The Virtual Assistant: Outsource Your Help, But Follow This One Golden Rule
Life as a modern business owner is hectic. When you’re juggling meetings, calls, emails, needy clients and new ventures all in a single day, it’s sometimes hard to remember that you need to re-order paper for the office or take care of an overdue invoice.
Enter the Virtual Assistant, or VA for short. Thanks to the internet, you can hire talent from across the country to do anything from office upkeep to project management. A VA arrives on your (virtual) scene and works alongside you like he’s in the same room. The best part? You get to decide how much responsibility to give away. The more you delegate, the more freedom you have to work on the aspects of your business you find most rewarding.
Another plus for you is that you don’t have to spend endless time and money on finding the right candidate in your backyard. A world of talent is ready for hire and willing to put in the extra manpower. In fact, 42 million Americans currently label themselves as self-employed consultants and freelancers. That’s a huge talent pool!
Virtual Freedom
- 13 min reading time
Virtual Freedom by Chris C. Ducker dives into the ways you can hire a VA to best meet your needs. If you’re intrigued by the idea of inching ever so much closer to virtual freedom, you might already be thinking about the tasks you can hand off to your future VA. Keep in mind, though, that there’s one thing you should never outsource: your content.
Choose your content creators wisely
Your own unique, branded content is the very thing you’re selling to your customers. It’s what makes your business your own! That’s why it’s important that you provide content yourself.
Imagine if you entrusted your VA with a video production budget, and the resulting video contradicted your original creative vision. Whoops. Or maybe he wrote a blog post on an industry topic but didn’t pick up on details that come from years of knowledge and experience in the field. Five or ten articles like that can mean an overall decrease in the quality of your brand.
Keeping content in-house ensures it’s of the caliber that your customers have come to expect. Just remember, no one will ever know your content and vision better than you, so keep hold of the reins on that one. Plus, you’ll have more time to create outstanding content if you hire the right VA to handle all the other duties.
Now, get to brainstorming all the ways that virtual help can work for you!
Chris Ducker has plenty more to say about virtual outsourcing in his book Virtual Freedom, so be sure to pick up a copy or read the (13-minute!) Blinkist summary.
