5 Signs You Need a Virtual Assistant Fast

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Have you ever found yourself finishing up work late? Ever noticed how it’s becoming more difficult for you to find time for other aspects of your life, like spending time with family and friends?

Wouldn’t it be great if you could just hire someone you can trust to take care of some of the more tedious tasks of your business?

Imagine what it would be like.

• To have someone take care of your emails for you.
• To have a trusted colleague make your appointments.
• To have another person do some of your business research.
• To have an assistant take care of your social media accounts.
• To have an experienced co-worker who can do the bookkeeping.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have someone do all these things for you so you’ll have more time to take care of your family, hang out with friends, or focus on the more important aspects of your business?

So why don’t you do it?

You’re afraid you won’t be able to afford hiring an assistant. You’re afraid that delegating some of the tasks you’re used to doing yourself will be a huge mistake. You have trust issues. You’re afraid the assistant will do poorly and mess up your system. Do any of these sound familiar to you?

Believe it or not, we’ve all been there.

Everyone who works for themselves or run their own business is aware of how stressful and time-consuming the job can be. Your work, as a business owner/manager, is not necessarily over when the day is done. Keep in mind that running a business is not your typical 9-to-5 job; it’s a 24/7 job that requires pretty much all of your attention.

But here’s the thing: it doesn’t have to be like that. There’s no rule that says you have to put all of your time and effort into your business to make it successful. Yes, it helps when you devote a certain amount of time on running the business and keeping it in good shape. But you don’t have to do everything.

 

 

Do you want to know a secret?

Most successful entrepreneurs will agree that the secret to running a successful business isn’t about doing everything yourself. It’s about proper delegation. Knowing which tasks you should do on your own and which ones you should delegate to another individual is crucial.

This is how you can effectively manage your time and focus on the more important aspects of your business, while still having time to spend with your family and friends.

So how do you know when it’s time to hire a virtual assistant who can help do some of the tasks you don’t have time for?

There are several tell-tale signs that signal it’s time to delegate specific jobs to a professional assistant. Be sure to consider your own situation when you check out some of these signals:

Telling Signs That You Need to Find a Virtual Assistant Soon

1. Your company inbox is filled to the brim with unread email that it’s exhausting to even look at.

Do you have any idea how long it takes to respond to every single email your company receives on a daily basis? What about those useless spam letters and subscriptions? It’s challenging and time-consuming to manage and sift through email to figure out which ones are relevant to your business and which ones are junk.

If you find yourself spending hours every other day just sifting through a full inbox of unread mail, maybe it’s time to hire an assistant who can sift through all those messages, so that you only have to deal with the most relevant correspondence.

2. You’re pushing well over nine hours of work every single day that you’re getting used to arriving home late in the evening.

This is the very definition of work overload. You spend the majority of your time in your office that you start to forget what it feels like to relax. All work and no play is not a very healthy approach when it comes to running a business, not to mention what it can do to your health, as well as your relationships.

A healthy balance between business and leisure is the key. If you constantly find yourself having to stay in your office for longer hours than usual, it might be high time to find a virtual assistant who can help cut your workload by taking some of the tasks off your shoulders.

3. You spend all weekend dealing with business-related tasks that weekends are becoming an unfamiliar concept for you.

Weekends are supposed to be time that you spend recuperating and relaxing with your loved ones. It’s time that you do things for yourself, not thinking about business or whether or not you’ve sent out the orders or did the books correctly. Your weekends should be spent on the beach, in the movies, or on the couch, catching up with your favorite shows on TV.

If you’re finding it hard to do the things you usually like, you’re so hung up with work that you don’t even realize it’s a Sunday; you might want to reassess your situation and consider looking for someone who can help you manage all your business-related tasks.

4. Your sales are starting to drop and you’re missing out on a lot of business opportunities.

How could this happen, when all you do is spend most of your time on business-related tasks? Well, sometimes you get stuck doing so many menial tasks at once that you lose sight of what’s important—managing your business.

You see, a company is like a ship. It has a lot of moving parts that need to be manned constantly and efficiently. If you’re talking to clients, then who is doing the books? If you’re stuck promoting your business on social media—updating posts, creating content, and so on—then who’s doing the other marketing aspects for your business?

At some point, you will realize that you can’t possibly do everything on your own. There’s just not enough time in a day to accomplish every single task, while you look for other opportunities. A lot of entrepreneurs have tried doing everything on their own, and a lot of them failed.

5. You have great online marketing ideas for your business, but you lack the acumen to successfully implement them.

Okay. It’s one thing to have a lot of big ideas for your business, especially when it comes to marketing strategies, but it’s another to effectively implement those ideas.

Sure, you may have a certain level of expertise when it comes to creating content, posting blogs, or even maintaining your website. But keep in mind that all these things require serious time investment. What about the other aspects of your business?

Moreover, if you incorporate social media as part of your online marketing strategy, who’s going to be handling it? Creating, posting, and sharing relevant content on social media is not as simple as you might think.

The process itself requires some strategy like figuring out the best time of day to post your content, finding fresh and unique content to engage your target audience, and spending time to like, comment, and share your followers’ content.

If you want to implement your marketing ideas effectively, you’re going to need someone with the right experience and expertise to help you do it. Perhaps a skilled social media virtual assistant or an experienced SEO virtual assistant; these types of professionals can help you develop a great online marketing strategy that will improve your online footprint and push your brand forward.

What kind of virtual assistant should you hire?

In case you still don’t know it by know, there are different kinds of virtual assistants. Some are highly skilled at the administrative aspects of business, while others are more generalized and can do a wide range of tasks like research, making appointments, sifting through email, writing business letters, and so on—anything to help lighten your workload.

There are virtual assistants, however, who focus more on the technical aspects of marketing, such as search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing, content writing and development, web design, and even software development. But because these types of professionals have exceptionally unique skills that are in high demand, they tend to have higher rates compared to others.

So if you have a limited budget, the best thing you can do is carefully assess your workload. Figure out which tasks you can do on your own effectively and see which ones you’d rather outsource to a virtual assistant. And based on those delegated tasks, you can figure out what kind of assistant you want to hire.