Liam Martin hit home when he shared what business owners don’t get about virtual assistants. In his words, “when clients ask me about virtual assistants or remote staff, the first thing I get them to understand is what they as clients are good or not good at doing. This is often quite difficult for entrepreneurs, as they’ve usually been doing everything in their business themselves.” 

Sounds familiar? Read on as we share a list of (eight) virtual assistant tasks you can outsource today to leverage domain expertise while focusing on the business core. You will leave this post with a better understanding of how to delegate effectively and find virtual assistants. Let’s go! 

No non-core task is a bigger time sink than accounting and bookkeeping. When they should be focused on finding product-market fit or growing sales, startup founders get routinely stuck reconciling expenses and statements.

You can learn bookkeeping basics to save money. But not only a few transactions can complicate accounting but any errors can prove very costly. Expert general assistants help you avoid that and ensure compliance with the latest laws.

You may have a great website, with stunning visuals and copy. But if it’s not optimized, it won’t rank and bring leads. Google is the world’s favorite search engine and gets over 270mm US unique visitors.

With a monopoly spanning geographies, Google offers businesses a tremendous opportunity to reach more people worldwide and expand their customer base. A search engine optimization expert performs a host of services like white-hat, black-hat, gray-hat, on-page, off-page, technical, international, and local SEO to ensure your website performs.  

Check out what Liam Carnahan has to say about SEO and what it takes to drive results!

Image Source: LinkedIn

Thomas Watson Jr, the second president of IBM, put it best when he said, “good design is good business.” But many skilled designers fail to tie design with business objectives. A strong web design helps you build a solid brand identity and win customer trust.

Be it online or at a brick and mortar, quality product images and videos are necessary to drive people to action. Best designers use the latest software and editing techniques to create visual assets for your needs.

Marketing exists to make sales easier. And content - whether written or visual - plays a key role in generating leads and nurturing them through the sales cycle. If you share long-form content or post on social media without understanding the modern marketing landscape, you risk losing your target audience to others and denting revenue.

But expert marketers perform thorough research, create a strategy, and set success metrics to track the impact on the bottom line.

Think a combo of creatives and copy is enough to grab eyeballs on social? It’s not. Unless you perform painstaking research to brainstorm ideas that may appeal to customers and support business goals, social media management is best left to virtual assistants.

They find the right channels and formats and follow algorithm best practices to ensure your content works. Tired of misconceptions around Duolingo’s s social media presence, Zaria Parvez, the brand’s Global Social Media Manager, offered some great insights into what social management is really like!

Image Source: LinkedIn

Let’s take another example. You may own a restaurant in California and need people to visit. Striking photos on Instagram and funny TikToks may incite visitors to check you out. But the same strategy won’t work for a B2B SaaS selling a tool to manage employee databases.

And which may need to post thought leadership content via carousels on LinkedIn to reach HR leaders. Similarly, employer branding and establishing credibility are two different business goals that need vastly different efforts. 

In saturated markets, exceptional customer service can prove to be a differentiating factor. Buyers have higher expectations from customer service than they did a few years ago, and more than half of them recommend a brand with great customer service to friends.

A tepid response to their concerns can invite resentment and cause churn. Skilled virtual sales staffing helps you offer quality support and avoid the following aspects of a bad customer experience!

Source: Zendesk

Irrespective of industry, digital platforms like websites and apps are necessary to take your business online and can have a massive impact on its success. In a digital-first world, people prefer visiting a business website before converting into customers.

But having these platforms doesn’t generate results if they are not sleek and designed keeping user experience in mind. Seasoned software staff uses top technology to build high-performing platforms for your firm.  

Many advocate for email over in-person meetings or phone calls for business communication. While helpful, it has led to “email overload,” with executives reporting feeling bogged down by the number of emails they receive every day.

I can’t find anything in my inbox and I could spend my whole day responding to incoming emails are common refrain. But you can reclaim control over your email and stop it from hampering your productivity by working with a personal assistant. They organize emails, clear spam, send follow-ups, and flag important ones. 

Delegation leads to a win-win situation since you can focus on the ‘core’ while tapping into expertise for secondary business functions. Yet, many leaders don’t delegate properly or at all.

