance

1. How Does Hiring A Virtual Assistant Leads to Maximum Productivity

   December 3, 2015 12:09 pm 1 Comment

   

   One of the common reasons why entrepreneurs hire virtual assistant is to get more clients. Rarely or it is an often-neglected reason that businessmen outsource to get more works done faster. Thinking more deeply, increased productivity means more clients, and more clients can lead to more profit.

   Here’s why. When entrepreneurs have more time to focus on what’s important for the success of their business, there’s an even greater chance for their businesses to grow. Hence, hiring a virtual employee does increase your productivity. With this guide, we will help you determine the exact kind of tasks you should delegate to your virtual assistant for maximum productivity.

   But before hiring a virtual assistant to help reach your sales target, remember that your business is made up of two major functions: your core and auxiliary. As well as keeping your business going these two functions – operations or tasks – help you overcome the challenges of running a business to survive.

   Core Functions: These are functions that you ought not neglect plus it is where your involvement as the proprietor is badly needed. Most often, entrepreneurs work round the clock attending to these functions and gives the impression that they seem are accomplishing so many things.

   From among many startups, it is common to find them having the following core functions: marketing, product or service creation, product development, and client follow-up. It’s noticeable no functions can simply be neglected or dismissed outright because of their contribution to the prospect of your business surviving the debacles of running a business.

   Auxiliary Functions: Not only these functions drive business success, they’re also the ones that left unattended to could spell disaster to your startup and growing enterprise. In principle, auxiliary functions are inseparable to your core functions.

   Some experts compare auxiliary functions to the body of a car that any businessman shouldn’t simply dismiss or the whole venture will fail miserably in terms of attractiveness.

   For marketing, traditional marketing tactics no longer sticks that much. There must be new channels that marketers should seize to maximize reach and double your sales. Its auxiliary function could be social media management. Being inactive in either Facebook and Twitters is not an option for the busy entrepreneur.

   In the area of product creation, it involves more than implementing the idea that you originally thought of, sketched or jotted down your journal. Research is vital as well as knowing if the market is ready for your product idea. While the auxiliary functions of product development (e.g., research) is related to product creation, there is a difference as this function requires customer feedback (e.g., emails, forums, Facebook page comments, etc.).

   So it really is important to focus on the core functions of your business while getting the help of a virtual assistant to do the rest for you. Now, let’s proceed to the how-to part of delegating your non-core functions which prevent you from concentrating to the core areas of your business.

   1. Start Work on Your Next Product/Service. As you may already know and have realized, creating products is not child’s play. As much as it’s exciting to bring out a product that solves problems, you should be careful about releasing something that has not been backed by solid research.

   Take into account the market research data obtained by your virtual assistant from social networks and forums. To ensure that you and your virtual assistant are in the same page, create and share a real-time spreadsheet like Google Sheet with your VA and let her update it with information he or she obtained so it becomes easy for you to access data and collaborate.

   2. Create A Product/Service That Will Wow Clients. Competition is tough and surviving the market forces entails that you have a product or service that your clients would find irresistible because of the quality and uniqueness. To avoid running out of clients, strive to bring new ways to improve your service or the quality of your product. One way to do so is by considering the feedback given by clients regarding what you have to offer to your market.

   To make this possible, let your virtual assistant gain access to your spreadsheet via Google Drive. Through this, you can then give your virtual assistant the task of sorting the feedback and recommendations from your clients, in turn helping you hasten the process of pooling suggestions, feedbacks to improve your next product or service.

   3. Write Blogs Using the Inputs By Your Virtual Assistant. You will write faster and write the right content your readers expect from you if you will tap the help of your virtual assistant. Research-based blogs are what readers feel matters or are important to them, especially if your blog responds or offer feasible solutions.

   To maximize the help you can obtain from your virtual assistant, simply give him or her complete access to your blog so while you create the content, your VA can respond to comments.

