When you have a lot on your plate, the work efficiency of a personal assistant can leave you with more time to run your business. Personal assistants are preferred based on their ability to handle a variety of tasks even remotely.
Deciding over hiring an in-person personal assistant or a virtual assistant can be stressful. Making the wrong choice can have a significant impact on your organizational goals. Therefore, it’s best to have an overview of the difference between a personal assistant and a virtual assistant and what they do.
What is a Virtual Personal Assistant?
The role of personal assistants can be in any form. What they do depends on a personal assistant’s duties and responsibilities. Also known as personal secretary, a personal assistant provides executive support to a business owner or help to another person. In addition, the general idea of what assistants do involves helping with tasks in the house or managing various administrative functions of a business.
3 Types of In-Demand Virtual Assistants
Whether you’re on the search for a private personal assistant or virtual assistant, there are a lot of things to consider. This is crucial to find someone to assist with processes to oversee small businesses. Moreover, hiring one should be based on the needs of your business. You might want to take a closer look at the popular personal assistant tasks.
To find the right personal assistant, let’s walk you through the types of services for your needs. In general, a personal assistant supports private clients in residential settings and professionals in office settings.
1. Administrative Assistant and Household Assistant
The essential facts about business support staff are limited in the thoughts of being an administrative assistant. Their tasks are commonly referred to as the typical executive support duties. These include scheduling meetings, answering phone calls, and basic data entry.
Some administrative tasks fall under handling bookkeeping and accounting. They can also help with managing inboxes and organizing project agendas. With their keen attention to detail, they ensure to take care of your to-do list, as well as complete any errands that you need help with. Aside from the office management responsibilities, a personal assistant handles domestic and international personal travel as needed.
2. Content Writer
Due to the technological advances, digital marketing campaigns play a key role. This is where businesses actively put their efforts to generate revenue. Because of this, content writing has become a necessity for any modern brand. With a search engine-optimized content, large corporations depend on contents to generate revenue.
Behind a great brand is valuable and relevant content. Hence, leaving this task to a virtual assistant, who is an expert in this field, can be a great digital marketing decision for your business.
3. Social Media Manager
A remote personal assistant supports an individual or a business owner with personal tasks or office-related functions. With their help, personal assistants can ensure that owners can now focus more on important tasks. In the case of social media managers, they serve as a personal assistant for firms or influencers. Their work focuses on social media platforms to promote an agenda online. This type of marketing role is a significant part of a business that a personal assistant can handle alone.
But aside from these basic business functions, virtual personal assistants can also help with bookkeeping, design, and other digital marketing efforts. Hence, you can customize your personal assistant’s duties to fit your business needs. With that said, a virtual assistant can quickly become a vital member of the organization. You should take a moment to think about the kinds of personal assistants and which one is right for you.
Top 3 Ways a Remote Personal Assistant Can Help You
In case that you’re having a difficult time to get everything done in a month, you may want to consider hiring either a part-time or full-time worker. This way, you can balance all the responsibilities in your personal life. This explains hiring a personal assistant can serve as an asset to any growing business. However, it can also be difficult to tell when the right time to welcome one aboard can be.
The battle between choosing an in-person assistant or remote virtual assistant seems like a tug-of-war but because of the digital advances, virtual assistants are crucial to business success. Before making the crucial move, we want to help you reduce your uncertainty and find your footing.
1. You get help with general mundane administrative tasks.
When you started your business, you might have envisioned the big picture of closing huge deals and making critical business decisions and not the general business tasks such as handling phone calls, managing emails, and maintaining spreadsheets. Since it’s true that business owners must focus on high-level processes, they need virtual personal assistants. Every entrepreneur needs a serious help in growing their business.
2. You find time for your priorities.
One of the biggest realities of running a business is that time is limited due to being always busy. Therefore, hiring a virtual personal assistant is speaking about leveraging time. Assign the mundane and repetitive tasks to your personal virtual assistant while you give time on the development and growth of your business. Through this, you can harvest the fruits of your labor on strategies and receive breakthrough results. Aside from hard work, time management is what makes people productive.
3. You actually make an economically viable decision.
In a traditional office space, companies have employees to manage and pay for expenses and benefits. However, as the remote work setup has become more viable in today’s day and age, you can actually save costs. How? Having a remote personal assistant at your employ can ensure the completion of your daily tasks—much easier and without costing you too much.
Furthermore, you are only paying for the work of a personal assistant. Even though you only give them freedom to take care of your projects, you know you’re getting someone with expert knowledge in the field. Keep an eye on your costs to thrive in a competitive market and earn profits.
Get More Done in Less Time as You Scale Your Company
1. Have a shared project management platform.
Describe your task and share a project list where you and your personal assistant can easily track everything from travel planning to project management as well as amount of time to get things done. Avoid loading the tasks through an email as there might be deadlines or appointments that you might miss out. Instead, you can have your assistant create an Excel spreadsheet to record all deadlines. This way, you get the assurance that nothing will slip through because you have a master list.
2. Set labels to priorities, deadlines, and completions.
Assign projects and keep a reminder of what is extremely important. Instead of having your assistant to write notes, encode the task on a project list. Closely monitor key responsibilities through color coding. It helps to know that your personal assistant is on the same page with you about the activities you want to delegate.
Going into the business of hiring a personal assistant, you must know the cost of virtual assistant services as well as their hourly rate. Sometimes a personal assistant will do the assigned tasks through hourly pricing or one-time project pricing. For tasks that are measured by hours, you have the freedom to set a fixed time for all task completion time. In contrast, some tasks require a lot of effort and time, and a flat fee is the only option.
3. Determine the number of hours.
Ready to Hire a Personal Assistant?
Outsourcing a job, no matter how big or small, allows you to focus on what you do best and have a personal assistant take care of what you can’t oversee. Looking to hire a virtual assistant? Let us touch upon the details of what your business needs. Put no time to waste! Hiring a virtual personal assistant can benefit you by taking some tasks off your plate to boost your productivity. Contact us now to know more!