With a
Virtual Assistant you are now poised to make your life much, much easier and your business way more efficient. However, while there are countless
tasks you can assign to your new VA, you can’t just heap everything at once, every little thing, and expect instant results. That’s not just efficient. So, how do you start out? Which roles should you start outsourcing to get the most bang for the buck? Here, we’ll go over the jobs that are perfect for your new VA, the ones that should be off-loaded for your startup’s benefit.
Bookkeeping
Bills… bills… bills… the perennial headache of small business owner. These can be easily the first thing you can delegate to a VA. Fretting over the number crunching can take so much time so letting the VA into the bookkeeping system can free you up by a lot. Now you won’t have to worry about outstanding invoices or chasing unpaid bills!
Inventory Management
Similar to bookkeeping, you can offload the tedium of overseeing and monitoring the stock levels of your warehouse. Let the VA handle updating your site to reflect current stocks, or inform you when it’s time to restock on certain items.
Managing emails, appointment, schedules
Sifting through important mails and low-priority ones can itself be a time-consuming task. Scheduling appointments, even scheduling itself, requires keeping track of a lot of stuff and your might not remember every little detail.
So let the VA handle this. When they’re familiar with your routine, they can start prioritizing which messages will reach you directly and which ones can wait for later. They can send the obligatory Happy Birthdays or thank yous. The same goes for your appointments. Brunch meetings can be rescheduled, but wedding anniversaries… can’t.
Social media, blogging
Your hashtag game not quite on point? Confounded by the latest internet jargon or nonsensical memes? Let the VA be the one to keep your social media up to date with the current trends.
Need content for your blog, to give your company an identity and to boost your site’s SEO metrics? If the VA’s got writing chops, you can have ‘em whip up some quirky (but keyword) rich content, not just dry copies.
Drowned by customer comments and messages? The VA can take the load off your back and start connecting with your customer base.
Fresh ideas for your social media and blogs can be invaluable in imbuing your brand with personality and helping it stick out from the rest. After all, social media marketing is important for SMEs and you don’t want to be left out!
Research
Thinking of new products? Checking out the competition’s websites? Want to see if a potential employee, or some other business, is legit? Save time by having your VA do the Internet research.
The same goes for finding hotels, booking tickets, getting good deals and mapping out your itineraries. Your VA can probably help plan out really fun activities for your vacation too!
Filing Databases
Need to update your contact lists?
Got faxes or business cards with information that needs to be plugged into your company database?
Want a transcript of a voice conference? Need the minutes of a meeting?
Sounds like the kind of grunt work for your VA.
Crafting Presentations
Got a business meeting coming up? Don’t fret over piecing together that PowerPoint presentation – your VA’s got it! Have that savvy specialist work his or her magic to turn raw data into clear-looking visuals, elegant graphs and crisp text summaries.
Listing and ad entry
As timeless as they may be, listings and ads still do the job. Filling them out can be a total time-consuming chore though, even with multi-platform apps. So let the VA handle this, he or she can chug away and enter your company and products’ details in all the listing sites out there, and answer the inevitable inquiries!
So Start Trusting
Whether it’s handling your business’ social media or bookkeeping, remember you’ll have to trust your VA. For the former task, they’ll need your logins for Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and so on, and their posts will define your company’s identity to the public. For the latter, they’ll have to collate your business’ metrics, from your profits to your tax returns.
So, remember: relying on them to do these roles well requires entrusting them with the information they need and giving them the breadth they need to operate. You’ll need to if you want anything accomplished.
-John li
