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8 signs your small business could benefit from hiring a virtual assistant

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personal assistant prices for your small business.Knowing when it’s the right time to get help with running your business can drive its growth and prevent you from burning out.

Entrepreneurs are often guilty of living and breathing their business.

Burning the candle at both ends and wearing many hats all comes part and parcel with running your own business. As your business grows though, you will find it harder and harder to keep all those balls in the air, all by yourself, all of the time.

Here are 8 signs that it’s time for you to think about hiring a virtual assistant.

You’re spending all day doing admin – If you’re spending all your time on day-to-day admin and there’s no time left for revenue-generating activities, then it’s time to outsource the time-draining tasks so that you can focus on growing your business.

Big ideas and projects keep getting pushed back – If you’ve got lots of exciting projects sitting on the side lines but find that they keep getting pushed further down your to-do list then you’ve probably got too much on your plate. A virtual assistant can reduce your workload, giving you back some of the time you need to work on new projects.

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Specialist tasks your business could benefit from outsourcing and why

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help with business administrationOutsourcing tasks that require specialist knowledge to a virtual personal assistant could help your business grow whilst also saving you time and money.

Whilst it is necessary for small business owners to wear many hats and have a full and varied skillset, there are certain tasks that require an expert to be completed most effectively.

We’ve identified three key areas that are frequently outsourced to expert virtual PAs because they require extensive knowledge of industries that are complex and constantly changing. Outsourcing these tasks to a virtual assistant can not only free up time, but also have financial benefits and aid business growth.

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Here is why you should outsource to a virtual assistant…

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Do you deserve a bit more time and money? We believe you do.

We believe every small business owner needs and deserves a great Virtual Assistant. Why? Because a great VA will save you time and make you money. Bear with us on this one…

So let’s just say you have a task you have to do each month. It takes you 5 hours. Quite honestly you hate doing it, you don’t really have the skill set for it and you procrastinate over it each month.

It’s always sat on your to do list making you feel slightly uncomfortable, guilty and let’s face it a little bit resentful that it won’t just vanish from your list FOREVER.
You have one in mind, don’t you?

If you hand this task over to a VA with the right skill set it’s likely they can do this task in a fraction of the time… or they could even automate it for you.

The task can be outsourced to a virtual assistant in 3 hours each month, saving you 5 hours.  Or it could be automated as a one-off project and now your task only takes 30 min each month!

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Business as Usual On the Beach

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Juggling a small business and the school holidays can be difficult for parent entrepreneurs, and hopefully you’ve planned some holiday time for yourself and your family.  But do you check your emails on the beach?  Are you tweeting as you sightsee?  Do you fret about missed opportunities while you’re trying to relax?

 

Many people start their own business to improve their work-life balance, then find it impossible to switch off and enjoy the downtime.  The good news is that you can outsource many tasks and automate others to keep things ticking over while you’re away.

 

Tasks to Automate

Social Media posts

Are you spending all day posting on different social media sites?  It’s important to regularly connect with your customers, particularly on platforms such as Twitter where frequent posting is essential, but there are tools such as Buffer, Hootsuite and Tweetdeck which enable you to schedule posts in advance across multiple platforms.

 

Email responses

Why not set up an automatic follow up to enquiries?  We find that Mailchimp can take the strain out of your email marketing, and your Pink Spaghetti PA can always help you by setting up a template.

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5 Key things we didn’t know before starting a small business

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1. Outsource
Entrepreneurs often feel they need to be able to do everything on their own, but this can lead to you wasting precious time doing mundane tasks that someone else could do better and faster. Look for ways to automate or outsource repetitive jobs, and you’ll have more time for the important things. You’re also only as good as the team you have behind you. Make sure you have the right people in place to deliver the service you want to deliver.

2. You’ll spend a lot of time running your business
So you’ve started your business because you’re passionate about what you do, but as a business owner you’ll spend the majority of your time on administration, marketing, selling, business planning and answering a whole load of emails. To make any money out of your new business these are things you need to get to grips with, even if admin’s not your first passion.

3. The importance of making friends with the media
However fantastic your product or service, you need to tell people about it if your business is to succeed. Local press can often have space to fill and will welcome newsworthy stories about your new business. Editorial will often seem more credible to the general public than advertising, so make friends with your local media and harness the power of free publicity.

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Small is Beautiful

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So you run your own micro business, congratulations!  You may be surprised to learn that you are in the majority – businesses employing fewer than 10 people make up 95.6% of all UK businesses.

So what’s great about being tiny?  There are myriad advantages to small businesses, both to the business owner and to the customer.  Here are a few of them:

 

For the entrepreneur:

Independence – be honest, who hasn’t ever wanted to be their own boss?  People working for themselves are happier too.

