If your company is a startup or a small business, you must be desperately looking for extra hands. Those few employees you have hired are not enough to manage everything. You must be wishing if you’d had a few more people in your company who would take sales calls or manage the order supplies that is running low. But you may not be in a position where you could afford to hire a few more people or may not be able to create space for any more people in the office space you have rented. Mitul Palan, founder of Brainworks Solutions Private Limited, a BPO organization in Mumbai, suggests that while you concentrate on the core pursuits of the company, leave the other things to the outsourced Virtual assistants.

Who are virtual assistants?

Virtual assistants are professionals who work independently for your company from a remote location. An assistant could be helping to make sales calls for several companies like yours. Most of the time, such a professional, works from his/her own office. Without having to offer all the benefits of a full-time employee, you can let the professional handle different aspects of a company that are usually handled by an in-house employee. According to Mitul Palan Mumbai, the virtual assistants help the small companies to get help in different administrative tasks while the entrepreneurs can concentrate on generating revenue.

Where can you find one?

If you are looking for a virtual assistant for your company, search online. Most of the reputed call centers and companies offering virtual assistance have websites and social media presence. Thus, you should be able to find a suitable service provider by searching online. From the list of all available companies, you must choose the most appropriate virtual assistants.

What kind of services can you expect?

There is a long list of services that a VA can provide. They operate remotely on behalf of your company. Given below is a list of different types of services that you can expect from such a professional:

• Data entry
• Event planning
• Live telephone support for customers
• Bookkeeping/Accounting
• Assistance in advertising
• Content drafting and submission
• Customer service and support
• Active database management
• Graphic design, desktop publishing
• Planning meetings and seminars
• Social media marketing and SEO
• Word processing and transcriptions
• Planning travels and booking tickets 

Why not hire staffs temporarily?

Mitul Palan feels that there are a lot of differences between hiring a temporary or contractual employee and hiring a virtual assistant. He says that the flexibility one gets by being able to hire VAs on hourly or daily basis is incredible. However, a company has to provide all the facilities and salary to an in-house employee, even if there will be months or days when he/she would have no work. Moreover, employees have to be given spaces within a company and other benefits too. The company will also have other responsibilities towards them as well, which is not the case with hiring virtual assistants.

So, no need to count the overheads of employees for undertaking various temporary tasks or projects. Hire virtual assistants instead. It is not just financially beneficial, but convenient from many angles as well. It is a beneficial trend that most of the startups and small business entrepreneurs are following. You should follow it too!