In a word? Yes. A Virtual Assistant can take a lot of weight from your shoulders by doing tasks that don’t necessarily need to be done by you. When you are a small business owner, you usually become the business, and there are things that will necessarily be done by you, and only you. However, if you are an artist, why spend time scheduling social media posts when you can have a virtual assistant organising your posts, while you continue to work on your creations?
Note: I will focus this blog post on social media and digital marketing which is what I do the most. I do take on administrative tasks, but it’s not usually the bulk of what I do.
It can be hard for many business owners to decide whether it’s time to delegate and pass down tasks to someone else since they are so used to doing everything themselves. “Should I delegate?” “What tasks could a virtual assistant do for me?” “How many hours would I hire a virtual assistant (VA)?” “What will I do with all that “spare” time?” There are so many questions that can come to your mind at this moment, but the bottom line is that a VA can help you succeed. A virtual assistant will help you with routine tasks. In turn, you will have more time to focus on tasks that will actually help you grow your business.
How to know how many hours to delegate to a virtual assistant?
While there is no right or wrong number of hours, and it will depend on different factors such as the size and type of business you run, your budget, or the work load you might have, most clients hire a virtual assistant for an average of 10-20 hours a month , and it works pretty well. You might think that 20 hours sounds like a bit too many – what can be done in that time? Let’s take social media as an example of what I usually do as a VA for small businesses:
Scheduling posts, writing captions, researching hashtags, producing graphics or sourcing images for two weeks of Facebook and Instagram content easily takes around 6-7 hours to complete. A month’s contents becomes 12-14 hours of work. If you add the time spent engaging with your audience in these platforms, you can easily get to 20+ hours in a month. This is something you can easily “outsource” to a virtual assistant. This is a repetitive continuous task that takes up a lot of your time.
What other tasks are like this? According to an article by The Virtual Hub, this is part of the official list of tasks that can be easily handled by a virtual assistant:
· Inbox management (deleting spam, respond to client queries when possible, newsletters)
· Website/Blog Management (creation and writing of blogs including research, blog layout, image sourcing, repurposing content for other social media platforms, monitor comments, simple SEO)
· Calendar Management (book meetings/calls, cancellations and re-bookings)
· Travel arrangements (booking travel including flights, accommodation, etc.)
· Social Media Management (schedule posts, copywriting, image sourcing, engagement management, content creation, measure performance)
· Administrative Tasks (documents, presentations, email management)
While obviously not all of these might apply to you and your business, it gives you a good idea of what a virtual assistant can do for you (and most of these are services I offer!).
If you are not sure of how much time you should hire a VA for, I suggest you do the following for two weeks: 1) Every day write down all the tasks you do regarding your business, and the amount of time it takes you to do each of them--you might be surprised by the time you are spending on certain tasks! 2) Select the tasks that could be done by someone else—the ones that are repetitive, take a lot of time, do not require to be done yourself, etc. 3) Add the hours it took you to complete those tasks, and you have the approximate number of hours and the tasks you could delegate to a virtual assistant.
How much does a VA cost? And is it worth it?
You might also be wondering if it’s worth paying for a VA. It is not a good idea to start comparing a VA’s wages to office workers or general employees, it is VERY different! Some accountants say the true cost of an employee is about 1.8 times more than the wages you actually pay. With a full-time employee, you pay taxes for that employee, national insurance money, insurance, holiday pay, sick pay… and have to fulfil many more requirements. A virtual assistant will be an independent contractor. This means less paperwork to complete and less taxes to pay.
Hopefully I have given you an overview of why hiring a Virtual Assistant is a good idea. If you would like to find out if I am a good fit for your company, don't hesitate to contact me!
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