How Virtual Assistants Can Grow Your Business

Starting a business is already an impressive feat, although growing that business is a whole new ballgame. Plenty of people have built their own businesses and have truly worked hard day after day and doubled their income over and over again. However, for many of them, there is a plateau where they can only make so much money because they only have so many hours in the day. If you have reached this point in your business, it may be time to get some outside help.

What Is a Virtual Assistant

That outside help would be a virtual assistant! A virtual assistant is someone online that you can hire to do any various tasks that take up your time. Just think about it, if you have a landscaping business, you likely have hired guys to help with(or take over) the manual labor that the job entails. Likewise, these virtual assistants can do all the mundane, time-consuming tasks that businesses require.

Then after you have all the virtual assistants that you need, you are free to do the important work in your business. Plus you finally have time to try out all those ideas you have for growing your business. This is the very reason that business owners are able to rapidly grow their business after hiring a few virtual assistants, they simply have more time!

What Can a Virtual Assistant Do for You?

Great, so these assistants can help you out, but what can they do exactly? Well, it is obvious that the backbone of your business will still have to be you. Do not expect to hire a virtual assistant and then let them run loose forever. They are like any other employee, they have to be trained and supervised. With that being said, let’s take a look at what they can do for you.

• Post on social media - This one is huge. Currently, I post on all social media platforms 12 times a day. That takes a ton of time that I do not have, but it brings in leads so it is worth doing. With a little initial guidance, a virtual assistant can make your social media content and post it on time. Then at the end of the day, you can see that your brand posted awesome posts everywhere! 

• Editing - Editing videos or even podcast audio is a time-consuming task, and if you are a landscaper you are probably not an expert video creator. However, there are tons of really awesome virtual assistants that can take your raw footage and make a movie-quality youtube video. Then they can chop up that video and post it around on social media.

• Accounting - Your finances are extremely important as a small business. Finances and especially taxes can get very complicated, so unless you want to put dozens of hours into it every quarter, an accounting service is an awesome idea.

• Writing blog posts (like this one) - for nearly all businesses a blog is a great idea. Millions of people google questions related to your industry every day, if you have an article covering the topic, you can also offer your own services or products. 

For example, if someone googles a term like “best lawn mower for small yards” then you have an article with a great mower you have used and you include an affiliate link, you will surely sell a few of them. Plus you can also get ads on your website that will pay you for every view you get. Having multiple revenue streams is key to any successful business.

• Calendar management

If you do not already have an automated tool for your scheduling, a virtual assistant can confirm the best time for clients and also do confirmation calls before the job. Plus it is a huge relief to be able to just show up to a job without having to go through the hassle of scheduling it.

• Email marketing

Making a good-looking email and sending it out every week takes time. If you are like many online business people, you may have been ignoring your email list recently. A virtual assistant can make beautiful emails and send them on time as often as you like.

• Assemble monthly reports

Much like accounting, it is important to know how your business is doing every month. I have personally spent dozens of hours putting together reports just to see how my business is doing or how much it has been growing. Unless you just like putting reports together, you just care about the end numbers, which a virtual assistant can find for you.

• Answer phone calls

If you have a business that generates leads over the phone, hiring a call center to pick that phone up for you can be a huge time saver. Most of the time the virtual assistant or service that does this for you also books your appointments.

• Plus much more

These are just a few examples, and every company has different needs. Long story short, a virtual assistant can do nearly everything in your business. 

Learn the Basics Yourself

Before you go hiring freelancers willy nilly, you need to know how to do whatever task you are hiring for. If you hire a freelancer to do something, and you have no idea how works, well they could do a poor job and you would never know it.

Obviously, you can not become an expert in every field that your business requires, but you can learn the basics. For example, if you want to start a blog, do a ton of research, get a website built, and then write a dozen or so articles to get a grasp on how it works. Then you can hire an expert that knows more about it than you do and you can pay them to do a much better job. So you get better quality content, and you do not even have to touch it.

Don’t Be Afraid to Cycle Through Freelancers

A lot of virtual assistants are awesome, but a lot of them are crap. You will definitely need to hire multiple assistants or freelancers to do the repetitive tasks. Then they will disappoint you and then you will need to find another one. It is very common to cycle through freelancers and you should not feel bad about it, it’s just business. 

With that being said, you will eventually find a freelancer or two that really work well with you and repeatedly produce great work. It may take some time but they are well worth the work.

Build a Team of Virtual Assistants

After you get a few virtual assistants, it then becomes your job to manage your virtual assistants. Which sounds like a lot of repetitive work doesn’t it? What do we do to eliminate repetitive work? We hire a virtual assistant! So after you start to build a team of assistants, you then should hire a manager for your assistants.

This one manager is then your only point of contact. You can also make them responsible for hiring other freelancers to do any work you need. This becomes an awesome resource because then you can say to your manager “hey, I need this and this” and it gets done, regardless if you have ever hired someone that knows how to do it.