Virtual Assistant

Ten Reasons For Small Businesses To Outsource

The year 2009, for entrepreneur Chris Ducker, was fraught with commitments above and beyond necessary. He had a doting family to go back home to, but being an entrepreneur meant that he had to forego his personal time and suffer many sleepless nights because it was more about being ‘in’ the business rather than being ‘on top of things’. Luckily for him, he made some smart choices and was well on his way to gain that much-needed respite through outsourcing. Now, he works an average of 6 hours a day, can look into personal commitments, focus on building new business goals and advocates Virtual Assistance services, all the time! If you’re managing a start-up and you’ve blown that amazing business opportunity because you missed a follow-up deadline or were too tied up with routine administrative operations for your business, then hiring a Virtual Assistant is something you might want to consider. However, the thought of hiring a Virtual Assistant for a first-time outsourcer can immediately trigger a feeling like the world is about to zap all the cash from your bank account. But it is not always so. In one of the earlier blogs in the series, we stressed on how to decide ‘when the right time is to outsource. In this blog post, we’ll give you plenty reasons as to ‘why’ you should outsource- especially if you are a small business owner or an entrepreneur. Read on! 1. Reduced Costs As much as small businessmen would like to believe, hiring a virtual assistant can in fact save you money instead of stretching your budget. Since a virtual assistant is not a full time employee, you won’t need to worry about payroll taxes, sick leave, vacation pay, health insurance etc. In the case of virtual assistants, they only get paid for the hours they work and in turn, add more value to your investment. For example: You might end up paying an in-house employee for 40 hours of work per week, despite the employee taking coffee breaks, going out to use the restroom and making ceaseless phone calls. However, if you hire a Virtual Assistant and you have purchased only 20 hours worth of work per month, you will end up paying the Virtual Assistant for only 5 hours of work per week! That’s a difference of almost 8 times! Ergo, it is safe to say that the costs of hiring a VA are a lot lesser as compared to hiring a full-time employee. 2. You Don’t Need To Provide Office Space The best part about outsourcing is that you don’t need to worry about providing an office space for your Virtual Assistant. Global Virtual Assistants use their personal computers and their own internet connections to execute the tasks you send them. If you are a small business and you think that hiring a group of in-house employees and providing for large offices right away could cost your business, outsourcing could come across as a boon for you. 3. Training For VA’s Is Not Required Every year, businesses spend thousands of dollars on training employees to update their knowledge on new software, tools and the latest technology. By outsourcing your work to a Virtual Assistant, you can easily save on all this money because Virtual Assistants are already trained and are quite well-versed with the latest online tools and software because their jobs demand it. Depending on the nature of tasks you want to outsource, you can either choose general Virtual Assistants, who are jacks-of-all and are all-rounders, or you could choose to hire specialist Virtual Assistants who are proficient at one particular job. 4. A Pool of Resources To Choose From If you choose to partner with an outsourcing company, you’ll be working with a melting pot of specialists and gain access to a large pool of online resources. You won’t have to go looking to hire specialists, sifting through countless applications and interviewing hundreds of people. If you are a small business and you don’t want to waste your company’s resources and time searching for the right specialists for your job, partnering with an outsourcing company is easily be one of your best bets. Once you SignUp, you will be able to outsource tasks of multiple natures to your Personal Virtual Assistant and then relax, knowing that your tasks are in safe and experienced hands. 5. You Can Quit Anytime Firing an in-house employee can be a long and tedious process and there may even be instances, wherein you will need to abide by employee agreements if you want to avoid lawsuits. With a Global Virtual Assistant however, you don’t need to worry about any of it. You have the flexibility to fire your virtual assistant instantly and easily if deadlines are missed or the assistant repeatedly makes mistakes despite feedback. 6. Get Your Tasks Completed On Time & Efficiently As a small business owner, you’ll realize that you have a ton of work to complete, no matter how important, tedious or repetitive. Who said that being an entrepreneur was easy? The trick to finding the right balance, is to work on tasks that have greater value (monetary or otherwise) and outsource the rest to your personal virtual assistant. This way you’ll find that your other tasks (which you don’t like to do or find too boring or time-consuming to complete) are being handled a lot more efficiently and are completed within the stipulated deadlines. 7. Boost Productivity If you are a hard working entrepreneur or a small business owner and want to get more done in less time, you can boost your productivity with outsourcing. Having virtual assistants take care of all the tasks that you don’t like to do yourself means that you will gain that extra hour or two to focus on other important jobs and tasks at hand, thereby maximizing productivity and making more time for yourself in the day. 8. Re-Location & Travel Becomes A Lot Easier If you are traveling, have

Ten Reasons For Small Businesses To Outsource Read More »

The year 2009, for entrepreneur Chris Ducker, was fraught with commitments above and beyond necessary. He had a doting family to go back home to, but being an entrepreneur meant that he had to forego his personal time and suffer many sleepless nights because it was more about being ‘in’ the business rather than being ‘on top of things’. Luckily for him, he made some smart choices and was well on his way to gain that much-needed respite through outsourcing. Now, he works an average of 6 hours a day, can look into personal commitments, focus on building new business goals and advocates Virtual Assistance services, all the time! If you’re managing a start-up and you’ve blown that amazing business opportunity because you missed a follow-up deadline or were too tied up with routine administrative operations for your business, then hiring a Virtual Assistant is something you might want to consider. However, the thought of hiring a Virtual Assistant for a first-time outsourcer can immediately trigger a feeling like the world is about to zap all the cash from your bank account. But it is not always so. In one of the earlier blogs in the series, we stressed on how to decide ‘when the right time is to outsource. In this blog post, we’ll give you plenty reasons as to ‘why’ you should outsource- especially if you are a small business owner or an entrepreneur. Read on! 1. Reduced Costs As much as small businessmen would like to believe, hiring a virtual assistant can in fact save you money instead of stretching your budget. Since a virtual assistant is not a full time employee, you won’t need to worry about payroll taxes, sick leave, vacation pay, health insurance etc. In the case of virtual assistants, they only get paid for the hours they work and in turn, add more value to your investment. For example: You might end up paying an in-house employee for 40 hours of work per week, despite the employee taking coffee breaks, going out to use the restroom and making ceaseless phone calls. However, if you hire a Virtual Assistant and you have purchased only 20 hours worth of work per month, you will end up paying the Virtual Assistant for only 5 hours of work per week! That’s a difference of almost 8 times! Ergo, it is safe to say that the costs of hiring a VA are a lot lesser as compared to hiring a full-time employee. 2. You Don’t Need To Provide Office Space The best part about outsourcing is that you don’t need to worry about providing an office space for your Virtual Assistant. Global Virtual Assistants use their personal computers and their own internet connections to execute the tasks you send them. If you are a small business and you think that hiring a group of in-house employees and providing for large offices right away could cost your business, outsourcing could come across as a boon for you. 3. Training For VA’s Is Not Required Every year, businesses spend thousands of dollars on training employees to update their knowledge on new software, tools and the latest technology. By outsourcing your work to a Virtual Assistant, you can easily save on all this money because Virtual Assistants are already trained and are quite well-versed with the latest online tools and software because their jobs demand it. Depending on the nature of tasks you want to outsource, you can either choose general Virtual Assistants, who are jacks-of-all and are all-rounders, or you could choose to hire specialist Virtual Assistants who are proficient at one particular job. 4. A Pool of Resources To Choose From If you choose to partner with an outsourcing company, you’ll be working with a melting pot of specialists and gain access to a large pool of online resources. You won’t have to go looking to hire specialists, sifting through countless applications and interviewing hundreds of people. If you are a small business and you don’t want to waste your company’s resources and time searching for the right specialists for your job, partnering with an outsourcing company is easily be one of your best bets. Once you SignUp, you will be able to outsource tasks of multiple natures to your Personal Virtual Assistant and then relax, knowing that your tasks are in safe and experienced hands. 5. You Can Quit Anytime Firing an in-house employee can be a long and tedious process and there may even be instances, wherein you will need to abide by employee agreements if you want to avoid lawsuits. With a Global Virtual Assistant however, you don’t need to worry about any of it. You have the flexibility to fire your virtual assistant instantly and easily if deadlines are missed or the assistant repeatedly makes mistakes despite feedback. 6. Get Your Tasks Completed On Time & Efficiently As a small business owner, you’ll realize that you have a ton of work to complete, no matter how important, tedious or repetitive. Who said that being an entrepreneur was easy? The trick to finding the right balance, is to work on tasks that have greater value (monetary or otherwise) and outsource the rest to your personal virtual assistant. This way you’ll find that your other tasks (which you don’t like to do or find too boring or time-consuming to complete) are being handled a lot more efficiently and are completed within the stipulated deadlines. 7. Boost Productivity If you are a hard working entrepreneur or a small business owner and want to get more done in less time, you can boost your productivity with outsourcing. Having virtual assistants take care of all the tasks that you don’t like to do yourself means that you will gain that extra hour or two to focus on other important jobs and tasks at hand, thereby maximizing productivity and making more time for yourself in the day. 8. Re-Location & Travel Becomes A Lot Easier If you are traveling, have

Six Ways To Use Your Newly-Gained Time Post Outsourcing

So, you decided to take the big step and hired a Virtual Assistant to help you get through life’s challenges. Outsourcing was never your top choice, but you had to, owing to the increasing work pressures, the costs of keeping an in-house assistant and the growing responsibilities you had to shoulder at home. Now you’re glad you hired a VA, but what next? What does one do with the free time and how does one transition into the new life with the newly-gained time, effortlessly? Consider why you chose to outsource in the first place. Either you believed that a professional would do a better job than you would at a particular job, the costs of outsourcing were a lot cheaper than if you were to hire an in-house assistant or also because you realized that your children and wife were beginning to forget what you looked like. With outsourcing, you finally got those laborious tasks out of the way and earned yourself a minimum of 2-4 hours for yourself everyday. There’s so much you can do! If you are unsure of how you can use this time productively, take a look at a few of these suggestions- 1) Read A Book Keep yourself abreast with all the reading that you’ve missed out on all these years. Download an e-book if you’re running out of time or walk to the local bookstore to pick out a book you like. If you are a bookworm, there is no better way to spend your time productively than by reading. Reading can help you de-stress and can transport your mind into another world altogether, whilst also helping you sharpen your mind. 2) Prioritize Your ‘Bucket-List’ Activities 2-4 hours is a lot of time to tick at least one of the activities off your bucket-list everyday. Always wanted to sign up for a dance class? Go paragliding or volunteer at a local NGO? With the time you’ve earned from the outsourcing, you could try your hand at the activities that interest you. Finding a hobby or working on one, can help you put your job and/or life in perspective and can help you develop a new set of skills. It will also give you the chance to expand your networking opportunities and is a breath of fresh air when you feel like you’re on the verge of a total burnout. 3) Build A Better Business Ever heard of the adage, ‘Do what you do best and outsource the rest’? Now that you have outsourced all the back-end work to your Virtual Assistant, you will find more time to focus on the core competencies of your business and set better goals. If you have had to manage all the aspects of the business yourself, you will know that your life was nothing short of a nightmare! With outsourcing however, you will find that you have more time to strategize, de-clutter your mind, reorganize your business and govern its primary activities to help it grow and sustain. 4) A Healthy You, Is A Happy You Exercise well, eat healthy and meditate in your spare time. Rather than sitting at home and lazing around, go for a light jog or a long walk. Doing things that keep you feeling fit, physically or mentally can help you lose the stress you’ve been carrying around on your shoulders and will also give you the time to gather your thoughts. Furthermore, exercising regularly can help you discipline your mind, get your endorphins flowing and make you look and feel better. Need more reasons? 5) Spend Time With The Ones You Love If you live with friends or family, spending your free time with them makes absolute sense. Make some time for your children and spouse. Attend your girl’s ballet performance or your son’s big game. Imagine the joy on their faces when they find that both their parents are in attendance. If you’ve missed out on those dinners with your friends or your partner in the last couple of months, make it a point to catch up with them during your free time and show them that you care and you are not anti-social. There is nothing more relaxing than to surround yourself with the people you love and who love you during your free time. 6) Invest Some Time In Personal Care Once you find that you’ve got a flow going with outsourcing and your VA is handling all the work for you, don’t burden yourself with more work during your free time. Instead, invest this time for some personal care. Whether it is something as small as filing your nails, getting some sleep or hitting the spa, ensure that you make time for your personal needs everyday to shed those layers of stress. Though making money is important to make ends meet in today’s time and age, spending time for yourself can make you look and feel like a million bucks. Life after outsourcing can be rewarding if you choose to make it so. The time you’ve earned is precious and limited. Make use of it productively and you’ll automatically find success and will be able to strike the perfect work-life balance in the process.

Six Ways To Use Your Newly-Gained Time Post Outsourcing Read More »

So, you decided to take the big step and hired a Virtual Assistant to help you get through life’s challenges. Outsourcing was never your top choice, but you had to, owing to the increasing work pressures, the costs of keeping an in-house assistant and the growing responsibilities you had to shoulder at home. Now you’re glad you hired a VA, but what next? What does one do with the free time and how does one transition into the new life with the newly-gained time, effortlessly? Consider why you chose to outsource in the first place. Either you believed that a professional would do a better job than you would at a particular job, the costs of outsourcing were a lot cheaper than if you were to hire an in-house assistant or also because you realized that your children and wife were beginning to forget what you looked like. With outsourcing, you finally got those laborious tasks out of the way and earned yourself a minimum of 2-4 hours for yourself everyday. There’s so much you can do! If you are unsure of how you can use this time productively, take a look at a few of these suggestions- 1) Read A Book Keep yourself abreast with all the reading that you’ve missed out on all these years. Download an e-book if you’re running out of time or walk to the local bookstore to pick out a book you like. If you are a bookworm, there is no better way to spend your time productively than by reading. Reading can help you de-stress and can transport your mind into another world altogether, whilst also helping you sharpen your mind. 2) Prioritize Your ‘Bucket-List’ Activities 2-4 hours is a lot of time to tick at least one of the activities off your bucket-list everyday. Always wanted to sign up for a dance class? Go paragliding or volunteer at a local NGO? With the time you’ve earned from the outsourcing, you could try your hand at the activities that interest you. Finding a hobby or working on one, can help you put your job and/or life in perspective and can help you develop a new set of skills. It will also give you the chance to expand your networking opportunities and is a breath of fresh air when you feel like you’re on the verge of a total burnout. 3) Build A Better Business Ever heard of the adage, ‘Do what you do best and outsource the rest’? Now that you have outsourced all the back-end work to your Virtual Assistant, you will find more time to focus on the core competencies of your business and set better goals. If you have had to manage all the aspects of the business yourself, you will know that your life was nothing short of a nightmare! With outsourcing however, you will find that you have more time to strategize, de-clutter your mind, reorganize your business and govern its primary activities to help it grow and sustain. 4) A Healthy You, Is A Happy You Exercise well, eat healthy and meditate in your spare time. Rather than sitting at home and lazing around, go for a light jog or a long walk. Doing things that keep you feeling fit, physically or mentally can help you lose the stress you’ve been carrying around on your shoulders and will also give you the time to gather your thoughts. Furthermore, exercising regularly can help you discipline your mind, get your endorphins flowing and make you look and feel better. Need more reasons? 5) Spend Time With The Ones You Love If you live with friends or family, spending your free time with them makes absolute sense. Make some time for your children and spouse. Attend your girl’s ballet performance or your son’s big game. Imagine the joy on their faces when they find that both their parents are in attendance. If you’ve missed out on those dinners with your friends or your partner in the last couple of months, make it a point to catch up with them during your free time and show them that you care and you are not anti-social. There is nothing more relaxing than to surround yourself with the people you love and who love you during your free time. 6) Invest Some Time In Personal Care Once you find that you’ve got a flow going with outsourcing and your VA is handling all the work for you, don’t burden yourself with more work during your free time. Instead, invest this time for some personal care. Whether it is something as small as filing your nails, getting some sleep or hitting the spa, ensure that you make time for your personal needs everyday to shed those layers of stress. Though making money is important to make ends meet in today’s time and age, spending time for yourself can make you look and feel like a million bucks. Life after outsourcing can be rewarding if you choose to make it so. The time you’ve earned is precious and limited. Make use of it productively and you’ll automatically find success and will be able to strike the perfect work-life balance in the process.

Save 60 Minutes A Day – ‘Hi, I’m Richard!’