Founders either lack the delegation skills or the time to explain tasks, follow up, take questions, or offer feedback. But that’s a clear sign you must delegate something out of your schedule. Consider these four tips:

• Identify projects to outsource and define their scope in advance to avoid scope creep.
• Fix OKRs and KPIs for virtual assistants to help them understand what success means.
• Delegate to the right talent. Checks skills and experience before assigning tasks to a VA.
• Build trust. Set clear deadlines and avoid micro-managing your virtual assistant. 

Note that successful delegation isn’t just about what comes before going hands-off. What comes after you cede control is as important. To ensure projects and tasks remain on track, remember to set a schedule for checking in and conducting a mutual review to identify hits and misses. 

Entrepreneurs get so immersed in daily operations they mistake needing help with busy work. If you are working in your business more than on your business, spending time on routine tasks, struggling to maintain a work-life balance, or missing opportunities to scale your offerings - consider hiring a virtual assistant. They help you reclaim time and focus on growth levers.   

Image Source: Huffpost

But remember hiring a bad fit can do more harm than good for your business. Unless you have assessed needs, spotted skill gaps, and developed elaborate SOPs before hiring independent talent, communicating and collaborating with them may be challenging.

Likewise, if your job description is not built keeping virtual assistant cost and virtual assistant skills in mind, you may have to sift through countless irrelevant applications before finding the right person for the job. 

A clear idea of why to hire a virtual assistant helps you create a solid virtual assistant job description and choose the right platform for sourcing talent. Depending on the business model and maturity, you can choose freelance marketplaces to hire workers. Or, you can partner with a virtual assistant provider to save on hiring, training, office upkeep, and managing contractors. 

Independent talent brings incredible value to the table. They can perform many common virtual assistant tasks and help business owners unlock their full potential. SPEAK WITH US today to learn how Office Beacon’s virtual staffing solutions empower busy founders and executives to accomplish more in less time, hit deadlines, focus on what matters, and crush business goals. 

Virtual assistants handle routine and taxing back-office tasks. Busy executives and founders hire them to perform both general and niche services so they can focus on core business functions and accomplish more in less time. If you want to hire a VA but are unsure about typical rates, read on. We share four major factors to help you gauge the virtual assistant cost accurately.  

But first … 

Virtual assistants are incredibly beneficial for growing businesses. They boost productivity, improve work-life balance, and offer an affordable way to work with best-in-class talent. Virtual assistants also help you save on additional expenses incurred on full-time hires. But unless you have set up proper systems, they may not be the best solution for your needs.

Before hiring a virtual assistant, ask yourself these four questions: 

• Have you prepared clear guidelines and step-by-step instructions for the hire?
• Do you need help with admin tasks or a specialized virtual assistant service?
• How much time can you invest in training and giving feedback?
• What level of technical expertise do you need?

Virtual assistants don’t have access to insider knowledge and company resources. If you haven’t devised protocols to help them seamlessly collaborate with your in-house employees, consider a virtual assistant provider that not only finds the perfect fit but also has seasoned project managers to train and supervise talent to ensure your virtual assistants work efficiently. 

With that covered, let’s get down to the factors that impact virtual assistant costs.

Unlike in-house employees, virtual assistants don’t expect clients to pay hefty compensation. You don’t need to provide health and life insurance, travel allowances, competitive 401K matches, paid time off, and learning reimbursement to hire and retain top-notch talent.

But the following key factors can help you accurately estimate the cost of hiring a virtual assistant for business:

A virtual assistant can perform various tasks for your business. They can book meetings, manage social media, create websites, and design creatives.

You can club services into categories like marketing, customer support, sales, financial planning, or administrative work when planning what to outsource. The day-to-day virtual assistant tasks and the hours required constitute scope - a major factor determining the cost of hiring virtual assistants. 

Virtual assistants work remotely which lets you hire talent from anywhere in the world. You may be in California and hire an independent worker from New York. Or you could delegate tasks to an assistant located in the Philippines or India.

The cost of living is different for all three areas. A virtual assistant in New York will cost more than their Indian counterpart and may also bill for the time spent on discovery calls and meetings.

The core skills possessed by independent talent help them stand out. While some are beginners, others command substantial knowledge from previous in-house roles which lets them perform demanding work without supervision or detailed instructions. Expert virtual assistants know their worth and charge as per the complexity of the work.

Virtual assistants can work full-time or part-time. They may come aboard for a specific project or dedicate a fixed number of hours each week. Depending on the arrangement and how hands-on you want the virtual assistant to be, the independent contractor may charge different rates.

For example, an assistant working on a one-off email campaign will charge less than a more involved consultant helping out with a business strategy.

