Over the years, businesses have been recalibrating their strategy for delivering their day-to-day tasks. Whether it's the completion of industry-relevant databases for analysis or compiling a daily order record, it has become a common business practice for companies to take the strategic time out by hiring a virtual personal assistant.
Is It A Smart Move To Hire A VA For Your Repetitive Tasks?
It's a smart corporate move, knowing that the majority of businesses require strategic time out from their mundane tasks to begin anew to expanding their ventures for greater revenue and recognition. In this case, acquiring the best virtual assistant services holds common ground for startups, small businesses, or even enterprises.
The Right Price of Hiring A Virtual Personal Assistant:
But most business owners, startups, and running ventures often ponder about the right cost of hiring a VA or outsourcing their virtual assistance services! It's possible that enterprises hire a team of VAs for their company research and administrative tasks, whereas startups or small businesses hire this resource for customer support, appointment-setting, or email correspondence to cut out the cost of hiring multiple individuals.
With that in mind, we insist upon 4 solid aspects that factor in at the time of evaluating the right cost of hiring a virtual personal assistant. Let's find out how much should small businesses and enterprises spend over a VA to expedite their corporate tasks:
1) Nature of Work - What Are They Being Hired For?
It all begins with evaluating the nature of their work—the type of task or the level of complexity we're putting on the virtual personal assistant. For example, if you're hiring a virtual assistant from the top BPO companies to handle your customer support, such as responding to customer emails or receiving inbound calls, the hourly price for this resource is anywhere from $8 to $10.
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From the same standpoint, hiring a VA for a specialized skill or a specific niche will be costlier than hiring one with generic skills. This could be best described as starting a contract with a social media manager for a specific industry or a VA for an automotive business, where handling high-ticket customers is itself considered a skill.
At the time of hiring a personal VA, it's better to evaluate the overall skills of the candidate to curate the best talent for your company. Browse their relevant titles, and look out for their track record of working with similar companies.
2) Level of Urgency - What Is Their Turnaround Time For Tasks?
Hiring a virtual assistant for tasks pinned with strict deadlines could result in a higher payout for this resource. It means that VA's that come onboard for flexible working hours and moderate workload from your side are ought to cost lesser altogether.
We should understand the fact that the majority of the virtual personal assistants are people with a distributed schedule: college students, housewives, etc. and they can have several commitments prior to joining your company to complete your VA tasks.
But most virtual assistants are willing to compromise their plans for an extra money to get your job done . In this case, finding tasks without time constraints could lead to a lower hourly rate and eventually help you save additional costs on hiring VAs online.
ALSO READ: 6 Business Tasks To Outsource To Your Virtual Personal Assistant
3) Relevance of Experience - Their Skill Set & Expertise:
Hiring an experienced virtual assistant is a bittersweet decision for any business. In a nutshell, you're paying them for their hard-earned skills and the finesse of maturity to perform your tasks well. But, at the same time, they may go beyond your budget, and this can result in a second-thought in the minds of your recruiters.
Likewise, an executive assistant with a solid working record of a specific industry will charge more than a VA who is just starting over. All in all, to hire an experienced virtual assistant, companies should either expand their budget or negotiate with them at the start of the contract to increase their pay every once in a while.
If your tasks include uploading images, downloading forms, building databases, or simple data scraping, you can hire a beginner-level virtual personal assistant without being stretched out of your budget. By doing so, you can reduce the VA's hiring cost and smartly reinvest the rebate into hiring another resource for your business.
4) Payment Structure - Fixed or Hourly?
While hiring a virtual personal assistant, it is extra important to understand the dynamics of the payment structure you'll use. There are two methods to initiate a contract: fixed or hourly. Even though it's rare to find the best VA's working on fixed prices until it's a full-time job, the hourly structure saves you the cost of hiring this resource.
In an hourly format, a virtual assistant will only be billing their hours worked and may adjust their working hours as per the amount of workload available to execute. With the fixed price contract, it's just the opposite. The virtual assistant should be paid the full amount regardless of how much he or she has worked in any given month.
Usually, companies recommend hiring virtual assistants online at an hourly rate, which is anywhere between $8 and $15, depending on the expertise, experience, and number of hours per week. As a company, it's best to choose the hourly payment structure and ask your virtual personal assistant to track their working hours to ensure the transparency of the service, and evaluate the fair cost of hiring a VA