As an Entrepreneur, free time is hard to come by. Quite regularly you will find yourself trying to wear many hats to sustain & grow your business. However, attempting to do it all yourself without help can lead to many late nights at your desk. In the long run, whether you like it or not, this will bog you down and you’ll soon find yourself on the road to burn out…
To prevent this you need another pair of hands to offload those mundane tasks that take you away from focusing on the bigger picture. One way to do this is by taking on an employee. However, someone once said to me that taking on an employee was the most expensive thing they had ever done! So it’s not surprising that often small business owners turn to outsourcing parts of their business to a Virtual Assistant instead.
Unlike employees, there are no ties involved with hiring a VA as they are completely self-employed business owners themselves, working from their own fully equipped offices. You only pay for the actual time spent on a task so you can forget about holiday/sick pay, NI & PAYE contributions, paid tea breaks and even better they are never stuck in traffic or late for work!
You might not realise it but there are many parts of your business you can outsource to experienced VA’s which if done correctly can have huge rewards for your business and personal life.
As a business owner myself I completely understand that outsourcing parts of your business to someone else is daunting stuff. However, I also know that many successful entrepreneurs took the risk and now say they would never look back. How do I know? Because they are my clients and they outsource their important but time consuming tasks to me – their Virtual Assistant.
The most obvious advantage with hiring a Virtual Assistant to help grow your business is the flexibility of it. With uncertainty surrounding today’s global economy, companies need the ability to expand or downsize quickly. Unfortunately, that’s not always possible but by outsourcing it allows businesses to adapt more quickly to rising or slowing demand.
The most common hurdle entrepreneurs are faced with when deciding to work with a VA is working out what tasks they can actually outsource. With this is mind I have put together a list of some tasks you can start to outsource today:
- Diary Management
- Audio Transcription
- Travel Arrangements
- Data Entry
- Customer Relations
- Preparing Business Documents
- Invoicing
- Email Management
- Chasing Late Payers
- Social Media
- Research
- Database Management
- Web Design & Management
And many more…
So what are you waiting for… put the kettle on and take 10 quiet minutes to create a clear list of tasks you could do without!
Kascha Clarke is Founder of Clarke Virtual Business Services