What if the growth of your business caught you unprepared? You start to realise you are being flooded with unread emails. Scheduling meetings with clients is getting tedious with too many of them wanting to have a piece of your time. And then you start missing social media updates, your network clamoring for more of your content online. Your long term customers are raising hell for not receiving any replies from you. Your business is swallowing you alive. What should you do?

Why not dump these tasks to a virtual assistant? No time to do everything? Focus on the essentials of your business and then turn over the less critical to a VA! Online tools have made it possible to streamline VA workflow, making it very efficient to hire one.

There is no doubt now is the best time to hire a virtual assistant. But what are the tasks they can actually do for you?

Emails and Scheduling

If you are running a business you would know how emails can easily pile up. You can end up wasting hours catching up with random people. Then there is scheduling of appointments and managing your calendar. Hiring a VA can free your time so that it is possible for you to meet multiple clients or pursue big leads, rather than sifting through emails. What else can they do?

1.      Build up your database

2.      Filter your emails and check for spam

3.      Take over customer service management tasks

4.      Send greeting cards or event invitations

5.      Arrange your travels

6.      Remind you of business-changing appointments

7.      Schedule meetings and other engagements

If you are currently handling hundreds of contacts or serving just over a thousand customers, imagine getting all these tasks done for you. You will free up so much time you will have countless chances to improve your company’s bottom-line.

There is no doubt now is the best time to hire a virtual assistant.

File Storage

Many business owners are too distracted to mind where they put their files. Knowing where everything is would mean spending less time searching for a piece of document in the sea of drives and folders. Fortunately, VA’s now have the competency and skill set to organise business files for you. They can even sync your folders with cloud storage giving you access to your files anywhere. What else can a VA do with your data?

1.      Google Drive and Dropbox organisation

2.      Data entry

3.      Manage spreadsheets

4.      Prepare presentations

5.      Merge and convert PDF files

Administrative tasks

Administrative tasks might look negligible in the grand scheme of things but it is necessary. Mundane, maybe, but vital in keeping a business moving forward. VA’s can create reports for you and even assume the role of a project manager to make sure your team is at par with their deliverables. Other administrative functions they can do for you include:

1.      Preparing minutes for online meetings

2.      Creating templates for documents

3.      Creating reports

4.      Creating forms

5.      Doing receptionist tasks

6.      Checking your voicemail

7.      Sending out client invoices

Hiring a VA allows you to focus on the core activities of your business.

Social Media and Online Marketing

One of the best ways to market your business online is through social media. While taking care of one platform is manageable, making sure that multiple platforms are updated can mean expending many hours in social media. Because of its people-centric nature, social media demands engagement from business owners. Having a Facebook page on top of a personal Facebook is already time consuming. Adding YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn to the mix could easily eat up all your time.

VA’s can take care of the following online marketing tasks:

1.      Create FB Pages and Groups

2.      Post FB updates

3.      Manage FB Insights

4.      Create and manage Twitter accounts

5.      Create and manage Instagram

6.      Grow your network across multiple social media platforms

7.      Respond to inquiries and comments across multiple social media platforms

Hiring a VA allows you to focus on the core activities of your business. Instead of sorting your documents you can invest that time thinking about streamlining your operations. Instead of answering product inquiries on social media, you can develop new products. By hiring a VA you empower yourself to do bigger things. Lead your business to success, for other tasks, dump it to your VA!