Don’t you wish you had the time to fly back home to be with your wife and kids this holiday season? Don’t you yearn to give your loved ones some of your time? Let’s face it. With so many people working 9-5 jobs everyday and managing whole businesses, it becomes almost impossible to make some time for yourself and also, your loved ones. Giving someone your time is intangible and the most irreplaceable feeling in the world. At GetFriday, we understand that ‘time’ is precious and creating fond memories with loved ones is crucial – one that can even beat the joys of winning a lottery or even bringing home fat pay checks!

Save 60 Minutes A Day – ‘Hi, I’m Richard!’ Read More »

Don’t you wish you had the time to fly back home to be with your wife and kids this holiday season? Don’t you yearn to give your loved ones some of your time? Let’s face it. With so many people working 9-5 jobs everyday and managing whole businesses, it becomes almost impossible to make some time for yourself and also, your loved ones. Giving someone your time is intangible and the most irreplaceable feeling in the world. At GetFriday, we understand that ‘time’ is precious and creating fond memories with loved ones is crucial – one that can even beat the joys of winning a lottery or even bringing home fat pay checks!

Understanding When To Outsource

Knowing when to outsource your work for better productivity and control is very important, and it is fairly simple too. You need to watch out for a few tell-tale signs that will give you enough and more reason for you to outsource the work that you don’t necessarily need to do yourself. For instance, you may suddenly feel a swell in work pressures or you might realize that you are spending a lot more time at the work place than you should be. Your regular 9 hour job has now turned into a 13 hour job and to make matters worse, you are spending all your time thinking about work or doing work, including the weekends! That leaves you with no time to focus on your personal life or even, have a life! Sometimes, a recurrent, onerous task, that is handled internally and is draining a company’s resources can be handled better externally and for cheap! Or if you feel that your business is saturating at the peak with no further growth or profits, you could outsource certain functions of your business to virtual assistance providers and see how your business fares. If you have crossed the threshold, then it is probably a wise time to outsource. This blog post highlights 4 instances where you should consider outsourcing! 1. You Are Compromising With Your Work-Life Balance When you start outsourcing your lives, you will be able to strike that perfect balance with your job, children and your family. To make room for things that really matter, you can begin by outsourcing routine jobs that either take too much of time, are too mundane to carry out everyday, or tasks that can easily be handled by someone else.This way, outsourcing will give you the freedom to use your time the way you want to spend it and can finally help you leave for home earlier from work and give you your weekends back. Striking the perfect work-life balance is paramount and when you think you are giving away too much; far more than what you are receiving, that’s where you draw the line and make the decision to ‘outsource’! 2.Your Business Is Stagnating Intermittent outsourcing can work wonders for your business – if you know when to take advantage of it! With outsourcing, your business will be able to grow at a healthy pace, talent and expertise are available at your fingertips and you don’t need to provide for an office space, or a phone or a computer for the person working for you. If you find that your strategies are failing, your employees are not motivated to work because they are overburdened with too many arduous tasks or you aren’t generating the revenue you have been expecting for a while, these are sure-shot signs of your business stagnating. In such a situation, a complete turnaround needs to be made. You need time to understand what has gone wrong with the business and what areas need focus and improvement. If you think you have hit this point in the cycle, it would be a wise-time to outsource works that take up your time. By freeing yourself and your employees of tasks they don’t necessarily have to handle, or delegating onerous work to your Virtual Assistants, you will be able to make some time to re-strategize and re-structure your business before it spirals out of control. 3.You Juggle Multiple Hats At Work Years ago, outsourcing wasn’t very accessible to SME’s. This was a luxury that was once limited only to the Fortune 500s. Today however, it is advisable for small business owners to outsource as much as they can from the get-go, because time is the greatest asset for small businesses. Though cash flow for SMEs are not as sturdy or secure as large businesses, outsourcing the work to cost-effective remote assistant companies might just be feasible and can let SMEs focus on growing their businesses. According to a study conducted by Constant Contact, 56% of small business owners feel like they can never leave their businesses to do anything else and need to be constantly around to save the day. Consider the situation – if small business owners don’t delegate the work to the right persons at the right time, they would have to juggle between different responsibilities, including managerial roles, marketing, accounting, customer support and other administrative aspects of business. To handle so much at the same time, could result in the lack of quality, stress, loss of time to focus on other aspects of life, and the company and can slow down the process of scaling the business considerably. Conversely, by outsourcing specific functions of the business to reliable Virtual Assistants, it is possible to maintain the highest level of operations, in a manner that doesn’t break the bank and your back, and also promote the growth of your business by giving you more to time to cater to existing customer and new ones. At the end of the day, being a small business owner will require you don many hats, but effective outsourcing from the start could help you laser your focus to what really needs to be accomplished and can also give small business owners the benefit of taking periodical breaks to reboot and plan ahead. 4. It Is Expensive To Get Work Done Internally The battle between outsourcing vs. insourcing is incessant. However, when you find that a job can be handled externally for lesser costs, than internally, it would be better to outsource – especially because labor is a lot cheaper overseas and you also get more bang for your buck! Sometimes, in-house employees need time and training to handle specialist tasks. This requires money and can take a number of sessions before an employee is completely adept with the software or the tool. For instance, it could be cheaper for companies to outsource their payroll work to companies like Sage Payroll rather than hire in-house payroll specialists, train them, pay them salaries and

Understanding When To Outsource Read More »

