What is a virtual assistant, and why would you want one?

Virtual assistants provide the services of a personal assistant, with the advantage of paying only for the services you need rather than the full salary and benefits required for an on-site personal assistant. Virtual assistants are a boon for small business owners who work from home and whose time would be better spent on activities that generate income, while outsourcing secretarial activities that are necessary for running the business, but not income producing.

What can a virtual assistant do?

Your virtual assistant can and will do any task that you would employ a regular assistant to complete, assuming that it is something that doesn’t require their physical presence in your office. For instance, typing letters, creating documents, preparing PowerPoint presentations, or writing blog posts for your business website.

To get an idea of where and how you would use a virtual assistant, make a list of all the non-income generating activities that you do throughout the day which could be outsourced so that you would have more time to spend on jobs that make money. Then calculate how many hours in each day you spend on these non-income generating tasks and decide whether it would be more efficient to hire out this work to someone else.

After you’ve made the decision to hire a virtual assistant, begin slowly by first clearly defining exactly what you want to hire out. Second, to test the effectiveness of this new system, begin by hiring out your projects in small increments rather than hiring one virtual assistant to do everything. This will save you time and most important, money, as you find what best benefits the running of your business.

Generally, I have used virtual assistants as needed for work such as data entry and writing.  My virtual assistant in Australia provided the back end for a software business – sending out stock and answering emails.  I’ve also set up virtual assistants to provide live help – sourced from a firm that specializes in doing this.

How to hire a virtual assistant

There are several online marketplaces where virtual assistants bid on jobs offered by business providers. The advantage of this system is that you can specify either a short-term or long-term project, being very particular in specifying what needs to be done, and thus pay for only the services you need. The most popular sites for these services are: rentacoder.com and elance.com. Visiting either of these sites will educate you as to the wide range of both small and large projects that business owners are outsourcing. This may give you further inspiration for ways in which you can outsource other activities within your own business.

Both rentacoder.com and elance.com allow you to post your job requirements and allow virtual assistants from around the globe to bid on your job. This bidding system provides you with the most competitive rates for each project. It also allows you to check the background skills, and recommendations of each applicant by looking at their profiles, their relevant experience, and their ratings received on prior projects.

While visiting one of these sites you’ll notice that your virtual assistant can be based anywhere in the world. The lowest cost providers tend to be from countries such as India, Pakistan, or Bangladesh, where labor costs are lower. Don’t discount these providers because of their lower prices, they are often educated in English and should be able to provide the same services as an assistant in a native English speaking country. Unless you need a native English-speaking assistant for specific writing assignments, you may be able to save yourself money by employing an assistant from one of these countries.

Whether you are hiring a virtual assistant from a developing country or a Western country, it’s best to start the relationship with a small assignment. This will enable you to quantify the quality and productivity of the person you’ve hired with little downside. Additionally, this will allow you to hire experts for the specific projects you need, and not a jack-of-all-trades, who may be great at data-entry, but unable to provide the crisp graphics you need for a slide presentation. Perhaps the most important factor for success in achieving your goals is to give very clear instructions on the parameters of the project. This will make sure that both parties understand what makes up the successful completion of the project. By establishing your standards up-front, you will be able to rely on their understanding of your requirements as time goes on.

Outsourcing work through a virtual assistant can save you time and money, why not try it soon?

Tags: outsourcing, virtual assistant

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 17th, 2010 at 11:24 am and is filed under Business tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.