Mark Shore

Mark Shore is a member of the Docstoc original article team. His areas of expertise are in: sports, entertainment and mass communications law. He is a graduate of the University of Southern California with a major in Broadcast Journalism.

Blog

Should You Hire A Virtual Assistant For Your Business?

By Mark Shore | August 18, 2011 | 1888 Views

What Is A Virtual Assistant?

Virtual assistants come in all different shapes, sizes and forms with varying skillsets. No matter what your company needs, chances are there are a number of virtual assistants that can help you out.

Sometimes people hire virtual assistants to answer phones, send and receive e-mails or faxes, handle personal or business social media accounts. Others can come with expertise or be trained in specific software programs or help out with bookkeeping, web design, graphic design and copyright. Moreover, they can help you market your business, perform market research, handle all of your scheduling and post advertisements.

Basically, anything you need help with as far as administrative tasks go and beyond, a virtual assistant can help you out with.

How Much Do They Cost?

The cost of a virtual assistant depends a lot on need. The nice thing about virtual assistants is that they are for the most part all freelancers, so you only pay them when you need them. Some businesses only really need a virtual assistant for a few hours a week whereas some require more like 4 hours a week. Since they are not employees, you only have to pay them an hourly rate and don’t have to worry about benefits or any other kind of compensation.

To check out prices of various virtual assistants, check out various websites where you can hire them –

HireMyMom.com
Elance.com
Guru.com
TaskUs.com
Craigslist.com
VirtualAssistant.org
Virtualassistnatjobs.com

These sites and many like them make it easy to find a virtual assistant that fits your budget.

Why Shouldn’t You Hire A Virtual Assistant?

While there are many reasons why you should hire a virtual assistant, there are also a few why you shouldn’t. First off, you never really know what you’re going to get when you hire a virtual assistant. It’s wise to ask for references and previous work experience when hiring, but even then you can’t be too sure. Especially since some virtual assistants can come rather cheap (about $10/hour), you can never be sure about the quality you are going to receive.

If you don’t have a large budget to start off with, then it’s probably best to wait until you have more money to spend. After all, with most things you get what you pay for so if you aren’t willing to spend a lot on a virtual assistant then chances are you won’t be too pleased with the results. Moreover, it can be good practice to learn some of those tasks yourself so that down the road if you did want to hire a virtual assistant then you would know exactly how you want each job done.

Stay Involved

If you decide to take on a virtual assistant, don’t just delegate responsibilities and let them go. Stay on top of how everything is going and make sure that your brand is staying intact. Especially if you have your virtual assistant answering e-mails or managing your social media accounts, you want to make sure that they are portraying you and your company in the way you want them too. Even the best virtual assistants can’t know what you’re thinking all the time, so follow up with what they’re doing and give them sound feedback.