Search for:

Remember what Chris Ducker said about entrepreneurs’ most valuable commodity?

biting a pencil
Photo by: mattmcwilliams.com

Now, think about those day-to-day activities you’re taking care of… Should you really be the one doing them ALL?

Yeah, yeah, we know that you have a lot of work and limited time and financial resources.

Still, rest assured that hiring a competent Virtual Assistant will enhance your productivity and enable you to put your online business on the fast path to growth and success.

Not only will you have more time to devote to the core income-generating activities, but you’ll have more free time to spend relaxing with your dearest ones while your business empire is expanding.

No matter what industry you’re involved in, start with creating a list of duties:

  • you think you’re best at and you love doing,
  • you would like to do but cannot and
  • you don’t have enough time to do.

Now the whole picture is getting clearer, right?

You’re perfectly aware of all those monotonous, time-consuming daily activities you’d better outsource to a Virtual Assistant, aren’t you?

And by the way, don’t worry about tracking time with your Virtual Assistant. With a nifty tool like Hubstaff, you can keep track of all the billable hours you will pay for. Clever, right?

Now, let’s point out some of the time-saving tasks a Virtual Assistant can perform efficiently for you.


Organisation and Administrative Tasks

When it comes to organising your daily activities, managing your super busy schedules and your business administration, hiring a reliable Virtual Assistant will undoubtedly do a lot of good for you and your company.

After all, you cannot expect to be productive if you’re not super organised, right?

Seasoned Virtual Assistants are immensely helpful in:

  1. Scheduling your appointments
  2. Planning and arranging travels
  3. Tracking deadlines and sending you reminders
  4. Data entry
  5. File storage and organisation
  6. Creating and managing Spreadsheets
  7. Preparing presentations
  8. Preparing online meeting minutes
  9. Creating reports
  10. Creating and updating charts, graphs, pivot tables etc.
  11. Creating various document templates and forms
  12. Creating surveys, monitoring and reporting results
  13. Project management between you and the rest of your team
  14. Preparing training materials and training new team members
  15. Handling and filtering emails and keeping all your business correspondence organised and easily accessible
  16. Managing and screening phone calls
  17. Preparing agendas for online meetings or telephone conference calls
  18. Building your business database
  19. Managing your data/system backups
  20. Planning events and sending invites
  21. Transcribing audio or video files
  22. Keeping an eye on industry news, summarising them and sending you alerts and much more.

In short, a Virtual Assistant who is well-organised and skilled in data management can set up and systematise almost all your business procedures.

By taking on all those pesky business administration and organisation tasks, your Virtual Assistant will directly and strongly support your business development.

Bookkeeping Tasks

Many Virtual Assistants nowadays are skilled in accounting and bookkeeping. Then, why would you let these mundane activities suck your precious time when you can spend it on more strategic activities?

Here’s what cost management activities a trustworthy Virtual Assistant can handle to spare you the stress:

  1. Processing invoice transactions
  2. Performing your accounting related transactions
  3. Processing receipts
  4. Inputting receipts to a spreadsheet
  5. Tracking and logging your business expenses
  6. Regularly providing reports or emailing a list of your expenses
  7. Reconciling all your transactions
  8. Billing clients
  9. Chasing late payments
  10. Perform basic bookkeeping using tools such as MYOB, XERO & Quickbooks
  11. Yearly tax preparation and other similar duties.

Entrepreneurs sometimes leave all this work to pile up, which is not recommendable, especially when there’s someone skillful who can keep an eye on your budget so that you always know whether your projects are on the right track financially.


Editing Video or Audio Files

With the help of a vetted Virtual Assistant, you can create a raw video or audio materials and provide instructions on how to edit them so that you don’t need to worry about those details that usually take up a lot of your time.

When it comes to video or audio editing, a skilled Virtual Assistant can lend you a hand in the following tasks:

  1. Rearranging, adding and/or removing sections of video clips and/or audio clips
  2. Creating smooth transitions between video clips
  3. Correcting colour
  4. Adding extra elements: effects, graphics, music, etc. to improve videos
  5. Applying filters and other enhancements
  6. Removing unwanted and flawed bits
  7. Removing background noise
  8. Transcribing video and audio files
  9. Sourcing, creating and adding a basic video and audio intro
  10. Sourcing, creating and adding a basic video and audio outro
  11. Annotating videos
  12. Uploading videos on YouTube or Vimeo
  13. Uploading videos to various social media channels
  14. Uploading videos to other video sharing sites
  15. Uploading video or audio files (e.g. podcasts) to your blog posts
  16. Other basic video and audio editing tasks (picture and/or sound).

