Whether you’re the founder of a rapidly growing startup, an executive at a well-established firm, a first-time small business owner, or a professional service provider, hiring a virtual assistant to delegate your business tasks is a cost-effective way to boost your success.
This article will explore the top 11 benefits of hiring a virtual assistant to help you decide if it’s the right solution for you.
1) Focus on the Activities that Drive Your Success
Reclaiming your time is one of the best reasons to hire a virtual assistant.
The ServiceNow State of Work Report found that executives spend an average of 16 hours per week on administrative tasks and other work that doesn’t require their authority or expertise. This is backed up by our findings in the 2024 Executive Productivity Report, which indicated that administrative responsibilities remain a top productivity buster, driving stress up and productive work hours down.
This significant decline in productivity hinders your advancement on essential projects.
The top benefit of hiring a virtual assistant is that it allows you to focus on the activities that drive your success.
Offloading all of your time-consuming and tedious administrative tasks frees up a lot of time for you to improve your strategic projects and build key relationships.
Virtual assistants can manage your repetitive tasks such as:
- Scheduling meetings and calendar management
- Data entry
- Taking phone calls
- Travel planning
- Managing social media accounts
- Internet research
- and more
Learn more about what it's like to work with a Prialto virtual assistants.
2) Reduce Hiring and Employee Costs
The second most commonly cited advantage of hiring a virtual assistant is cost savings.
Though the average salary of virtual assistants is similar to that of entry-level in-house employees, you incur no hiring, incentive, or overhead costs, saving your company thousands of dollars. Virtual assistants cost around 78% less than full-time, on-site employees.
A Society for Human Resource Management study found that filling job positions costs an average of $4,129. This cost includes:
- Time spent creating job listings
- Fees to post on job boards
- Ads to attract candidates
- Time spent reviewing resumes and interviewing
- Background check fees
- Miscellaneous employee-related expenses specific to an individual company’s hiring processes
In addition, companies spend thousands of extra dollars per employee on training, benefits, medical insurance, and perks. By hiring virtual assistants, you can avoid these costs and instead pay fixed monthly salaries for the services you receive. If you're considering buying a business, leveraging virtual assistants can also streamline your operations and reduce the overhead associated with onboarding new staff.
Plus, since your virtual assistants work remotely, you don't have to worry about the operating costs associated with having them in a physical office, such as office space, furniture, technology, and software.
These are just a few of the ways you'll save money over hiring full-time employees.
Read More: How much does a virtual assistant cost?
3) Gain Access to a Huge Pool of Knowledge
One unique reason to hire a virtual assistant through a managed virtual assistant service like Prialto, as opposed to an independent contractor, is access to a vast pool of knowledge that helps drive your ROI.
For example, we support clients across industries such as trucking, fintech, and real estate, which has provided us with knowledge of various tools and processes.
If your virtual assistant does not know how to perform a task you request, they can reach out to their colleagues and receive internal training.
You can also leverage the service's collective knowledge to drive initiatives, including:
- Setting up a new CRM and training your virtual assistants to keep it updated
- Streamlining your task admin work and task management
- Improving your sales pipeline management
- Creating processes so your virtual assistant can take on more complex projects
- Designing data entry workflows
To access these advantages, you can work with your Engagement Manager, who will help you facilitate documentation, process design, and training.
4) Scale Your Support Up and Down with Your Business Needs
You can hire a fractional or full-time virtual assistant depending on your volume of work, the skills you need, and how many team members need support. If your business experiences fluctuations throughout the year, hiring a virtual assistant is the most cost-effective solution because it allows you to scale up or down as needed quickly.
During your busy season, you can easily double or even triple the hours of virtual assistant support you receive. When your business slows down, you can reduce costs by decreasing the amount of support you pay for.
With a virtual assistant, you are essentially paying for what you need.
5) Never Go a Business Day Without Support
When your in-house assistant is out of the office, you have to cover their workload until they return. This sudden lack of support can be stressful and significantly impact your productivity and work-life balance.
This is why one of the most significant virtual assistant advantages, from a managed provider, is that you receive backup support.
From your onboarding day forward, a backup virtual assistant is trained alongside your primary VA so that you can still receive the same support when they are sick or on vacation.
Learn day: When is the right time to hire a virtual assistant?
6) Achieve Greater Work-Life Balance
Delegating admin tasks to the right virtual assistant frees up your time to engage with the activities and people you love.
Furthermore, by freeing up more time in your days, your virtual assistant can assist you in achieving a healthy work-life balance by creating space in your schedule for personal priorities.
In our 2024 Executive Productivity Report, we discovered that bookkeeping (49%), scheduling meetings (45%), and responding to information requests (35%) were the three tasks executives disliked the most. Seventy-three percent of these executives indicated that, although they disliked these tasks, they were essential for keeping the business operational.