Personal Satisfaction – you’re working in a field you really enjoy, and you have the creative freedom you only dreamed of in the corporate world.

Work/life balance – you can set your own hours, reduce your commute to zero and see as much of your family as you want to!

Learning opportunities – as a cog in the corporate machine you typically only perform a tiny part of the overall function.  As a business owner you have to get involved in the whole process, even when you outsource parts of it to other experts.

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Be More Organised in 2017

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If you are one of the 5.3 million small businesses, how you grow your business is key. We know from experience you have to ‘work smart’ so here are our top tips to be more organised. Once you’re organised, you can pack more of the right stuff into each and every day and cut out the tiring and frustrating bits which make you feel hassled.
Follow these straightforward steps and see what a difference they make.
1. Know what’s importavirtual administrative assistantnt to you – we all have long to-do lists, but what items on it are really important? What would you regret not doing…
2. Conversely, know what’s not important to you. What can you stop doing or delegate to free up time?
3. Just get started. Break the task down and set some parameters for when you’d like to achieve certain aspects. What simple steps can you take right now?
4. Set a time frame for finishing – and commit to it.
Accept that you don’t have to do it all yourself. With a bit of imagination – and some support from Pink Spaghetti – 2017 could be your best year ever!

Do you Vlog for your Business? Here’s How to Get Started!

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As the popularity of Vlogs (Video blogs) increases, and the statistics show they are great for engagement, we asked Magic Pony Films to come up with some tips to help you dip your toe in the water!

Video blogs help you to build connections with potential customers; they show your human side and once you get over your nerves for filming then it can be easier than written content and definitely a quicker way to spread your message to the world. Here are our top tips for video blogs:

1. Content – before filming you need to be certain of your content. It is great to get your message out there but you have to have a clear plan. It is about quality not quantity. Where does your video blog fit in with your marketing plan? It’s important to be authentic, viewers will not be able to identify with you if you are being fake and are likely to switch off. Make sure your opening is catchy; we have all watched videos which make us want to switch off in the first few seconds, don’t let this be yours! Video blogs should not be all about self-promotion, sharing your expertise is likely to leave a lasting impact and this will help viewers to remember you and see you as a ‘go to’ person should they need your services in the future. The best video blogs are those where people share their passion for a subject. shutterstock_328684406

2. Audio – think about your environment. There is no point in setting up the perfect shot if viewers are distracted by the sound of your fridge. People need to hear what you are saying. You may wish to consider purchasing an external microphone if this is something that you want to do regularly.

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Inspirational Businesswomen in celebration of Be A Millionaire Day 2016

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Friday 20th May 2016 is National ‘Be A Millionaire Day’. At Pink Spaghetti we have several inspirational businesswomen as customers who may well belong to this exclusive club. Millionaires or not though, we think all of our clients are 1 in a million and we thought we would share with you some of their successes.

One of our Pink Spaghetti Franchisees, Laura from Newbury, has the privilege of working with a very special lady who has turned a small venture into a thriving business. Romilla Arber runs Honesty Group in West Berkshire, started just two years ago. Honesty Group has gone from strength to strength in a short space of time and provides a benchmark for all women thinking of making that leap and starting their own company. We spent some time with her recently to understand how she has made it such a success:

Pink Spaghetti Q&A

1. What prompted you to start your business and how/where/when did it start?
I wanted to start a business venture in the food sector that could make a reasonable profit whilst retaining its integrity towards staff, customers and suppliers. I started it in 2014 at the Honesty Cookery School.

2. How many people do you now employ?
We now employ 30 staff across the group.
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3. What has made your business so successful? Could you give us 5 tips?
My 5 key tips are working hard to hire and retain the right staff, making good customer service a priority, training and developing staff, charging competitively, having a strong and clear vision.

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The Work Life Balance of Being A Mum

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Every member of the Pink Spaghetti team is a mum, every franchisee, every member of staff. We all have very different skills, but there is one thing we are all great at – juggling!

We speak to a lot of people, friends, customers, and time and time again we meet people who think they should be able to do it all, but can’t.  They all have the misguided impression that other people do everything, brilliantly.  What they forget is that people probably think that of them too.

Life was busy before children, and now add in the school and nursery runs, planning, and of course spending time actually enjoying the children, and every other area of our lives gets squeezed!

People simply cannot do everything, we all have to make choices.  Do we sit and play with our children?  Great!  But the cleaning won’t get done.  Home cooked food all of the time?  Yummy!  But that won’t keep the paperwork up to date.

The truth is that there are only so many hours in the day, and we choose how we spend them (and a high percentage of it may be on Facebook!) so we need to look at how we can carry on juggling, that is a fact of life, how do we keep all those balls spinning?

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email help@pink-spaghetti.co.uk or click here to find your nearest team