There comes a time in business when the activities become too expanded that a single person or even two persons cannot handle them all. Ultimately the decision is taken to hire an assistant who would look after the administrative tasks while the people performing their regular duties would continue accordingly. Expansion in work does not always mean that income sources have also expanded. The income might remain the same but the duties are multiplied. Now hiring an assistant in this situation would simply mean that extra pressure is being put upon the company’s financials and giving out an extra salary would be a huge burden.

To manage the work load without exerting too much pressure on the company’s bank accounts, the best option a business owner can take is to hire a company providing virtual assistant services. Hiring a virtual assistant company does not mean that the business is getting involved in something too expensive. Every company has its packages about the services offered in it and the amount that will be charged from their clients. In some cases where every need of a client does not fall within a package, a tailored package is designed and the fee is declared to the client.

Paying a fee for the virtual assistant services is very different from paying a salary to an employee hired as an assistant. When an employee is hired, the state laws are consulted about the salary, annual leaves, vacations and medical allowances, let’s not forget the taxes too. When all these amounts are calculated, the accumulated amount crosses the three digit figure easily and the company is liable to pay all these amounts if they want to hire an assistant in the office. Normally when an assistant is hired, he can perform the duties according to his abilities. If the work load is greater than the capacity of a single person, there is obviously a need for two or more and the company would be in need of more than one assistant but paying the salaries of them all will be an issue.

Taking the virtual assistant services would mean that an entire team of assistants get hired for a single fee. No matter what the services fee would be but it never crosses the three digit figure if the client asks for almost every service that can be performed by an assistant. But even in this case the client pays the salary of a single office assistant but gets the work which would be performed by an entire team. Hence it always pays to hire an online team rather than a bunch of in-house assistants.

A business administrative assistant holds a key position in every company because he makes it possible for the managers and the business holders to streamline their daily work. As every other person is busy in doing their tasks, nobody has enough time to take care of the other important things that are necessary to run a business. But in order to keep business operational costs within control, most business owners do not hire an assistant but later regret it. If the business needs to control on its operational costs but still need to hire an assistant because his position is undeniable even in the smallest business, the best option is to choose a virtual administrative assistant.

Who is a virtual administrative assistant?
The assistant has many roles to perform in an office. He has to act as a secretary, as a receptionist and also as an assistant. All of these roles can now be performed even without a physical presence in the office thanks to the advanced technology we have access to. Since businesses have mostly gone online, clients rarely walk into the offices to ask for details and prefer to find the information on the company website. Hence, the importance of a company website has become greater than its physical office.

A virtual assistant performing the administrative roles does all the work but instead of being present inside the company’s premises, he performs his duties from a remote place. He performs all the tasks assigned to him. And as it has become undeniable to have a well maintained website with a support option, the virtual assistant greets all the customers on the website through the online chat support. Thus, he fulfills the requirement of a receptionist.

Is it cost effective to hire a virtual administrative assistant?
The option to go online automatically boosts the chances of saving more money and get extra work done. A virtual administrative assistant can do more than just work like a typical assistant but can even provide the services of maintaining the website and keep it alive. Designing and development is a huge issue for website holders because they cannot do it without a professional and unless they hire one which is extremely costly, the website will not be looking good. The virtual assistant can provide these type of services too so this assistant becomes more of a multipurpose employee than just an assistant whose tasks are limited. The virtual assistant charges a nominal fee for the services he provides, mostly for just the hours served. His fee does not require taxes and benefits but just the amount which has been mutually agreed. So yes, the virtual assistant for the administrative tasks is definitely cost effective.

Advancement in the internet and most probably the IT industry has provided professionals to provide services remotely. One of the industries that has also benefitted from the growth of internet is the real estate sector which can now get a real estate virtual assistant. The virtual assistants providing services to the realtors can do a lot to improve their business and organize it for them before they come to the office. A virtual assistant can streamline the business activities for his client when they are available or even when they are out of the office.

Realtors have very little time to spend in the office because most of their time is spent outside in the field. They are either outside showing property to the customers or are taking pictures of the new property that has just come to their knowledge. And since there isn’t just some amount of office work to be done in the backend, the realtors who do not have a real estate virtual assistant to support them are behind in the administrative work. They already have a back lock huge enough to keep an assistant busy for the entire month before moving to the new tasks.