Here are some of the ways our members use their VAs to balance their calendars:
- Reserving 45 minutes for lunch
- Ensuring their last meeting of the day ends in time for them to have dinner with their family
- Booking workout appointments
- Taking over their social media management so they spend less time on social media
Just let your virtual assistant know your priorities, and they’ll accommodate them in your schedule.
Virtual assistants work hard to take on administrative tasks so you can focus more on your goals, such as your physical and mental health, business growth, or optimizing your free time in your personal life.
Learn More: Do you need a full-time or fractional virtual assistant?
7) Skip the Management and Save Time
So, why don't more people hire a virtual assistant? One of the main reasons we hear that busy executives and business owners don’t take advantage of administrative support is that they don’t have time to manage an assistant.
With a managed service approach, you don’t need to. For example, at Prialto, we assign each of our clients an Engagement Manager who drives their processes and mentors their VAs.
If you want your virtual assistant to improve something or offload a new project, just let them know, and they’ll ensure your feedback is considered.
All of our virtual assistants also have team captains who monitor the quality of their work and provide them with feedback on how to improve continuously.
8) Experience Minimal Impact From Turnover
Why hire a virtual assistant when you could hire someone in-house? The benefits of having a virtual assistant are more than financial.
Good virtual assistants are instrumental to your productivity. When an in-house assistant moves on, it can take a few months to find a suitable replacement and get them up to speed. That gap in support is highly disruptive to your productivity.
An often overlooked benefit of hiring a virtual assistant is that you experience turnover less frequently, and when it happens, your Engagement Manager ensures a smooth transition.
Here at Prialto, we have a strong company culture and incentive programs that ensure low turnover. Although occasional turnover is unavoidable, we have processes to minimize the impact on our clients and ensure they never go a business day without service.
9) Boost Your Brand Image Online
Another of the top benefits of hiring a virtual assistant is their impact on your brand's online presence and image.
Virtual assistants can be crucial in maintaining your digital presence, attracting more customers, and increasing your business's visibility online.
Social media marketing and management help
A virtual assistant can manage your social media profiles, engage with your audience, share relevant content in your industry, and monitor online conversations about your brand on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other social channels.
Reputation management
Virtual assistants can track online reviews and feedback on third-party sites such as Google Reviews or G2, respond to customer concerns, bring them to your attention, and help maintain a positive brand image.
Content creation help
By assisting you in producing high-quality content such as blog posts, email marketing newsletters, or infographics, virtual assistants can help improve your website's SEO ranking, drive more traffic to your online channels, and increase your lead generation goals. They can also utilize a content marketing platform like SE Ranking to further streamline this process by offering SERP-driven insights, AI assistance, and quality checks to help you create SEO-friendly content that drives faster traffic growth
While they probably won't excel at writing your content for you, your virtual assistant saves you time on all the other tasks needed, such as formatting, editing, posting, and scheduling it.
10) Streamline Your Decision-Making Processes
All the above virtual assistant benefits result in streamlined, affordable administrative work. Your virtual assistants can then further this work by gathering data, conducting research, and providing valuable insights.
Market research
Virtual assistants can conduct market research to help you better understand your target audience, competitors, and industry trends, enabling you to make informed decisions about your business strategies.
Data analysis
Your assistant can help you identify patterns, trends, and opportunities by collecting and analyzing data from various sources. This information can inform your decision-making process.
Reporting and documentation
Virtual assistants can create detailed reports and documents, consolidating essential information to support decision-making and keeping your team informed and aligned.
Read more: See how businesses of every size are leveraging outsourced executive assistants
11) Improve Employee Satisfaction and Performance
Research has found that American workers spend approximately 38% of their time on administrative work that doesn’t require their status or expertise. This significantly negatively impacts their business productivity and, in many cases, job satisfaction, as high-performers resent working on tedious tasks.
Virtual assistant support effectively boosts the performance and satisfaction of your high performers by enabling them to spend nearly all their time on the projects that drive their success in core business areas.
We support many sales, recruitment, marketing, and operations teams, which have significantly improved productivity and morale since hiring virtual assistants to handle their tedious tasks.
Related Reading: 9 Questions to Ask Before Hiring a Virtual Assistant
The Benefits of Hiring a Virtual Assistant are Clear
Hiring a VA offers many benefits that can significantly impact your business's success and growth.
From cost savings and increased efficiency to offloading your mundane administrative activities and access to specialized skills, most virtual assistants have the potential to revolutionize the way you manage your daily business operations.
As the business landscape continues to evolve, embracing the power of virtual assistance can help you stay ahead of the curve, adapt to changing circumstances, and maintain a competitive edge.
From small business owners to executive teams at Fortune 500 companies, virtual assistants offer benefits for individuals and teams alike that push businesses forward.
If you want to streamline your processes, improve productivity, and expand your business capabilities, consider partnering with a Prialto-managed virtual assistant and experiencing the advantages firsthand.
Learn more about what it's like to work with a Prialto virtual assistants.