Besides the above factors, virtual assistant skills and pricing options can also impact costs. Seasoned contractors can be picky about work and may charge monthly retainers. Whereas, beginners looking to build their portfolio may be happy to take up one-off projects and invoice hourly.

Growing startups that don’t have the budget to build an in-house team outsource their back-office tasks precisely because of the flexibility to hire talent as per business needs. As you calculate the virtual assistant cost and budget to hire independent talent, factor in: 

A virtual assistant may be a generalist or offer niche services. In-depth knowledge, experience, and familiarity with industry best practices also influence virtual assistant costs.

A good rule of thumb to go by is this - the greater the skillset, complexity, and expertise required for the job, the higher the pricing. For example, specialized virtual assistants would cost more than a back-office specialist handling data entry and billing111.

Virtual assistants do hourly, project, or retainer pricing depending on scope. If you need part-time help, you can pay by the hour or on a project basis. But a sabbatical leave may require you to hire talent full-time and pay a fixed retainer.

Freelance marketplaces and gig-based job boards are pocket-friendly options to find independent contractors but they require significant HR work. A dedicated virtual assistant provider like Office Beacon can match you fit the right fit and mitigate HR concerns and overheads on office upkeep.

Virtual assistants often work with multiple clients and use invoicing software for billing. Before hiring an independent contractor, ask them about their payment method.

While many still prefer the good old direct deposits, the rise of platforms like Stripe, PayPal, and Wise has changed the way virtual assistants accept payments and manage their finances. And that’s a wrap! Do you plan to hire a virtual assistant in 2023? Let us know in the comments below. 

Virtual assistants add incredible value to the lives of busy business owners. Besides boosting productivity and improving work-life balance, virtual assistants help you cut overhead costs and optimize resources. But here’s the thing.

Though remote workers are immensely valuable for growing companies, you may end up with a bad fit due to a lack of clarity on the virtual assistant skills you should look for.

In this post, we highlight ten basic (but vital!) virtual assistant skills. These may vary as per role and job requirements but nonetheless are a good referential point for your next hire.

Whether you source talent directly through company channels or rely on referrals, industry networks, or managed marketplaces, ensure your virtual assistants possess the following skills to enjoy a long-term and smooth working relationship with them.

Subject matter expertise is the top virtual assistant skill to test. Your virtual assistant must have a strong grasp of industry trends and best practices to ace their job.

Freelance marketplaces and communities have both emerging and seasoned talent. Depending on business priorities and budget, you can hire beginners, intermediate, or experienced professionals to manage your tasks. 

Firms hire independent workers for many duties, but the most in-demand virtual assistant services include:

Different from accounting, virtual assistants offer invoicing, data entry, billing, reimbursement, reporting, payroll, and reconciliation as part of virtual bookkeeping services. They help you manage day-to-day company finances and ensure your accounts are accurate and up-to-date.

A virtual assistant handles your personal or company email to review and resolve customer queries. They check all incoming emails, send follow-ups, and flag emails that need your attention. You can also entrust them with email marketing and reporting. 

Content writers create short and long-form content for both digital and print publications. They write blogs, email newsletters, brochures, ebooks, guides, digital ads, and website copy to strengthen your digital marketing.

It includes tasks like creating and managing social media profiles, creating strategies, and posting and curating user-generated content to build a brand online. A social media virtual assistant also runs paid campaigns and collects user feedback via polls.

Virtual assistants handle non-core tasks that don’t add to the bottom line directly. An umbrella term for inessential activities, a back-office specialist helps you maintain employee records, prepare reports, and manage office equipment infrastructure, and supplies.

You can hire virtual assistants to remove unwanted background voices, synchronize audio and video tracks, add special effects, adjust color balance, and create soundtracks to enhance the quality of your multimedia assets.

Independent website and app developers deploy leading technology and best practices to build intuitive websites and apps. Whereas SEO specialists offer on-page, off-page, and technical SEO audits to improve your platforms’ visibility on search engines and app stores.

Businesses rely on customer service reps to answer customer questions, provide information, and solve complaints. They trust reps to deliver exceptional customer experience and ensure complete satisfaction by processing returns, exchanges, and refunds.   

Website and software developers need high technical prowess to create scalable world-class digital solutions for your business. But even for non-tech roles, basic IT knowledge is essential for day-to-day tasks.

