Why Summer is the Perfect time to Partner with a Virtual Assistant

The slower summer months are made for taking on new employees for your business, such as a virtual assistant. While many folks are on vacations, and most customers or clients are too busy enjoying the nice weather and the many activities that come with it, you can take the time needed to help a virtual assistant become acquainted with your brand and business goals. Instead of waiting around, looking at your empty inbox, and wondering whether there’s anything more productive you could be doing than taking your third coffee break of the day, why not use this time to train a virtual assistant so they can become an effective member of your team?

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Introducing Your Business to a Virtual Assistant
Since most businesses tend to be slower during the mid-to-late summer, you probably have more time on your hands to get a new virtual assistant up to speed on your processes. During the busy fall months and the period leading up to the holidays you may not have any time to spare at all, so make the most of the calm before the storm now. If you already have a preferred workflow, now is the time to experiment and see where a virtual assistant might fit into it. It might take a few weeks of trial and error before even the best Virtual Assistant and business owner can develop a seamless ability to function together. You need to think about a couple of things:

• What tasks you will want a virtual assistant to focus on
• How you like documents, spreadsheets, and graphics to be formatted
• What style do you like blog articles, social media posts, and emails to follow
• How much communication is ideal for keeping delegated work going smoothly, but not taking up too much of your time

A good virtual assistant will be happy to work with you on these, in addition to learning your brand and the way you want it to come across. Your vision for the business is the most important, after all, and while a clever virtual assistant may be able to offer suggestions about how to improve workflows or marketing strategies, it’s ultimately up to you to direct them.

Tackling Your To-Do List
Summer is also a good time to get all those little, annoying tasks on your never ending to-do list completed, with the help of a new virtual assistant. Some of those small tasks may not be worth you spending much time on them, but can still be important to the functioning of your business. Plus, if they’re recurring tasks, spending a little more time helping to orient your virtual assistant now will make it simple and fast for them to handle such things in future, without you even having to get involved. Figuring out what kinds of work you can pass along to a virtual assistant and gauging their performance on different types of work now can really save you headaches once business picks up again and you need to delegate more of the small stuff. This will also help keep that to-do list manageable in future!

Planning for the Future
Re-examining long-term goals is another good thing to focus on during the slower months, and a virtual assistant can help with that, too. Some tasks on your to-do list may have so many components and be so wide-reaching that they will completely change the way your business functions. This sort of paradigm shifting work is perfect to tackle during summer, especially with the assistance and second opinion provided by a good virtual assistant. You can really overhaul the way things run, making it easier to handle any upcoming changes you make to your business.

During the slow season you can set up new systems and prepare new procedure documents or business manuals so that when you are busier in the upcoming months, onboarding clients or hiring new staff will be a breeze. A virtual assistant can help you develop those essential documents and make plans for your business to grow and accommodate more clients.

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So what are you waiting for? Why not book a free consultation to find out what a virtual assistant can do for you this summer, and make real use of your slow season.