How a virtual assistant can save your start-up time and money

When you start a new business, it is easy to get overwhelmed by all the things you have to do. You’ve got to produce products or provide services, fill orders, ship packages, create content, and maybe even send out a weekly newsletter.

Chances are you’re trying to take care of everything by yourself and that's great for keeping costs down. Your business may be growing fast, but it isn’t quite at the point where you need to employ a couple more people full-time. Plus, when you hire a new person, you’ve got to train them. That’s going to take even more time. How are you going to find time with all the things you already have to do? You may be able to do it all, but chances are you’ll also burn out and feel overwhelmed by everything you have to do.

Don’t let your business suffer the consequences. A virtual assistant may be just what you need! These individuals can lift some of the burden off your shoulders by taking care of those boring, but necessary, administrative tasks so you can put your time and energy into really running your business.

How exactly does a virtual assistant help my business?

Client Relations

A virtual assistant can make the dreary task of getting back to clients a little bit easier. They can help you filter emails, voicemails, and other messages from clients and prioritize them. Any useless messages can be deleted, and the remainders can be sorted by urgency. That way, you’ll know which clients have important messages that need immediate replies, and which ones can wait for a better time. A virtual assistant can also help schedule meetings and keep you on top of any events you have scheduled for the week. Why plan yourself when they could do it for you?

Administrative Services

Virtual assistants do a lot more than schedule meetings. They can do lots of administrative work — document creation, file type conversion, travel arrangements, and other things that are too mundane for you to be doing yourself. It’s a great way to enjoy an organized business so you can spend your time focusing on the business’s core activities. Virtual assistants can also do research for your business, searching for cheaper suppliers or ways to streamline the production process.

Content Creation

If you’ve got social media for your business and a blog area on your website (which you should), a virtual assistant can aid you in creating content to publish. They can also properly format any content from external sources and write good captions for posts online. After content has been published a VA can also reply to comments and interact with your audience.

Social Media

Just about every business has social media accounts nowadays. It’s a great tool to reach and interact with customers. However, it takes a lot of time and effort to manage it. With a virtual assistant, you won’t have to worry about it. They can create content, schedule posts, and interact with your community online. They can also assess the effectiveness of each channel and help you determine which should receive your main focus.

Marketing

Marketing is an essential business activity for every company. You have to know how to present your goods and services to the audience you are trying to reach. Most virtual assistants are well-versed with different marketing tools — and they can help you market effectively. This may be through press releases, social media, influencers, and even newsletters.

Basic Website Help

If your business isn’t ready for a full-blown designer website, a virtual assistant may be able to help you set up something simple first. Most are knowledgeable about the basics of WordPress — web hosting, installing themes and plugins, posting content, and a lot of other things. He or she can help you develop a web design that is attractive and effective so your customers can have a great user experience on your site. Virtual assistants can also help you get started on SEO so you rank higher on search engine result pages, securing you a greater amount of traffic and therefore greater leads and sales.

Save Money With Part-time Help

Generally, virtual assistants don’t work full-time. Rather, they work when they are needed, so you won’t have to pay for a full-time employee (including wages, benefits, office equipment, deductions, etc.) if you aren’t even sure you have enough to keep them busy for the whole day. All you’ve got to pay for is the work they perform.

How much time do you spend booking a flight?

A virtual assistant can help you with your travel planning and booking.

It's easy to book a flight. However, over 50% of people spend more than an hour booking a simple flight. That's a lot of time. In fact, according to a study by Expedia, travel package bookers visited 38 travel websites 45 days prior to booking travel. That's a lot more than an hour.

Save time booking travel

You don't have to be a corporate executive to enjoy the benefits of a travel manager. A virtual assistant can manage your travel instead and save you time. She can research, plan, price and book your flight. Whether you're traveling for business or pleasure, your assistant can take care of the details. She can also have your rental car waiting at your destination airport, reserve your hotel, and plan your itinerary.

Get the best prices

How many times have you researched a flight to find the price has gone up significantly by the time you book it? Most of us don't have time to monitor the prices in real time, so let your virtual assistant do this for you. She can work with your preferred travel agency, book it online, or deal directly with your preferred airline. Plus, your assistant can manage your frequent flyer account to ensure you get the seat and meal options you want, ensure you get credit for miles flown, and even request the coveted upgrade!

Support while traveling

Unlike travel agencies that simply give you options on trips, a virtual assistant knows you. Not only can she handle the booking details, she's also behind the scenes for your entire trip. If anything goes awry, she can make on the spot changes and get you back on schedule. Want to make a change during the trip? Done. Book restaurant reservations on the fly — a virtual assistant can do that too!

Leave your travel details to a virtual assistant and enjoy your trip. Call My BTLR today to find out how easy it is.

What is a Virtual Assistant?

A virtual assistant can help your get your business up and running.

Entrepreneurs start with a lofty dream. You're going to mix things up, change the business world as we know it. However, once you get started you begin to realize how many seemingly mundane, boring things you have to do to actually get the business up and running. There are a lot of administrative tasks a business requires that may keep you from making your dream come to life. Why deal with the daily drudgery when you could hire a virtual assistant?

What exactly is a virtual assistant?

A virtual assistant is someone who takes cares of administrative duties for you remotely. They can reply to emails, do data entry, do website administrative work, and even handle your social media channels. Many of these people work on a contract or freelance basis, meaning you get to take advantage of the flexibility by only hiring them for as long as you need them.

Are you still unsure of whether your business could benefit from a virtual assistant? Read on to learn more about what a virtual assistant can offer.

You’ll have more time to do other things

Most entrepreneurs hate the lengthy meetings, drawn-out phone calls, and mundane emails piling up in their inboxes. It can easily take up a lot of your time, meaning you don’t have as much time to focus on your core business activities. A virtual assistant frees up your time, allowing you to do so.

They’ve got expertise

Virtual assistants are becoming more and more widespread and the field is becoming more competitive. As a result, many have developed other skills — social media management, marketing, copywriting, or maybe even basic accounting. If your business has yet to require full-time employees for these tasks, you may find that a virtual assistant is just what you need. Plus, you won’t have to think about tax, employee benefits, or yearly contracts.

You’ll be able to entrust more tasks to them as time goes on

In the beginning, you’ll probably have your virtual assistant carry out simple duties — email management, customer service management, or bookkeeping. If they perform well, you’ll find that as time goes on, you’ll be able to entrust more complex and important duties to them, further freeing up your time to do other things.

You can strategize and grow your business

Chances are you started your business doing everything yourself, maybe with a person or two by your side. This is a great way to cut costs, but it also can be stressful and leave less time for long-term thinking. Having a virtual assistant take care of time-consuming but otherwise mundane tasks gives you time and energy to put some thought into where you want your business to go, and how you can take it there.

Ready to hire a virtual assistant? My BTLR can help. Contact us today to learn more about our USA based virtual assistants and how to get started.