It pays to put in the time and effort with a virtual assistant to get to know them and how you can work together to make the relationship and your business blossom.

The Benefits of Working with a Virtual Assistant

If you’re reading this there’s a good chance that you see the ways work has been transformed during 2020. We’re at the beginning of grand reshaping of the ways we work. The speed of digital transformation was already rapid but it’s been further accelerated by the pandemic, leading to much more remote work and a reliance on digital communications that can help you manage the transition.

Many people are looking to hire a virtual assistant to help them adapt to a digital workplace. From admin work to marketing services and even website maintenance… real estate virtual assistants are gaining a lot of traction as an affordable, invaluable asset when it comes to standing out online and reaching an audience who is living and working through their mobile devices.

Hiring a virtual assistant can feel slightly awkward at first but that will soon pass. Soon you’ll be finding ways that you can maximize the potential of this new type of business relationship. By passing off a portion of your workload to someone else, it will free up your time to focus on the parts of the business that only you can do. You’ll soon realize how much valuable work you are able to get done without being bogged down by the more redundant parts of your day. Working with a virtual assistant becomes both freeing and valuable to your business as well as your personal life.

Teachable. Repeatable. Scalable. – Three Keywords of Outsourcing Success

In a recent post, we explained how a great way to fail at outsourcing is by moving over too much, too quickly or moving the wrong type of tasks offshore’. We suggest starting to work with a virtual assistant slowly, monitor them closely and then build up momentum.

When choosing tasks to offload to your virtual assistant, try to keep these three things in mind. Is the work:

  • Teachable – Work towards being able to teach someone how to do the work by creating a video tutorial of how to perform the task. Once you get that right, it shows how well you understand the task that you need done, and it frees you up from ever having to do any more onboarding later on.
  • Repeatable – Shifting over repeatable tasks supercharges your team to focus more on building the more complex operational or relational needs of the business. Repeatable tasks that come up frequently are great for virtual assistants as these will become the backbone of their workload and give you additional time to focus your efforts elsewhere.
  • Scalable – The nature of a well-run virtual assistant is that they have the ability to scale up or down quickly by adding more virtual assistants to your team. The more teachable and repeatable the task, the easier it becomes to scale your team as your business begins to grow!

By making sure your tasks are teachable, repeatable, and scalable, you’ll be able to get your virtual assistant up to speed quickly so that you can get back to work spending time and energy on tasks that only you can handle.

When You Find the Right Virtual Assistant, Half the Battle is Won

You need a VA with a good command of your native language, who you can trust with your data and who understands your specific business needs and objectives. Once you’ve found that person, you can start with simple tasks that give the VA a good overall view of what you do and who your clients are. Start with tasks that occur daily so that you can monitor their performance closely.

At the end of the day, business is primarily about relationships. Build a relationship with your VA and try to learn about their strengths and weaknesses, just like any other employee. It’s important to integrate your virtual assistant into your team so that they have all the access they need to perform their tasks adequately. Keeping them at an arm’s length because you don’t trust your VA is a sure way to make their productivity flounder and the relationship fail

Virtual Assistants in The Philippines

There are a couple of reasons why so many US-based organizations choose to work with virtual assistants from the Philippines. They find that the agents are well-educated, tech-savvy and typically have great written and spoken English. They have a solid infrastructure behind them that ensures stable internet, minimal downtime and a willingness to work flexible hours. Furthermore, the exchange rate to the Philippines guarantees that the work can be done very affordably and still offer your VA a healthy standard of living.

It is our experience that you truly do get what you pay for when it comes to outsourcing any business process, including a virtual assistant. But if you’re willing to cultivate the relationship and commit to hiring a remote employee, you’ll be able to take a lot of the stress out of your working day by partnering with a talented virtual assistant in the Philippines.