Whether you’re running a small or mid-sized business, efficiency is essential. You’ve got a small crew, growing profits, and a continual need to scale your business upward. How do you keep growing without breaking the bank?
It’s impractical to hire more employees before you have enough profit to make the hiring process sustainable. But you can’t get your earnings to rise if you aren’t able to put people on projects. It sounds like a vicious cycle but thankfully, there is a solution: virtual assistants.
In this article, you’ll learn how a virtual assistant can help your business grow and keep you on track with increased production.
Increase Your Cost Savings
One of the many benefits of hiring a virtual assistant is the fact that you only have to pay for their time. This cuts out extra costs, such as:
– The need to supply a computer
– The need to provide office space
– The need to increase internet bandwidth for your office
– The need to offer employee health insurance
– The need to contribute to employee taxes
– The need to increase liability insurance
– The list goes on!
The above list adds an incredible amount of cost to your bottom line. If you own a fledgling business, or you’re not in a place where current profit levels support those needs, a virtual assistant could be a perfect option.
Even if you get to the point when you’re able to hire a full-time secretary, you might find that the availability and flexibility of a virtual assistant are more tailored to your needs.
If so, you can have the best of both worlds by gaining the assistance you need and saving an incredible amount of expense. That money can then go to other areas such as marketing or product development.
Increase Your Scalability
When you need to grow your business, it’s essential to have people in place who can grow with you. When orders increase, you’ll need:
– Faster production time
– Increased customer service
– Better customer experiences
– Consistent follow-up for clients and customers
As you grow your business, it’s not always possible to hire full-time employees to assist you. You must, however, meet the increasing volume of orders that come in.
Customer service must come front and center to establish your business as a trustworthy company that cares about its customers. Shoppers will want more significant levels of interaction and experience through Facebook, a website, and other social media outlets.
Finally:
There will be an increased need for follow-up due to a variety of reasons including delayed orders, customer satisfaction, client interest, and conversion.
You cannot possibly handle all of this alone. But a virtual assistant can act as your right hand man, enabling these vital aspects of your business to be covered. Knowing you have someone on the job for these needed areas will take the stress away from you.
Less stress = a more focused and driven business owner.
Increase Your Efficiency
Not only will a virtual assistant decrease costs, but they’ll be able to increase your productivity level, thereby helping you gain more business over the long run. As a business owner, you can only do so much.
There are only 24 hours in the day, and you should sleep for at least a few of them. In short, you can’t do everything and be everywhere all the time.
Understandably, you want to be involved in every detail or your business. The great thing about hiring a virtual assistant is that you don’t lose any control.
You can assign your VA as many or as few tasks as you consider worthy of delegation. They can take care of the tasks that have a habit of filling the hours of your day. Tasks like:
– Filtering your emails
– Receiving phone calls (and passing you the important ones)
– Managing your calendar
– Setting your appointments
– Managing social media
– Bookkeeping and payroll
These tasks are not usually ones which entrepreneurs get excited about. Leave them up to your virtual assistant so you can go out and meet clients, raise funding, and develop your latest and greatest product idea.
Increase Your Marketing Potential
This is perhaps one of the most valuable things a virtual assistant can do today. Marketing has grown exponentially from ten, twenty, and thirty years ago.
If you don’t have a good marketing plan complete with excellent follow-up, emails, phone calls, social media interaction, funnels, and ad campaigns, you’ll be hard-pressed to get your business off the ground.
Marketing ranks in importance right alongside having a business plan. Both go hand-in-hand in our customer-focused, content-driven, satisfaction-oriented society.
Your virtual assistant can carry out marketing plans, interact with your customers on social media, make those all-important phone calls, carryout email funnels, and promote ad campaigns at the click of a button.
Your New Helping Hand
You can rely on virtual assistants for a wide variety of tasks, from making phone calls, taking orders, following up with customers, and directing your marketing campaigns. They’re flexible and take care of their own business needs, saving you thousands.
Now that you know how a virtual assistant can help your business grow, will you be hiring a virtual assistant?