Contracting with a virtual assistant is an important way for a small business to deal with their non-money making tasks. VAs usually do administrative and technical tasks that either you can’t do or don’t have time to do, or that are not your main source of income. Here are ten reasons why you could need a VA for your business.
1. Your Workload Is Too High
If you find yourself working day in and day out, you need to find someone to help you. Remember why you started your own business? You started it because you wanted freedom. Now you probably feel chained to your desk. You’re starting to experience success but it’s starting to take over your life.
2. You Put Off Important Admin Tasks
You’re so busy doing billable work that important admin tasks such as customer service and bookkeeping are put off until it’s so overwhelming you don’t even want to do it. This is dangerous because you cannot know how well your business is doing without doing the books and admin tasks.
3. You Are Spending Too Much Time on Non-Money Making Tasks
You’re keeping up with the administrative work, but you are spending more than 10 hours a week doing it. These hours could be spent doing tasks that make you money instead. If you can earn $140 an hour, why are you doing tasks that could be done for $20 to $50 an hour?
4. You Are Stressed Out
You find your business a drudge and you’re no longer having fun. You catch yourself looking at want ads and fantasizing about not having so much responsibility. Your health is suffering and you don’t have time to exercise or eat right.
5. You’re Working More than 40 Hours a Week
As a business owner, you knew you’d have to work long hours in the beginning. However, if you’re working more than 40 hours a week, you need to find someone to help you. Figure out how many hours of your work is billable versus non-billable. The non-billable amount is how much help you need from a VA.
6. You Don’t Want to Train People
Hiring an employee comes with training but hiring a VA doesn’t. You hire one or more VAs who have experience and specialize in the things that you don’t know how to do. You’ll gain their expertise once you hire them.
7. You Don’t Want an Employee
Hiring an employee comes with a lot of paperwork and government regulation. When you bring on a contractor they do their job without training, use their own tools, and meet your deadlines in their own time.
8. You Don’t Know How to Do Something
If you need work done that you really don’t know how to do, and it will take you more time due to having to learn it, you’re better off having someone else who is an expert do it for you. They’ll do it a lot faster than you can, and during the time you are wasting time trying to learn, you could be earning money.
9. Your Business Is Growing
You’re building your business and it’s growing fast and steady. Each week you have more work to do than last week. You’re getting to the point of overflow. Contracting with a VA will help you manage the growth easier.
10. You Realize Others Can Do the Tasks
Once you realize that others can do the task that you’re struggling doing, both in skill level and the time you have to work on it, you’ll be able to let go and let someone else help you.
Virtual assistants can screen your emails, respond to some of them, send you only the ones that you need to respond to personally, schedule and confirm appointments, book travel, make calls for you, conduct research, fill out reports, create invoices, post invoice payments, and manage projects for you that other contractors are working on.
Working with a VA can free up your time to focus on the things that make you the most money instead of the unbillable admin work, giving you more time to focus on taking on more billable work.
like the whole idea…sign me up. because the whole idea is making sure the client is happy. and we get to do what we love.
Right, we sometimes try to do it all on our own but then realize that we are really not super-human.