How to Hire an Assistant (without adding an employee)
by admin ~ June 8th, 2009. Filed under: practice management.How to Have More Time Each Day: How to Find, Screen and Hire Assistants and Virtual Assistants
Sure, it’s nice to have an assistant to do all of the administrative and clerical work. In fact, it’s essential as in most parts of the country, you can hire such a person for $30,000 to $50,000 annually and the time they will free up for you can easily earn you an additional $150,000. Why? because they will do the work values at $15 to $25 an hour while you are generating more business where you earn $100 to $1000 an hour.
The latest trend however is not to take on additional employees but to outsource this work to a virtual assistant. These are trained professionals who are already familiar with your industry (e.g. securities or insurance) and may already work for other professionals just like you. So they don’t need to be taught form scratch. They work from their location using their PC, their phone and you contract for as much time as you need form them–either on a regular basis (e.g. 50 hours per month) or by the project.
Download the free report
How to Have More Time Each Day: How to Find, Screen and Hire Assistants and Virtual Assistants
Listen to this post
June 22nd, 2009 at 12:11 am
Upon first reading this article I saw the term “virtual assistant” and immediately thought of some kind of android assistant. However on reading more into it, I notice that this term simple applies to a freelancer, such as myself. And I can tell you that the results are a lot better from certain freelancers than what you would get from other “professionals” in the area.
July 26th, 2009 at 10:57 pm
The hard part is to find a reliable virtual assistant. More third party sites will do what Ebay and Amazon marketplace have done to allow people to hire and review… and for virtual assistants to bid and advertise. Lots of moving services sites already use this model.
August 11th, 2009 at 11:09 am
Depending on the skill level of the required tasks, consider offshoring your virtual assistant needs as well. Whether it’s ordering your wife flowers, complaining about a bad invoice, organizing spreadsheets/data, etc. all of these tasks can be handled quite capably overseas for less than $6.00 per hour.
We happily deliver competent, capable VA’s to busy executives and management and are continuously amazed at how excited they are within a few weeks/months at the additional time saved. Most people are concerned about hiring a VA initially because they don’t think they’ll have enough for them to do, but a few weeks in you start to realize the capabilities of your virtual assistant and you can then pile the work on!
August 15th, 2009 at 11:02 am
Finding a virtual assistant is a tough jobs. Even though if you get one, you need to certainly get his trained from scratch.
August 17th, 2009 at 2:53 pm
Depending on the skill level of the required tasks, consider offshoring your virtual assistant needs as well. Whether it’s ordering your wife flowers. Thanks for sharing.
September 2nd, 2009 at 6:50 am
Real Estate is also a great example of a business where a VA is used quite often. Your points are spot on about how to save money with a virtual assistant and not taking on another employee.
September 28th, 2009 at 3:42 am
I certainly like the though of someone taking the jobs that I am not so keen on! I worry about whether they will get done properly I suppose and lower our standards, which just means I have to spend time on training. I know it is the right thing to do… just got to convince myself
November 24th, 2009 at 2:10 pm
Really it is a tough job to find a reliable virtual assistant.Skill,personality, education,experience and knowledge is the key factor that every assistant need to possess.Without all these factor they can’t performed their task smoothly.Thanks for your awesome blog.
December 5th, 2009 at 7:23 am
Love the article. Were thinking about adding an employee to the payroll, but can’t deem the financial side of things.
December 7th, 2009 at 7:09 pm
I agree, outsourcing is indeed the best way to go these days that you want to earn more and focus on your core business. Why waste your valuable time, effort and money when you can leverage by hiring a VA? We did that and we’re reaping the benefits.
December 26th, 2009 at 7:04 pm
My “friendly competitor” has been outsourcing to a “virtual assistant” in india, who answers his emails and calls for 10 cents each.
I’ve been tempted to do the same, but never made that decision because I never looked at it the way you do. This clears things up a little.
January 24th, 2010 at 12:27 am
i agree ! Finding a virtual assistant is a tough jobs. Even though if you get one, you need to certainly get his trained from scratch
January 30th, 2010 at 8:31 pm
it cut off costs if the job’s not to crucial. outsourcing, these day’s been booming.
February 12th, 2010 at 8:58 pm
I’ve tried a few virtual assistants and you definitely get what you pay for. It’s also worth spending the time to train up an assistant. It is frustrating at first - I’ve found in a few cases I’ve ended up thinking that I could just do it quicker myself and in fact I’m not using a VA at the moment for that reason.
I did have a really good one (google Virtusec) a few years ago.
February 13th, 2010 at 7:04 am
Nice info. Thasnks for the report.
But. It’s hard to find a good virtual assistant.