The role of a personal assistant can really vary from client to client. Whether they’re acting as your personal shopper, reminding you about birthdays, booking travel, researching, bookkeeping or helping to keep your diary and inbox in check, a PA should leave you with time and headspace to do what you do best. In the words of Lisa Krohn, previous PA to Jimmy Wales co-founder of Wikipedia, the real job of an assistant is “giving people permission to let things go.” Assistants are by no means a guarantee of success, but they can certainly help you on the way to it.
Who needs a personal assistant?
Entrepreneurs are often the most in need of assistance with maintaining a reasonable work-life balance. For people who carry their office around with them all day, a PA is invaluable not only for reminders and correspondence, but for taking care of things whilst you’re in a meeting or on vacation. An experienced assistant should be able to recognise when you need to be disturbed on the beach or when a holding email will do.
Even if you’re working for someone else, though, funding your own PA has its major upsides. You can delegate the most time-consuming tasks to reduce your workload, make sure everything is efficiently monitored and followed up, and free your mind to focus on the more challenging tasks. A part-time assistant is often most cost effective in these instances as they can be on hand when you need them most, but won’t be charging you for any downtime. At Outsourcery all our PAs are part-time for that very reason; we’re here to help arrange a flexible working schedule for maximum productivity.
Personal assistant for teams are also extremely beneficial if you’re working on a project and require some communication management so that things don’t get forgotten, lost or disregarded along the way.
How do I find the best assistant to suit me?
That’s our job. At Outsourcery we put a lot of time and thought into ensuring the most effective working partnership possible. Let us know exactly what you’re looking for, your goals and special requirements, and we’ll introduce you to the perfect person to take on the job. But we do realise that one of the biggest barriers to hiring a personal assistant is that people don’t know what they need. To help you decide, we offer all of our clients free trials before you sign up to any packages so you can experience the benefits first hand.
We can almost guarantee, you’ll soon discover there’s so much more that can be delegated than you first thought. Productivity and efficiency aside, you’ll find your intellectual capacity increases, leaving you time to think about the big stuff for once.
