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Should You Hire a Temp or a Virtual Assistant?
Written by: Rita CartwrightArticle Overview: If you find yourself in a position of needing temporary administrative assistance and/or specialized services, should you hire a temporary assistant or retain the services of a Virtual Assistant (VA)?
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Should You Hire a Temp or a Virtual Assistant?
You find yourself in a position of needing temporary administrative assistance. As an entrepreneur and small business owner, it is necessary for you to minimize expenses. Should you hire a temporary assistant or retain the services of a Virtual Assistant (VA)?
If you decide to contact a temporary staffing agency to hire a temporary assistant, they will send you someone who has the experience to complete the necessary tasks. However, the agency's fee will be more than the salary you would perhaps pay your own staff. You will also be paying for downtime, breaks, bathroom trips, personal phone calls, time around the water cooler, etc.
In the future when you need temporary assistance and you hire the same agency, it is not a guarantee that they will staff you with the same temp you work with before. Therefore, you will have to repeat the same instructions and office procedures to the new temporary worker.
There may be an occasion when you need specialized services; for example, bookkeeping, e-mail marketing campaign, or website design, and you realize that temporary agencies do not offer these types of services. In both cases, you have a spent a lot of energy and time.
However, if you choose to work with a Virtual Assistant, especially one with a team of associates, they will provide you with administrative assistance, as well as other particular services. They will become familiar with your business practices; therefore, you will not have to repeat the same instructions, which would be the case if you hire a temp.
Another benefit in working with a VA as opposed to hiring a temp is you will not have to pay for downtime. You will pay only for the actual time used to complete your tasks.
There are several occasions that may require temporary assistance, including helping your current staff with overflow of work. The same Virtual Assistant you retained to complete your temporary administrative and other specialized functions can also assist your staff with overflow of work. Since they are already familiar with your business operations, no instructions will be necessary.
An additional advantage in retaining a VA rather than a staffing agency is they will have a vested interest in your success. A role of a Virtual Assistant is to help small business owners to reach their next level of success. Since they are also business owners, they understand what is required to develop and grow a small business. A temp will just show up to complete your tasks without concerning themselves with your business success. They are not business owners; they are employees and will not have that business acumen, which leads to a different mindset.
Whether you have an in-house staff or not, outsourcing your administrative tasks (ongoing or temporary) make good business sense. A Virtual Assistant can be thought of as having an assistant in a satellite office, except you are not required to provide the office space or equip it with the necessary office equipment and supplies nor pay for the employee-related benefits or taxes.
When you find yourself in the position of needing temporary assistance and/or specialized services, and you want to save energy, money, and time, consider retaining the services of a Virtual Assistant rather than contracting with a temporary staffing agency.
The Benefits of Working with a Virtual Assistant over a Temp
What Is A Virtual Assistant Business
How To Hire A Virtual Assistant
The Need for a Virtual Assistant Association
What to Give the Exec Who Has Everything
Article Tags: administrative assistance, outsourcing, temporary staffing, virtual assistant
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About the Author: Rita Cartwright RSS for Rita's articles - Visit Rita's website  After Rita earned her Bachelor of Science degree in Marketing, she was hired and trained by Sears to be a Sales Manager. She soon discovered retail sales was not for her. So, Rita decided to become an entrepreneur offering virtual assistant services. Since 2002, she has provided word processing services and other virtual assistant services to entrepreneurs and small business owners. During the past eight years, Rita has used various Internet marketing strategies to market her online business and discovered that she has a passion for Internet marketing. As a result, she decided to focus on offering Internet marketing services and recently, decided to change her business name to RJ's Internet Marketing Services in order to reflect the niche service offerings. Rita enjoys being an entrepreneur, as well as working with other entrepreneurs, especially, business and life coaches. She admires how they transform people's businesses and/or lives by helping them to become successful. Today, Rita is glad she didn't receive any job offers 10 years ago. She has been more successful at searching for clients as opposed to searching for employers. Click here to visit Rita's website   Working with a Virtual Assist |
Related Forum Posts
Outsource your work?
