A few months ago, we wrote the post: Here’s a Quick Way to Save 15 Hours a Week to Use on Growing Your Business – and add $1,500 to your bottom line during that same period.
Now, we’re back with five more ways to save 15 hours a week – hours you can use to propel your business forward, spend more time with the family, or even – gasp! – plan a vacation. The beauty of an hour saved is that you can do with it whatever you please.
If you want to save real time, first find out how to choose the right virtual assistant, set them up to succeed and delegate effectively. Sans this trifecta, you’ll never feel fully comfortable handing your business VA the reins to the complicated tasks that will set you free.
Let’s get started on saving you 15 more hours:
1. Let Your VA Handle Customer Service (5+ Hours a Week)
As your business grows, chances are so have your customer service needs. From answering quick (and not-so-quick) troubleshooting questions, to liaison with your fulfillment company or service partners, to fielding thank-you’s from satisfied clients, you likely have at least an hour’s worth of customer service to complete every day.
Let your business-grade assistant take on this task. Via phone, email and live chat, your virtual assistant will expertly answer questions and provide assistance, always with the respect your clients deserve and expect.
Bonus: When you work with a VA company like Boldly, your assistant can be a native English (or German, or French, or …) speaker, so your customers will never experience cultural or communication frustrations.
2. Delegate Invoicing, Payment Processing, and Refunds (3+ Hours a Week)
If you sell any type of product or service, you will inevitably spend time invoicing clients, processing their payments, and, occasionally, refunding full or partial payments. Have an affiliate program? Even more details to process. This is exactly the type of admin task that you should hand over to your assistant: after thorough training, she’ll be perfectly equipped to take this responsibility off your hands.
3. Hand Over Tasks That Involve Typing (2+ Hours a Week)
Ah, the classic admin assistant role: word processing. In the nearly 150 years since the invention of the typewriter, word processing has not become any more fun: and it’s still a timesuck.
Writing an e-book, a white paper, typing client notes, a report…the list is endless. While you can’t change the nature of the beast, you can certainly delegate it away: charge your VA with your daily and weekly word processing tasks. Whether you dictate, record notes for transcription or send over a quick outline, your virtual assistant will know how to turn your thoughts into cohesive documents, memos, and emails – all duly branded and written in your company voice.
4. Assign Research (2+ Hours a Week)
Whether you realize it or not, online research eats up hours of your week. Every time you peruse the latest industry news; or search the Web for a better, more efficient shipper; or hunt for resources to back up your latest blog article, you’re actively researching.
The basic brainstorming is yours, so you’ll always have to keep the wheels turning to conceptualize new ideas. But once you’ve identified industry news sources, or discovered a need for a better shipper, or brainstormed your latest blog article topic, you can delegate the actual research. Send a quick note to your VA and she’ll slog through the Internet’s infinite information bog for you, returning solid, genuinely useful resources for you to review.
Bonus: When it comes to apps and software, Boldly has an extensive list of the best apps for all kinds of business tasks, and we have secured discounts and special offers for many, as part of our Executive Club, which is free for all clients.
5. Hand Over Website Design & Admin Responsibilities (3+ Hours a Week)
Your website is your public face, but does it make sense for you to develop the constantly evolving skills necessary to manage it? Need to update content? Keep your plugins up to date? Create a new landing page for a PPC campaign?
If you don’t have serious web-coding chops, the simple thought of changing a menu color or adding another widget can be daunting. So forget the stress and delegate website administration to your business-grade VA, who can arrange for one of Boldly’s in-house developers to make the changes. She’ll have those menu colors updated and widgets added in less time than it would take you to worry about how you were going to do it yourself.
Wondering how a virtual assistant may be able to help you save time? Check out how it works.
