Warning: You’re Losing Money by Not Using Virtual Assistants!
The digital era allows business owners to source talent from afar, without the need to relocate employees to your business’s office location. Whether you’re looking for unskilled workers for data entry, experienced administration or customer service staff, or you need more specialized workers to do web design/maintenance, photo-editing, or software coding; there’s a Virtual Assistant out there waiting to be hired by you right now.
Virtual Assistants offer significant money saving advantages over doing time-consuming things yourself, or hiring a burdensome employee who adds a slew of extra overhead costs to your business operations.
Time
Time is the one thing you can never get back. And once you run out of time, that’s it – the journey’s over! Consider the time you spend doing menial tasks like administration, data entry, book keeping, fielding customer phone calls, marketing your business on social media, messing with your company website, etc.
These are all things that a good Virtual Assistant can do for you, so you can focus on the more important aspects of your business, which often times are put on the back-burner by startup entrepreneurs who don’t understand the growth benefits possible when you spend a little cash delegating the menial and mundane.
In fact, an experienced VA will do all these things far better than you ever could!
Why spend hours researching how best to implement a social media marketing attack to get more customers when there’s a Virtual Assistant out there who has nothing but time to provide value to your followers, and seek out even more followers in the process?
You have better things to do, such as improving your product/service line, finding investors to help you expand, and brainstorming and testing ways to improve your business’s process to increase profits.
Why not hire a full or even part-time employee, you ask?
True Cost of a Full-Time Employee
Here’s a few facts to get the wheels turning:
- Most states and provinces have labor laws that force you to pay for two 15 minute breaks per 7+ hour shift. Another paid break is mandatory if they’re working for 12 hours. That’s 2.5 hours a week that you’re paying out for zero productivity, every 5 day work week!
- If you want to attract the best workers, you have to offer either a half-hour paid lunch, or hour unpaid. If you’re paying for lunches, that’s another 2.5 hours per week you’re paying for where nothing’s getting done. Even going the unpaid route, you’re losing a whopping 5 hours a week in productivity time.
- In the U.S., employers typically pay around $2.50 per hour in required benefits on top of an employee’s hourly pay. That’s $100 a week ($4800 per year) extra added to the true cost of each employee you have on staff. Forget about all the other fringe benefits that may be required to attract the best staff (source).
- Add another $2.50 per employee, per hour if you want to offer health insurance (source).
- Most in-house staff will require two days off per week. As soon as the overtime limit is reached, you’re legally obligated to pay them your state or provincial mandated overtime rate.
Hiring a Virtual Assistant is so Worth it!
Your business won’t grow if you’re wasting time doing tasks that can be completed for pennies-on-the-dollar. How much is your time worth?
You can have affordable, yet experienced Virtual Assistants – especially those from reputable virtual assistant company like 24/7 Virtual Assistant – working round-the-clock to help you further your business, without:
- Making and fielding phone calls to set up interviews (typically at the applicant’s convenience) after placing the job advertisement (which costs a good chunk of money using off-line publications).
- Paying the costs involved with training and/or terminating full-timers when they don’t work out.
- Paying extra hourly per-employee expenses for benefits and insurance, on top of salary.
- Paying required overtime pay when crunch time hits on a time-sensitive project.
Did I mention TIME?
Time is money. Time is forging new relationships. Time is maintaining a loving marriage, or finding that special someone. Time is teaching your kids how to ride a bike and drive a car.
Virtual Assistants free up your time, so you have more of it to expand your business, make more money, and ultimately enjoy more of your life.
Cover photo credit: Cheshire East Council / Flickr
About the Author
Ivan Widjaya A mobile entrepreneur who loves to work anytime, anywhere he wants. He runs several popular business blogs, make money online and live a geoarbitrage lifestyle. He typically works at home and travel with his family when he wants to, often without his business.
