5 Signs It’s Time to Hire a Virtual Assistant

CIO Insight Staff Avatar

Updated on:

By Tricia Sciortino

As a technology leader, you’ve got all kinds of tools at your disposal to help you work smarter and faster. And yet you likely find yourself falling behind on the tasks that are most important to you. That’s because no matter how many tools you have to get things done, it’s the tool between your ears that can ultimately take you forward or backward in your organizational goals. There’s no duplicating that tool, but partnering with a trusted virtual assistant can help you accomplish what you really need to do.

If you’re wondering whether you need a virtual assistant, the answer is probably a resounding “yes.” Here are just five of the telltale signs that you need a virtual assistant to help you take your organization forward:

1. The bulk of your time isn’t spent on revenue-generating tasks. How much do you charge clients for your time? Or, if you’re salaried, how much are you paid per hour? And how much of your time do you spend on activities that aren’t worth that much? Are you spending the majority of your time on administrative tasks, scheduling meetings or travel, processing email, researching new solutions, posting content to social media, or other tasks that aren’t in your core areas of responsibility? This can be delegated to a virtual assistant for a fraction of the cost of you doing them yourself. Partner with a virtual assistant, and you’ll discover dozens of hours in your week that were previously filled with lower-value activities that you can now spend on those high-value tasks that only you can do.

2. You’re losing sleep. That feeling you get when you wake up at 2 a.m., convinced there’s something essential at the office you’ve forgotten? That feeling is a bigger drain on your mental energy and productivity than you probably realize. When you have a virtual assistant on your side, you have someone else watching your back and helping you make sure everything’s getting done that needs to be done.

3. Things are falling through the cracks. You’ve got so many projects in flight and people you need to communicate with that you can’t keep track. And it’s starting to show in missed deadlines, missed communication and possibly in your overall revenue trends. When you hit that point, it’s past time to partner with a virtual assistant to help you manage all those details and emails so that you can focus on the bigger picture.

4. You’re living in your inbox. If you’re spending your entire day in your inbox, you’re not accomplishing the things you really need to be accomplishing as a leader. Email is the lifeblood of most companies today, no doubt—but it can also be the leading killer of productivity and keep you from accomplishing what really needs to happen. Let a virtual assistant become your inbox gatekeeper and triage your incoming email, and you’ll be able to focus completely on the tasks you need to do without feeling the pressure to constantly check your inbox.

5. You’re managing, not leading. If you’re spending more time on managing the details on your projects—setting up systems, administering programs or software installations, updating sites and systems, and all those administrative tasks—you’re not truly leading your organization. You’re managing details, and probably doing it pretty successfully, but you’re not leading. If you’re called to be a leader in your organization, you can’t get wrapped up in details. Those can all be delegated to a virtual assistant, and you can focus on doing the things that only a leader can do.

If you find yourself in any of these situations on a regular basis, partnering with a virtual assistant can truly be a game-changing solution for you. Make your final administrative task of 2015 be hire a virtual assistant and start off 2016 with more productivity and results than you ever thought possible.

Tricia Sciortino is the president of eaHELP. Prior to starting with eaHELP, she worked for Cogun, a national church construction company. 

CIO Insight Staff Avatar