   By hiring a virtual assistant, you’d surely get a lot more productive when you focus on your business’ core side. Not only it is less stressful if you have outsourced the tasks to a competent and reliable virtual assistant, you also need not worry about getting your sales target doubled in due time. All you have to do is take action and make your outsourcing investment pay off.

2. How to Communicate Effectively With A Virtual Assistant

   12:06 pm Leave a Comment

   

   Just imagine how working well with your virtual assistant would benefit you: getting more things done, return on outsourcing investing, and more. Doing the contrary, like disregarding all the vital approaches to managing your virtual employees well would definitely spell doom.

   Because when you ignore the tell-tale signs of managing your virtual assistant well, there’s definitely some pricey cost to pay: missed targets and costly outsourcing investing. Believe it or not, you’ll feel like you’re cursed. And of all the important approaches outsourcing sages would advise you, here’s something worth making your priority: constant communication.

   Before we start, let’s discuss what it takes when starting a virtual relationship

   Early steps are often challenging but crucial to an effective relationship. The getting-to-know phase is difficult but all the awkwardness and hesitations must be overcome first to two weeks working together. As is often the case, it is the boss who must step up and make the initial move of easing the air of discomfort.

   Since working with your virtual employees is demanding – from ensuring that your communication lines are open all the time to talking constantly with them – we’d like to offer some guidelines on communicating well with your virtual assistant every waking hours of your life.

   1. Encourage Open Communication.

   The assignments you give to your remote employee could be relationship starter. It is through the tasks you give that regular communication and exchange of views can be performed inevitably.

   Start calling her or him over the phone or through Skype or Google Hangout because of its video capabilities. But you can also send text messages either through Viber or Line. Emails and file sharing can also be used to give instructions as well as encourage free exchange of views and opinions on work-related matters.

   Do this until both you and your virtual staff are comfortable working with each other. The more comfortable you feel, the more that you could readily suggest time-saving work systems or raise potential issues at hand.

   2. Set-up A Regular Meeting Schedule.

   Others might find holding a regular meeting unimportant. But considering how an hour or less setting up a regular meeting with your virtual worker every week could help make things done fast, specify deadlines, expectations, articulate your brand story and vision and the likes.

   Use your regular weekly or monthly meeting to draw out your team’s strategies, plans, assessment and evaluation on things. This meeting is also a good way to motivate and boost your employee’s morale. You can also use such meeting to orient staff about your core competencies, products and attack on things vital to your growth and success.

   Above all, meetings help establish trust between and among your virtual workers and to the leadership. The more that trust is built early on, the more that the staff would deliver their best in the performance of their functions. This could be daily, twice or thrice a week or monthl or depending on your case. An end of the week meeting looks ideal though.

   3. Choose the Mode of Communication Wisely.

   What kind of communication channel or line you choose when working with your virtual assistant is critical in forging a relationship. No communications, instructions or messages must come vague or unclear when relayed to your staff. No meanings or words must be lost in translation.

   Formal or informal? Strike a balance where your approach will thread when communicating with your virtual staff. Being too formal may seem awkward at some point and might be perceived as being too stern or unapproachable. Changing the tone to something more accommodating could prove helpful to allow open communication.

   There is no way your virtual staff should feel his ideas or feedback are not being entertained. Make the first effort to make your employee feel comfortable whether in flagging a critical issue or asking a question.

   4. Create Shared Systems.

   Offline and online tools becoming more and more accessible for personal and enterprise users, make the most out of these shared records when dealing with your virtual staff. Initiate such shared systems once your working relationship starts.

   But one thing that’s very important when sharing your vital information to your staff is ensuring trust. Early on both you and your VA must understand what’s at stake when you let your virtual assistant gain access to your Dropbox folder containing your credit card numbers and passwords to just about anything you manage to keep your business running.

   You will also need to share your projects list – both old, ongoing and upcoming – with your virtual assistant. Sharing the list would be a very convenient way for both of you to store updates and feeback, as well as priorities and deadlines.

