What is a Virtual Assistant and Why Should I Hire One?

Chances are if you’re reading this then you know that you need some admin support for your business, someone has mentioned a virtual assistant and you’ve come looking for more information.

One of the questions I am frequently asked is ‘Exactly what is a Virtual Assistant?’, closely followed with ‘Why should I work with one?’ so I thought I would write this blog post to help answer those questions a little bit.

WHAT IS A VIRTUAL ASSISTANT?

A Virtual Assistant is normally a self-employed individual who works from a location other than the business owners’ premises and provides them with a range of different services; these can be anything from general admin to more specific services such as event planning or lifestyle management.

Some Virtual Assistants will specialise in a specific area such as Social Media or Event Planning and others will have a broad range of experience in many things. Neither of these are better than the other, it all depends on the support that you are looking for in your business.

It is also always possible that you know you need some support, but you are not entirely sure with what, a VA will discuss all this with you and help get to the areas where they can most help you.

WHY SHOULD I WORK WITH ONE?

There are a number of reasons business owners turn to virtual assistants instead of in-house employees and these are just a couple of them:

Hiring a Virtual Assistant means you can save on overhead costs because you are not paying for a physical space for the VA, you are not paying for the electricity or equipment that is being used and because VA’s charge on an hourly or project basis you are only paying for the work that has been completed. You also do not have to pay sick pay or National Insurance as a VA will be responsible for this themselves.

A Virtual Assistant will also only work on tasks that they already know how to do, meaning you do not lose time or money training someone to do the tasks you need completing.

Hiring a VA saves you time; there is no simpler way to put this. Whether it is for a one-off task or for a specific number of hours per week, you will be able to outsource tasks and free up your time to concentrate on the things you most want or need to.

Productivity is also known to be higher; an employee will often do a variety of tasks, some they enjoy and some they don’t inevitably leading to a dip in productivity. Whereas a VA is doing this because they enjoy this work and productivity levels rise when someone is enjoying their work, which in turn can again save money and time

If you’re looking at this and thinking it all sounds brilliant and you think a Virtual Assistant is the right fit for your business then use the contact page to send me a message and we can start the discussion on how I can help support you and your business.