The decision to hire a VA is not always an easy one for a small business owner. Making that first step to paying out your hard-earned cash can be difficult. You’ve built up your business from nothing, so handing over parts of it to a complete stranger can feel daunting, particularly if you’re struggling to see how spending that extra money will benefit you.

However, if you’re finding that you’re spending your evenings catching up on paperwork and client emails, you never seem to have the time to review your business and you’re starting to worry about when you’re going to be able to concentrate on bringing in new clients, then a VA won’t just be beneficial, they are essential.

Read on to find out how a VA will save your business time and money.

As small business owners and sole traders we all wear many different hats. As CEO, Finance Director, Marketing Manager and Customer Service Lead we plan for growth, ensure our business is on a healthy financial footing, work on attracting new clients and ensure that our existing clients’ needs are recognised and met. And we put the Admin hat on to take care of the essential tasks needed to provide our business with structure and underpin everything the other departments do.
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This all mounts up to a lot of work. And while a lot of small business owners will happily outsource to an accountant or social media manager, they can be a lot more resistant to hiring someone to take care of the admin.

You know you’re overwhelmed and struggling with the amount of admin on your plate. And you know you need to outsource some of it to a professional. But when you’re so busy it can be difficult to identify which admin tasks you should outsource. Plus, a lot of small business owners get used to doing everything themselves and get into the mindset of “I can do that, it only takes 5 minutes”.
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The thing is, all those “just 5 minutes” add up to a lot of time in the long run. Leaving you with even less time to decide what you are going to outsource. Luckily for you I’ve come up with a quick guide to 20 easily outsourceable admin tasks that you could hand over to a virtual assistant tomorrow.

​Many small business owners who struggle with their admin would love to get some outside help. Knowing where to start can be tricky though.

A question I’m often asked is: what kind of tasks can a VA help with?
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The remit of individual tasks a VA can assist with is very broad but the types of work we take on essentially boil down to 3 things:

Normally at this time of year I’d have written about how to manage the school holidays along with running a small business, but so many of us had to negotiate 4 months of home-schooling that the summer holidays didn’t seem to present the same challenge this year. In fact this looks like being the easiest 6-7 weeks of the parenting/work juggle that I’ve done in quite a while.
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Our experiences since March of this year have all been different. Some business owners embraced lockdown, using it as an opportunity to take a look at marketing strategies and revamp existing processes and practices. Others have reacted to the new situation by realigning their offering – moving from face-to-face services to online. Some have been even busier than usual. A lot of us will have been concentrating purely on what absolutely needed to be done, keeping our business afloat and letting a lot of the little day-to-day things slide. 

Are you overwhelmed by work? Desperate to outsource but no idea where to start?  It can be dispiriting looking at a mountain of work, knowing it would be so much easier if you had someone to help but feeling that you have to get everything in order before you can ask someone to take it on.

Do you want to know a secret? You don’t have to get everything sorted before you outsource your tasks. In fact, isn’t the whole reason you need to outsource that you can’t physically get through it all?
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Here are 5 things you can outsource now: