If you cannot afford to hire permanent full or part time staff for your business, or perhaps you only need a couple of hours of 'hired help' a week, then why not consider utilising a Virtual Assistant? The benefits of hiring a VA are numerous.
There are none of the hidden costs of hiring permanent staff such as paying for holiday, sick and maternity/paternity leave, national insurance or pension contributions.
In these current tough economic times it seems senseless to have a paid employee sitting around twiddling their thumbs.
With a Virtual Assistant you only pay for the work they actually do, no thumb twiddling pay involved or paying for time spent chatting at the water cooler.
Let's face it, if you are working on a task which is below your hourly rate, then it makes sense to outsource that task to a Virtual Assistant.
A good Virtual Assistant can help with anything from organising your emails to updating and maintaining your website.
With today's technology there are so many tasks a VA can perform without being present in their client's office or even meeting face to face.
Internet and the advent of cloud technologies has pushed this to the fore.
Many Virtual Assistants offer a pay as you go (PAYG) service or retainer packages.
The benefit of utilising a VA's retainer package is that the VA usually provides a discount off of their usual PAYG hourly rate.
This not only gives the VA a guaranteed income every month but also gives the added benefit to the client of receiving a discount on the full hourly rate.
No matter what kind of business you are in, or in fact whether you are a one-man band operation or not, it's time to consider hiring a virtual assistant.
Before you do this however, consider this exercise.
Tomorrow morning, before you start work at all put a sheet of paper and a pen to one side and use it to log everything that you do on that day.
Don't leave anything out because it seems to be mundane, because this is the actual point.
At the end of the day when you tally up the amount of time that you spent on administrative and more "mundane" tasks, you can begin to see how employing a virtual assistant could make a significant difference to you.
Remember that every moment of time that you spend doing those administrative and essentially non-productive tasks is a moment of time that you are not engaged in development, marketing or the search for new clients.
A virtual assistant could be a highly cost-efficient way of outsourcing so many of those tasks that eat into your productivity and your potential for success.