Since the modern times demand for a website to be updated on a regular basis, it can be a hectic task for the realtors to manage the paper work; website maintenance and dealing with clients within the days work timings. Hence they have to make arrangements for these tasks to be handled by a permanent resource. Hiring an assistant in the office would certainly be alarming for the company’s budget. Since the assistant wouldn’t be dealing any clients and just handling the paper work, it wouldn’t be a wise move. And then for website maintenance a separate person would be hired. This means that the company’s operational costs have doubled in an instant.

The real estate virtual assistant would be a handy man plus an all in one employee for the business. While the costs are automatically reduced when the employee is hired online as he does not walk in the office. The payment for the transport and coffee and other activities are automatically shed off from the company’s budget. Next, the virtual assistant for the real estate business would handle the official tasks and also keep the website updated. As he will do all these tasks, the business will get more exposure and the business owners get more time to focus on the market rather than inside their office.

Some of you may be asking what a virtual office assistant is. As futuristic as it sounds, it would not be wrong to say in this context that the future is already here. A virtual office assistant is already present for the world to make use of and this assistant is no less than any kind of a regular office assistant. But the difference in this kind of assistant is that he provides the client services from a remote office and never walks through the gates of the client or his employer. While this may sound weird to many office bearers; but a larger community makes use of his services just because of this quality.

Many business owners are now more interested to hire online virtual assistants for their official work rather than the regular office assistant. The benefits of working with the virtual assistant are many and there is no loss but profit when compared with the regular office assistant. Let’s be frank here, what duties do you expect from your assistant who walks in your office daily and performs his duties. Obviously the work you expect from him is to handle the official emails, answer queries, send a number of new emails and attend telephone calls. Rarely would your office assistant would perform any additional tasks but all the assistants who work in offices over the globe do nothing more than this and they charge heavily for it.

Apart from the wages they charge to their employers, the employers are needed to bear a lot of other expenses. When your assistant comes in and swipes his card in the attendance machine, the first thing he does is preparing a cup of coffee and then settles down for work. Now as he has clocked in, he turns on the lights and the air conditioner or the heater if it is winter. Now the electricity bill has started falling on the wallet of the employer even though he has not arrived yet. Now these kinds of overhead charges cannot be reduced as it would mean reducing the working hours and hence the work to be done by the office assistant.

Now compare the virtual office assistant in this case. No one enters the office doors hence there is no cup of coffee made on the office expense. As the virtual assistant does not walk in through the doors he does not turn on the office lights or the air conditioner or heater of his employer but does it all on his own expense in his own office. Hence the employer is saved from these overhead charges and has no concern how much electricity bill comes to his virtual assistant nor does he care about the amount of coffee cups consumed a day by the VA. This is all a win win situation for the small business owner because he cannot afford to bear such overhead charges.

Taking a business from its initial stages to the top is more than just owning an online store and adding pretty graphics to it. Maintaining your web store is the greatest task which is the only way you can take your business to greater heights. Just like any other business activity as you need maintaining the customers, answering queries and doing a lot of other important tasks to keep your office in a neat and busy condition, your website also needs to be taken care of. Unless there is someone appointed for the task, it can be the biggest disaster for your business.

We all know that the internet has taken over our lives. We search for everything on the internet. Using the online maps for guidance to our destinations and even to search for the latest movie release date or for any other kind of information we are directed towards the internet. Even the purchases are now made online and there is no secret reason behind it than just the plain reason that we are more comfortable with it than anything else now. Hence in order to keep the business on the track of growth, every business now needs to have an online virtual assistant to take care of the website.

The reason to hire an assistant online is because of the many benefits associated with it that a regular assistant in the office cannot provide. The first on the list is the cost effectiveness. A regular assistant in the office would charge a high salary for which most small businesses are not quite ready yet. As the business generates just enough money to support a single person or a family, hiring another one can put a huge stress on the budget and can derail the business’s financials. The virtual assistant can be hired in two ways. If you have enough work to keep him busy for a full day all over the month, choose him on a fixed monthly fee which obviously will be a fraction of the regular office assistant. If not, than hire him on hourly basis and pay only for the hours you take services from him.

The second benefit you get with an online virtual assistant is the low maintenance cost. Since your assistant isn’t coming to your office for work, you do not have to purchase a PC for him nor do you have to provide him office space. As you are not providing him office space you do not have to provide him a table, chair and the other items needed for work. Hence there is zero office maintenance cost from his side so you get another place to save money from even with a hired assistant. These major factors have made small businesses break free from high operational costs and get time and money to spend on expansion and growth.

Owning a business is not only a dream of some, but it is the dream of every professional who understands his industry and possesses the abilities to be a leader. It can be the sweetest dream to picture yourself as a leader of a business where people work round the clock and you get to keep all the profits. This is probably the very picture which urges the entrepreneurs to start a venture and after they have setup everything and begun working, the workload kills their personal life and instead of feeling happy about their business, they get depressed.