Knowing when to outsource your work for better productivity and control is very important, and it is fairly simple too. You need to watch out for a few tell-tale signs that will give you enough and more reason for you to outsource the work that you don’t necessarily need to do yourself. For instance, you may suddenly feel a swell in work pressures or you might realize that you are spending a lot more time at the work place than you should be. Your regular 9 hour job has now turned into a 13 hour job and to make matters worse, you are spending all your time thinking about work or doing work, including the weekends! That leaves you with no time to focus on your personal life or even, have a life! Sometimes, a recurrent, onerous task, that is handled internally and is draining a company’s resources can be handled better externally and for cheap! Or if you feel that your business is saturating at the peak with no further growth or profits, you could outsource certain functions of your business to virtual assistance providers and see how your business fares. If you have crossed the threshold, then it is probably a wise time to outsource. This blog post highlights 4 instances where you should consider outsourcing! 1. You Are Compromising With Your Work-Life Balance When you start outsourcing your lives, you will be able to strike that perfect balance with your job, children and your family. To make room for things that really matter, you can begin by outsourcing routine jobs that either take too much of time, are too mundane to carry out everyday, or tasks that can easily be handled by someone else.This way, outsourcing will give you the freedom to use your time the way you want to spend it and can finally help you leave for home earlier from work and give you your weekends back. Striking the perfect work-life balance is paramount and when you think you are giving away too much; far more than what you are receiving, that’s where you draw the line and make the decision to ‘outsource’! 2.Your Business Is Stagnating Intermittent outsourcing can work wonders for your business – if you know when to take advantage of it! With outsourcing, your business will be able to grow at a healthy pace, talent and expertise are available at your fingertips and you don’t need to provide for an office space, or a phone or a computer for the person working for you. If you find that your strategies are failing, your employees are not motivated to work because they are overburdened with too many arduous tasks or you aren’t generating the revenue you have been expecting for a while, these are sure-shot signs of your business stagnating. In such a situation, a complete turnaround needs to be made. You need time to understand what has gone wrong with the business and what areas need focus and improvement. If you think you have hit this point in the cycle, it would be a wise-time to outsource works that take up your time. By freeing yourself and your employees of tasks they don’t necessarily have to handle, or delegating onerous work to your Virtual Assistants, you will be able to make some time to re-strategize and re-structure your business before it spirals out of control. 3.You Juggle Multiple Hats At Work Years ago, outsourcing wasn’t very accessible to SME’s. This was a luxury that was once limited only to the Fortune 500s. Today however, it is advisable for small business owners to outsource as much as they can from the get-go, because time is the greatest asset for small businesses. Though cash flow for SMEs are not as sturdy or secure as large businesses, outsourcing the work to cost-effective remote assistant companies might just be feasible and can let SMEs focus on growing their businesses. According to a study conducted by Constant Contact, 56% of small business owners feel like they can never leave their businesses to do anything else and need to be constantly around to save the day. Consider the situation – if small business owners don’t delegate the work to the right persons at the right time, they would have to juggle between different responsibilities, including managerial roles, marketing, accounting, customer support and other administrative aspects of business. To handle so much at the same time, could result in the lack of quality, stress, loss of time to focus on other aspects of life, and the company and can slow down the process of scaling the business considerably. Conversely, by outsourcing specific functions of the business to reliable Virtual Assistants, it is possible to maintain the highest level of operations, in a manner that doesn’t break the bank and your back, and also promote the growth of your business by giving you more to time to cater to existing customer and new ones. At the end of the day, being a small business owner will require you don many hats, but effective outsourcing from the start could help you laser your focus to what really needs to be accomplished and can also give small business owners the benefit of taking periodical breaks to reboot and plan ahead. 4. It Is Expensive To Get Work Done Internally The battle between outsourcing vs. insourcing is incessant. However, when you find that a job can be handled externally for lesser costs, than internally, it would be better to outsource – especially because labor is a lot cheaper overseas and you also get more bang for your buck! Sometimes, in-house employees need time and training to handle specialist tasks. This requires money and can take a number of sessions before an employee is completely adept with the software or the tool. For instance, it could be cheaper for companies to outsource their payroll work to companies like Sage Payroll rather than hire in-house payroll specialists, train them, pay them salaries and

Is Your Work-Life Balanced?

Do you feel like there is an imbalance in your personal and professional life? Are you not able to find time for yourself, let alone find time for your family and friends? It is easy to let our lives become overwhelmed by work and once that happens, it almost seems impossible to find the right balance and you’ll find that your productivity levels would have dropped considerably at work. Here’s how you can recognize if there’s an imbalance in your work-life and what you can do to bring yourself back in the game. Symptoms To Look Out For The first step is to take a look at the symptoms of an “imbalance” in work-life and then tally your own symptoms/experiences with this check-list. Here you go- You find that you work longer hours than most of your colleagues. You spend more time in the office than you do at home and you always come back stressed, tired and anxious. To top it all, you have to commute in traffic!

Is Your Work-Life Balanced? Read More »

Do you feel like there is an imbalance in your personal and professional life? Are you not able to find time for yourself, let alone find time for your family and friends? It is easy to let our lives become overwhelmed by work and once that happens, it almost seems impossible to find the right balance and you’ll find that your productivity levels would have dropped considerably at work. Here’s how you can recognize if there’s an imbalance in your work-life and what you can do to bring yourself back in the game. Symptoms To Look Out For The first step is to take a look at the symptoms of an “imbalance” in work-life and then tally your own symptoms/experiences with this check-list. Here you go- You find that you work longer hours than most of your colleagues. You spend more time in the office than you do at home and you always come back stressed, tired and anxious. To top it all, you have to commute in traffic!

