What is Virtual Assistance and how does it work?

Ever wonder how many successful Solopreuners (A business owner who runs their business all by themselves and have no staff assisting them) accomplish so much on their own. The challenges for such business owners are innumerable and are quite common among the said diaspora. They have multiple clients and receive tens if not hundreds of emails hourly while trying to grow their businesses. Well, here’s a clue… Virtual Assistant.
THAT’S RIGHT! Assistants and support teams!

Today, you can hire a virtual assistant based in the Philippines while you live and run your business in North America or Europe. Virtual assistants aim to make your everyday administrative or operation related tasks easier so you can focus on running your business.

Who hires virtual assistants?

There is no straight answer to this question. There are VAs who are hired by yoga studios, travel influencers, famous authors, entrepreneurs, motivational speakers, bars and restaurants, food bloggers, Mom bloggers, fashion designers, video agencies, and so on. There are also VAs who hire VAs to help manage THEiR business.

If you run your business online or if a lot of your business processes are reliant on tasks that could be accomplished online, then hiring a virtual assistant may be suited for you. Startups and SMEs hire virtual assistants to reduce operational cost since they do not need to maintain office space and pay utilities.

What are virtual assistants and remote workers?

A virtual assistant (VA), as the name indicates, is an assistant that helps and supports your business virtually. Virtual assistants and remote teams are employees based in a different city or country, meaning that the person is based at a remote location and is trained to facilitate you and your business when called upon and is NOT a robot. In short, a VA is basically a business owner’s right hand. Many companies who hire a virtual staff, consider them as full-time employees as they are crucial to the daily operations of the business. The truth is: virtual assisting is part of an $105 billion (and growing! ) outsourcing market according to Outsource Workers. Entire companies are leaving their offices (even in big fancy Silicon Valley!) to go entirely remote but guess what they ALL still need in order to run?

There are a many benefits to hiring virtual staff, but first, what kind of tasks can they do?

What can a virtual assistant do?

Apart from bringing you your coffee, there’s isn’t anything that a virtual assistant can’t do. Businesses hire virtual assistants for an array of business needs. More so, when their main goal is to hire someone to do the repetitive or operational tasks so that business managers can focus on the strategy or growing their business. Depending on what businesses need them for, virtual assistants can assist with almost every work-related task. Among other things, some of the most common tasks that virtual assistants are hired for are social media management, operational and administrative tasks, website design, community management, content management, blog writing and ghost writing. There are also those VAs that specialize in project management.

In addition to those, companies can hire role-specific VAs to handle specialized duties as well. In these scenarios, virtual assistants have a specific skill set that only allows them to tackle just one domain. For example, sales and marketing, public relations, or customer service.

The most common types of virtual assistant jobs:

• Administrative Virtual Assistant  –  Helps with office management like managing emails, calls, scheduling meetings, managing contracts, making travel arrangements, organizes events details, and more.
• Digital Marketing Virtual Assistant  –  Manages social media pages such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn; Creates content and advertisement for these platforms and in search engines; Writes articles and other forms of content for blogs and websites.
• Online Shop Virtual Assistant  –  Handles email and chat sales support or answers inquiries from customers; Manages data entry and edits product images and categories; Handles shipment and return of products.
• Bookkeeping Virtual Assistant  –  Manages inventory and budgeting; Handles year-end bookkeeping, payroll processing, payment of credit cards, and more.
• Real Estate Virtual Assistant  –  Gets leads or clients for real estate properties; Answer prospect buyers’ inquiries, sets up meetings; Encodes data, files necessary paperwork, creates reports.
• Data Management Virtual Assistant  –  Prepares, compiles, and sorts data entry; Reviews data for accuracy, generates reports, enters data into CRM system.

What are the benefits of hiring virtual assistants?

Did you know that having virtual assistants is a win-win situation? It has many benefits to business owners, as well as members of the remote staff. As virtual assistants work remotely, businesses save extra expenses related to providing them with space and equipment for them to contribute. This saves the business many dollars and much time and effort so they can focus on other aspects of their business, which is perhaps one of the major reasons why business look to hire Virtual Assistants.

Benefits to business owners:

• Hire the best talent from any part of the world  –  Due to the nature of this line of work, you don’t have to be limited to hiring people from your country or city. Instead, you can access talents from across the world!
• Manage a business 24/7   –  If you are an e-commerce store or a business owner that needs assistance 24/7 such as answering inquiries, then hiring remote administrative assistants from different time zones will be the right fit for you. They can also work in shifts best suited to their time zone.
• Access to a younger, more dynamic workforce  –  More and more young people are embracing the digital nomad lifestyle or remote working. According to a report by the World Economic Forum, virtual teams are transforming the workplace and the younger generation prefers this setup.
• Remote workers are more productive  –  According to a Harvard Business Review article, virtual assistants and remote employees are more productive because their stress levels are lower. As they don’t have to stress about commuting to work, their morale is boosted and they complete nearly an extra day’s worth of work every week compared to their colleagues who worked onsite.
• No overhead costs – Having a full virtual team located remotely decreases your operational costs. This means you don’t have to pay for a physical office, utility bills, even internet connection.

Benefits to virtual assistants:

• • Virtual assistants can work at their own pace  –  Since different people have different energy levels throughout the day, people who work from home can work at their own pace and be more productive overall.
  • Workers are not exposed to bad weather  –  They start work fresh and energized because they do not have to travel outside and be exposed to bad weather. This also keeps them healthy and safe.
  • Working from home reduces costs for your virtual team  –  They don’t have to commute or drive to the office and the result is they don’t lose precious hours in the traffic. At the same time, they also don’t have to spend for lunch, so they get to save their money. In turn, this translates to lower rates as they don’t need to charge to offset these costs of working.

Remote workers spend more time at home and with their families  – 

One of the best benefits of working from home.

Now that you understand who a virtual assistant is and what they do, are you ready to hire your virtual assistant?