Could your small business benefit from a Virtual Secretary?

Virtual Secretaries/Assistants are becoming increasingly popular, with many small businesses choosing to hire one. Some business owners find that they need assistance with their office admin but can’t afford to employ a full-time secretary in their office; a virtual secretary can fill in the gaps by providing ad-hoc assistance and it’s cost effective too, as you only pay for the time that you use.

If you are a small business owner and find yourself in the following situations, then it may be time to look at hiring a virtual secretary to help you:

You miss deadlines to follow up
You’re tied up with the day-to-day running of your business
You regularly work evenings and weekends to keep up with routine administrative tasks
You have routine admin tasks that you don’t like performing and these take time away from running your business and generating money

There are many tasks that are suitable for delegating and outsourcing to a virtual secretary. If you’re looking to hire one, but not sure what they could help with, this list can give you some ideas:-

Diary and E-mail management
Appointment bookings
Database building
Internet research
Typing & audio transcription (transcribing podcasts, webinars etc)
Social media management
Proof-reading
Invoicing
Tender proposals
Document Editing and Formatting

This is obviously not exhaustive and you can identify which tasks of your own you can outsource by finding ones that you dislike performing such as invoicing, blogging, tweeting, etc…These are ideal projects to hand over to a virtual secretary.

So, what do you think? Do you have experience of hiring, or working with a virtual secretary/assistant? I would love to hear your comments…