   5. Reward Skills.

   Whether it’s a specific expression of praise or doling out a gift to a job well done, experts agree that such tokens of appreciation really improve employee productivity and increases loyalty. Laud your virtual assistant for a carefully-worded Facebook fan page status and you’ll see him or her feeling more motivated. In fact, employees often work better when they feel that their work is appreciated.

   Remember that communicating constantly with your remote staff enhances your relationship with your virtual assistant. Follow the guidelines above to improve your relationship with your virtual staff and make more things get done.

3. Smart Tips to Finding Your Virtual Assistant

   11:59 am Leave a Comment

   

   One of the most often asked questions on the subject of virtual assistant staffing is where to find and hire the best employees from the virtual world. As those we’ve talked to since founding Big Outsource back in 2010 admit, this is one aspect they once answered deliberately and carefully.

   Picking out of millions of contractors is not only time-consuming and tedious, it also must be recognized that there is a certain amount of uncertainty when hiring someone you don’t know.

   Will the chosen staff do a good job? Will this virtual staff or team of virtual employees work and cooperate well together (knowing that conflict can easily arise between and among strangers trying to work on projects and tasks together)?

   Here are a few tips that you can follow whether you are searching for a good virtual assistants on the pages of job boards on freelance portals, social media channels and the likes.

   Freelance websites. Finding virtual assistants on freelance websites like Freelancer, oDesk and Fiverr, just to name a few, is harder than identifying which tasks to delegate to an outsourced personnel.

   What confounds the search is the fact that with millions of independent contractors signing up and posting their professional profiles, there are so much on offer. Millions of profiles is overwhelming and it thus makes pre-selecting just your best five candidates can be painfully hard.

   Fine, there are features and tools to help you check the most favorable candidates. Having been in this business for quite a long time, freelance sites have gone a long way to ensuring they give you the best candidates through the tests for languages and computer skillsets these sites give. Check out the scores and competence levels of your candidates but never rely on those tests alone.

   Look over the profile of your prospective candidates, their body of works or portfolios and read over the reviews or testimonials former colleagues or clients wrote. Best of all, you can always ask for references form their former employers.

   Going through this process is especially helpful when you want to hire professional and skilled assistants for complex and complicated tasks. However, if you need someone who’ll do data entry or simple routine tasks, you can simply test him or her and see if they can do the job you assigned them.

   LinkedIn. This popular social media website focused on the professional careerists host groups dedicated for virtual assistants. Pretty sure these groups come with lots of virtual assistants and independent contractors on lookout for job hunters and employers who might be attracted to them. One critical advantage of sites like LinkedIn is that registered members are not anonymous. Unlike with freelancer and job board sites, anonymity trumps transparency immensely.

   On LinkedIn, it is quite hard for an independent contractor to build reputation nor manufacture his own credibility. The praises and recommendations coming from colleagues or former employers the contractor has had the chance of working it are manifestation of years of fruitful work. It may also means they’re legitimate.

   But never just let these stuffs convince you just as yet. Make sure to double check every claim posted on the contractor’s account. Prepare a test to properly evaluate and assess the contractor to better make the right choice,

   Some Warning Before Hiring

   We’re not starting to be too pessimist this time. But truth be told that the Internet is a dwelling place of both legitimate and illegitimate people. On the gray side of it, there are plenty of scammers who are out to deceive people like you. There are also low-level contractors that you can spot here and there just so they can earn money from employers like you.

   Given this reality, great chances that you won’t find the right virtual employee for your company from any of those channels we’ve mentioned above is alarmingly positive.

   O.K. we get it that you’ll soon find some contractors on the web, but it’s no guarantee they’ll be around far too long to satisfy your requirements. How much if you’ve hired a couple of inefficient virtual employees that you’d use to form a team? You can just imagine the headache such might cause you.