Your virtual assistant must be able to collaborate seamlessly over modern communication and project management tools and track new updates, without needing daily reminders from your team.

Likewise, good command over marketing technology comes in handy when you need your virtual assistant to create excel reports, presentations, design collaterals, or manage CRMs like Salesforce or HubSpot.

Computer literacy and comfort with trying new tools would make it easy for them to be on your software stack.

Virtual assistants often have to context switch and multitask while collaborating with clients. Being remote, they collaborate on project management software and attend video meetings in real-time to brainstorm and discuss ideas.

When hiring, check your potential candidate’s experience with sync and async communication tools and if they can communicate effectively. 

Detail orientation is a critical skill for virtual assistants handling administrative tasks like payroll, scheduling, or managing projects. They should be sharp-eyed and active listeners, able to distill complex ideas into handy notes for reference.

Businesses rely on virtual assistants to create error-free content, emails, and presentations. Whatever the role, ensure your virtual assistant can minimize distractions and turn in the best quality work on time. 

You may be looking for a personal assistant to plan and manage your calendar. Or your marketing team may need a designer to create graphics and videos for social media. Either way, both roles require a virtual assistant to collaborate with your team to understand priorities and act proactively on them. 

Probe into shortlisted candidates' work experience in a global and remote team setting. Do they come from a background of collaborative culture and are skilled in the practice of collaboration?

Glean their responses for awareness of, as Harvard Business Review puts it, “appreciating others, being able to engage in purposeful conversations, productively and creatively resolving conflicts, and project management” for team performance. 

Nothing kills productivity like procrastination. And with the rise of the digital era, it’s almost impossible to ward off distractions, with our devices constantly lighting up with the latest news and the next big breakthrough.

Virtual assistants are not immune to this sensory assault. Add multiple clients into the mix and the ability to manage time effectively to maximize productivity and hit deadlines is apparent.

Top-rated contractors are masters of the art of effective time management and know how to manage their schedules to get more done in less time. To test for time management skills, ask candidates to run you through their approach to handling big-ticket projects and high-priority tasks all due around the same week.

Organization and time management go together. It’s hard to be organized without effective time management and vice-versa. Many independent contractors are solopreneurs who juggle multiple clients at once and chase competing deadlines.

If your virtual assistant doesn’t have strong organizational skills, they’d struggle to prioritize deliverables and likely miss deadlines.

Ask prospective hires open-ended questions about their daily workflow and preferred style of working. Do they schedule tasks and create to-do lists? What systems and tools do they use to streamline administrative duties and manage projects? Check answers for insights into their working style and if it fits yours.

In-house employees trade full-time jobs with alternative opportunities to work on their terms. The freedom to pick flexible working hours, clients, and projects is a strong incentive. According to a 2021 Upwork survey, American freelancers contributed $1.3 trillion in annual earnings to the US economy and more than half of non-freelance respondents expressed an interest in freelancing in the future. 

But freelancers also go in-house in search of a steady and predictable income.

Image Source: Superpath

Independent work is appealing but it also has its fair share of challenges. To successfully navigate the ins and outs of a virtual work environment, your hire must have solid self-motivation and concentration skills. Screen the resumes for the potential hires' experience in a virtual environment and the client history.

Their work experience on LinkedIn can also hold clues to reliability and credibility.

One common element between successful businesses is the will to measure performance and pursue effective strategies. Unless you hire a virtual assistant who’s comfortable with data and can interpret it to discover what’s working and not, you’d face difficulty identifying the right channels and tactics to focus on.

Let’s take an example. 

Social media is a powerful channel for SMBs to find traction with new audiences online. If you are a B2B company, LinkedIn paid ads may work for your business. Whereas for a B2C firm, Instagram may turn in good results. But without data to support either of these decisions, your virtual assistant may undertake social media activities that don’t yield any results and waste resources in the process.    

Creativity is not a hard skill for most jobs - unless you are hiring for a creative role. Think writing, design making, or audio and video editing. But beyond these functions, creativity is also necessary to discover novel solutions to complex business challenges.

If you don’t have the time to share detailed briefs or offer constant supervision, your virtual assistant must be able to test and run with unique ideas that solve on-the-job setbacks. 

Virtual assistants are an indispensable part of the post-pandemic workforce. Before hiring independent talent, identify skill gaps on your team and determine whether your business needs a full-time or part-time virtual assistant.

Get in touch to learn how Office Beacon empowers emerging businesses to build flexible teams and hit their goals.