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Yes, of course, you might be thinking about a Virtual Assistant like Siri, Alexa, or Cortana. However, a non-artificial Intelligence Virtual Assistant could be seriously more effective and efficient than your first virtual assistants’ thoughts. In this article, we discuss what a virtual assistant can do and why it is important for you and your business to have one

 

First thing first… I’m part of A3L Virtual Assistants, and we just launched our website a few days ago. So I think it is super important to give our followers a briefly but condensed summary of what do virtual assistants do, how exactly they work, and help you to identify if one of our virtual assistants in A3L could work for you. I’m going to be as simple as possible and straight to the point, so keep reading.

What exactly is a Virtual Assistant?

In two words, a virtual assistant is a “personal assistant”. However, he/she works remotely. Yes, as simple as that…. Therefore, a virtual assistant saves you time and money because you do not need to:

• spend a lot of time organizing an interview,
• waste hours and effort screening candidates,
• train your Personal/Virtual Assistant, as they are usually already trained or experienced in the task you want to delegate to them,
• include him/her in your payroll as a full-time employee. Yes, this results in saving money. Also, you are avoiding a potential risk,
• set up physical space in your office where your Personal Assistant can work,
• buy him/her a lot of equipment like a laptop, fax, phone, loads of stationary…

What can a Virtual Assistant do? and how can they help me?

Possibly one of the pros of hiring a virtual assistant, is what they can help you with. In a nutshell, a virtual assistant job is to take care of all those extremely time consuming yet critical administrative tasks. These tasks are necessary to run a business on a day-to-day basis. And that is why a virtual assistant is important to any business. By delegating those tasks to a qualified person, then you can free up your valuable time to use in what matters the most.

The services virtual assistants can offer can vary from basic ones such as diary planning to more specific such as project management. However, not all virtual assistants can move from very basic things to very professional ones.

If you want specific services, you will need to hire a Specialist Virtual Assistant. This is a person trained, qualified, and with the necessary experience in a specific area. It could go from Digital Marketing, Web Development, Project Management, Recruiting, Event Planner, among others. Usually, the hourly rate of a trained and more skilled virtual assistant is more expensive because of their expertise.

Now, for basic back-office administrative duties, you could hire a Generalist Virtual Assistant, who will be in charge of things such as:

• Taking your phone calls,
• Documents management,
• Taking meeting minutes,
• Create PowerPoint presentations,
• Prepare the logistic of any business or personal travel,
• Keep your payments and bills up-to-date,
• Reconcile your transactions.

And so many other tasks that they could be topic for another article. That is why we always recommend having a chat with us if you do not see the service you need on our website. There are so many services that you can discuss with us before you commit to paying for virtual assistant services.

What is the average rate of Virtual Assistants?

That brings us to another point… Hours and costs, which is the other important benefits of virtual assistants. Since a virtual assistant is self-employed, you don’t have to commit under any form of a contract of employment. Instead, you just pay for the hours you have used, you won’t pay more. And if you still have hours available for the package you bought they are usually carried out for the next month (at least we do it in A3L Virtual Assistants).

Statistically, it has been demonstrated that an average worker is just productive only 38% of the contractual working time. This means that out of 8 working hours only 3 are used effectively. The rest is filled with different other tasks. With a virtual assistant, you pay for those effective hours because people that work remotely are up to 91% more productive.

Costs?, it is usually half price comparing with hiring a Personal Assistant, and again, it would depend on the type of Virtual Assistant you require (Specialist or Generalist, where the latter is the cheapest). As mentioned before, you pay an hourly rate that most commonly starts from 25 GBP in the UK. You might think, it is over the minimum wage, but you need to consider some other aspects like most likely the virtual assistant you are hiring is not an amateur. Also, you need to consider all the overhead costs that you will not incur when hiring a virtual assistant. For example, you don’t need to pay for computers, working space, training, insurance etc…

So, there you go the perfect balance. And yes, it could be cheaper, but I will leave the reasons why to another post. I just can say it would be worth it.

How to know if you need a Virtual Assistant?

In conclusion, if you as a small business owner or entrepreneur:

• Feel you are not being as productive as you want,
• Feel you could do more if you just have a little bit of help with your workload,
• Have too many basic but important things to do but you don’t know where to start,
• Want to be a mom but also loves what you do with your business,
• Need balance in your life

Or if you just simply want to enjoy your business ownership journey without worrying about the boring back-office administrative tasks… you need a Virtual Assistant.

 

Well, I think I answered most of the common questions in this easy-to-read and short article. If you have more question please feel free to leave a comment or DM us, and of course, if you want to experience how your life would be with the help of high quality and affordable Virtual Assistant, go to our website www.a3lvirtualassistants.com and have a chat with us to see what can we do for you.

See you in a bit!

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