assistant
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Working as a virtual assistant, you've never considered yourself as a real entrepreneur... well, not on the level of Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, but you do have some entrepreneurial experience. Maybe you've done a few personal assisting jobs here and there but never considered turning it into a real entrepreneurial journey!
The fact that you have experience assisting people with various clerical tasks means that you have the potential to become a very successful virtual assistant (VA). This might be something you never thought about doing but if you're great at accounting or data entry, why not turn your skill into a legitimate money-making business?
Trust and believe, there is a great need for VAs in the small business community. So if your fear is not being able to drum up enough clients, that should be the least of your concerns.
The thing about entrepreneurs is that they'll start out with these grand ideas and visions, however, once they actually get into the daily operations of running their business, they quickly find out how easy it is to get bogged down with the simple tasks that are of lesser importance.
Things like answering phone calls and emails, crunching numbers, inventory management, and translation and transcription are all tasks that are detrimental to running a business, but they're some of the biggest wastes of time... This is where VAs benefit small business owners the most.
What Exactly is a Virtual Assistant?
A virtual assistant is someone who works from home or who works remotely and offers specialized services to business owners. As a virtual assistant, you can offer services that range from anything under the sun... pretty much, whatever service the business owner needs, if you have that skill set then you can offer that service.
Now, before you can become a VA, people have to know that you have a VA business, right? Of course. With the title of a virtual assistant, you can only imagine that your business is going to have to be an online business. With that being said, you're going to need to create your own website to list the services you offer.
The awesome thing about online businesses is that you not only can sell services but you can sell various products as well. You can sell your VA services and also sell products to give you additional sources of income. To achieve this, you simply start by building your website on one of the most popular website builder there is!
There are, of course, major considerations to think about in starting your own business, but you'll never know your true business potential without taking that leap of faith and just going for it.
The irony in all of this is that as a virtual assistant, your job is to assist business owners with the tasks of running their business... Well, when you become a VA, you too have become a small business owner as well! Pretty soon, you might need your own VA to help you with your VA business!
Why Business Owners Hire Virtual Assistants
Business owners know that time is money and they're not just going to hire a VA if they don't have a real need for one. After all, hiring a VA is going to cost them money, so as you get hired by business owners, it's important to understand that they're going to expect you to efficiently do the work they hired you to do.
In knowing that, it's important that you create a schedule for yourself that will allow you to get the work done that you need to get done all while maintaining a healthy work-life balance. People tend to think that just because you work from home that you're excluded from the stressors that come with working a job.
Your clients aren't going to know that you're stressed at home because they're dealing with their own stress of running their business. That's why you have to take the necessary steps to ensure your own productivity, wherever you're working from.
Because business owners have their own stress to deal with, they hire VAs to alleviate some of the business stress they encounter on a daily basis to help them put more focus on the actual running of their business. Take a look at some of the major reasons why business owners hire VAs.
Business Owners Lack Expertise in Certain Areas of Their Business
Regardless of what industry a business owner is in, they aren't going to know EVERYTHING about what it takes to successfully run their business... There's going to be something that they don't know how to do. Because they're not experts in a particular area, they hire people who are.
They Feel Overwhelmed With Doing It All
Lots of small business owners, especially when they're first starting out, feel like they have to do it all. They feel like it's their business and no one should know their business better than them, therefore, they have a hard time passing some of their responsibilities off to other people.
It's perfectly understandable to be a little nervous about handing those responsibilities off to someone else out of fear that it won't be done right. But what those business owners fail to realize is that when they try to take on everything, they're also setting themselves up for the potential for failure because they are unnecessarily overwhelming themselves by taking on too much.
In fact, according to Forbes, one of the biggest mistakes that business owners make is trying to do everything themself. By becoming a VA, you are helping business owners achieve success simply by taking on the tasks that they probably can do on their own but are feeling bogged down with the responsibility of doing everything on their own when they indeed don't have to.
It's really a win-win for both parties... you get business and business owners get to put more focus on running their business.
They're Too Busy to Focus On Minuscule Repetitive Daily Tasks
Those daily tasks that are equally important in running a business but not so important that the business owner needs to put their main focus on it are one of the biggest reasons why business owners hire VAs. Business owners have enough on their plates as it is, so things like answering phone calls, responding to emails, and administrative work is something that they can hand off to a VA to lighten their workload just a little bit.