If you have recently started a company or run an organization that is growing, you need to staff departments with the right people. This can be tricky, especially if you run a bootstrapped business with limited resources. Hiring full-time employees can be expensive — besides a salary, you also need to pay benefits and offer paid leave, and you can be stuck with them if it turns out they are not a good culture fit. Doing administrative tasks yourself gives you less time to focus on strategic, big-picture work needed to build a sustainable and profitable business.
If you find yourself in this situation, we recommend you hire a virtual assistant (VA) to make your life easier and more productive.
VAs are skilled remote workers specializing in administrative tasks needed to manage and grow a company. VAs are based in different parts of the world — predominantly in the Phillippines, South Asia, and Central and Latin America — and cost significantly less than onboarding a full-time employee. You can hire a VA on a per-hour, per-project, part-time, or full-time basis, and they cost as little as $3–$5 per hour. There are many kinds of VAs who have different specializations. These include travel, medicine, real estate, law, coding, web development, personal assistants, executive assistants, chief of staff, marketing, email, and many more. You can hire VAs on professional marketplaces like Fiverr and Upwork. Or through agencies like Leverage, myVA360, Wing Assistants, Time Etc, 20four7VA, Prialto, Execviva, and many more.
In this blog, we will review 15 types of VAs and what they can do to benefit your business:
This assistant helps agents, brokers, and companies working in real estate with specialized tasks. These include managing property listings, maintaining client records, scheduling viewings, supporting marketing efforts by creating flyers, ads, etc., conducting market research on property prices, buying trends, and neighborhood information, and providing administrative support. Their work can make you or your agency more productive, freeing time for core business tasks like onboarding new clients.
These VAs help law firms, attorneys, and legal departments of large organizations. They help with legal research, draft documents like contracts, handle client inquiries, manage case files, and help with administrative support like billing clients, data entry, and other office-related tasks. Legal VAs can be especially cost-effective, given the high costs associated with hiring full-time attorneys and lawyers.
An executive VA (or EVA) works only with executives and helps streamline their work and lives, giving them more time to focus on business strategy and their personal lives. Tasks EVAs do include managing calendars, scheduling appointments and calls, email inbox management, making travel arrangements, researching market trends any other information you may need, and personal tasks like buying gifts, making reservations, booking movie tickets, and more. EVAs are flexible and their work can be tailored to your needs if you need them part-time or full-time.
These assistants can do several tasks for you, including flight, train, or boat bookings, hotel reservations, organizing car rentals, planning itineraries, insuring your trip, arranging airport transfers, finding currency exchange deals, and much more. They will organize your trip while adhering to a predetermined budget, saving you time and money. If you run a travel agency, you will find that hiring an assistant is much more cost-efficient than a full-time employee.
A virtual chief of staff does tasks that an executive assistant would traditionally cover (email management, scheduling meetings, travel bookings, etc) and, more importantly, helps implement a CEO’s vision for the company, acting as a strategic partner. They make sure that a company’s different departments work together toward the same goal, oversee the execution of new initiatives, give the CEO advice, help with decision-making, handle sensitive information, help prioritize strategic tasks, and filter information that reaches you.
A marketing VA can help establish your brand and widen your audience base. Tasks they focus on are content writing and creation for specific audiences, SEO optimization, market research, design, managing influencers who may work with your company, newsletter management, conducting A/B testing of website pages and email campaigns, and analyzing data from Google Analytics, social media platforms, MailChimp, and other sources.
Email management VAs can efficiently handle and declutter your inbox, filter and sort emails by priority, use tools that make management easier, and do many more tasks. They use tools like timetoreply to track metrics and leverage inbox management software like Superhuman and Rightinbox. These tasks let you begin your work day by responding only to priority emails and you can organize your time more efficiently.
A dedicated VA who handles customer complaints and queries can improve customer satisfaction and organizational efficiency. A customer service VA serves as the first point of contact between customers and your company; they resolve issues, process orders and track missing ones, update and manage webpages like FAQ sections and other knowledge products, and update CRM systems. VAs work remotely and, depending on their geographic location, can be available 24/7 to address customer queries, giving you an advantage over competitors in your field.
Dedicated VAs who focus on social media can give you data-driven strategies to improve your online presence, improving audience reach and engagement while cutting costs. Social media VAs can create content and schedule on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X, TikKok, and LinkedIn. They will develop a strategy for each platform, execute campaigns, and track performance metrics to inform future decisions. Additionally, they can reach out to influencers and create a collaboration plan with them. Tools VAs use include Hootsuite, Buffer, and Sprout Social to manage online engagement.
An accounting VA can support all your financial and accounting tasks, including bookkeeping, invoicing clients, following up on payments, maintaining payroll records for employees, assisting with tax filing, organizing information for audits, and liaising with banking representatives. Accounting VAs will likely cost much less than in-house accountants and you can easily scale the number of VAs you need based on the work at hand. If you need accounting VAs for specific tasks, like filing taxes, you could hire them only toward the end of the financial year.
An assistant trained in using software like Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and Affinity Designer, to name a few, can create high-quality graphics that ensure brand consistency and maintain a high standard of professionalism. A graphic design VA can help create graphics for social media posts, design banners and flyers, create a visual brand style that makes your company instantly recognizable, and create templates for reports and presentations.
A healthcare VA can assist with clinical and administrative support relating to healthcare providers and facilities. If you are a doctor and run a practice, hiring an assistant can free up your time, allowing you to treat more patients, and reduce your overhead costs. Dedicated healthcare VAs can schedule appointments for you, handle patient communication, send reminders for follow-up appointments, manage patients’ medical records, crosscheck patients’ insurance coverage, and transcribe medical notes and dictations.
Assistants focusing on project management can bring increased efficiency and better communication practices into your organization. They specialize in tasks like creating project plans, maintaining timelines, updating deadlines, facilitating communication between departments and external stakeholders, managing budgets, and ensuring quality control — all necessary to execute a project smoothly. Moreover, VAs focus on administrative tasks, giving you more time to focus on project strategy and scope.
A data entry VA processes and manages data for an organization. These VAs streamline data management processes by cleaning and extracting data, organizing files, appropriately naming data storage files for easy access, and providing data analysis support when required. This ensures accuracy in data storage and improves accessibility, saving time and resources.
If you run an e-commerce business, hiring an assistant specializing in your industry can bring expertise to your organization and help your online store run smoothly. VAs can handle tasks like stocking inventory, managing product lists online, processing orders, updating the website, analyzing competitor strategies, executing sales and special events, and providing general administrative support. E-commerce VAs cost less than hiring a full-time employee, and their time-tested strategies can help your company save money in the long run.
Founded by serial entrepreneurs, Leverage Assistants is a white-glove service that helps you find 1% assistants and then teaches you how to build leverage with them. If you're interested in a strategy session to learn how to use an assistant, click here.
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