Save 60 Minutes A Day

Save 60 Minutes A Day With GetFriday

As the saying goes, even a second is precious for a busy person and saving a whole 60 minutes is equivalent to striking a pot of gold. To have 60 whole minutes of your life back, could mean spending more time with your family, catching that movie you wanted to watch at the theater, jogging with your pet, Bruno at the beach, relaxing at the spa or just unwinding on the couch. To assist you all your business, personal and administrative requirements, GetFriday’s Virtual Assistants can help offload your work while you catch that much needed break for yourself. GetFriday has now come up with a series of ‘Save 60 Minutes A Day’ videos for you, capturing the very essence of how our virtual assistance services could help a client offload tasks and make a difference in his/her life in the process. The first of these videos, titled ‘Meet Jane’, is about a working mother of two, who is also an entrepreneur of a successful e-commerce store. Not being able to strike a balance in her work and personal life, Jane gets really flustered, but manages to change her life for the better by hiring a GetFriday Virtual Assistant! Her virtual assistant helps her by saving 60 minutes of her day everyday, by handling all her e-commerce back-end work for her, while she finally gets to spend some quality time with her kids! We are going to have a lot more videos in the ‘Save 60 Minutes A Day Series’, so, stay tuned for more updates!

Save 60 Minutes A Day With GetFriday Read More »

As the saying goes, even a second is precious for a busy person and saving a whole 60 minutes is equivalent to striking a pot of gold. To have 60 whole minutes of your life back, could mean spending more time with your family, catching that movie you wanted to watch at the theater, jogging with your pet, Bruno at the beach, relaxing at the spa or just unwinding on the couch. To assist you all your business, personal and administrative requirements, GetFriday’s Virtual Assistants can help offload your work while you catch that much needed break for yourself. GetFriday has now come up with a series of ‘Save 60 Minutes A Day’ videos for you, capturing the very essence of how our virtual assistance services could help a client offload tasks and make a difference in his/her life in the process. The first of these videos, titled ‘Meet Jane’, is about a working mother of two, who is also an entrepreneur of a successful e-commerce store. Not being able to strike a balance in her work and personal life, Jane gets really flustered, but manages to change her life for the better by hiring a GetFriday Virtual Assistant! Her virtual assistant helps her by saving 60 minutes of her day everyday, by handling all her e-commerce back-end work for her, while she finally gets to spend some quality time with her kids! We are going to have a lot more videos in the ‘Save 60 Minutes A Day Series’, so, stay tuned for more updates!

A Guide To Maximize Output With Your Virtual Assistant

Once you have decided to work with a virtual assistant, the next step is to talk to the virtual assistant or the organization that they work for, in order to find out what they have in store. With GetFriday’s decade long experience in virtual assistance services, we wish to deconstruct for you the successful formula behind hiring a fantastic and effective virtual assistant. A 2001 HBR study conducted with 70 virtual teams found that 82% fell short of their goals and 33% rated themselves as largely unsuccessful. And a 2005 Deloitte study of projects outsourced to virtual work groups found that 66% failed to satisfy clients’ requirements. This data goes to show that hiring virtual assistants is a serious business. It combines two complex functions of management – team work and communication. 3 Desirable Qualities Of A Virtual Assistant We decided to identify the most desirable qualities in a virtual assistant. Analysis of the data available with us shows communication, attention to details and ability to work independently top the list when it comes to outsourcing work to virtual assistants. Our view is that the key to a happy ‘outsourcing’ experience is to understand how to get the best out of your virtual assistant. 3 Expectations From Virtual Assistant That Need To Be Managed- 1. Virtual assistants must have great Communication skills The most mentioned and sought-after attribute while hiring a virtual assistant is communication. Virtual communication is often devoid of face to face interaction which provides information on emotional states or non-verbal cues. This, combined with lack of frequent communication, can risk your entire outsourcing success. The only way to avoid any pitfalls is to be extremely clear and disciplined about how you and your assistant will communicate. Establish standard norms for communication, modes of communication, frequency of communication etc. The details could include situations where just a simple email would do, and other circumstances when a phone call would be required. Encourage questions whenever messages are not clear. The performance of a virtual assistant / team can be expected to increase substantially whenever communication is clear. 2. Virtual assistants must pay careful attention to detail The second attribute that is considered desirable, is the ability to pay attention to detail. Most small business are concerned about the work that is being outsourced and are keen on preserving and building a reputation that hinges on providing great services / products. We have all heard of Apple products and the amount of detail that goes beyond its physical product. Small businesses want to emulate the same. And rightly so, they seek attention to detail from virtual assistants as a standard criterion. Establishing clear processes for work outsourced could resolve the problem of attention to detail. Clear processes bring clarity and logic to work, therefore ensure attention to detail is incorporated in the process rather than being dependent on human memory and skill. Feedback is another important aspect. When you provide precise feedback about your expectations and how their attention to detail will impact your work, either positively or negatively, people tend to take notice and inculcate it into their regimen. Broad based feedback that attention to detail is missing is not going to help your virtual assistant improve. On the contrary, objective feedback and an awareness of the impact of their work definitely brings in good results.. 3. Virtual assistants must have the Ability to work independently The third most sought-after attribute is the ability to work independently. We frequently hear small business owners complaining about their virtual assistants and how they do not think for themselves. As a first step towards achieving this, shift the responsibility of work from process to person. Standardize what good work must look like, with opportunities to take independent decisions. For a start, specify the elements of process that could be handled by independent thinking and then slowly elaborate to include other parts of the process. However, note that this will be time consuming and requires patience to eventually achieve ‘quality’. Also, when you are outsourcing work to your virtual assistant, define the areas where you do not want them to take independent decisions very clearly so that even if a decision happens to be not right, it doesn’t impact your business too badly. 4 Essentials To Get The Best Experience With Virtual Assistant 1. Clarify and track commitments The problem with working remotely as seen by business owners, is the difficulty to monitor engagement and productivity. The solution could be, to carefully spell the outcome expected from the tasks. Regular meetings with virtual assistants could be held to understand the status of tasks. Most virtual assistants are ‘generalists’. By this it means that they have ample knowledge on a wide range of domains and don’t specialize in just one field unless specified. Therefore, when you are offloading work, make sure you have jotted down exactly what you want and how you want it done, by breaking down the task instructions in a step-by-step fashion. Avoid vague instructions at all costs. Don’t expect the virtual assistant to infer what you ‘intended’ to say. Instead, make your work and your virtual assistant’s work easier by clearly specifying all the details down to the ‘T’ and even asking if the instructions are understood. If the task is a technical one or the virtual assistant is handling it for the first time, you could even add tutorial videos, sample documents and screenshots of how it can be handled or done. Going all out to explain in detail what you want will only guarantee 100% results. 2. Positive Teams are more productive In most cases it is forgotten that though virtual assistants work remotely for your business, they still require a sense of team spirit. Well defined objectives, deliverables and tracking commitments helps the virtual assistants/teams remain focused. The additional element of engagement in your business goals is fostered when a positive environment of shared accountability and responsibility is imbibed. A happy and a comfortable working relationship

