Michael Leon11 Top Reasons Why You Should Hire a Virtual Assistant & More (2022)
Updated: 5 days ago
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Time does not equal money.
In fact, time is more valuable than money because if you lose money, you can always earn more later in your life but with time, it doesn't work that way.
Not unless you know of a Lazarus Pit that is in existence that gives us immortality, we don't have the ability to turn back time and biologically de-age, at least not with the physical capabilities we have now (sort of) and since the methods we currently have will more likely contribute to cancer rather than de-age us (video has lots of biology jargon).
But thankfully, we have virtual assistants (AIs such as Siri and Alexa don't count) that are willing to help out with our businesses, especially now that COVID-19 has made more people realize that working remotely in front of a computer at home all day is very possible.
So if you would like to:
Earn more money for your business
Have more free time in your life doing other activities or less important things such as hobbies
Be more emotionally stress-free
Then you'll love the 11 top reasons why you should hire a virtual assistant in 2021 as well as the 3 top reasons why you should hire a Filipino virtual assistant as a bonus along with some final words, what virtual assistant platform you should use, and how to pay your virtual assistants while minimizing transfer fees.
Let's get right into it.
1. Increasing Your Time Efficiency
By outsourcing your non-essential work to your virtual assistant, you'll significantly reduce the amount of work hours doing repetitive and mundane tasks while allowing you to shift your focus on more essential work.
Virtual assistants can handle administrative tasks such as:
Writing and sending emails and newsletters
Handling customers when it comes to live chat, phone calls, and/or emails
Research
Scheduling meetings for you
Data entry
Such examples are Microsoft and Verizon, tech companies that outsourced their work to numerous virtual assistants in foreign countries acting as their support team to deal with ongoing difficulties people are encountering everyday while the executives focus on improving and coming up with new products and services.
The amount of time you need in your life will be the number one factor that should determine whether or not you should hire a virtual assistant.
This is especially true if you're in a situation where you want to build a business on the side but you're busy working at your current job or focused on studying in school like I did (which was in biological sciences (intense grasp of concepts then memorization) and not business related), then hiring a virtual assistant is highly recommended.
2. Ability to Work With Them Anywhere
Regardless of whether you're at home, at work, at school, coffee shop, or airport, all you need is an internet connection and your phone (or your laptop) to check up on how your virtual assistant is doing.
Since they're working in their own personal space and time, the only things you need to be responsible for are to see if they're actually doing the work, their mental health, and their payment.
In regards to payment, that brings me to my next point.
3. Massively Reducing Costs and Expenses
Since virtual assistants are not office employees, you only need to pay them for the amount of work that they do.
You won't have to worry about paying a typical hourly wage which includes breaks, expenses such as office space and equipment, and employee benefits which includes healthcare* or any additional taxes.
By hiring a virtual assistant either part-time or full-time, you'll actually be saving over $8000 USD monthly and over $96,000 USD annually in comparison to hiring an in-house office employee.
You'd be crazy if that isn't enough to convince you to hire a virtual assistant for your business.
*Although you are not required to cover their healthcare costs, you should try to make sure that your virtual assistant(s) at least have health insurance so any damages to your business are minimized should something happen to them.
4. They Have a Particular Set of Skills, Skills They've Acquired Over a Very Long Career
Forgive me for the reference to Liam Neeson's film but virtual assistants do have a particular set of skills they've likely acquired from working in different kinds of jobs and companies.
So if you have any skills that you lack and you don't want to take the time to learn it, there's an entire marketplace of virtual assistants with various skill sets that you can delegate tasks to instead.
These skills can include building and maintaining a website with code along with SEO, social media marketing, video editing, etc. so there's no need for any training while being able to save yourself a lot of money.
But if you already have the skill set such as copywriting and are just looking for a virtual assistant with that same skill set to save yourself some time, it would be very beneficial to see if there are things that they can improve on and vice-versa after you've hired them to establish a stronger work relationship with each other down the road.
Just be specific about the skills you are looking for what certain tasks you want done when posting the job in whichever website you're using and/or contacting the person individually and having them send in their resume.
The last thing you would want is to be bombarded with numerous applications all because your job listing was too general so you end up wasting time deciding which applicant to hire out of all the others who happen to be qualified also.
For myself, my personal preference would be to hire someone based on the type of personality along with how much emotional intelligence that they have aside from skill requirements, similar to how Elon Musk doesn't require high school or college degrees for his job applicants. I place a greater emphasis on communication so they can get the job done smoothly along with their preference in psychological needs.
5. More Flexibility
Since virtual assistants can have a different work schedule from you, this makes it possible for them to be working for you in different time zones at various different countries as you're sleeping.
This provides you greater flexibility in task management while maximizing performance and increasing output production of your business.
With that in mind, virtual assistants makes it possible to run your business with 24/7 availability, even during official holidays, just like how Microsoft does with their tech support team in regards to customer response time which is how they are able to generate a large following of loyal customers over time.
