Is your work endless? Do you require an assistant to relieve the workload?
It’s, indeed, a rock hard decision to appoint an assistant. You have to think about every vertical of the business operation and niche jobs. Besides, the capital is another factor. You can’t afford to employ an unskillful person. It will apparently be a loss of time, efforts and money to train the one who could wear multiple hats.
Hiring a virtual assistant can sail you across the business complexities. Let’s get through its definition and then, its importance.
Who is a virtual assistant (VA)?
The one, who offers a remote assistant in technical, creative and professional administrative jobs, is a virtual assistant. He outsources the skills that meet a specific business requirement. Let’s say, your organisation is overloaded with data mining projects. Despite burning the midnight oil, your data executives fail to produce the quality work. Moreover, the turnaround time exceeds. At this time, the virtual assistant services come into play.
How much a virtual assistant cost?
A salaried professional costs an arm and a leg. It means that you have to have a big pocket to afford a bundle of skills. But, a smart step can take you away from this expense. Let’s say, you pay $40 a day to a data researcher. His work clocks between 9 and 5. But, the upwork or outsourcing lets you get out of this typical diameter of work.
A Quora author claims of making $1700 to $2000 a month through a US based virtual assistant, viz. Upwork. On the other hand, Fiverr pays nearly $10 to a new freelancer. Likewise, there are several outsourcing companies that have a network over the WWW to offer economical virtual assistance. They come with flexible approach to customize package on-request. Moreover, you can catch professionals of almost every domain as a remote assistant.
Indian government is pushing it into a fashion by triggering freelancing work. It’s trying to employ unemployed people, as in government jobs, through its initiative of Digitize India. The jobless people or those who need extra income sign up to contribute in the digital India movement. In the nutshell, the remote or virtual assistant is a need of the hour.
Advantages of hiring a virtual assistant:
- Time savior: The proficient freelancer deploys his skills to shorten the turnaround time.
- Save revenue: Since it’s freelancing, an entrepreneur chooses the one who perfectly fits in his budget.
- Tediousness at bay: By signing a deal with the VA, one can combat non-core challenges like a walkover.
- Fixed cost: It being outsourced, the entrepreneur stays away from a fluctuating market value of the overhead expenses, manpower, and other related expenses.
- Expand growth: The entrepreneur can focus on core functions to align growth prospects.
- Best talent at reach: The virtual assistant attains expertise in a specific domain. Therefore, one can reach the outsourcer that possesses stronghold on a particular skill that he requires for expert solution.
- 24/7 availability: India, China and other parts of Asia are the most sought-after countries to seek outsourcing services because of their economical specimen of work. It pushes globalization. But most importantly, it’s the round o-clock availability that makes it a cup of tea of the western countries.
- Pay for performance: What the businessman pays is for the performance only. Let’s say, you have a dozen of web development projects in Australia. But, a project costs AU$10000 on an average. But, a virtual employee can put this costing down to a great extent.
How to hire a virtual assistant:
- Check your network, be it on the social media or the search engine
- Go for referrals, if your friends/colleagues have any.
- Filter the online list of virtual assistants while keeping their packages, flexibilities and skills into account.
- Negotiate the work and the cost.
- Put your terms and conditions upfront in terms of robust security, confidentiality and privacy.
- Sign a bond as a precautionary measure.
- Define the turnaround time.
- Define the quality that you seek.
- Provide a short training to make him understand the project.
- Assurance on working according to feedbacks.
- Coordinate 24/7.
- Evaluate efficiency consistently.