A Virtual Assistant trained in visual and audio technology is capable of performing these and other similar tasks quickly and in turn save you tons of money and valuable time.

When the work’s been done, you can review it, provide feedback and ask for some tweaks if needed.

Or you can even take it a step further and ask your qualified Virtual Assistant to create video and audio presentations and other types of files for your business from scratch based on your detailed guidelines if that’s what they excel at.

Photo by: flickr from Dave Dugdale

Customer Support Tasks

Virtual Assistant Checklist
Click image to download the Cheat Sheet.

Although customer support is critical for almost any business, communicating with every single customer personally is bound to become extremely tough and time-consuming as your business grows.

So, you should find a Virtual Assistant with superb communication skills to provide customer service on your behalf and develop long-term relationships with your customers.

Customer support duties you could delegate to your VA involve:

  1. Setting up a customer support system in your online company if you haven’t had one
  2. Responding to customer enquiries and help requests via phone
  3. Making outbound calls e.g. via Skype
  4. Regularly checking and responding to voicemail
  5. Returning phone calls on your behalf when needed
  6. Responding to email enquiries
  7. Receiving, reading, sorting, and filing emails
  8. Writing, proofreading, editing and sending follow-up emails to customers
  9. Writing, proofreading, editing and sending outbound emails to customers
  10. Responding to website live chat enquiries
  11. Providing live chat support when customers need help
  12. Setting up email autoresponder
  13. Setting up live chat
  14. Creating support tickets, responding to them and closing them
  15. Processing customers’ orders
  16. Processing refunds
  17. Sending greeting cards, thank-you notes and invitations to customers or clients

What’s more, getting in touch with other companies’ customer and tech support (when you’re a customer) or supplier liaison are additional business communication activities on which a good VA could save you hours.

You could also provide guidelines for creating email templates and phone scripts (or create them yourself) to ensure consistency in customer service.

Online Research Tasks

One of the most time-consuming activities in any business is conducting extensive research. Yet, it is necessary for making a solid foundation for your future business decisions and moves.

So, why wouldn’t you free up some time and farm out the tiresome research to a Virtual Assistant with outstanding skills, who can collect the right information for you?

Assigning the following research tasks to your Virtual Assistant depending on their expertise level will make your life much easier:

  1. Doing general web search on a given topic
  2. Product hunt
  3. Keyword research
  4. Pricing research and comparison
  5. Finding relevant information about your competitors
  6. Finding the best application(s) for a particular task
  7. Searching for the lowest-cost utility provider
  8. Figuring out the highest-rated product for a particular use
  9. Researching blog posts to figure out what gets read in your niche
  10. Researching topics related to your services or products around which you could create content
  11. Finding corporate media companies where you can advertise your business
  12. Researching customer support platforms suitable for your customer’s needs
  13. Researching social media platforms where your target audience typically spends most time
  14. Hashtag research
  15. Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube and other social media keyword research
  16. Researching webinar platforms suitable for your customers or client’s needs
  17. Finding third party tools most suitable for your clients or customers’ needs and requirements
  18. Researching market trends and finding out the latest ones in your area of expertise and so on.

Don’t you agree that having a well versed Virtual Assistant do all this heavy lifting for you could save a huge amount of your time?

Not only can your VA gather all the necessary data for you, but organise and present them in a form that is easy to read and understand so that the important points stand out.

What’s more, your VA can double-check all the facts for accuracy, as well as suggest what they see as the best possible or cost-effective further steps to take.

So, how much is YOUR time worth to you?

Don’t you think that hiring a skilled Virtual Assistant for all those more or less routine activities that suck time from every single day is a wise investment?

No? Well… Think again…


Then, stop wasting time and burning money and start growing your business faster with the help of a trained Virtual Assistant.


Shareable Image

Photo courtesy of rawpixel.com from Pexels



Write A Comment