When you’re just starting out, what’s one task you could assign to a virtual assistant to better streamline your work and make yourself more productive?
These answers are provided by Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most successful young entrepreneurs. YEC members represent nearly every industry, generate billions of dollars in revenue each year, and have created tens of thousands of jobs. Learn more at yec.co.
1. Data Organization
Simply collecting data isn’t enough. You also have to organize it to optimize your operations. But when you have a huge amount of data, organizing can become a tedious job. That’s where virtual assistants can help you. Let them streamline the data for you. It can be a great help for you and your business.
– Thomas Griffin, OptinMonster
2. Bookkeeping
Bookkeeping is a common thing for entrepreneurs to assign to assistants. It takes a lot of extra time that you could spend elsewhere. It’s important to keep track of your finances so you’re comfortable where you stand in your business and can prepare in case anything unexpected occurs.
3. Customer Emails
A great task for a virtual assistant when you’re first starting out is responding to customer emails and messages. You can give them templates for responses and show that your company has excellent customer service by responding in a timely manner. This is an important piece to building your business that can be very time-consuming. However, it is an easy task to pass off to a virtual assistant.
– Lisa Collum, Top Score Writing
4. Personal or Business Research
While there are hundreds of tasks that can be outsourced to an assistant, I would start by outsourcing my own personal or business research. Research tasks can include finding the best flights; researching gifts for employees, family or friends; leads research; data and statistics for content; finding contact details and researching business communities and events, etc. That will save a lot of time.
5. Employee Onboarding and Training
This is always a hugely time-consuming process that can often be delegated to an assistant, assuming that you provide them with the standard operating procedures necessary for them to get started. If they need assistance, be there for them. And, of course, get to know the trainee. But you can’t expect to do all the training yourself.
– Tyler Gallagher, Regal Assets
6. Relationship Management
When your business grows, it can be difficult to reach out to individual members to wish them a happy birthday or to congratulate them for important events. A virtual assistant can be a lifesaver as they can remind you of important personal events. They can help you arrange gifts, send messages and continue to build solid relationships with others.
7. Social Media Content Development and Scheduling
Social media content development and scheduling are great tasks to give to a virtual assistant. I find that if we outsource social media tasks, we’ll save about four hours a week.
– Kristin Kimberly Marquet, Marquet Media, LLC
8. Project Management
Virtual assistants can organize both internal and external project management and keep everyone involved on the proverbial ball. The sooner you can outsource this task, the better, because you want your VA to be able to scale the process quickly as your business scales. These tasks, especially for agencies like mine that need to organize internal staff alongside the client, gobble up much precious time.
9. Internal Communication
Every company has internal events and tasks that need to be announced, and you have to send reminders and respond to questions when making these announcements. Virtual assistants can take a load off your back by managing such internal events and communication. They’ll also make sure that important admin work gets done to help your business run smoothly.
10. Meeting Management
Virtual assistants are excellent for keeping track of recurring meetings. We had our first assistant create and maintain the documents for our weekly and biweekly meetings. We found that this step made it easier for us to dive in and get down to business, which saves everyone time and energy.