What are a few immediate questions that pop up in your mind when you see the title of this blog? The first one might be — what is a project-based virtual assistant?
It may be followed by why should I hire one?
Now, as a small or medium-sized business owner, you are more than familiar with juggling varied responsibilities every day. From managing your vendors to building an entire team, there is always more than one thing that demands your attention. If you are running a service business, you need to communicate with freelancers, agencies, clients, and employees for projects. With all these people working on multiple projects, there must be someone who supervises the unhindered functioning of every individual.
Hiring a project-based virtual assistant gives you the liberty to delegate a substantial portion of your responsibility to a trained professional and put your business in an auto-pilot mode. The virtual project manager ensures that all tasks are executed on time and gets back to you daily with a virtual assistant project report to keep the process running smoothly.
What is a Virtual Assistant?
A virtual assistant is someone who offers various services to entrepreneurs or businesses from a remote location. While they are not your regular in-office employees, they have access to the necessary tools and data to get the job done virtually.
Traditionally, a virtual assistant was a self-employed individual who was an expert in performing specific tasks.
At present, mainly post lockdown, it has taken the shape of an industry. Today, the world is full of VA companies where a wide range of professionals, be it web designers, content writers, digital marketers, accountants, etc., work hand-in-hand in or for the same VA companies and assist their clients virtually. These professionals are Virtual Assistants with specific skill sets and expertise.
The most significant benefit of hiring a VA company over a freelancer is that the company provides you backup, more options in terms of work management, and the option to change your VA based on your preferences.
How impressive is that?
Top Benefits of Hiring a Virtual Assistant or Project Manager
- Outsourcing Non-Core Tasks Increases Efficiency
Entrepreneurs and businesses deal with a list of non-core actions like scheduling meetings, sending emails, data entry, internet research, handling customer queries, and sending newsletters. These are not essentially core tasks but must necessarily get done by an in-house team member. Making your in-house team take care of such non-core tasks takes away from their productive time.
Outsourcing all such non-core tasks to a project-based virtual assistant with the right set of skills will increase the efficiency of both these tasks and your in-house team. It helps you invest all your time to perform your set of core tasks.
- Reduces Operational Costs
One of the biggest reasons entrepreneurs and business owners consider hiring a virtual assistant is their overhead costs. Instead of recruiting a full-time employee to get a small job done, you can hire a project management virtual assistant to take care of it. Since they charge mostly on a task or hourly basis, you only end up paying for the work done.
Moreover, virtual assistants work remotely. So, you can rid yourself of expenses related to office space, systems, and even internet connection. Well, that’s not all. There are no training costs when it comes to virtual assistants. While you must invest a certain number of resources and time into training a full-time employee, virtual assistants work solely on tasks they excel at. Now that is a lot of time and money saved!
- Streamlines Your Operations
If you have not yet leveraged services from a virtual project, you are bound to be surprised!
A virtual assistant smoothens your processes and streamlines your entire operations. Additionally, they can watch out for discussions and conversations about your industry or brand on social media, keep an eye on the activities of your competitors, collect feedback from your existing clients, and most importantly, monitor your markets. The more virtual assistants work with you, the more ideas they implement to streamline your tasks.
- Round the Clock Customer Service
Most businesses today have a global customer base. However, catering to international time zones and global needs can be pretty difficult when your staff and business are located in a specific area.
For instance, if you are situated in New York, your business hours will be midnight for customers residing in Melbourne, Australia. The only way of dealing with this is to make sure that your New York office operates 24 hours a day. But with virtual assistants, you are in luck! As they are remotely based, you can hire them from across the globe to take care of clients from multiple time zones 24 x 7. It allows you as well as your staff, to strike an excellent work-life balance.
- Creating Impressive Content
As a brand, you would want to establish your place within your industry. Researching and developing content around your service or product, you get to add value to the kinds of customer experience you offer. However, content creation is a time-consuming process and is exactly a virtual assistant project that you would want to delegate. A skilled virtual content writer can handle your content creation, right from market research to publishing to rake in higher traffic to your website.
- Manages Your Timeline
Delivering a particular project is not as complex as delivering it without a prior plan. Maintaining the timeline for your project is the most efficient and simplest way of managing and tracking its activities. A timeline breaks down your project into smaller achievable units, gives you a picture of where your team stands, makes progress at every stage and helps you identify the weak points. A project management virtual assistant can easily handle and prepare these timelines to ensure that your deadlines are respected and met on time.
- Frees Up Your Time for Strategic Thinking
Since a virtual project manager is skilled enough to take care of most non-core activities for you, you get more free time to focus on enhancing your business.
Instead of wasting your resources and time carrying out everyday operations, you can start thinking strategically about your business from a long-term outlook. It helps you list goals that can eventually guide your business towards long-term success and better performance.
- Offers Peace of Mind
Lastly, having a virtual project manager take care of your tasks gives you peace of mind, which undeniably, is priceless. So, the cost of your sanity is to delegate all your tasks faithfully to someone who is both skilled and efficient enough to take care of them. Multitasking is a lot less effective than monotasking, and virtual assistants help you focus on vital things that have been ignored so far.
So, the next time you ask yourself, “why should I hire a project-based virtual assistant” the answer lies in the plethora of excellent benefits mentioned above. Simply put, they can streamline your activities in absolutely no time!
At MyTasker, we have a team of dedicated virtual assistants skilled to take care of your core and non-core tasks ranging from managing your accounts on social media to handling phone calls, all the way designing websites, creating high-quality content, and generating quality leads. Moreover, since they do not need continued supervision, it is a win-win for all!
