If you’ve ever tried to manage a business on your own, you know how difficult and time-consuming it can be. The number of tasks and responsibilities you must take on can become overwhelming, especially as your business grows. Consider all the tasks you must complete, such as travel arrangements, scheduling, record keeping, answering calls, writing emails, managing your social media, and so on.

If you’ve ever tried to manage a business on your own, you know how difficult and time-consuming it can be. The number of tasks and responsibilities you must take on can become overwhelming, especially as your business grows. Consider all the tasks you must complete, such as travel arrangements, scheduling, record keeping, answering calls, writing emails, managing your social media, and so on.

With the rise of remote working, becoming a virtual assistant has become a popular career path for many skilled individuals. VA’s, as they’re more commonly known, are a more flexible alternative to a full-time personal assistant. You can hire a VA through their monthly packages that are tailored to the size of your company, allowing you to
pay only for productive time. This allows you to save on costs too.

What Exactly Is a Virtual Assistant?

A virtual assistant, in its most basic form, is someone who assists a business remotely. Businesses realized that they didn’t need to hire a full-time personal assistant to handle time-consuming tasks. This is because of the virtually limitless array of tools and software available, as well as advancements in the internet, making the process
more reliable and faster.

Countless entrepreneurs and online businesses that require assistance but don’t want to invest in an office space for extra employees are especially in demand for VA’s. Small and medium-sized businesses rely on them, particularly for specific tasks such as communication, social media management, and organization.

Countless entrepreneurs and online businesses that require assistance but don’t want to invest in an office space for extra employees are especially in demand for VA’s. Small and medium-sized businesses rely on them, particularly for specific tasks such as communication, social media management, and organization.

Reasons to Hire a Virtual Assistant?

The internet now offers limitless opportunities for business owners to grow and distinguish themselves from their competitors. It also makes networking and the formation of strong professional relationships easier for everyone. With all of that, the benefits of hiring a virtual assistant have never been clearer.

Cost-Effective Alternative to Personal Assistants

Running a business typically involves a wide range of tasks, but some of these can be minor but time-consuming. Rather than hiring a full-time employee, you can employ a virtual assistant to handle those tedious minor responsibilities. Because virtual assistants charge on an hourly or task basis, it will help you reduce your overhead
costs.

When you hire a virtual assistant, you can also save money on employee training. When you hire a new employee, you must sometimes invest time, money, and resources in their training. A virtual assistant, on the other hand, comes equipped with the specific skill sets that fit your business needs.

Free up Time to Grow Your Business

Because virtual assistants can handle your non-core tasks, you’ll find that you have more time to focus on strategizing and growing your business.

Rather than wasting precious time and resources on day-to-day operations, you can use them to think strategically about the business’s future and its growth potential. This enables you to set goals that will guide your company’s performance and long-term success.

Scale Your Business Faster

As your company expands, you’ll inevitably need more hands on deck. Instead of wasting valuable time and money on the recruiting process and searching for new talent to meet your rising work demands, a virtual assistant will help you scale faster. This is because VA’s typically work on a project-by-project basis. You’ll enjoy the piece of mind of knowing you’ll always have a reliable source of talent when you need it.

Increase Efficiency

Sending emails and newsletters, dealing with clients, research, scheduling, data entry, and a multitude of others are some of the non-core operations that your company must deal with regularly. Using your in-house employees to handle these jobs will significantly reduce your efficiency.

A virtual assistant will take care of all non-core tasks for you, so you won’t have to worry about allocating your employees’ time and effort for them.

Offer 24/7 Customer Service

If you run an online business, chances are you have international customers. And one of the most difficult issues you’ll face when this is the case is providing round-the-clock customer support, especially if all of your employees are in the same city or country. For example, if you live in Canada, your working hours in New Zealand or Australia would be at night. The solution to this problem is to hire a virtual assistant in the time zones of your clients. You can also allow your employees to have a good work-life balance while still being able to serve your customers 24/7.

How to Hire a Virtual Assistant

As we saw, hiring a virtual assistant can provide businesses with countless benefits to maximize income and facilitate growth. As a business owner, you’ll reach a point in which it will become virtually impossible to handle all the load of caring for your company.

Many virtual assistants have a wide range of skills that are beneficial to you, even in ways you couldn’t account for. But you might be wondering where to look for and hire one?

Make a detailed list of all the chores and obligations that you’d rather not or can’t accomplish yourself as a first step. Here are some time-consuming activities that you can delegate to a virtual assistant:

• Writing documents, emails, and social media copy
• Oral communication and customer service
• Preparing presentations, spreadsheets, and other computer related tasks
• Scheduling meetings, events, and tasks
• Managing social media and communities
• Website management

The list you make will provide you with a good idea of the skill set you need in the ideal virtual assistant for you. You can then look for an assistant on freelancing sites such as Upwork, Fiverr, and many others.

While these platforms do have a lot of good talent available, there are also numerous low-skilled individuals offering their services. As a result, sifting through hundreds of thousands of candidates can be tedious and time-consuming.

As a better alternative, you can use the services of an outsourcing agency such as Smart Staff.

Smart Staff understands that hiring remote workers from other countries can be difficult, so we set out to remove this barrier and provide you with the assistance you deserve.

We can put you in touch with the best virtual assistants New Zealand has to offer. We guarantee that the virtual assistant NZ you receive is perfectly suited for your needs and will even provide you with added value thanks to our high standards and vetting processes.