A Guide To Maximize Output With Your Virtual Assistant Read More »

Once you have decided to work with a virtual assistant, the next step is to talk to the virtual assistant or the organization that they work for, in order to find out what they have in store. With GetFriday’s decade long experience in virtual assistance services, we wish to deconstruct for you the successful formula behind hiring a fantastic and effective virtual assistant. A 2001 HBR study conducted with 70 virtual teams found that 82% fell short of their goals and 33% rated themselves as largely unsuccessful. And a 2005 Deloitte study of projects outsourced to virtual work groups found that 66% failed to satisfy clients’ requirements. This data goes to show that hiring virtual assistants is a serious business. It combines two complex functions of management – team work and communication. 3 Desirable Qualities Of A Virtual Assistant We decided to identify the most desirable qualities in a virtual assistant. Analysis of the data available with us shows communication, attention to details and ability to work independently top the list when it comes to outsourcing work to virtual assistants. Our view is that the key to a happy ‘outsourcing’ experience is to understand how to get the best out of your virtual assistant. 3 Expectations From Virtual Assistant That Need To Be Managed- 1. Virtual assistants must have great Communication skills The most mentioned and sought-after attribute while hiring a virtual assistant is communication. Virtual communication is often devoid of face to face interaction which provides information on emotional states or non-verbal cues. This, combined with lack of frequent communication, can risk your entire outsourcing success. The only way to avoid any pitfalls is to be extremely clear and disciplined about how you and your assistant will communicate. Establish standard norms for communication, modes of communication, frequency of communication etc. The details could include situations where just a simple email would do, and other circumstances when a phone call would be required. Encourage questions whenever messages are not clear. The performance of a virtual assistant / team can be expected to increase substantially whenever communication is clear. 2. Virtual assistants must pay careful attention to detail The second attribute that is considered desirable, is the ability to pay attention to detail. Most small business are concerned about the work that is being outsourced and are keen on preserving and building a reputation that hinges on providing great services / products. We have all heard of Apple products and the amount of detail that goes beyond its physical product. Small businesses want to emulate the same. And rightly so, they seek attention to detail from virtual assistants as a standard criterion. Establishing clear processes for work outsourced could resolve the problem of attention to detail. Clear processes bring clarity and logic to work, therefore ensure attention to detail is incorporated in the process rather than being dependent on human memory and skill. Feedback is another important aspect. When you provide precise feedback about your expectations and how their attention to detail will impact your work, either positively or negatively, people tend to take notice and inculcate it into their regimen. Broad based feedback that attention to detail is missing is not going to help your virtual assistant improve. On the contrary, objective feedback and an awareness of the impact of their work definitely brings in good results.. 3. Virtual assistants must have the Ability to work independently The third most sought-after attribute is the ability to work independently. We frequently hear small business owners complaining about their virtual assistants and how they do not think for themselves. As a first step towards achieving this, shift the responsibility of work from process to person. Standardize what good work must look like, with opportunities to take independent decisions. For a start, specify the elements of process that could be handled by independent thinking and then slowly elaborate to include other parts of the process. However, note that this will be time consuming and requires patience to eventually achieve ‘quality’. Also, when you are outsourcing work to your virtual assistant, define the areas where you do not want them to take independent decisions very clearly so that even if a decision happens to be not right, it doesn’t impact your business too badly. 4 Essentials To Get The Best Experience With Virtual Assistant 1. Clarify and track commitments The problem with working remotely as seen by business owners, is the difficulty to monitor engagement and productivity. The solution could be, to carefully spell the outcome expected from the tasks. Regular meetings with virtual assistants could be held to understand the status of tasks. Most virtual assistants are ‘generalists’. By this it means that they have ample knowledge on a wide range of domains and don’t specialize in just one field unless specified. Therefore, when you are offloading work, make sure you have jotted down exactly what you want and how you want it done, by breaking down the task instructions in a step-by-step fashion. Avoid vague instructions at all costs. Don’t expect the virtual assistant to infer what you ‘intended’ to say. Instead, make your work and your virtual assistant’s work easier by clearly specifying all the details down to the ‘T’ and even asking if the instructions are understood. If the task is a technical one or the virtual assistant is handling it for the first time, you could even add tutorial videos, sample documents and screenshots of how it can be handled or done. Going all out to explain in detail what you want will only guarantee 100% results. 2. Positive Teams are more productive In most cases it is forgotten that though virtual assistants work remotely for your business, they still require a sense of team spirit. Well defined objectives, deliverables and tracking commitments helps the virtual assistants/teams remain focused. The additional element of engagement in your business goals is fostered when a positive environment of shared accountability and responsibility is imbibed. A happy and a comfortable working relationship

Getting your Outsourcing Right!

