If you’re working too many hours in your business, that it’s leaving you little to no time to work on your business, then you’re doing things wrong. You’re going to want to read this article to the end, because I’m about to go over seven reasons why you should hire a virtual assistant to help you grow your business.
By the end of this article, you’re going to have a clear understanding of why having at least one virtual assistant is vital for you to help you grow your business.
After you read this article, be sure to check out my previous articles on all things virtual assistants in which I’ll go over, how to hire a virtual assistant, where to hire a virtual assistant, as well as how to manage and train your VAs.
Before I get started, though, whenever I referenced VA throughout this article, just know that that stands for virtual assistants, but without further ado, let’s get started.
Reason 1: VAs help you work smarter, not harder.
The first reason why you should hire a virtual assistant is because virtual assistants help you work smarter, not harder.
If you’re finding yourself constantly, emotionally or mentally exhausted, it means that you’re at risk of burnout. Burnout is a very common pain point with entrepreneurs because they’re so passionate about their ideas that they think they can just run through walls to make that idea happen. And while it’s true, that perseverance is super important in the journey of entrepreneurship, willpower is ultimately a finite resource. And so if you’re running just on your willpower to get something done, eventually you will run out of willpower.
Bringing virtual assistants to your team helps you start to think about how you use your time, as opposed to just using your time. It makes you work smarter, not harder.
Reason 2: VAs test the scalability of your business.
The second reason why you should hire a virtual assistant is because virtual assistants test the scalability of your business. If there is a process that you can’t necessarily outline for a virtual assistant then it means that it will break without you. And what that means is that your business is too reliant on you in order to run without you.
Worst case scenario, if something terrible were to happen to you, your business would cease to operate. And so that means that you haven’t really built yourself a business, you’ve built yourself a job. This is dangerous territory. And it’s the reason why some businesses close after their founder passes away or moves on to another venture.
It’s also the same reason why family businesses that are generational focus so much on making sure that there are successors over time to plug in for the executives of the business. Virtual assistants help here as you operationalize your processes, since they help you assess what needs to be done in house and what can be outsourced.
Reason 3: VAs force entrepreneurs to be disciplined.
The third reason why you should hire a virtual assistant is because they force entrepreneurs to be disciplined. Having a clear documentation in place is the only real way that you can have success longterm with any virtual assistant team and in big pitfall with a lot of first time founders, as well as entrepreneurs is their lack of discipline.
They’re so used to wearing so many hats and having their focus be stretched in so many different ways that they’re not used to actually documenting what they’re doing to help teach another person to help take that off their plate. So, as a result, they’re just juggling a ton of different plates and ultimately something is going to drop.
I remember when I was first starting out that this was really tough for me to take a step back and let go of things, but it was only after I started to bringing in some virtual assistants to help me out with some tasks, to take a few hours here and there off of my plate, that I was able to realize that this was so important in terms of exercising discipline in building a business.
So by hiring virtual assistants, you’re making the conscious choice that you want to scale your business beyond yourself. And that is the key to any longterm successful business.
Reason 4: – VAs help you let go.
The fourth reason why you should hire a virtual assistant is because they help you let go of things.
A big pain point for entrepreneurs is the challenge of letting things go. At least it was for me. I knew that for the longest time that I always felt like I was the best at doing SEO research and that I couldn’t possibly outsource it to a virtual assistant.
For months, I held onto the task of running keyword analysis because I felt like it was a task that you needed some sort of a name skill in order to do, and I didn’t want to give it to somebody else to do in these very important marketing efforts. But the thing is, if you know anything about basketball, Iso ball is never the way to win championships. And you can see that by the fact that mellow still hasn’t won a ring.
And so what I realized was that unless I started training a virtual assistant to start taking on these SEO tasks, I would always have to spend several hours every single week doing these actions. So what I decided to do was to approach things with an open mind and try teaching one of my virtual assistants, SEO research, and lo and behold, after a few training sessions in which I went back and forth with her through some mini tasks, which you can learn about in my prior video on how to manage and train your virtual assistants, she was able to actually get the hang of it.
In fact, sometimes she does it better than how I would even do it. So over time, I was able to specialize her to be an SEO specialist and take that entire action off of my plate so that I could continue growing other parts of my businesses. This is a huge lift for me because now I’m able to save several hours every single week, which in turn saves me weeks on end when that’s annualized over every single week that she’s doing this task.
