No one has ever disputed the role or the usefulness of assistants, yet a lot of people are on the fence when it comes to virtual assistants. In reality, however, while virtual assistants preserve every advantage of traditional assistants, they bring a few boosts that might interest you. Here are a few reasons why hiring a virtual assistant as a small business owner feels like having a secret weapon.
1. It’s cost-effective
Everyone’s hour has its worth. Sometimes, this worth is expressed in hourly wages. Now, this hourly wage is usually higher for some well-grounded reason. A person getting paid more is either doing a job that requires a unique set of skills and experiences or taking a higher level of responsibility that can go wrong.
Other tasks, however, are not as demanding. When managing schedules, responding to emails, and entering data into a table, someone with little to no experience could do this effectively.
Virtually, you can put anyone on this task – a person getting paid $15 per hour or a person who’s paid $80 or $200 per hour. The choice is yours, but they’ll do the same job.
Seeing as a remote employee (a virtual assistant) is sometimes from a region with a lower standard (and, therefore, lower living costs), this pay may be more than competitive.
Overall, hiring a virtual assistant will save you a lot on your operating costs while sacrificing nothing on the actual productivity of your enterprise.
2. Better work-life balance
A virtual assistant can help you avoid getting overworked. This means you might have some mental and emotional energy left when you get home. This is incredibly important for your work-life balance, which is very important for your ability to persevere in any industry in the long run.
Remember, your children will only remember if you worked late 20 years from now.
The thing is that a virtual assistant also gets in charge of managing your schedule. If you instruct them to do so, a human virtual assistant will always better organize a schedule for a human. They’ll organize tasks depending on their complexity.
Also, remember that menial and repetitive tasks tend to wear you out more rapidly than really complex and challenging tasks. Why? Well, because of the reward-to-return ratio. When playing a video game, some levels are incredibly complex, and they take repetition over and over again. However, since there’s a reward in terms of fun and a feeling of accomplishment, this is not such a big issue.
So, leaving repetitive tasks to someone else and focusing on your core tasks will make you less mentally exhausted.
3. Simpler hiring process
Getting a full-time employee can be incredibly expensive and difficult.
First, you need to create job listings and post them on job boards (usually not for free). Then, if you want to reach enough people so that you have a decent pool to choose from, you need to use ads to attract candidates or even create a full hiring campaign.
Then, you need to review resumes and conduct interviews, handle background checks, and, overall, handle a vetting process as thoroughly as possible.
So, why don’t you have to do this with virtual assistants? Well, for two reasons. First, they might come from an agency employing business virtual assistants that does everything for you. Second, even if you want to employ them “directly,” you’re probably looking for someone for an entry-level position, so you don’t have to worry that much.
You incur no hiring or incentives costs, and since they’re likely independent contractors, you don’t have to pay extra for their employee benefits, medical insurance, and perks.
4. Focusing on more important tasks
There are some tasks that only you can do and some that anyone in your employ can do just as well. Now, since your own time (as the person at the helm) is one of the scarcest resources in your entire organization (even in the digital work environment, you can’t be everywhere at once), shouldn’t you be more careful?
You need to focus on the money-making aspect of your business. This means you need to bring in more work and perform your core tasks (depending on your industry). Once you get paid, you can use some of these resources to outsource, pay for SaaS platforms, and do many other things you didn’t have enough time to do.
The bottom line is that your primary objective is to increase your revenue. So, even when you hire full-time employees, you need to make sure that these people will work on these money-making tasks. Administrative tasks and everything related to that should probably be outsourced.
5. An optics win for your organization
As an entrepreneur, there are some decisions that only you have the authority to make since you’ll bear responsibility. When representing your business, people don’t want to talk to an assistant but the person in charge.
This also means that, even as a one-person startup or a professional, there’s a lot of visual gain to be made by hiring an assistant. Just think about it this way: having an assistant can make a great impression on your negotiating party. Telling them that your assistant will contact them sounds like a cheap sales trick, but, in reality, it’s a massive boon to your image, and it works like a charm.
As a professional of any kind, you would hire an assistant, and the fact that the business world has migrated to the digital world doesn’t change much. A tool can do most of these tasks, but a human VA is just a massive optics win.
Wrap up
In the end, hiring a virtual assistant can save money, increase productivity, and make your business look better and more professional. Then, there are the passive boosts, like the one to your private life, a simplified hiring process, and a chance to focus on the most important tasks (those that no one but you can handle). Hiring a virtual assistant in 2024/2025 should be a no-brainer for any small business looking to become more competitive.