6. Scaling Your Business
As your business grows, there may come a point in time where the demand from your customers or the necessary time spent for lead generation will eventually exceed the amount your current workforce can actually handle, especially if you're working as a solopreneur.
If that is the case, then hiring a virtual assistant would be the best cost-efficient method for increasing profits while improving your current products and/or services overall.
You do not want to be the business that refuses to hire new in-house employees to save costs and not look at hiring virtual assistants as an option from the sudden increase in work-volume.
This kind of scenario can possibly do more harm than good if you've already established a following by damaging customer loyalty and retention and/or process in creating a successful lead generation.
I've personally encountered this scenario myself as a customer when it came to a rapid growth for a certain company. It took them 3 days to read an email I sent and no response was given since they were unable to keep up with demand which gives them a bit of a bad reputation for handling customer inquiries as a result.
So virtual assistants, in a way, can actually help save your business when that crucial point in time of your business comes by.
7. Committed to a High Quality of Service
Virtual assistants are very committed to providing high-quality results to clients like us in order make sure we're getting the best value that we paid for.
They do this since this affects their online reputation on how their future clients are willing to hire them based on the reviews of their performance from their past clients.
After all, they're not like your typical office employee that are able to get away with doing a bit of a lazy job while still getting fully paid for their work.
And you can already see why those people aren't in the virtual assistant industry.
8. Effortless Management
Since virtual assistants have their own personal life to take of, it is not necessary to communicate with them outside of work.
So it would be your best interest to keep things purely professional since you don't want any possible drama in your life and only communicate when necessary with work-related updates.
So if you need to hire multiple virtual assistants at once or over time, you can go ahead and do that.
Just make sure you're not being a terrible boss to your VAs by neglecting their psychological needs which would force them to quit either because you're not communicating properly or communicating with them in a toxic behavior.
After all, they are still human-beings like us and are not meant to be overworked.
9. Quick and Easy to Hire (and Also if Anything Goes Wrong)
If you're looking for someone to hire immediately, then actively searching for a virtual assistant that meets your specific needs should definitely take less than an hour based on the amount of time looking at their profiles and any other background information you should know.
Otherwise, you can take the time to list the specific details of the job while describing your needs for certain virtual assistant platforms without the need to pay for advertising costs and it's typically free. You may or may not have to conduct an online interview with the applicants if you managed to find several of them that are perfect for the job.
Either way, both options are perfect whether you want to get things started immediately or you'd rather take the time to get to know the capabilities of the person you're hiring.
But if anything goes wrong with your current virtual assistant, they are quick and easy to replace as well.
This can happen if your VA flakes out on the job and doesn't respond to your messages. But 99% of the time, it is the client's fault since VAs will most likely find that client's their behavior wasn't appropriate to them. Like I said before, you don't want to be the toxic boss by neglecting their needs.
Otherwise, if you find out that your VA isn't capable for the job, you can easily replace them and hire a different one.
Just remember that they are not superhuman and one VA may not be able to finish all the tasks you've delegated to them so you would be better off hiring another one for the sake of their health.
10. Better Mental Health
Speaking of health, you can become easily overwhelmed and clouded with stress if your tasks continue to pile up every week and you don't see it shrinking anytime soon.
This is one of the most important reasons why hiring a virtual assistant to delegate your tasks is so crucial.
By avoiding burning yourself out almost every single day and create a greater sense of peace within yourself, not only will you find yourself becoming more productive, you're restoring your mindset as well.
There's also the fact that you'll be avoid dealing with more (if any) office drama occurring with in-house employees that can negatively affect your mindset and productivity.
So if you would like to build a bigger business sooner, then you'd be better off with a virtual assistant that won't be caught up with problems such as gossip, being late to work, coming late from lunch, etc. unlike an office employee.
11. Understanding That You Can't Do Everything Alone
Time goes by faster than you think. That's why it's considered your most valuable asset in life and it's more important to utilize other people's time instead who are more well suited for the job.
I was taught with a mindset from my parents to do everything alone with the cheapest method possible which was most often, the free method.
I did manage to find the time during the summer after finishing my spring semester or quarter in college and it turns out that 3 months of free time still isn't enough to complete the tasks that I wanted to do.
I tried learning how to code a website but that proved too frustrating for me since a lot of things kept just breaking and I didn't understand how to fix it so I paid for a service to have them fix it for me.
In the end, I just ended up creating more problems than fixing them and wasting more time and money than I should have because of the fallacy of my mindset I was instilled from my parents back then.
This mindset may most likely be relatable to you which was why I decided to do my own research in regards to self-improvement and somehow finding myself hiring a Filipino virtual assistant along the way.
3 Top Reasons for Hiring Filipino Virtual Assistants in 2021
1. High Literacy Rate and One of the Largest English-Speaking Countries in the World
According to an article from the Manila Times, the relatively current literacy rate in the Philippines is 94% along with 70% of the population being fluent in English.
It is about a 3% drop in literacy rate from the previous years but that has a relatively minimal effect on the population since English is one of the two official languages in the Philippines.
That is because the Philippines used to be a part of US territory from 1898 to 1