   Faster and Easier Route Is Just Around the Corner

   We could be the answer to your quandary. Big Outsource takes a bunch of the mess out of your worries, such as negotiating virtual staffing pricing, pre-screening qualified candidates, testing contractors to determine their skill level, and finding the best employee management platform.

   All you need to worry is figure out what tasks you would like to outsource because we have more than a hundred tasks that you can outsource. Wondering about your outsourcing options? Don’t worry, our virtual assistant staffing services is one of the most flexible and affordable around.

   We’ve been around in this sector for more than three years and sure enough our experience in handling virtual assistants, keeping the motivated and morally-boosted are just a sampling of what we can help deliver to help you achieve your business objectives.

4. Want to Keep Virtual Employees Motivated? Use These 6 Tips

   11:56 am Leave a Comment

   

   One of the bigger challenges opened up by outsourcing is how business leaders would stay caught up with their pool of virtual employees. More than ever now, keeping employees motivated, regardless of their physical and virtual locations, is something that employers should recognize how to do.

   Ensuring that staff culture thrives remains an important facet of work environment 2.0. While it’s difficult providing the personal touch when working with a virtual staff initially as compared when managing full-time teams that work together in an office, but not a second such should disappoint nor stop you from hiring virtual employees.

   Little adjustment is required to make things work between your staff from the virtual world and from your office. As an employer, be open about changing how you deal with virtual employees. Be more understanding and adept at motivating each team member. Don’t refuse giving a “pat on the back” or dispensing good responses as well to manage virtual staff more effectively.

   Here are five ways that you can seize to motivate your virtual staff to work hard, up-to-speed and energized when dealing with workloads.

   Recognize and Respect. Let’s start with this because this is highly important. Being the respectful boss of virtual employees can spell a whole bunch of difference than treating your remote staff or virtual team as if they’re your slaves from outer space.

   Try to be nice all the time with your virtual or remote staff. Communicate calmly, be patient, and make your statements clear all the time. Even if they’re from Manila or Beijing, talk or communicate with your virtual employees as if they were merely in the same room as you.

   The sense of personal attention you give can help the entire team feel more comfortable working with each other.

   Teamwork = Team Effort. Making your pool of virtual employees genuinely feel like they belong to your team would help a lot in making them feel motivated. A team member who feels appreciated or recognized for the cooperation they render could help push the project moving forward through to its completion.

   As a result, you will achieve more when the hidden wall dividing two separate units of your employees – from the virtual world and physical location of your office – are broken. Working as one single unit could help ensure that your projects and goals are being achieved successfully.

   Get in Touch Often. It helps a lot touching base with your employees as often as possible. Getting intimate with them helps ensure that everything that you’re building up is going there to where you want it smoothly.

   Promote team cohesion by holding meetings on a weekly or bi-weekly frequency to keep everyone up-to-speed. As for your virtual employees, hold one-on-one meetings. What good is this for? That’s the perfect question to ask. Well it allows you to ask specific questions about the tasks they’re working on and it also impresses that you’re as invested in they’re project as they are.

   Then see how much you’re making your employees feel more motivated.

   Reward Team and Individual Effort. Recognize great efforts by all participants within your team or your organization. When dispensing appreciation with praise or rewards, include your virtual employees.

   When employees know how their hard work pays off for the organization and you acknowledge, they’ll feel more energized and motivated. Giving gift cards or surprising your virtual worker with package delivery to reward exceptional work may be simple, but it go a long way in improving team morale and work culture.

   Be reasonable. It’s vital that you keep everyone’s workload in perspective. Ask around just how much every employee has on their plate. Doing so would help you understand and decide which tasks to assign to your full-time and virtual employees. You’d also be smarter putting realistic deadlines and setting benchmarks to follow.

   When employees feel they’re immensely understood, given realistic deadline and reasonable workloads, they’ll be more motivated to contribute and do the job assigned them.

   Employee Management Tools. There are systems that you can use to keep track of hours, project deadlines, and more of the likes to keep every member of your team on the same page. More often, it is through smart and smooth management style that keep employees motivated and virtually in synch with the rest of your workflow.

