It’s no secret to business owners and entrepreneurs: if you want to scale and grow your business, you eventually need to replicate yourself and hire other people.
After all, there’s only so many hours in a day and your body can only do so much within that time frame.
A perfect example? Jeff Bezos. Can you imagine if he had to manually and single-handedly take everyone’s orders, pack them, and ship them? He’d only probably be able to serve less than 500 orders a day. Not to mention, he’d had to take some time off from taking orders because he has to source products, negotiate and contact suppliers, and accept/store/organize his products.
The best way to avoid having to become a slave to the hours would be to create multiple versions of you, doing the same (if not better and more efficient) work that you do.
If you still think that there are now too many virtual assistants in the world and there’s no room for you, here are a few reasons why business owners continue to look for help:
1) to help take care of the smaller, more time-consuming things
For many small businesses, hiring help for the smaller and often mundane tasks are among the first things that they do.
Need help answering emails and support questions? Hire a customer service specialist.
Need to manually enter data from one platform to another? Get someone to do data entry work.
As boring as these kinds of tasks can be, they are usually the most time-consuming of all.
2) to work on the things that are not their expertise
My first hire was an accountant. While I did a lot of bookkeeping and tax document processing myself, I could not be bothered crunching the numbers to submit to the tax people. So I hired an accountant on retainer to do all the numbers for me instead.
If you want to scale fast, hiring people for their expertise is usually the best way to go. You not only have to worry about implementing the work AND making sure that they come out with superb quality, but you also get to demand higher rates from your clients because of it.
3) to help them gain back their time
Sometimes business owners just want to be able to gain back the time they lost working on their business so they can spend more of it with their family or by themselves, doing their hobbies.
The right hire could mean freeing yourself up from hard tasks that consume a lot of time trying to figure out. They can also be smaller, easier tasks that just take too much time for them.
4) to help them focus on the bigger picture
Once you start growing your business, you want to be focusing more on the bigger picture.
Managers and business owners, for example, cannot carve the time out of their day to spend cleaning the building restrooms. They may be able to spot the small problems but they assign and delegate these tasks to someone else instead of doing the fixing themselves.
Business owners want to be able to focus on activities that help the business grow and generate more income and hand over other work to people who are more capable than them.
5) to allow the business to run without their constant supervision
A lot of entrepreneurs and business owners start their companies in order to have more freedom with it comes to time and money. The problem is that during the growth phase, their businesses can demand so much of their time and effort – even more than is required from a full-time employee.
As such, the biggest goal is to find a way to replicate themselves by assigning tasks to the right people so that they are more and more hands-off on the process. Having a good system and documenting SOPs is crucial for businesses that want to scale and grow, even without the owner eyeing on ALL the details ALL of the time.
Positioning Yourself and Your Services
Knowing the reasons why business owners hire virtual assistants is important in being able to close contracts with them. You want to be able to angle and market yourself in such a way that your prospective client sees the value in hiring you – whether it’s being able to save time, being able to hand off tasks without micromanaging and worrying, being able to focus on company growth instead of implementation and delivery, and so on.
Even virtual assistants (and other service-based business owners) also need virtual assistants!
despite my busy schedule i have not considered getting myself a virtual assistant, perhaps its different if ikaw jud mag work on the things that need to be done.. but akoa rana opinion hehe
Someday, someday I can have one too. When that happens, I know that I am on the peak of my career. That’s the goal.
I totally agree with all the points you’ve mentioned above. VAs are such a great help, especially in scaling up businesses. As a VA myself, I can attest to how my client was able to expand his online businesses by replicating himself. Also, we don’t communicate that much since he has already built a system that allows me to work without his constant supervision.
Thank you for the insightful information, Pam. I agree. Having a small business, myself, was a hard deal for me. I am actually considering hiring one but my business partner prefers the traditional way – doing all the transactions all by ourselves which is, in doubt, very tiring and time-consuming. Admittedly, it was frustrating but I know someday I would be able to convince her – the importance of VA’s and the like in the business world.
There is a demand for VAs and where was this industry when I was looking for one hahaha. Keep doing what you are doing because it has helped a lot of people. Time is indeed precious and VAs are awesome.
I couldn’t agree more. I have a few business owner friends in the US who hired VAs, too, to help them do marketing and social media management for instance, while they focus on other equally important aspect of their business.
This is the best point of view of Hiring Virtual Assistants. Many of us today are running out of time yet have small outputs of our work. That’s why we need to replicate people who have same vision like us in work.
What was the demand like for virtual assistants during covid lockdowns and after lockdowns?