Totally, yes! Having someone to hand over routine tasks to make your life easier? Who can say no to that? Be able to take vacations or sabbaticals knowing you’re leaving your work in an expert’s reliable hands. Having a virtual assistant benefits you in so many ways, for starters, it’s a weight off your shoulders not many people experience.
The tasks of a virtual assistant can vary. They can assist with any kind of administrative task, from helping with travel plans, itineraries, and bookings all the way to managing an entire office or even digital marketing tasks like social media and content management. They will free up time in your busy schedule so you can spend all your energy and time on growing your business.
Virtual assistants benefit your wallet as you only pay for the actual hours worked. This can make hiring a virtual assistant very cost-effective because you only pay for the hours you use them.
You don’t need to employ someone permanently to enjoy the same benefits.
Guaranteed productivity and lower costs
Virtual assistants make their money by being highly productive and delivering value because they quickly realise that their income depends on execution and efficiency, they, therefore, do not prolong work and are never (dare we say it) lazy. Another benefit about virtual assistants is that they work remotely using their own equipment and they take care of administrative tasks such as independently taking care of their tax payments – all of this means reduced overheads for you, so you save more money!
Hiring permanent employees is costly and not scalable. Here are just a few of the human resource costs to consider when hiring a new employee:
- Salaries and inflation
- Onboarding and training
- health insurance
- Workers compensation insurance
- Payroll taxes
- Paid leave and sick leave
- Equipment expenses
- Office expenses
Hiring a permanent employee for 40-45 hours per week doesn’t necessarily mean that they work all those hours but you’re still paying for them. A virtual assistant can work on specific projects and only bill the actual hours worked. You may think that you need to spend a lot of time onboarding a new virtual assistant and this can be costly. But you’ll find that if you are suitably matched to the right candidate, with a skillset you require, you can actually get them up and running in no time at all.
Save Time
We all know that time is money, especially in business and a virtual assistant can save you a LOT of time that you can invest in developing strategies and plans to grow your business. With a virtual assistant, you will get a verified expert and you don’t have to waste time and money training them because they focus on specific tasks that you have hired them for.
You should create a list of tasks that you plan to outsource to a virtual assistant and have a selection process that weeds out unsuitable candidates before you start hiring
Cut out costly employee training
What about training? Consider the regular training costs you would need to pay for permanent employees. If you want to enhance your employees’ skills then it is up to you as an employer to pay for the ongoing education and training of your staff. And let’s face it, ongoing education and training is an essential part of the workplace nowadays. To keep up with constant innovation, employees need to keep up to date with the latest technology, trends, and best in practice procedures. Virtual assistants invest in their own education separately because they also understand that they need to keep their skills relevant and up to date.
Virtual assistants are highly skilled and only usually perform the work that they are trained to do, for example, the work that virtual social media assistants do. They also usually do it for other clients they may have, so have gained much experience in this regard. It’s not unusual for an employer to use a full-time employee for tasks they aren’t trained to do, this is because having someone on the payroll means you need to fill their hours, even with work they cannot necessarily accomplish. This is clearly not a concern when using a virtual assistant who has mastered their field.
The idea that someone is hired temporarily provides flexibility and fluidity. A good virtual assistant is not going to overstay their welcome. When the work is complete, it’s complete, time to venture on other new things. There’s no obligation to keep them hanging around.
There can be times when it does make financial sense to hire a full-time employee, one needs to weigh up the pros and cons. But as the world continues to change and the fact that we conduct business mostly virtually any way, it really does make good business sense to consider the virtual contractual route. Now it’s up to you to decide.
