A virtual assistant can save you tens or even thousands a year. Don’t believe it? Then read on. We’ll explain how to cut costs in your company with a virtual assistant.
Who is a virtual assistant anyway?
Is this the first time you’ve encountered the term virtual assistant? Let’s explain what her job entails. A virtual assistant performs the same activities for an employer that a traditional assistant would – but with a few differences:
- The entire collaboration can take place online or over the phone, so the employer doesn’t have to hire a new office to hire an assistant.
- The virtual assistant is never sick and never takes vacations.
- Unlike a traditional assistant who goes to work for 8 hours a day, a virtual assistant only performs tasks when needed.
- A virtual assistant has many times more skills. How is this possible? Find out in the following paragraph.
A virtual assistant knows marketing and finance and speaks five languages
A virtual assistant doesn’t have to be one person – it can be a team of several people with different skills and experience. This allows them to cover a much wider range of activities, giving the employer specialists in several different sectors in one person. If you were trying to find a single assistant who knew sales, marketing, accounting and several languages, you’d probably be looking for a long time.
How to reduce costs in your company with a virtual assistant?
We’ve already explained who a virtual assistant is and what they do. But how can it help you reduce costs in your company? The answer is simple: It is much more flexible than an employee. She only works when you need her. You don’t have to pay unnecessarily for 8-hour working hours that an assistant wouldn’t use all. A virtual assistant can work for you for as little as 20 minutes or as much as 5 hours a day – or every day in a completely different way.
A virtual assistant will also reduce your costs for sickness and holidays
You’ve probably encountered a situation where your employee has fallen ill, and you’ve had to find a replacement. You almost certainly also reimburse employees for vacation or give them sick days. With a virtual assistant, you won’t have to do anything like that. She is always available to you – and if she happens to fall ill, she is seamlessly replaced by another virtual assistant who, thanks to the CRM system, knows exactly what to do and at what stage of your cooperation. The virtual assistant also works for you as a freelancer, so you don’t have to pay health and social security contributions for her. In short, you only pay for the pure time she spends on your tasks.
Virtual assistant is faster
With a team of experienced assistants, virtual assistants have far more experience and skills than a real assistant. This means she can handle tasks faster and better, that might be difficult for a real assistant, as she has never encountered them before.
Imagine giving your assistant a brand-new task: Write a few Facebook posts. The assistant has never managed a company account before, so she spends a lot of time trying to find out how to write such a post. In the end, she writes several posts, only about half of which are usable. In contrast, a virtual assistant just hands the task over to the team member who knows how to write posts, and the job is done – quickly and well.
How to cut costs: How much will a virtual assistant save you?
How much exactly does a virtual assistant save you? The final figure is of course dependent on the hourly rate of the virtual assistant compared to the hourly rate of an employee. A virtual assistant is usually a little more expensive but will get a lot more work done in each amount of time. In the end, it also works out cheaper because you don’t have to pay social security and health insurance contributions or holiday pay.
What do you pay the virtual assistant for?
The way virtual assistants charge for their work varies. At myTimi, we do it in such a way that the virtual assistant is logged into the CRM system while performing your tasks. This system accurately measures to the minute the time the assistant spends on your tasks. This way, you can be sure that the assistant has used the time to the fullest and you can see in a regular report how much time each task has taken.
What can a virtual assistant do for you?
A virtual assistant most often does the same work that a traditional assistant would do: administration, answering phone calls and scheduling appointments.
In addition to these tasks, virtual assistants at myTimi can also do more complex business-related work: reporting, customer service, acquisition, billing or marketing.
Would you rather have a virtual assistant or in-house experts?
Are you putting together a plan to reduce your company’s costs and are stuck on whether it’s better to hire a virtual assistant or a team of experts? The truth is that even virtual assistants run to some limits, and in some situations, in-house specialists are more beneficial to you.
How to find a good virtual assistant?
How to know which virtual assistant is the right one? We recognize that choosing a virtual assistant can be a challenge. There is no such thing as an assistant. A good virtual assistant shouldn’t add to your workload, but the opposite – she knows how to take on tasks efficiently and complete them independently. She’s also reliable and trustworthy – you need to be sure she won’t drop a task at the last minute or give away your trade secrets to the competition. A virtual assistant should also be versatile and experienced in several different fields so that she can do the widest range of diverse work. There’s also the question of how you pay the virtual assistant – the most profitable virtual assistant is one where you only pay for actual work done.
Virtual assistant (not only) for your business: 4 reasons to choose myTimi
- Our team consists of experts in different business areas under one roof. Thanks to this, we solve every task quickly, efficiently and with high quality.
- You only pay for the pure time we spend on your tasks.
- We are fair. If you are not satisfied with our service, you don’t pay.
- We are transparent. We report all costs to you regularly and you can see exactly how much time each task took.