If you are dealing with multiple business units, you always could use a help or two from others.

The basic rule of thumbs is not to be a control freak – that is, having all your business under your sole control.

Why?

The best idea of entrepreneurship is to delegate, delegate and delegate. This way, you preserve your most valuable resource – time – and use it either to build more businesses or to have it yourself – a privilege most people don’t have.

Business delegation and business process outsourcing (BPO) can be achieved through my favourite outsourcing method – hiring a virtual assistance.

Virtual assistant help you build a real business, not another job

The idea of starting a business is to make it grow, becoming a real business, not another job.

Job?

Yes – many business owners are sole proprietors. They operate their own one-person company.

If the owner is having problems, so is the business. If the owner stop working, the business stop running, too. If this is your case, then you are having a job, camouflage as a business.

Virtual assistant can ‘redeem’ you from your job-business.

A virtual assistant (VA), hence the name, is your independent assistant, helping you with various job functions and work, such as office administration work, personal assistance, data entry, bookkeeping, and even website design.

The benefit of BPO to virtual assistant

Virtual assistance helps you cut cost and increase your and your business efficiency.

As most virtual assistance are provided through the Internet medium, you don’t have to bother managing your ‘employee’ face to face. What’s more, you can escape from office politics and dynamics by having employees. They often bring their personal problems to the workplace, creating non-condusive office work environment.

Where to look for a virtual assistant

You can always look for a virtual assistant in most freelancing and work at home forums. You can also look for one through a VA network.

One of the company providing virtual assistance through a network is BPOVIA.

BPOVIA offers you one stop solution for virtual assistance need. To highlight, BPOVIA offer you, in my opinion, a niche VA service – China Business Development Service, helping you doing business in China. The services include China market research, direct mail marketing, sourcing, virtual office and telemarketing, and trade show service.

How to choose a good virtual assistant

Many offer you virtual assistance, but only a few qualified.

You might want to consider the following tips:

• Quality often comes at a price, as per hour charge differs the quality of VA you hire – hiring the most cost-effective one is an art.
• Choose a VA that has excellent communication skill, as most done through the Internet – getting an idea across is more challenging than the usual face to face interactions.
• Choose English-speaking VA is an edge, as not all VA have equal skills in written and spoken English – Native speakers are not always necessary, but having a good combination in English skills is essential.

Any experience in outsourcing to VA? Please share your thoughts by commenting to this post.

Ivan Widjaya
BPO

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