Tired of having too much on your table? Outsource some of your tasks to a virtual assistant. This article explores all the tasks that a virtual assistant can help busy business owners with!
Business owners often find themselves with long to-do lists and very little time to handle everything themselves. Besides running a company, meeting with clients, and managing finances, there are a number of other smaller but crucial tasks that need to be taken care of in order for a business to function smoothly. But, when there is so little time to handle everything, how can an entrepreneur manage all these tasks? Well, if they care about their overall health and wellbeing, they shouldn’t.
This is where virtual assistants can help.
If you’re a busy entrepreneur yourself, you likely understand how tiring it is to handle everything on your own. But, we have some excellent news: hiring a virtual personal assistant can take plenty of these tasks out of your plate, giving you more time to focus on more essential things about your business.
Keep reading below to learn more about what a virtual assistant is and what tasks they can help you with!
Virtual Assistants Explained
The name is pretty self-explanatory: virtual assistants are basically personal assistants that you hire virtually, or better said, remotely. They are independent contractors that provide all sorts of administrative services to their clients, all 100% remotely, outside of the client’s office.
Now, what’s different about VAs is that they are more tech-savvy professionals than traditional personal assistants. They don’t just perform administrative tasks like handling your agenda and responding to emails. They also handle more complex and techy tasks like social media maintenance, business planning, marketing, web design, and many others.
A VA can be a part-time or a full-time employee, depending on your business’s needs and how many tasks you want them to help you with. The point is that there are plenty of benefits of hiring a virtual assistant, including:
- Reduced labor cost
- Increased productivity for yourself and your business
- Delivering work at time
- New skills that your business needs
- Improved work quality
Not sure how working with a VA is so beneficial for you? By completing all sorts of tasks that you don’t have time for.
7 Tasks a Virtual Assistant Can Do for You
Now you know precisely what a Virtual assistant is and how they work. It is also time to explore the tasks VAs can help you with.
First, know that a VA can perform various tasks, ranging from scheduling appointments and responding to emails. But, these are just the tip of the iceberg. A VA can help you with so much more, including:
- Manage your calendar
Managing your personal and professional calendar is an essential task when you’re a busy entrepreneur. It is the only way to ensure that you stay on top of all your tasks. But, actually creating and maintaining a calendar can be challenging when you barely have the time to complete all the tasks in it. This is where a VA can help make calendar management an easy task for you. They will schedule calls and appointments, confirm them, provide reminders, and reschedule those canceled meetings.
- Manage your business travel details
Business owners travel a lot for the sake of their business, whether to meet clients, sign new contracts, or participate in important events for entrepreneurs. But, planning a business trip from scratch is a complex task. You need to research flights, accommodation, transportation options, book everything, and arrange everything for the events you’ll be attending. Don’t you have the time? Don’t worry. A VA will manage all that for you.
- Help with business development
Business development requires a lot of research. From researching leads to finding email addresses and finding information about developing a new product to sell more, researching takes a lot of time. But, it is also necessary, so you can’t simply ignore it. So, you need a VA to do it for you.
A virtual assistant can do many business development tasks, including researching leads on social media like LinkedIn, designing product or company presentations, finding relevant email addresses, and researching important information that helps you develop a new product or service.
- Accounting tasks
Accounting is an essential part of any business. The better you keep track of your business finances, the bigger the chances of managing your business well and making wise decisions. Yet, accounting is also a time-consuming task. Plus, it also requires specific knowledge of accounting, like calculating taxes, formulating business documents, and so on. Well, a VA can do this stuff instead.
A virtual assistant can maintain the books, create and send invoices, chase down payments, and look for funds that you can further invest in developing your business.
- Social media management
Truth be told, as a business owner, you are likely too busy to spend time on social media (unless you’re like Mark Zuckerberg and social media is your business). So, you don’t have the time to answer messages, respond to comments, post to build your social media presence, and so on. But, a VA can handle all that for you and ensure that your social media presence is in its best shape.
- Client relationship management
Responding to clients in a personal way and sending corporate gifts that impress each of them can be a really time-consuming task. However, it is crucial to make your clients feel important so that they stay loyal to your business. So, how do you manage client relationships when you are a busy professional? You hire a virtual assistant to handle these tasks for you.
- Handle personal errands
Last but not least, a VA can also help you with some tasks related to your personal life. In other words, a virtual assistant can run some personal errands for you too. As a busy business professional, you rarely find the time to handle some personal tasks like making restaurant reservations or sending gifts to your loved ones. A VA will manage all these for you.