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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These are some good tips. Virtual assistance and BPOs can really cut costs with the right choices. It’s best to outsource jobs you don’t need to do yourself to people who can and want to for cheaper, while concentrating on the higher-level tasks. Even the simplest tasks can even be put to machines, like external hosts instead of internally-maintained servers, high-capacity domain names from services like godaddy and advanced PBX services like gotvmail. Everything can be online, leaving you with further overhead.
Mackamentain,
Thanks for the additional tips – I agree – we can concentrate on other more important issues and overheads, to further improve our biz performance and efficiency.
cheers!
Thanks for some good tips.Virtual assistance is very helpful and it cut the cut.
Hi,
Indeed – having a virtual assistant is just like having a personal assistant without the need for him/her to follow you wherever you go :)
Nice post discussing about the virtual assistance. BPO industry is really a phenomenon business nowadays. Thanks for some good tips.
Hi,
Thanks to you too for visiting this blog :)
Cheers!
The way the economy is today, most small businesses have no other choice than to outsource work. It’s a lot more cost effective than hiring a staff of employees. At my company, we even cut our travel budget. We now do meetings from one office through video conferencing. We were able to accomplish this by a new conferencing service through: http://www.24conference.com. As a regional manager, I no longer have to travel 150 miles away from the office just to hold meetings with supervisors and other staff members.
John,
Thanks for the tips…
This was a pertinent post. Virtual assistance service is something that can help you best. With an exceptional growth opportunity, virtual assistant service helps you in getting online personal assistance service on a much lower cost. This not only helps you in giving a complete edge to your business but also staying updated in the competitive era. This is the reason, it has become hot choice for every growth seeking entrepreneur. – Yolanda
I completely agree with many of the points that has been raised in this article. Virtual assistants are capable of managing any number of business tasks that you and your small business may require. Companies can bring on a virtual assistant to accomplish a one-time task, to act as a business owner’s practically full-time assistant, or anything in between; Countless small businesses are finding that the convenience, professionalism, and high competency of virtual assistants is just too good of a deal to pass up.
Indeed, virtual assistants are life-savers – So much things going on and so much things need to be done in today’s highly competitive business world, and the right virtual assistants can only do your business good.
Cheers :)