Our Virtual Life
Everyone has different preferences when it comes to the way they work. For example, some people love listening to the radio while they plough through their to-do list, while others need radio silence to be able to concentrate. Some assistants prefer to work for one company in their offices, while Virtual Assistants prefer to provide the same service from afar.
For us, the virtual life works. We’re Virtual Assistants through and through and provide all our services virtually to our clients – we’ve never met some of them in person! If you’re not used to virtual working, this can be difficult to get your head around. How can we work effectively with people we’ve never met?
With this in mind, we thought we’d share an insight into our virtual life, why it works for us and our clients, and why we absolutely love it.
Flexibility
If the pandemic and home-working have shown us anything, it’s that virtual working enables flexibility. Now, that doesn’t mean we’re off walking the dog and prepping dinner when we should be working. While we provide our services virtually, we are actually office-based and work daily from our West Midlands based office.
Instead, flexibility for us means being able to work with anyone, anywhere. While some of our clients are local, others definitely aren’t, and we probably wouldn’t have the opportunity to work with them if we weren’t virtual.
We’re able to use virtual communication tools like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and good old WhatsApp to converse with our clients (or we go old school and give them an actual call), meaning they receive the same level of support as they would from an in-house assistant, just without all the travelling!
Working virtually also makes choosing a Virtual Assistant easier for you. Imagine finding the perfect assistant – they’ve got the exact skills you’re looking for and are ready to start immediately, but then you realise they’re not virtual and live hundreds of miles away. You’ve lost your opportunity to add a perfect fit to your team. With Virtual Assistants, this issue is eliminated. You can focus your search on looking for a VA with the necessary skills and experience to be successful in the role you need to fill without having to worry about where they’re located. Because we’ve embraced the virtual life, we can work for you, wherever you are.
Productivity
You’ll know that in-house staff aren’t 100% productive all the time – it’s near impossible for anyone. But with Virtual Assistants, we know that we only have a certain number of hours to complete your tasks within. We also know that we’ll only be paid for the time we spend being productive.
As you’d imagine, this is a huge motivator and means that Virtual Assistants will be 100% effective when working for your business. They don’t have all day, every day to get tasks done, so the pressure to do so in a timely manner keeps us focused and on task. To reassure you of our productivity, we’ll always keep accurate logs of when we worked for you and the tasks we completed.
Increased productivity when it comes to Virtual Assistants also stems from us being self-sufficient. We won’t require extra training to get the job done, and we’re already experts in the services we’re providing for you. Because we already know how everything works, we’re able to complete tasks quickly and effectively and can probably squeeze a few more into our dedicated hours!
Temporary Work
One of the things we love most about the virtual life is being able to step in to support clients at the last minute. Occasionally, a client will come to us with staffing issues that are impacting the way the business is functioning. Most recently, we’ve had quite a few clients having to let staff go due to the pandemic.
Because we’re virtual, we’ve been able to step in almost immediately to keep things running smoothly. Take one of our newest credit control clients, for example. Their accounts department was drastically reduced to just one person over the course of the pandemic, meaning they’d fallen behind with chasing late payments, and aged debt had built up considerably.
They called us, and we were able to provide them with our credit control support service almost immediately. We spent a few hours running through their processes and procedures with them, they sent us all the information we’d need to carry out the task successfully, and then we made a start. Had we not been virtual, this process would’ve been extended considerably. There’d have been in-person meetings and interviews, lots of planning and travel and office introductions – it simply wouldn’t have worked for them.
Being virtual allowed us to step in as soon as possible, preventing the issues they were facing from worsening over time. This client may not need our services forever, but we were there when they needed them the most.
Cost-effective
One worry employers always have when taking on new staff is the cost. And often, it’s not the cost of their salary that is the issue. It’s all the added extras like sick pay, holiday pay, office equipment and additional training that add up and make it almost impossible to stay within your budget.
As assistants, it’s within our nature to want to support your business, meaning the last thing we’d want to do is cost your business any more than is necessary. This is another reason as to why we love the virtual life. We’re entirely self-sufficient – if we’re off sick or off on holiday, we don’t get paid. We provide all our own equipment and undertake any further training ourselves.
With Virtual Assistants, you’ll only ever have to pay for the work we do for you and nothing more.
The Virtual Life works for us, could it work for you?
Being virtual isn’t for everyone. Some people prefer working for a company in person, and some employers prefer all their staff to be under one roof. For us, though, there’s nothing quite like being virtual. We feel that, over the years, it has opened up numerous opportunities that would not have been available to us had we not been virtual and has allowed us to work with a fantastic range of clients all over the country and beyond.
If the flexibility of a Virtual Assistant sounds like something that may benefit your business, please do not hesitate to get in touch. We provide services in credit control, content creation, data entry and admin and have a range of flexible, affordable packages designed to support businesses like yours.