Nowadays, the dynamic business environment brings a lot of new challenges and exciting opportunities for entrepreneurs and small business owners. Therefore, to be relevant, successful and competitive in running any business, is all about understanding the importance of productivity and efficiency, so you can fully utilize your talent and professional skills. In other words, it is all about focusing on your strengths and making a significant contribution to growing your business, while outsourcing and training the right people to take care of the rest.
A business magnate, investor, and philanthropist Azim Premji sum it perfectly: “The important thing about outsourcing or global sourcing is that it becomes a very powerful tool to leverage talent, improve productivity and reduce work cycles.” Moreover, outsourcing allows companies to reduce the cost of their services or products and creates the economic expansion that lowers unemployment.
HOW CAN OUTSOURCING ADD VALUE TO YOUR BUSINESS?
When you are an entrepreneur, a start-up or a small business, it is only natural that over the time you can not keep up with your deadlines, successfully handle customer inquiries, manage your e-mail and website, grow your social network, do salary calculations, update accounting or just follow up with your to-do list.
In the end, the constant lack of time to finish the necessary tasks or the lack of resources to hire additional full-time employees can result in a decreased level of productivity and efficiency in your business. It will make it harder for you to stay competitive in the existing market. And think about it, filling financial statements or planning and coordinating the meetings, is not helping you to make any progress in achieving professional goals.
According to Timothy Ferris, author, entrepreneur, and angel investor, “Doing less meaningless work, so that you can focus on things of greater personal importance, is not laziness. It is hard for most people to accept because our culture tends to reward personal sacrifice instead of personal productivity.”
Based on our experience working with Scandinavian companies (Denmark, Norway, and Sweden), the easiest way to deal with this challenge, while growing your company, is to outsource virtual assistance service, that can help you with your accounting, bookkeeping, marketing, customer service and anything else that you have on the list.
In fact, when you remove the requirement of physical presence, you create unexpected possibilities to outsource a highly experienced and qualified person from anywhere around the globe. Besides, a good Virtual Assistant can do more than arrange the flights or manage your schedule: he or she naturally becomes a part of your team and helps you to achieve your professional goals. What is more, Virtual Assistant keeps you organized, focused on bringing the value to your company, but most importantly, helps to free your and your team’s time that can be used for building the marketing strategies and making significant progress in growing your business.
WHAT IS A VIRTUAL ASSISTANT?
Virtual Assistant (VA) is a highly qualified, experienced, skilled and knowledgeable person, who remotely provides administrative, accounting, marketing, technical, creative and(or) personal support to any entrepreneur, business or start-up. Dive deeper into understanding what a Virtual Assistant is and the advantages it can bring to your company.
For some time now, freelancers and Personal Assistants (PAs) were increasing in demand as companies, and small businesses understood the value of flexibility and cost-effectiveness of their services. However, the easy access to the internet and e-mail has open new possibilities for many independent professionals to work remotely from their home office, while providing the same value to the company, they work for.
Therefore, if you are in need for additional secretarial or bookkeeping assistance within your business, but you don’t have resources to hire other full-time employee or extra equipment and space in the office, hiring a Virtual Assistant would be the right choice for you.
10 TASKS YOU CAN DELEGATE TO VIRTUAL ASSISTANT
However, whether you are starting or growing your business, knowing which assignments to hand over for your Virtual Assistant can look tricky and challenging at first. Therefore, for this article, the Virtual Assistants at Baltic Assist were asked to present the most common tasks they already do for their clients. So let’s take a closer look at 10 TASKS YOU CAN DELEGATE TO VIRTUAL ASSISTANT.
1. Personal Tasks
Virtual Assistant can keep you organized by managing your calendar and schedule, organizing the meetings with your team, taking care of your e-mail, and simply, helping you with your to-do list. Here at Baltic Assist, we call them Personal Assistants, and they can make a reservation to your favourite restaurant, book dentist or doctor appointments, arrange your travels, book flight tickets or even send thank you notes to your partners or family members.
2. Administrative Work
Virtual Assistant can help you to follow up with your deadlines, utilize your e-mail, schedule appointments with your clients. Also, they can plan and coordinate the upcoming events or staff meetings, send the invitations, manage customer relations and incoming enquiries, prepare confirmation e-mails and send invoices for your customers, update and enter information in your database, edit and proofread the text. As well as, they may keep track of your stock and order the supplies.
3. Tracking Your Accounts and Bills
Keeping the track on your accounts and bills can be one of the easiest things to assign to a Virtual Assistant. VA can prepare financial statements and management’s reports, respond to inquiries to credit institutions and local tax authorities. Moreover, they may help you with salary calculations, provide payslips to the employees, prepare end of the year report and payments, manage bank accounts operations, enter credit card transactions, prepare and send the outgoing invoices. And surely, balance your books and provide end of month reports.
4. Marketing & Social Media
Virtual Marketing Managers can help you to design a digital marketing campaign, conduct research to determine where your potential clients gather online, provide online marketing analytics and find your industry related social groups that you can join. VA can also help you to create e-mail marketing campaigns and newsletters, increase your followers on social media, write and schedule your tweets and post on social platforms. They also can assist in managing SEO friendly website. VA will send invitations to the upcoming events, as well as, will help to market the specific project, promote your business in the press and create a customer feedback form.
5. Research Your Business
Virtual Assistant can help you to research your competitors and vendors, investigate the potential customers and business opportunities, prepare reports about the target industry and existing market, find new products and services, investigate the specific topic, compile market data and find statistics, update you about changes in the industry, but also help you to locate business contacts and get in touch with the right people.
6. Customer Service
Virtual Customer Service Representatives can help you to manage customer relations and deal with the incoming inquiries, respond to phone calls and e-mails, provide technical support and live chat services, maintain the information of your website, monitor user conversation on different social platforms. They will help you to grow your social network and increase your followers on social media, engage with your customers and followers, as well as, create, manage and schedule your advertising material and newsletters.
7. Content Writer
Virtual Assistant can be an essential tool in helping you to get your message out there by assisting you to create blog posts, articles, newsletters and posts on social media. VA can proofread your website to make sure that it is SEO friendly, also transcribe the information, design marketing e-mail templates, write guides and instructions for your product or service, or simply, edit and format the documents, formal letters, invitations, presentations.
8. Web Design, Development & Maintenance
Some Virtual IT Developers, who are skilled in various programming coding, can build, design or maintain a professional website. VA can edit and upload new information to your website, make simple text changes, add new products and services, or simply make an announcement about an upcoming event or promotion. VA can also help you to promote your website, find the right keywords, optimize the information on your website to improve search engine traffic.
9. Virtual Assistant can help you with sales
Virtual Sales Managers will locate business contacts and find people, make calls to your leads, research new potential markets and prospects, make telemarketing calls, prepare promotional material, contracts and individual proposals, input order information to your database, prepare and send invoices, and, finally, deal with sale administration.
10. One-time Project
If you do not feel the need to hire a full-time Virtual Assistant, you can always use VA service to help you finish one-time project, so you can step up with your work and achieve the desired progress in your business. VA can help you to market the specific project, investigate the particular niche, create or proofread the content, prepare PowerPoint presentation, research your competitors or vendors, etc.