   Managing your full time employees is already difficult and the same can be said of virtual workers. Keeping a productive virtual team can prove to be a big challenge. Follow these six ways to keeping morale up and making your employees more motivated.

5. 7 Tasks to Outsource to a Virtual Assistant

   11:55 am Leave a Comment

   

   When it comes to building your business, your time matters more than anything. So instead of becoming the all-around-boss, it pays to devote your time doing the essential side of your entrepreneurial life and leave the rest to a virtual assistant or VA to do them for you.

   It’s just simple and plain smart to find a competent and trusted virtual assistant, than try being the superhero. Not only you’ll find hiring a virtual assistant unbelievably affordable, they might prove to be a real life-saver for you too! And just to kickstart your foray in outsourcing, see what are these tasks you can outsource to a virtual staff.

   Tasks that can be outsourced to a Virtual Assistant

   Managing emails. If there is one thing that many entrepreneurs consider to be sucking a bunch of their time, it is this. Usually, emails come in unexpectedly and they know the right timing to disturb you: just when you’re too busy working hard on a particular task.

   Time wasters truly they are, emails amount to luxuries that cost entrepreneurs their focused workflow. And getting interrupted by emails is never worth it. So what’s best to do is to get somebody like a remote executive assistant to handle all your emails.

   Checking and responding to emails would be one of the things you can instruct your virtual assistant to perform. You may also tell them that you will attend to important or urgent email only.

   Schedule management. Your virtual assistant can also be your secretary. Honestly, you need someone who’ll answer calls in your behalf. Don’t discount their importance because just consider that procrastrination can still keep you stuck.

   Like a full-time secretary, you can count on your point-of-contact assistant to keep an eye on your schedule. He or she will be there to remind you if there are charity balls you need to go to and people that you need to call.

   Client and partner relationship management. Here is another task that’s still connected to secretarial workflow that your virtual assistant can do for you. You can put your virtual assistant in charge of sending out gift cards, thank you cards or even holiday cards.

   Showing gratitude or appreciation to your clients or partners is something you must pay attention to. But with your very little time, expressing your regards can take up time, some effort and dash of creativity to send a gift card to your clients on holidays and anniversaries.

   Doing this chore requires little information from you and very so easy to do. But if your hands are full, you might consider letting your virtual assistant do these things for you.

   Bookkeeping. Bookkeeping is a more complex and time-consuming chore than say receiving calls for your client. If you hired a virtual staff to do this job for you, you would need to trust them take care of your bills, invoices, payments and the likes.

   The trust factor is really important since you would need to give over passwords and other personal information to a virtual assistant. With that said, this task is probably the hardest to give up to someone else, especially to an assistant who is offshore.

   Social media management. If you or your brand is present on any of the top social media webpages, you know for sure that managing the pages, and answering a few comments or questions can be very time-consuming.

   Outsourcing the task to a virtual assistant can let you leverage the time you save from handling comments and questions, including posting updates about your business. Social media management is after all a perfect task that you can delegate to your virtual assistant.

   Content creation for blogs. If there is any one component that is considered the most time consuming, it is blog writing and posting. Blog creation plays a vital role in your content marketing efforts but it also consumes a lot of time, from researching the given topic to writing and formatting the articles for your website’s blog section.

   With a professional virtual assistant, expect your blog posting quantity to shoot up, say on a weekly basis. An expert knows the trade by heart and requires minimal supervision when you let them begin.

   So just imagine how much more you can do with the four hours you saved from writing a blog and monitoring your website in order to make sure your content is updated.

   Website management and maintenance. Even if you have degree in computer science or a diploma in web design, it isn’t really wroth it doing it all. The task of managing and maintaining your website require more than a few hours to perform.

   Getting a virtual assistant for website maintenance can ease you the burden of always having to check the server or browse if your website is down. Then our outsourced virtual assistant can go over some bugs and spam messages to the inbox of your website email address.

