An in-depth understanding of your business needs and performing the necessary due diligence work before outsourcing; will make it easier for you to identify the type of resource that suits you. It will also help you figure out the number of hours in a day you will be engaging their services.

Your Personal Assistant or Receptionist can be engaged for as long or as short a while, based on your requirement. For those of you that are unsure, my suggestion has always been to start off small and then increase the number of hours as you go.
Maintain a clear and strong communication channel with the Outsourcing organisation to make sure you are not locked into any strict contract, enabling you to expand or shrink as needed.

Eventually, if you get busier, you will need to move towards a fully dedicated resource to meet the increasing demands of your organisation.

Knowing that you can expand or shrink your virtual resources gives you massive power to:

Example of a Flexible Virtual Resource Provider

“When things were a bit tight for us financially during the early part of 2010, Marisa happily put our hours to half time for a few months. (Our really quiet months).”

A ‘Full-time’ position is like eating three lavish meals. ‘Part-time’ is to skip dinner as two meals a day are enough!

Friendship is a pretty full-time occupa-tion if you really are friendly with somebody. You can’t have too many friends because then you’re just not really friends.

– Truman Capote

Do I need a part time or full time resource and why?

When do I need help the most?

Am I ready for it?