- Hi BinaryGuy - do you really need someone 4 days a week to do accounting work? If you bring someone more experienced on you won't have to take them around with you and you can spend the time building your business.
There are a number of people who you can outsource the work to - either a Virtual Assistant or a bookkeeper - have you thought about these options and not having someone actually come into the office?
Why should I hire a virtual assistant for SEO purposes?
- Do you find it hard to find time for rest because of promoting your business or your website all by yourself? Well, perhaps it is the right time for you to hire the services of an SEO virtual assistant.
Virtual assistants for SEO services will help you on the process of improving your rankings within search engine results to achieve an increase in natural traffic. The higher your site in the search engine results page, the more traffic and sales conversions you will obtain.
Using the services of virtual assistants (VAs) certainly is the best method to move in order immediate results and in reduced operational charges. This provides a great answer especially for a small business owner whoever company is actually considerably expanding, and the jobs have normally doubled.
Here are some of the services that a virtual assistant can do for you:
Traffic Geyser
Main Street Marketing
Data Entry
Web Research
Market Samurai
Managing Facebook
Managing Twitter
SEO
Local Business Listing Robot
Traffic Revolution
Infusionsoft
Senuke
Angelas Banklink
Linkjuicer
Blogging
SMM
Virtual Assistant
Personal Assistant
Article Writing
Spinning Article
Press release
Email Response Handling
Online Order Processing
Word Processing
Forum/Comment Posting
Social Bookmarking
Video Editor
Internet Marketing
Email Marketing
Link Building
Powerpoint Presentations
Web Development
Other Administrative Support
Re: Is This The Answer For A Busy Entrepreneur??
- [quote="litekepr":396nnmxn]Have any people on the forum had experiences with virtual assistants?? Did it work for you?? If not, what kind of problems did you have?? Did you find a way to resolve these problems??
Shri[/quote:396nnmxn]
I tried to get a job as a virtual assistant - I would have loved to do it... - but the job fell through. I don't think my prospective employer realized how much it would have cost for me to be doing the work she wanted... and after a prelimary 10 hours just to see how it'd work, she figured it would be cheaper to do it all herself!
And I've got to agree!
Unless the "boss" is some big shot who thinks the Virtual Assistant is a status symbol and is willing to pay for it, most VAs won't last long....
Hello from Nova Scotia, Canada
- Hello all!
I'm a Virtual Assistant and just started my business this past summer. I specialize in freeing up time and saving money for my clients by taking care of the time consuming, yet necessary, tasks that keep them from working on the revenue generating aspect of the business. At present my clients are from one end of Canada to the other - Prince Edward Island, British Columbia and here in Nova Scotia. I do a variety of tasks for them; client contact management, newsletters, website and blog updating; social network support and maintenance, and admin support within the financial services industry to name a few.
I joined this forum because I feel it would be valuable to connect with those outside the VA world. I'm looking to get a different perspective on business from the varied entrepreneurs here and be able to give something back as well.
Looking forward to meeting everyone!
Kathie from Melbourne, Australia
- Hello everyone, I've been a contributing author for quite sometime with Evan Carmichael but only recently became aware of this forum - I didn't know it existed.
I'm a mother of 5 daughters and wife of Graham. We live in Melbourne, Australia. My business was begun early 1994 fulltime from home so I could be here with our girls as they were growing up. I began a homebased secretarial business which became a Virtual Assistant business and network as the internet took hold in the business world. Today I manage a network of VAs in 15 countries.
Blogging became the perfect outlet for me as I'm an avid writer so I write several blogs, have authored some books as well and periodically do articles for printed publications and online ezines and newsletters.
Finally I've recently entered the speaking 'circuit' speaking at conferences, seminars and teleseminars, mainly in Australia but have begun to do a few teleseminars and radio shows for the US. I've just been asked to do my first 'physical presence' conference in Canada in 2009 which I am quite excited about.
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