Since a human being is termed as a social animal, there is no way a human being can stay away from his gatherings, friends and family for a long time. Ultimately he returns only to find that either his return is too late and there aren’t enough people to welcome him like the old times, or when he returns, the business starts suffering in the backend. So, in order to have balanced life, the business owner ultimately feels the need for an assistant but if he hires one in the office, his profits would be terribly shortened and it would have an adverse effect on the business. Now what to do? The business owner is now trapped and the way out can be very difficult.

The only possible way out is to hire an online personal assistant who would not only be cheap to hire, but will also make the life of the business owner easier and organized. Thanks to the modern technology the task to hire an assistant on the internet is easier than ever. A business owner can find hundreds of assistants over the internet who are not only available to work for him, but they are experienced professionals so that there is no lengthy trainings required and the work can commence within minutes.

Small business owners face the biggest challenges when hiring an assistant because all they have is one source of income. Hiring another person would mean to cut the share of the business owner and it would create many financial problems for the business owner’s personal and professional life. Hence the idea to hire an online personal assistant is the most suitable for him because in this way he would not only be hiring a team member, but he would also be expanding his business without any investment.

While fulfilling a lot of duties and administrative tasks, a virtual administrative assistant has many more abilities to work as a team member than a regular office secretary or a personal assistant. Modern office demands are now various and they do not revolve around just to reply some letters. Modern business techniques require a lot of work to be done online and not just on a monthly basis, but on a daily basis. If the company doesn’t get involved in many different activities, it is the job of the virtual assistant to make it look like an extremely active company without faking everything.

The work online can be crafted to be in favor of the company and since these years are called the years of social media by the gurus, the virtual assistant can create a lot of buzz on the social media pages through his internet marketing skills. It is important to have Facebook pages and Twitter accounts for every business today and they also need to be updated regularly to keep the followers and fans involved and engaged. Studies reveal that especially the young generation of today finds it more appealing to get informed about the sale and other important events of a company from their social media pages.

Companies which have an active social media campaign are not only to get a huge list of fans and followers, but they are also able to boost their sales through it. The recent customer trends reveal that they are more interested to shop online rather than at the stores in the markets. This simply means that the business owners who do not own a website yet are missing a huge piece of the customer’s pie chart. The business owners should now not only seriously think about getting a website made for their business, but since they do not have enough time to handle the tasks associated with it, they should hire a virtual administrative assistant to do it for them.

Today finding a reliable and hardworking virtual assistant is easier than finding an assistant to work in the office with zeal and enthusiasm. The giant search engine Google provides all the necessary links to the service providers within an instant. And the business owners can simply choose the best person or the company they like and get started with their business campaigns over the internet and social media. The results would be pleasing and it certainly would be worth every penny spent.

Are you involved in the real estate business? Do you find enough time to manage the clients and update all the data in the systems before it gets too late? Do you find it difficult to juggle the tasks successfully and still be able to beat competition? Are you feeling the heat of the competitors and wish you had an assistant but since your office isn’t big enough you are not hiring one? All of these questions are easy to answer but finding the right solution can be a very difficult task. Being in real estate business is not easy because time is what matters and realtors are always short of time.

Hiring an assistant in the office can be a bad choice. It would not only increase your operational costs, but it will also require you to upgrade your office, rent a new one if your office is currently small and increase a lot of other expenses too. Hence realtors should always opt for a real estate virtual assistant who will do all the tasks a normal assistant in the office would do but without raising the costs. The options with a real estate virtual assistant are many and any realtor big or small can easily afford to hire one according to his budget.

If you have never used a virtual assistant for your real estate business before, it might seem like a troublesome task at first. But there are two things you should keep in mind when hiring one and things will be smoother than silk between him and your business.

Mind set
Bear in mind that your virtual assistant is a business owner who is independent and runs his own business which is none other than providing virtual assistance. Hence he is a professional and wouldn’t be treated as someone who knows nothing about the real estate business. It doesn’t matter where your business is located, your VA will handle the tasks easily. He will be your colleague or a partner, so you can be sure that your business is in safe hands and your work will always be quality work.

Communication
Since your real estate virtual assistant isn’t a regular assistant who would be reporting to your office every single day at sharp at the same time, he would be working from a remote place and you’ll be needed to communicate using email and other services which suit both of you. If you are easy to use these services then working with a virtual assistant would be a piece of cake.