   Of course there are other tasks you can outsource to your virtual assistant but we’ll cut it here for the meantime. The next question is where to find your virtual assistant and how to determine if you’ve found the right one you can trust.

   We’ll go over these issues in our next blog. For the meantime, share your experience about certain tasks that you specifically outsource to a virtual assistant that you find helpful in growing your business.

6. Top 15 Tasks You Can Give to Your Virtual Assistant

   April 24, 2014 10:40 am 3 Comments

   

    

   Outsourcing is simply one of the best cost-saving options you can get these days from a third party remote staff. As well as the quality and cost to account for, there’s the range of virtual assistant tasks that your remote personal assistant can do in your behalf.

   But it’s a very tricky affair which tasks to offload, whether you’re a start up or a growing business.So before I introduce you to the more popular admin assistant works that you can outsource, what follows shortly are some factors to consider once you’re decided at hiring a virtual assistant.

    

   Virtual Assistant vs.Freelancer

    

   While a virtual assistant is technically a freelancer, but not all virtual assistants accept works on a freelance basis. I personally hire both freelancers and virtual assistants, each with tasks different from each other.

   Here’s how they’re different. In our organization, we regard virtual assistants in almost the same way that we regard a regular employee – minus their physical presence of course. Our VA work either on a full-time (40 hours) or as a part-timer (20 hours a week) basis.

   Due to this, we pay virtual assistants according to the amount of time they performed their VA jobs. On the other hand, we give payout to freelancers based on a per project basis and accomplishments.

   Another difference is that a remote staff can perform multiple VA tasks during the time they’re paid to perform the VA tasks that you assign. A freelancer is often task to do a repetitive tasks and is often just a single job.

   Hence, knowing the difference what a freelancer and a virtual assistant can do for you is important when going over your budget plans in view of your outsourcing binge.

    

   Popular Virtual Assistant Tasks (1-5)

    

   

    

   As the number of virtual assistants offering their services are growing, it should be a lot easier these days to find someone who fits your business organization or needs. With contract remote workers, you can use them perform plenty of VA tasks or VA jobs, including making customer service calls to sending sales emails to clients.

   Hence, it’s important to establish trust and confidence with your virtual assistants in the same way you would with a full-time employee of your organization. So if you’re still not sure where to start – but already decided that a VA is right for you – we’ll first introduce you to the general virtual assistant tasks that you can outsource:

    

   General Virtual Assistant – It’s the most common type of VA, with no special skills, but can do almost everything for you. Think of this kind as your virtual admin assistant or virtual office assistant in your organization. By doing a little bit of anything, they help you get the job done, especially the crucial business processes.

    

   Content Writer Virtual Assistant – These are virtual assistants with specialized skills like content writing. As a virtual assistant, this writer can help provide you the content or blog you need all day long. This is especially the kind of personnel you need if you need intensive article writing jobs.

    

   Web Developer Virtual Assistant – A virtual assistant who develops a website is not rare only plenty of options to find. These VA are skilled in building web presence and maintaining websites for you. There are also virtual assistantswho are knowledgeable of any advanced development frameworks, such as WordPress. Just ask and they may also be skilled in mounting system configurations, design and SEO.

    

   Search Engine Optimization Virtual Assistant –There’s definitely no scarcity of virtual assistants whose specialty is search engine marketing or internet marketing. Their expertise involves ensuring that your website is search engine-friendly and optimized to rank in search engines.

    

   Graphic Designer Virtual Assistant – If you need graphic design works for your marketing collaterals, websites or advertising banners, don’t worry, there’s a graphic designer virtual assistant to hire around. Depending on your needs, it is always best to get a virtual assistant to perform the VA tasks than a freelancer if what you need is not a one-time graphic design work.

