Virtual Assistant Tip: How to Focus on Growth and Billable Hours

Business Owner Tips

As Virtual Assistants, we solve one of the biggest challenges small business owners face: not enough time in the day. By outsourcing tasks that pull focus away from revenue-generating work, clients can spend more time on activities that actually grow their business.

A Virtual Assistant doesn’t just take things off a client’s plate—they free them up to work on the business, not just in it. That’s what makes hiring a VA such a smart business move.

Growing your virtual business assistant business

In order to build and grow a virtual assistant practice, there are several key areas you must focus on. I’m going to name three big ones that have been critical to the success of my business.

One: Building relationships with your network to earn business and referrals.

Two: Building trust and reliability with your existing clients through customer service, quality and consistency.

Three: Connecting and developing your business and personal brand with your target market. As my business has grown, the time it takes to focus on developing these three areas has increased. There are only so many hours in the day!

So if the time it takes to build and grow your business increases, where can you save time? Let’s go back to the beginning. When you initially start as a virtual assistant, you have to develop your business administrative and marketing systems and processes. This MUST happen before you can focus on building your network, developing relationships, finding clients, marketing and growth.

The systems and processes to operate your business will require documents and templates, right? Well, creating business documents and templates also takes time. And wouldn’t you rather spend that time on growing your business? Of course you would! I have good news.

Setting up your virtual assistant business processes

There are many virtual assistants who have already developed best practices, documents and resources that you can take advantage of. The goal is to give yourself the time needed to grow your business and log billable hours.

Virtual Assistant Business Planner

I wrote an ebook that takes you through practical steps to setup your home-based assistant business. It’s a streamlined approach to get you up and running as fast as possible.

Virtual Assistant Business Templates

I also have packages that include core sets of virtual assistant startup documents and forms to run your business. Keep in mind, I strongly believe you don’t want to overwhelm yourself with lists and forms that take more time to keep up with. Focus on what is essential and reasonable. Again the goal is to have your processes and documentation standardized and in place so you can working on your business and not in it! It takes some pre-work, but if you can save yourself some time by making a small investment in professional and fully customizable forms, that’s a great business decision!

I hope you find something that works for you!

Virtual Assistant Tools for Efficiency

More Tips for Virtual Assistants:

• How to market the value of saving time

• 7 Work from home lessons

Katie Bauer started Effective Virtual Assistance, LLC, in 2008. Based out of Northern Virginia, Effective Virtual Assistance, LLC partners with small businesses locally and nationally to give business owners the time they need to focus on core business and revenue generating activities.

With a firm belief that when a client is successful, that reflects on her success, Katie’s goal is to go above and beyond with each and every client task and project.

Over the years Katie has been contacted by aspiring VAs through clients or directly via her website, asking for insight and advice. She realized writing a short eBook to share her experience along with offering some of the documents and tools she uses to run her business could benefit other Virtual Assistants. Click HERE! You definitely want to see all the professional resources & customizable forms available.