Strategic Business Tips from Kim Beasley

Posts Tagged ‘virtual’

With the New Year starting today, I decided to start a new month-long series to help business owners find different ways to grow their businesses. During this month, I will share different tips that will help you to not only grow your business but also manage its growth.

Some of the topics that I plan on covering this month are:

• Cross marketing
• Social media
• Business management
• Virtual support teams
• Blogging

As I share these tips, I want to encourage you to respond with a comment about how they have helped you with your business or share additional information of how you currently are using the chosen topic. I’m looking forward to hearing of great things for everyone.

Do you have an idea of what a virtual assistant is? What do you think are the hiring processes for virtual assistants? Do you know how to manage a virtual team? What are the tools that can be used to communicate and manage the virtual team?

These are a few questions that can be asked when planning to build a virtual team or in getting a virtual assistant. A Virtual assistant is an independent entrepreneur or contractor who uses technology to provide services to clients globally, in the field of accounting, legal, marketing, etc. Virtual assistants may also have their own specializations such as graphic, web design, IT support, translations, etc.

It is essential for small business owners to hire virtual assistants that are competent, which means that they should have the experience and expertise in the services you need them to perform. Not only that, the virtual assistant should be someone who can work professionally and has a business sense. He or she must have impressive administrative skills and be a team player who could help in running the business along with the owners.

Business owners, on the other hand, should carefully plan the hiring process. Meaning, the owners must determine the qualifications and skills that they need a virtual assistant to have. The first step is to review the resume of the applicant so that the owner will know if the candidate is qualified. If you are working with someone whose native language is different yours, a writing test should also follow, because written and communication skills are very important qualifications for a virtual assistant. Then proceed with the interview process. After the candidate successfully passes with all of the above, a business reference is also important to learn about the reputation and credibility of the candidate.

As a business owner and entrepreneur, I realized that I couldn’t grow my business successfully if I didn’t have a solid support team. So I purposefully sought out Virtual Assistants (VAs) that I felt would not only be beneficial to my business but I would also be able to help them grow their business.

Recently, I was featured in an editorial column on Entrepreneur.com by Patti Simone regarding “Virtual Help for Real Entrepreneurs” about this very topic. The purpose of this article was to share how entrepreneurs were using VAs to grow their business.

If you are an entrepreneur and have yet to start working with a VA then I would highly suggest that you hire one. For more details about hiring a VA, please check out my post on this website entitled, “Business Makeover: Hiring a Virtual Assistant (VA)“.

I would love to hear about your experience in working with a VA (good or bad) because I believe that we can all learn from each other.

After hiring my virtual assistant (VA), I quickly realized that if I create a virtual team that I would be able to continue refining my business processes. I figured that it would a good idea to hire a team of specialist so that I could outsource to them and continue refining my business process.

As a business owner, one must keep in mind that having a virtual team in place will help you leverage your business better. Have you given any thoughts to putting a virtual team to work for you? Below is a list of areas that would be good to outsource to a virtual team:

• Managing Calendar
• Creating graphics
• Content Management (blog & website)
• Data entry
• Handling phone calls
• Organizing computer
• Research
• Creating newsletter

These are just a few of the areas that you can outsource to your virtual team. Have you been feeling overwhelmed or your projects are getting behind? Has this post sparked ideas of where you could put a virtual team to work for you? Then please feel free to leave you comments and share your experience of working with a virtual team.

Wow, I actually hired a virtual assistant (VA) to help me get things organized with my business makeover. This was a hard decision because I’ve always been the hands-on business owner and releasing control is hard. Don’t get me wrong, I can delegate when the need arises but to actually had over tasks that I’m used to doing, has been hard.

To help me determine who I should hire as my VA, I chose to ask for references from my mentor Mari Smith (@MariSmith) and she gave me 5 VA names. I immediately contacted them via Facebook but the strangest thing is that only one of the persons responded to me. I thought this was strange because if you are in business and someone contacts you about your services, it’s customary that you respond. So I communicated with the person who responded and now she and I are developing a working relationship.

What are some of the lessons that I learned from my experience in hiring a VA, hmmm let me share:

• Ask people you trust for referrals
• Make sure that you know what you are looking for in a VA
• Hire someone who is professional
• Hire someone who is prompt in responding to you
• Be prepared to sign an agreement, if they don’t have one then you should be concerned
• Be open to suggestion from the VA in how they can best assist you