If you've been hanging around the virtual water cooler at all lately, you will have heard about Virtual Assistants.
They are taking the small business world by storm, and with good reason.
In the same way that ebusiness is the 21st century's answer to the brick and mortar businesses of the past, Virtual Assistants (generally known as VAs) are the wave of the future in staffing, performing many of the same functions as their "employee" counterparts of the past, but at a fraction of the expense.
Like the traditional executive assistant, the Virtual Assistant can perform any number of functions.
Here are just a few of the many jobs that can be out-sourced to VAs: • Clerical services • Accounting • Ordering and invoicing • Shipping and receiving, • Answering and returning phone calls, • Responding to business correspondence, mail and email.
• Website creation and maintenance • Posting to blogs and social networking sites • Tech support • Making travel arrangements for business trips • Scheduling ~ which gets it's own category because whether it's business or personal, it all goes on the same calendar: appts with clients, vendors, potential customers, doctor, dentist, your kid's teacher, coach, or school counselor (and don't forget those little league games, ballet/piano recitals, holiday programs).
• Personal services, like • Shopping • Doing errands • Interviewing and hiring service personnel • Researching and making travel arrangements for holidays and vacations And that doesn't even begin to cover it.
If it's something you or your business needs to have done, chances are there is a VA who can and will do it for you.
"Okay," you say, "but I can do all of these things myself.
I may not always like it, but I can do it.
Why should I pay someone else to do something I can do myself, for free?" Ah, but are these tasks you're doing for your business really being done "for free?" If you think about the value of your time and attention in your business, you may find that these "for free" tasks may be more costly than you think.
For instance, take the thing you dislike doing the most in your business.
Let's say what you like least is sorting and responding to mail/email.
How does that go? Probably something like this: 1.
Since you don't like doing it, you put it off.
You tell yourself you'll get to it later, and then later becomes tomorrow, and suddenly a week has passed and your inboxes are full and over-flowing with messages and letters that need responses.
Now what? Well...
2.
Now that you've put it off so long, the task has gone from annoying to overwhelming.
There's a mountain of mail, which you don't like answering in the first place, so now you really don't want to do it.
So...
3.
Because you dread the task in the first place, when you do finally grit your teeth and sit down to complete it, it takes you two or three times longer to finish.
If you hired a Virtual Assistant to sort and answer your correspondence, you wouldn't have to worry about it.
It would be done, often much more quickly and efficiently, and you would be free of an onerous and unwanted task.
How much is your time worth? If you could hire a VA, just to do that one dreaded task, what would be the cost savings in terms of your time and aggravation? And if that doesn't do it for you, what if some of that mail or email you're putting off responding to is from clients or customers or even vendors who need a timely response because they can't move forward until they get your answer? Even worse, some of those clients, customers, or vendors may decide, upon hearing nothing from you for days, that they had better take there business elsewhere.
Maybe that "elsewhere" won't provide a product or service nearly as good as yours, but at least maybe they will respond to mail and email.
Or, more likely, they will have one of their Virtual Assistants do it.