Hiring a Virtual Secretary and How It Can Help Your Business

Maybe you have a vague sense of what a secretary can do, but you’re not quite sold on the idea of hiring one just yet. How do you know if you should hire one?

Let’s take a look at many of the basic tasks that a virtual secretary can handle remotely:

• Bookkeeping. Sick of tracking expenses or logging in receipts? Plug a virtual secretary into your bookkeeping software and you’ll be amazed not only at how easy the process is, but how quickly it can go. 
• Phone calls. Not only can a virtual secretary handle your phone calls remotely—answering on your behalf—but they can even place phone calls for you. This is great for all sorts of needs, from making travel arrangements to scheduling meetings and appointments.
• Managing social media. Don’t always have time to update Upwork or reach out to potential clients? Let a virtual secretary handle it for you.
• Email management. According to the American Psychological Association, “multitasking” is a bit of a myth. There is a certain psychological inefficiency to managing emails throughout the day, for example, which means that every time you check email, you’re losing more than just the time you used to check it. You’re losing focus. Outsource your email management to a virtual secretary so you can focus on your work.
• Proofreading. Any business will go through a lot of documentation—contracts, proposals, follow-ups, and the like. You’re not always going to have time to read it all. So instead of sleeping on it and forgetting to proofread before it’s time to send out your documentation, it’s a good idea to simply hand it off to a qualified virtual secretary.
• Real estate administrative tasks. Do you work in real estate? You may find it hard to always follow up with people, especially since real estate can be such an “off-hours” job. Having a virtual secretary ready to pick up phone calls will give you the appearance of running a much larger, professional business—even if it’s just you in the office.

An administrative assistant who works on-site can handle all of these tasks easily. But hiring a virtual secretary is a great starting off point. It will help you to learn how to better handle the responsibilities of leading a business, especially if you’ve never been in the position of “boss” before.

In addition to completing the tasks above, we have to ask a very simple question: what are the benefits of hiring a virtual secretary? Other than outsourcing your tasks, why hire a virtual secretary specifically? Why not any virtual assistant?

For starters, it’s true: any virtual assistant can save as much as 78% on operating costs every year. That’s a drastic reduction. Too often, business owners and managers make the mistake of looking at the upfront hourly rate of a virtual assistant or virtual secretary. They then compare this with the ostensible hourly rate of a full-time, on-site hire.

But for the reasons listed above, including expensive employee benefits, hiring a virtual secretary can be drastically more cost-efficient.

Let’s go beyond cost. Why hire a virtual secretary if you need a secretary to help grow your business?

• Efficiency. A virtual secretary with experience in handling the tasks like those listed above will be more efficient at them. They may arrive to their first day of remote work with the knowledge and tools to proofread more efficiently, for example. Or they might have a better system for bookkeeping. This makes them worth the cost because they aren’t only taking these tasks off your hands, but performing them more efficiently than you would have.
• Flexibility. If you hire a remote worker who’s done remote work before, you may find that the process is far more streamlined than you expected. After all, a remote worker has done many of these tasks before. They may need an adjustment period while they onboard to your system (more on that in a minute), but overall, their flexibility and adaptability will only benefit your business.
• Minimal investment. In addition to the cost considerations listed above, remember that a virtual secretary can be hired on a part-time basis. That means that you don’t have to make a full commitment before you start outsourcing your tasks. You can learn what it’s like to manage a secretary, how to onboard a new “employee” (or, in this case, an independent contractor), and smooth out the overall flow of your business. You can do it all for minimal investment, only paying the hourly rate for a part-time remote worker.

Of course, those benefits are just a few of the general benefits of hiring a virtual secretary. Hire the right one, and you may find that not all virtual assistant jobs are made the same. 

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