It always been quite a baffling experience over the years trying to understand as to what makes outsourcing tick. If we knew the answer, we ought to be able to solve the issue of customer satisfaction and keep all our clients happy. But time and again, we kept witnessing an unpredictable phenomenon; Outsourcing on an individual or small business level works well for some, while it backfires miserably for some others. The moot question being why is it so unpredictable, though the most obvious reasons would simply point to poor quality of service. The fact remains that it isn’t the only reason for failure. We found that success is not exclusively dependent on the quality of service alone, but depends on a lot of other factors, especially when you are dealing with a situation of cross-border global work exchange. So I tried to set forth on understanding the factors that affect the success of outsourcing especially w.r.t individuals and small businesses. With large business or Fortune 500 outsourcing, it is usually a business process or a transaction flow that gets outsourced and there are typically large teams on both sides to manage the transition and the associated risks. It is relatively harder to manage expectations when compared to let’s say manufacturing outsourcing, but is still easier when compared to managing individual expectations. The key problem here being that an individual’s expectations are rather fluid, likely to change with time, seldom possible to capture / document properly and is quite unlike a business process. Can one capture an individual client’s needs within a Service Level Agreement? Extremely difficult, if not impossible. To add to the complexity there are other issues like cultural differences, sometimes communication barriers and the willingness of the client to get organized. Many clients read about outsourcing, get excited at the prospect of being able to do it as an individual and promptly sign up. And 99% of the time, they either over anticipate their needs at the start or they haven’t organized themselves properly and analyzed as to what can be outsourced and what is best kept in-house. When this happens and there is a mismatch of expectations, it generally leads to a sense of disillusionment for those that are under prepared for the challenges of outsourcing. There are some clients who have been with GetFriday for the past 5 plus years and are still going strong, while there are others who drop out in frustration within weeks. So after years of studying cases of failure to meet client expectations, we came up with the idea of a video tutorial to help clients understand what it takes to succeed. We used the concept of illustrative story telling (concept inspired by RSAnimate) to capture the essence of it, in 7 clear steps. And hence titled ‘The 7 Steps to Outsourcing’. We hope you will like it and please do share it with friends / co-workers and others who may find it useful. P.S. This video is definitely not meant to pass the buck of making outsourcing work, exclusively to the client. It is meant to help clients and potential clients understand what it takes from both sides to make it a success. This apart, there lies an even bigger responsibility on a VA service like GetFriday to understand client expectations better, deliver good quality of service and be able to help the client gain time. Regards Sunder P CEO

Getting your Outsourcing Right! Read More »

It always been quite a baffling experience over the years trying to understand as to what makes outsourcing tick. If we knew the answer, we ought to be able to solve the issue of customer satisfaction and keep all our clients happy. But time and again, we kept witnessing an unpredictable phenomenon; Outsourcing on an individual or small business level works well for some, while it backfires miserably for some others. The moot question being why is it so unpredictable, though the most obvious reasons would simply point to poor quality of service. The fact remains that it isn’t the only reason for failure. We found that success is not exclusively dependent on the quality of service alone, but depends on a lot of other factors, especially when you are dealing with a situation of cross-border global work exchange. So I tried to set forth on understanding the factors that affect the success of outsourcing especially w.r.t individuals and small businesses. With large business or Fortune 500 outsourcing, it is usually a business process or a transaction flow that gets outsourced and there are typically large teams on both sides to manage the transition and the associated risks. It is relatively harder to manage expectations when compared to let’s say manufacturing outsourcing, but is still easier when compared to managing individual expectations. The key problem here being that an individual’s expectations are rather fluid, likely to change with time, seldom possible to capture / document properly and is quite unlike a business process. Can one capture an individual client’s needs within a Service Level Agreement? Extremely difficult, if not impossible. To add to the complexity there are other issues like cultural differences, sometimes communication barriers and the willingness of the client to get organized. Many clients read about outsourcing, get excited at the prospect of being able to do it as an individual and promptly sign up. And 99% of the time, they either over anticipate their needs at the start or they haven’t organized themselves properly and analyzed as to what can be outsourced and what is best kept in-house. When this happens and there is a mismatch of expectations, it generally leads to a sense of disillusionment for those that are under prepared for the challenges of outsourcing. There are some clients who have been with GetFriday for the past 5 plus years and are still going strong, while there are others who drop out in frustration within weeks. So after years of studying cases of failure to meet client expectations, we came up with the idea of a video tutorial to help clients understand what it takes to succeed. We used the concept of illustrative story telling (concept inspired by RSAnimate) to capture the essence of it, in 7 clear steps. And hence titled ‘The 7 Steps to Outsourcing’. We hope you will like it and please do share it with friends / co-workers and others who may find it useful. P.S. This video is definitely not meant to pass the buck of making outsourcing work, exclusively to the client. It is meant to help clients and potential clients understand what it takes from both sides to make it a success. This apart, there lies an even bigger responsibility on a VA service like GetFriday to understand client expectations better, deliver good quality of service and be able to help the client gain time. Regards Sunder P CEO

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