Want more time? 5 big tasks you can hand off to your virtual executive assistant
Don’t let your day-to-day to-dos prevent you from growing your business. Here are essential tasks you can offload to your virtual executive assistant – so you can focus on the big picture
One of the biggest challenges that all business owners eventually face, particularly as their company grows, is the amount of tasks that start piling up. They become stretched too thin trying to keep up with the essential tasks it takes to run their business, while trying to also focus on productivity and growth. Stress builds, mistakes start to happen leading to setbacks, missed opportunities, unhappy clients and burnout.
Trying to do it all is not a sustainable business model. As your business grows, hiring expert support on a fractional basis will not only increase proficiency and lower stress, but reduce overall costs – the cost of errors and time that could be spent making more money. The benefit of working with a virtual executive assistant on a need-to basis, instead of hiring an employee, is that there are no overhead or hiring costs and you’re paying per hour. (And with Northern Primrose Consulting, there’s also no retainer or monthly minimum spends.)
If you want to free up your time to focus on productivity and growth of your business, here are five big tasks that you could delegate to an executive virtual executive assistant.
Email management
According to researchers at Carleton University, Canadian workers spend one-third of their work day reading and answering emails – and 30 percent of the time, the emails are neither urgent nor important. Imagine a scenario where you only had to check your email once a week and where you had peace of mind that when you logged into your inbox, it would be nearly empty – emails all replied to and organized into their respective folders.
A skilled virtual executive assistant can manage your company inbox so it’s well-organized and nothing gets missed – they know the best practices for creating efficient email systems. Email management involves replying to emails, answering queries, managing internal communication, moving emails into proper folders, archiving emails and deleting spam, and flagging emails that need immediate actionable attention. With that kind of help, you would get 30 percent of your time back, or according to one 2019 survey, nearly 6 hours a day.
Calendar management
As the tasks of running a business increase, the available time in your calendar will decrease – that means figuring out how best to manage your time will become critical. A skilled virtual executive assistant can strategically organize meetings, events, and tasks to optimize your time and productivity and so that nothing gets missed. They can organize your days, weeks and months so that priorities are maintained as well as schedule in personal time to recharge and stay mentally fresh.
Project management
The task of managing a project from start to finish can come with a myriad of components: research, resourcing, bringing people together, being the communication liaison, managing timelines, overseeing expenditures, reporting, coordinating stakeholder meetings, following up on items and ensuring everything is on track. The list can go on.
A skilled executive assistant can be an invaluable member of any project. Whether that’s event planning, launching a product, or redesigning a website, having the right virtual executive assistant to support a project can make a huge difference in its success or experiencing setbacks and unsatisfactory outcomes.
Social media management
Gone are the days when social media was an afterthought to a business plan. The growth of social media has increased so significantly in the last decade that there are few businesses that aren’t at least on one social media platform. For some businesses, having a social media strategy and active social media presence is critical to their business – for brand awareness, to reach more customers and direct sales.
Managing and creating content for social media requires a different set of skills as well as time and effort to produce. A virtual executive assistant with social media management skills will know how best to engage with followers, be up-to-date on trends and ways to experiment with content, as well as schedule posts and videos that reflect the voice of your brand.
A lacklustre social media presence, outdated content, or inactivity (read: the last social media post was made in 2021), can give a not-so-great first impression of a company. If you don’t have the time to stay on top of your socials, offload the task to a virtual executive assistant who can be diligent about it.
Customer service
As the old saying goes, “The customer is always right.” While that may not always be the actual case, what rings true is that the quality of customer service can make or break a business. A virtual executive assistant who is skilled at communication and customer service can help retain customers, reduce problems, improve public persona and strengthen the brand, and increase word-of-mouth advertising.
Some business owners have the gift of customer service, while the reality is that some others don’t – and so investing in a virtual executive assistant for customer service is then vital. Fielding emails and phone calls can also be incredibly time-consuming and having an assistant to support in this area can be essential to growing a business.
Want to learn more about what else you can hand off to a virtual executive assistant? Let’s connect.