Too much to do, not enough time?
Sounds familiar?
Are you solopreneur, small business owner who is wearing many hats in your business? You are the CEO, Secretary, Events Manager, Marketing Manager, Graphic Designer, Accounts Clerk and after all that, you are also a friend, wife, cook, mum, teacher and more. Your work is never ending and often you feel overwhelmed. Taking care of everything leaves you with no quality time to yourself. No time to learn something new, no time to catch up with friends nor look after your health and wellbeing. Your life is constant race against the time. Race where there are no winners.
Guess what? You did not sign up to be your own boss to put up with this.
With help from a Virtual Assistant (VA), you can free up time you spend on doing things you don’t enjoy. Those things you are not quite sure how to master, those things that rob you your sleep, that weekend away with your girlfriends, your baby’s first steps or family celebration.
VA can look after your business whilst you focus on things that matter to you, like friends and family, self-development, working on your long-term strategy and putting steps in place helping you to grow your business.
Outsourcing can be scary and letting someone to take over your backend operations can be daunting, I get it. This is your business which you are proud of and delegating tasks to someone else means trusting a complete stranger and letting that someone into your inner circle, but believe me, when you can see your bank balance grow and have more time to enjoy your life, it’s all worth it.
Virtual Assistant is a fellow business owner and knows too well how to nurture your business to make it flourish.
Not quite sure what a VA can help you with? I suggest writing down everything you do in your business, be it a regular daily routine, weekly task or an annual job. Be it a project to put in place longer term processes or as easy as answering your business calls. Write down all these jobs you haven’t started but know you need to be doing in order to succeed. Once you have your list, create another column next to it to decide whether with some training and knowledge about your business these tasks can be undertaken by someone else. Third thing to consider- you may want to think how much time you spend on doing these tasks or think these tasks would rob you of your precious time with your kids and/or friends. Here’s a table to show how much time you can save by outsourcing and extra funds you could be making from it.
Below some tasks that can be easily outsourced.
Customer service
- Managing inbox and responding to emails
- Troubleshooting customer issues and providing solutions
- Drafting canned emails to frequently asked questions and recurrent scenarios
- Sending out contracts, customer agreements
- Maintaining CRM
General administration
- Answering Phone calls and taking messages
- Creating Word Documents and setting up spreadsheets
- Creating forms
- Preparing Presentations
- Ordering supplies and sourcing suppliers
- Filing (hard copy and soft copy)
- Online research
- Data Entry
Executive support
- Taking minutes
- Drafting correspondence
- Preparing agendas and following up on action lists
- Diary support and appointment scheduling
- Writing general operating procedures
Social media management
- Putting together social media plan/strategy for the year
- Producing the post schedule
- Hashtag research
- Engaging visual content creation for posts and stories
- Post scheduling for Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest
- Client engagement by commenting and responding to direct messages
- Organising giveaways or contests
Copywriting
- Writing content for your promotional collateral
- Providing text for your website
- Writing blog posts
- Drafting newsletters
Accounts
- Recording expenses
- Credit Card reconciliations
- Bill payments
- Preparing client invoices
- Sending out quotes
- Preparing Monthly Reporting
Event management
(Conference, planning day, retreat)
- Researching venues and sourcing quotes
- Researching and booking speakers
- Managing Invitations list
- Creating a marketing plan
- Booking vendors such as caterer, photographer, security
- Arranging event collateral and gift bags
- Setting up feedback survey
Website management
- Uploading content to the website
- Updating text, images and product selection
- Formatting and creating new pages
Recruitment support
- Drafting recruitment adverts
- Placing adverts on Job portals and LinkedIn
- Conducting initial screening dependent on criteria
- Scheduling interviews
- Conducting onboarding of new staff
There – 50 tasks that you can easily outsource to save time and focus on what really matters. I could add more but I am sure it’s enough to make you want to consider hiring a VA. But remember, Virtual Assistant is not your employee. Consider it more as a partner, someone to share the load with, to bounce off ideas from and an accountability buddy.