Reason 5: VAs extend your business hours.
The fifth reason why you should hire a virtual assistant is because virtual assistants extend your business hours. What I mean by that is my virtual assistants are working when I’m in off hours. And so I’m spending the bulk of my on hours thinking about how to position my virtual assistants for success so that they are working in my off hours.
What this allows me to do is it allows me to build a flywheel effect of my business in which we are never just stopping our work for the day when I stopped, my VA start. And when my VA stop, I start and so on. I want you to think for yourself, what could this mean for you?
If your VA’s could extend your work hours, if you could get a virtual assistant team to scrape a hundred leads for you every single day and queue it up into a template for a prospecting campaign. What could that mean for you in terms of the hours that you save every single day, knowing that you have email campaigns queued up and ready to go for prospecting, it would probably be in that you can spend your work hours securing more meetings and closing more deals while not having to worry about your pipeline running dry.
After awhile, you could even potentially train your virtual assistants to do some of the initial qualification for you to cut down on the number of discovery calls you need to do whatever the case may be, businesses that thrive today are the ones that over deliver on customer service and your VA’s can help you immensely in this area.
Reason 6: Hiring VAs forces you to adapt your communication and management styles.
The sixth reason why it’s important to hire a virtual assistant is because virtual assistants force you to grow and adapt your management style. Virtual assistants often communicate via text or email so if you’re not already good at one of these two mediums, you’ll have to get really good at it and be really good at explicit communication.
This forces you to always be clear as to whether or not you are explaining the why and the how behind every task you’re giving your virtual assistant. Messing up in your instructions could mean an entire day goes by before your virtual assistant gets back to you and starts working on it again, which ultimately slows down your business growth.
And so, by learning how to be explicit in your communication styles, it actually is a highly transferable skill that can be applied not only with your virtual assistants, but also with your in house team that you may be leading. If you need help on learning how to manage or train your virtual assistants, be sure to check out my prior article on that.
Reason 7: VAs are cost-effective.
And the last reason why you should hire a virtual assistant is because virtual assistants are cost effective. In many cases, hiring a virtual assistant is actually cheaper than bringing on multiple full time employees. The reality is that you can hire a highly educated and highly competent virtual assistant to work for more than 40 hours a week for just a couple of hundred dollars a week to get that same talent in the States, you’d have to pay three to four times that in salary, not to mention health insurance, as well as employee benefits.
Aside from that virtual assistants are super flexible. You can give them a couple hours of work every single week, and they’ll just work with other clients in the time that they’re not working for you. On the flip side, if you were to hire a full time employee, they would potentially just be sitting idle for hours on end waiting for you to give them the next task.
So instead of hiring a full time employee, you could literally hire three to five virtual assistants to get three to five times the work done to help you accelerate your business.
Let’s take a simple example. If we were to look for somebody with just an associate’s degree, not even a bachelor’s degree, that would run us about 42 grand a year. 42 grand a year is the equivalent of paying somebody $21 an hour. So with that $21 an hour, where we could also do in an alternate case is we could hire four Filipino virtual assistants at $5 an hour or. Seven at $3 an hour and get so much more work done. And we wouldn’t have to pay the employee benefits as well as health insurance for those virtual assistants.
So as you can tell, it’s a clear difference in terms of cost savings when it comes to hiring and bringing on a virtual assistant team. So as you can tell, it’s super hard to beat this, and there are a ton of reasons to bring on a virtual assistant as opposed to a full time employee, even major corporations do this. Back when I was a consultant, we had a team over in India that would help us with the design updates to certain slide decks that we would then send in client presentations.
Big takeaways
There are two things that I want you to remember when it comes to reasons why you should hire a virtual assistant.
- The first reason is because virtual assistants help you learn how to let go. As an entrepreneur or a startup employee, you will always feel like you are the best person to do something, but that is not always the case and it’s often a limiting factor that’s preventing you from reaching your next major milestone.
- The second reason is because virtual assistants introduce discipline into your business. They force you to document your processes, learn how to teach as well as implement and give feedback to your virtual assistants, which ultimately allow you to work on your business as opposed to being stuck, working in your business.
That’s it for this time though. In my next article, I will go over, when is the best time to hire a virtual assistant five signs to look out for?