As a small business owner, you may find yourself wishing you could just wave a magic wand to take some of the pressure off. With endless to-do lists and not enough hours in the day, it can feel impossible to stay on top of all your tasks and put energy into growing your business at the same time.
So, what do you do?
Unfortunately, we’re a bit short on magic wands at the moment, but investing in a virtual assistant could have the same impact in terms of transforming your work life.
Here’s how…
Transforming your Work Life with a Virtual Assistant
Improve Time Management and Work-Life Balance
One of the biggest transformative gifts a virtual assistant can provide you with is time.
When you’re running a small business, time seems to get eaten up by even the smallest of tasks. Ten minutes of admin turns into two hours, a quick social media post turns into an hour of scrolling, one credit control call turns into a twenty-minute chat.
Add that to the day-to-day running of your business and you’ll probably find there isn’t much time for anything else at all. More often than not, work will come home with you to be crammed in between dinner and bedtime, squeezed in during kids clubs… you know the feeling.
Investing in a virtual assistant restores some of that time to you, thus helping to improve your work-life balance. By outsourcing a few tasks to your virtual assistant, whether it be bits of admin, management of your social media accounts or even your entire credit control process, doing so can free up copious amounts of hours.
What you’re left with then is time to breathe. You can feed those hours back into your business, giving you more opportunity for growth, or you can take those hours home with you, instead of three piles of admin and twenty unread emails.
The small changes a virtual assistant helps make to your business can be a real transformative force for your work life.
Better Productivity and Focus
If you invest in a virtual assistant to improve your time management and gain some hours back, you’ll also be giving yourself the opportunity to improve your productivity and focus during your working day.
The less niggly tasks you have clogging up your to-do list, and your brain, the more energy you’ll have available to put into core aspects of your business. You’ll find you’re better able to concentrate on the task at hand, and work will be completed quicker and to a way higher standard.
Knowing that you’ve got an experienced professional handling other important tasks for you gives you peace of mind that everything is under control, and removes the weird guilty feeling we sometimes get when we’re working on one task but know there’s other important tasks that need to be done too.
In terms of how well you’re able to perform in your day to day working life, virtual assistants can make a massive positive difference.
Opportunity for Scalability and Flexibility
Transforming your working life doesn’t just mean taking a few things off your hands and giving you a few more hours to breathe during the working week. It also refers to improving the way your business functions overall.
Investing in a virtual assistant opens up the opportunity for flexibility and scalability, without the massive cost implications.
Growing your business can feel tricky. As amazing as it is, you’re also conscious of spending more than you’re bringing in when it comes to hiring new team members. Overhead costs for traditional hiring can be very expensive, and it can feel like a set-in-stone thing once you’ve taken someone on.
The beauty of investing in a virtual assistant is their flexibility. They’re there when you need them, and when you don’t? They’ll be on their merry way. With most virtual assistants, you only pay per time or task/project. This means that when workload is heavy or you’re adding something new to your business, a virtual assistant can be there to pick up the extra work.
If things are looking a little quieter, you can halt the support temporarily and not be out of pocket – something that would be difficult (and very unethical!) to do with a full-time team member.
Investing in a virtual assistant means giving your business the opportunity to expand, without worrying about all the added extras.
Access to Diverse Skills
You’re an expert at running your business, and you have plenty of skills under your belt to help you do just that. But, as you’ll know, it’s impossible to be an expert in absolutely everything.
Trying to muddle through tasks that aren’t your forte (or you aren’t particularly interested in learning about) can begin to feel like a chore. Investing in a virtual assistant gives you access to a diverse range of skills that you may not otherwise have the resources for in-house.
Take copywriting, for example – it’s an integral part of your small business marketing strategy and branding. But if you’re not an expert writer or don’t find writing particularly enjoyable, you may find yourself putting off the task of copywriting or settling for copy that perhaps isn’t working to your advantage.
Choosing to work with a virtual assistant who specialises in copywriting eliminates this issue entirely. You don’t have to spend your time doing something that isn’t within your area of expertise, but you get to reap the benefits of professionally written copy.
The same goes for tasks like credit control or data entry – just because you can do them just mean you should have to. There are expert virtual assistants out there who can step in to take these tasks off your hands.
Small Business Support with The Edwards Company
Here at The Edwards Company, we work with small business owners to transform their work lives. Whether it’s freeing up some of your time, improving your work-life balance, helping you scale your business or simply taking tasks you don’t love off your hands, we can help.
Get in touch with our fab team to get the ball rolling with some tailored business support.