VA – The Need of Every Business

Every business, whether large or small scale, need to have assistant. It is not only a symbol of state or rank but is also important for any management working professionals. But if we take a look on the situation, the people who can afford to hire assistants are few in number. For this reason, more and more professionals and entrepreneurs are now diverting towards hiring virtual personal assistant who help them to manage the load of work. Most of the virtual assistants, now, can help you in multi tasking. They can manage many different kinds of tasks such as keeping a track of your expenses, preparing presentations, maintaining your mail box, scheduling meetings etc. the amount they charge for all such services is just a fraction which you would pay to the onsite permanent office assistant.

But like with any other business practice, there are pros and cons of hiring the virtual personal assistants. So are the virtual assistants really worth hiring? Here are some pros and cons of having virtual assistants.

• Pro: they cost low
• Con: you get only the services you pay for.

The good thing about the services of virtual assistants is that, they are mostly based overseas. So they charge far less then you might have expected. The price and cost do vary from location to location and for services they render but you can hire some remote overseas assistants as low as just $3-$8 per hour.

Despite low cost, you have to bear up with their foreign holidays, sometimes translation issues and sometimes breakdown in communication due to their network problems or load shedding of electricity.

• Pro: you can get your work done while you are asleep.
• Con: it can be tricky to stay in contact due to time differences.

Sometimes it really gets difficult to work with a virtual personal assistant who is 6 or seven time zones away from you. If you have hired a team of virtual personal assistants this issue is less prominent but it takes time to get used to this.

The advantage you gain is that you can just email the to-do list at night before leaving your office and the things will be done the next morning when you will be back to work.

• Pro: you can have free trial periods of your virtual assistants.
• Con: there is a variation in fees and quality of services from person to person or company.

Some of the virtual personal assistant service providers offer free trial periods to check whether the virtual assistant fit your needs or not. This is a great way to check whether you will really be able to take advantage of the services of the virtual assistant or not. But you need to keep a check on the charges that they charge after the completion of the trial period as it can greatly vary.

There are many advantages and disadvantages as well, of hiring the virtual personal assistant for your business but only you can decide whether the service which you are hiring is worth it or not.