A Virtual Assistant may be an office administration professional, an SEO specialist, a web developer or any other individual who works from the comfort of their own home office or a leased office space or anywhere they want to be!
A Virtual Assistant can be engaged from overseas or here in Australia and generally works online completing tasks you assign to them.
What does a Virtual Assistant do?
Well, there are endless ways this can be answered, but in short, a Virtual Assistant does the majority of things that a personal assistant or office administrator does, but they’re never in your office. Answering telephones, replying to emails, invoicing your clients… anything you can do online, your Virtual Assistant can help you with.
What should I task my Virtual Assistant to do?
A great way to determine this is write down all those tasks that may be repetitive in nature or even tasks that you don’t like doing personally. But once you get to know your VA, you can task them with challenges of new work to make things a little more interesting for them.
Your tasks should be documented as system processes and given to your Virtual Assistant to manage.
Tasks your VA might do to help in your business
Advancing technology means that you don’t need to hire an administration professional to sit in your office. Below is a tiny list of tasks that VAs might regularly carry out:
- Taking incoming calls and scheduling bookings;
- Updating the content of your websites;
- Updating your social media accounts and replying to your customers;
- Replying to your client’s enquiries via email;
- Debt collection and accounts receivable tasks;
- Data entry;
- Calendar management;
- Booking travel;
- Writing board reports;
and much, much more!
Finding a Virtual Assistant
There are many and varied ways of finding and securing a VA. Some questions to ask yourself first:
- Full-time or part-time?
- Working from home or a leased office space?
- In Australia or overseas? Are time zone differences important to you?
- What skillset do they need?
If you engage an agency to source a VA for you, those questions and more will be part of the hiring process.
A Google search will give you multiple options on where to find a VA,
you can do this yourself or use an agency to find a VA for you. There
will be an associated fee if using an agency but the vetting process
will be done for you with a shortlist of candidates provided for your
final interviews.
Good luck in engaging a Virtual Assistant to assist in your business!