The wonders of the internet mean you can hire virtual assistants to pick up some of the slack that you don’t have enough hours in the day for.
As an entrepreneur, things can get pretty intense. For the most part, you’ll find that you have to do the work of a full team of professionals, all by yourself (at least in the early days) in order to achieve success and break through to the next level.
That being said, there are solutions available to you that don’t involve hiring full-time, physical staff, which is especially useful if you’re running your business out of your garage and don’t feel like inviting someone to set up an office in your kitchen.
The wonders of the internet mean you can set about looking for a stockbroker from the comfort of your sofa, and it also means you can hire virtual assistants to pick up some of the slack that you don’t have enough hours in the day for.
Here are some ways a virtual assistant can help your business thrive.
Virtual receptionists can create a heightened sense of professionalism, and prevent you being caught off guard
When working as an entrepreneur, having an important prospect or client phone up out of the blue and without warning, as you’re trying to cook dinner and do your work simultaneously, can be a bit of an inconvenience. Suddenly you’re put on the spot and have to both come across in an impressively professional manner, and also crunch numbers and logistics at the same time.
Hiring a virtual receptionist means you can relax more during the day, and rest assured that a professional is taking your calls for you and will forward you any necessary messages or information. You can then call your client back, after preparing your elevator pitch and getting into the right mindset.
Virtual assistants can manage some of your personal errands, and free up more of your time to spend on your work and hobbies
In his book, “The 4-Hour Work Week”, author and experimenter Tim Ferris recounts how he used a virtual assistant to manage some of the more tedious elements of his personal life for him, so that he could enjoy more free time to spend on productive and fulfilling endeavours.
Among other things, he describes using a personal assistant to order toys for his child, find information about his cell phone plan, pay his bills, and place orders for him at an online pharmacy.
While you should be careful about giving access to your personal life to other people, especially strangers, it might be that a virtual assistant could help deal with some of your day-to-day chores — researching hotels for your next vacation, for example — and streamline your entire life in the process.
Virtual assistants can handle time-consuming but non-complex work errands for you
As an entrepreneur, you want every moment you spend working to be as productive and meaningful as possible. Yet sometimes, you’ll find yourself having to spend hours skimming articles online to find the required data to put together a report or article, or else filling in reports on excel.
These kinds of work errands — the ones which require no particular niche expertise, but which take up time — can be seen to by a digital assistant. While you work on the “big picture” stuff, a virtual assistant can compile information for you into spreadsheets and documents, and so cut out a lot of the “busywork” from your life.