    

   Other Tasks to Outsource to Your Virtual Assistant (6-10)

    

   Beside the above-mentioned most common virtual office assistant jobs that you can outsource, you’ll find a lot more tasks that you can offload to a remote admin assistant. These are the other common VA jobs around:

    

   Bookkeeping – You can count on virtual assistants who are skilled in bookkeeping to take care of your bills and other payroll matters. With a trusted virtual admin assistant, you can share your bookkeeping systems and follow up on outstanding invoices and unpaid bills. https://www.bigoutsource.com/blog/top-tasks-for-virtual-assistants/You can hand over some control and access to your accounts as well, including password.

    

   Online Research – Some menial tasks such as researching over the web for items you need for your project can now be outsourced through a virtual assistant. You can also request to research for corporate legal frameworks, business contacts and potential employees.

    

   Data Entry – To focus on your more strategic jobs, delegating some data entry works will absolutely come as not only smart but a feasible decision in the long run. Among the most common data entry tasks include migrating contact addresses or updating of your directory to keep it current.

    

   Presentation Creation – When you need someone to summarize data or research findings that you will later need to be converted into a Powerpoint presentation, hiring a virtual assistant might come as a very reliable alternative. Preparing your presentations on your own is time-consuming simply because you need to be familiar with certain formats and quality standards, not to mention the grasp of data research.

    

   Managing Emails – Hiring a virtual assistant who can help you manage and respond to emails can really be a time-saver. With a virtual admin assistant, you are freed the hassle of going over a hundreds or thousands of emails when what you actually need to respond to are less than 20 emails.

    

   Even More Tasks for Virtual Assistants to Delegate (11-15)

    

   

    

   Other things you can ask your virtual admin assistant do are as follows:

    

   Social Media Management – Virtual assistants can handle and take care of all your social media brand pages. Whether it’s composing messages or creating photo quotes of inspiration to your followers in Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, you can bet your VA to perform all these VA jobs with gusto.

    

   Calendaring and Scheduling – With your very busy schedule, you’ll find virtual assistant your reliable assistant to manage your calendar.

    

   Event Planning –Planning an event can really be tough and time-consuming. Leverage your admin assistant’s event planning prowess and see your next party or corporate launch come to fruition.

    

   Managing of Comments – As your website or blog grows, there’s a lot of comments to deal with. A virtual assistant who will be in charge of moderating comment can be vital in ensuring your reputation is properly managed.

    

   Travel and Tours Research – Delegate the task of researching travel bookings, finding hotels and preparing trip itineraries when you are planning on a business trip or for pleasure.

    

   If you’re already outsourcing your organization’s menial jobs, what kind of virtual assistant tasks do you delegate?

    

7. Does Hiring a Virtual Assistant Makes You a Lazy Businessman

   January 14, 2014 2:31 pm 2 Comments

   

    

   Outsourcing lets business owners hire an offshore agency or virtual assistant to perform tasks or projects. Well, yes, this sounds good and a fact that almost everyone already knows. But recently there have been claims that the downside of hiring virtual assistant services is a surge in numbers of businessmen lazying or slacking off.

   The popularity of outsourcing has really taken off with the advent of modern technologies, which then enables real-time communications fast, cheap and accessible. Tools like Skype have become very ubiquitious in the performance of businesses and outsourcing in a globalizing world.

   A couple of decades ago, it’s unimaginable for businesses based in New York or London to manage a team of remote virtual assistants. The realities we have now are only but just a dream and visions found in paperback sci-fi books.

   So before we answer the question we left earlier about the alleged downright impact of outsourcing virtual assistant services, we’ll first look into what virtual assistants do that small businesses can outsource, the benefits of having a virtual assistant, and steps to finding the right virtual assistant and taking advantage of a transaction.

    

   Wanted: Virtual Assistants

    

   The high demand for virtual assistants have increased over the years as entrepreneurs started to realize the powerful impact that outsourcing can deliver on their growth, productivity and efficiency.

