Are you overwhelmed with your freelance venture? Have more work than you know what to do with? Keep forgetting to tweet or update your portfolio? Drowning in unread messages?
If any of these questions provoke an affirmative response (and your business is healthy, financially), hire a virtual assistant.
Most solopreneurs, high-earning freelancers, and small business owners don’t even realize they need help until they are in over their heads, stressed out and overworking themselves, and things start to fall through the cracks. The email inbox and social media presence are often the first to go, although the specific symptoms vary from case to case. One thing is universal, though: many business problems can not only be lessened, but turned into an advantage, if you know when to reach out for support.
What can a virtual assistant do? Here’s a list of 10 tasks that could potentially be outsourced to a virtual assistant:
- Email inbox management
- Calendar support
- Administrative tasks (populating spreadsheets, setting up templates, presentation slides)
- Travel support (research, reservations)
- Industry research (finding resource material, sources to contact, potential clients)
- Proofreading
- Public relations
- Social media management
- Transcriptions
- Basic image manipulation (stock sourcing, cropping, resizing)
If you find a single virtual assistant who provides all of these services (and has the expertise and skill to back them up), expect to pay them incredibly well because you’ve found yourself a unicorn. That said, it’s pretty rare that one person would need every single service on this list on an ongoing basis. If you decide to hire a virtual assistant, begin your search by choosing the relevant tasks from the list above to create your core list of requirements. Add any other attributes you might want to screen for, such as industry knowledge or time zone, and you’ve just created the search criteria for your perfect virtual assistant.
How to actually go about finding the right virtual assistant for your business goals? Good question. I’ll answer it in an upcoming post.