5 Virtual Assistants You Need to Hire to Scale Your Business

Posted March 20, 2019

What’s a good marker of success for a startup or small business? Many would say higher revenue, more interest from investors, or a bigger market share versus their main competitor. While these are all excellent indicators of startup success, there is one event in the life of many startups that truly signal upcoming success — the need to scale up.

Business growth vs scaling for small businesses

Although growing and scaling have been used interchangeably by many people in the business world, there are many factors that differentiate the two.

For one, growing your business is more straightforward than scaling up. Here’s a brief but effective definition from Spendesk:

“Grow become larger or greater over a period of time

Scaling — represent in proportional dimensions; reduce or increase in size according to a common scale“

Here’s another simple graphical generalization of growth versus scaling:

This means that while scaling your business is indicative of growth, the process behind achieving said growth is different when growing and when scaling. Growth typically means increasing your resources in proportion to an increase in your revenue. This means that the traditional way of growing a business results in a significant cost increase. Scaling, on the other hand, means that you don’t need to spend a lot to gain a big increase in revenue. For many small business owners who don’t have a big budget to blow, scaling is the more practical and feasible option.

Why choose virtual staffing when scaling your business

To effectively scale your business, you have to increase the size of your company without incurring significant overhead. This is why turning to virtual staffing to increase your human resources is a much smarter move for many small businesses compared to building or growing their local staff.

When you hire a virtual assistant, you don’t need to spend money for their computer, office space, internet connection, and the benefits that employers are required to provide their employees. Instead, you get the skill, talent, and experience of a regular employee without thinking about overhead expenses. If you go to trusted virtual assistant companies like 20Four7VA, you won’t even have to worry about HR, payroll, and performance monitoring.

Another major benefit of going virtual for your staffing requirements is the diversity of talent that you have access to. The best virtual assistant companies, like 247VA, have virtual assistants who come from all over the world, so you’re spoilt for choice when it comes to the level of skill, culture, and experience you want in your VA.

The 5 types of virtual assistants you need to hire

Once you have decided that hiring a virtual office assistant is the way to go to scale your business, you then need to figure out exactly what types of virtual assistant services and how many VAs you’re going to need to maximize your spending.

Here are 5 of the most important VA types that you need to hire to scale your business.

Administrative VA

One of the first steps you need to take when you scale your business is to delegative repetitive, mundane tasks to someone else. As the business owner, your time should be spent improving your product or service, strategizing for business growth, attending conferences to grow your connections, and other tasks that only you can do. Time spent fixing your schedule, opening and answering every single email, fielding calls, and doing all your business reports is time wasted. Hire a virtual personal assistant to do all these tasks and more for you instead.

Customer Service VA

In order to get more customers flocking to your business, you have to provide impeccable service from the start to the end of every transaction. In fact, topnotch customer service goes way beyond order or service fulfillment. Hiring a customer service VA means that you have a dedicated person who ensures that your existing and potential customers’ needs are met in a timely, friendly, and positive manner.

A reliable customer service VA can turn a one-time customer into a repeat buyer. This customer loyalty can be one of the biggest contributors to your revenue growth, so a virtual employee who specializes in customer support should be one of your priority hires.

Social Media Management VA

According to the 2018 Q4 Global Digital Statshot report from We Are Social, the number of social media users last year has reached 3.397 billion people — that’s more than 44% of the world’s total population! Just imagine what a strategic and carefully managed social media account or two can do for your business.

Here’s an overview of just how many potential customers you can reach by boosting your social media presence:

Your social media virtual assistant can do several things depending on their skill and experience level. An entry level VA can do your social media posting for you as well as responding to comments and monitoring engagement. An advanced level social media VA can do research and strategies to maximize user engagement, generate leads and increase conversions.

SEO VA

Search Engine Optimization is one of the best investments to make in terms of expanding your reach. Unlike ads, you don’t pay for each lead you get with SEO. Instead, you pay an SEO expert to help you target the right keywords, improve your website ranking on search engines, and essentially get more people to discover your business. This means that you open up your pool of potential customers without spending for every single lead you get. In general, effective SEO generates a staggeringly good ROI.

Content Writer VA

Content is king, and that’s not just an old cliche. These days, especially, when Google and other search engines place a lot of value on high-quality, informative content, you need to have a dedicated content writer VA to help you get your website to the top of Search Engine Results Pages or SERPs.

But aside from ensuring that the content on your website is excellent, a content writer can also help you with other things such as starting or maintaining your blog, writing good emails that convert and creating high-quality product or service descriptions.

Making the most of your virtual staff

The key to building an effective virtual team is to ensure that you’ve got a great management strategy in place. Even if you hire highly talented individuals, they will still need direction so that they are all aligned with your company’s goals.

Invest in creating a solid workflow for your team. This includes designating a single communication tool that everyone is going to use, having a project management software or tracker to stay on top of everyone’s responsibilities and progress, and of course, checking in from time to time with the team as a whole and with each of your VAs individually.

Building a well-oiled virtual team takes time and patience, but it is definitely a tried-and-tested way to scale your business without incurring massive overhead expenses.

Ready to hire a virtual assistant? Check out our free resource: VA Hiring 101: Your Guide to Hiring the Perfect VA