   Not only Manila virtual assistants cost only a fraction of the labor expenses they’d normally pay for a local talent, these staff can be very hardworking, dedicated and loyal. In most cases, these virtual assistants working now are former professionals who ditched their day jobs to become freelancers.

    

   What types of tasks are best offloaded to virtual assistants? Here, we’ll name a few and they include:

    

   • Repetitive, Lame Tasks. These are often less savory but there are virtual assistants around who are willing to do this job for you. Small businesses are leveraging this type of stuff from accounts payable, data entry and shipping inventory.
   • Specialized Tasks. Your accounting system may need an IT support to manage and maintain these tasks even on a part-time basis, then these could be the types you can outsource. Other examples include SEO analysis, data science tasks, online and mobile marketers, and more.
   • Executive level. Some executive type or level jobs can be outsourced to a virtual assistant and you might be in for the biggest surprise of your life if you’ll simply have someone provide you with financial analysis or ensure that your financial and bookkeeping works are being handled well.

   The more that you leverage skills and expertise of your outsourced staff, surely you’ll seize much of the benefits of having a virtual assistant. So the option for you, if you are a small business, is to actually outsource everything that drain or consume your time and energy.

    

   Risks and Perils of Outsourcing to Virtual Assistant Services

    

   The real share of outsourcing is helping companies, especially start up entrepreneurs, to minimize the opportunity costs that come with doing mundane and lame tasks. This is likely the consequence of halting off the high-impact jobs that you’re supposed to be doing just because you also perform the non-core side of your business processes.

   Beside the critical role that outsourcing plays in ensuring success to your enterprise, some real risks present themselves when your virtual assistants, who are third party outsider, perform the key aspects of your company’s future success.

   Unless the virtual assistant is the best fit and fully absorbed to your business goals and missions, some virtual staff may have a very different agenda or mission. When the motives are different with yours, expect works being rendered sloppily or messed up.

   So it’s not advisable to just outsource everything simply because you don’t want to do it. Especially if that piece of work you are avoiding to do are inherent to strategies and core competencies of your business. And it is in this case when businessmen can really turn out lazy.

   As a consequence, you might be in for a big business failure. And here’s why finding the right virtual assistant to perform your tasks or jobs is critical to your outsourcing success and business in general.

    

   How to Find the Best and Right Virtual Assistant Partner

   

    

   Here to help you find the right remote staff for your business are our tips, which include:

   • Careful due diligence. Research over the Internet for prospective virtual workers and conduct a background check on their capabilities, clients, success rate and testimonies from former clients. Do this until you come out with your short list
   • Decide the Tasks to Outsource. By taking a hard look at your business and finding out which are your strengths and the values you engender at your firm, you’ll arrive at a better selection of virtual asssitant to outsource. So if you’re main concern is product development, don’t simply outsource the stuff simply because you want to save.
   • Arrange a meeting. The meeting can be done using web conference or through Skype with the video call opened. This is the best way to gauge the extent of experience your shortlisted virtual assistants currently have. Ask questions related to the job or task that you will offload to your virtual staff and choose the ones who’ll satisfy your needs.
   • Negotiate the Cost. Remember not to be easily tempted by a very cheap labor cost that it appears too good to be true in the surface. In any transaction you’ll surely get what you paid for. But also don’t believe the notion that expensive is par excellence. Be watchful of sales presentation that only appear to be exaggerating and over inflating the positives.
   • Look for Virtual Assistant Who Care. If you’ll fall for a virtual assistant that offer a good cost deals but lacks the appreciation or care to your company’s unique culture, you should never compromise or settle for anybody not fit to your strategy or business culture.

   Final Words …

    

   The emergence of virtual assistants should help move your company to even greater heights and not serve as a lame excuse to slouch at your desk simply because you already have someone competent to do the work for you.

   Outsourcing is a strategy that can surely help your small business cut the budget and at the same time lets you focus on the essential aspect of growing your business. Done right, the benefits of hiring a virtual assistant can help multiply your profit potential and satisfy your customers with even better products and services.