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A Perfect Solution To The Rise Of The Online Office

by | Apr 20, 2020 | General

the Proper Virtual Assistant

The world as we know it is changing. Pandemic forced so many people to work from home or even stop working at all. What if you could work online? What if an online office was a perfect solution?

All businesses have the essential everyday background tasks to manage, but not all businesses need a support team with an actual physical presence to constitute 'an office.' For many years, innovative, forward-thinking business owners have been embracing the powers of the Internet and the positive working changes and opportunities that it brings and have preferred to operate with an online office. They realise using online systems and outsourcing tasks or entire roles within their business is simple, convenient, allows them to create their own freedom, and encourages business growth, whilst taking an almost non-existent business risk, making no long term commitment and receiving excellent value for money.

IT innovation is the fundamental driving force behind this change to working culture with the development of new secure platforms promoting and improving communication and collaboration. This transition to online working enables many kinds of workers, whether outsourced, employed, or entrepreneurial business owners to collaborate effectively and efficiently online.

Work Is No Longer a Place!

It used to be that you 'went to work'. However, with these technological advances, work isn't necessarily a physical location anymore, but an activity, a task... something you need to do, rather than somewhere you need to be.

Many businesses now find that there's a financial and operational disadvantage to retaining a physical office premises with dedicated staff. As online offices prove themselves to be more efficient, more productive, and better value for money, they're giving those operating online a competitive edge over their rivals.

The Perfect Solution? Oh yes – there is one out there for many businesses …

Two factors combine to work together and create the perfect solution in business support - online systems and virtual assistants.

Virtual assistants provide online business support across an astonishing range of roles and work with a multitude of online systems. Through reducing your workload and streamlining your processes by implementing an online office, your VA will positively transform your business and provide a scalable basis from which to build your success.

The incredibly intuitive, practical and efficient online systems available at little or no cost, cover almost all business support areas such as accounts, invoicing, payroll, customer service, document sharing and e-signing, project collaboration, communication, call answering, appointment systems, marketing, design and more!

Financial Benefit to Using an Online Office

The substantial savings in time and money by implementing an online office are clearly recognised. With an online office significant costs are immediately cut as there's no rent, rates, or utility bills, and each worker provides their own working space and equipment. Whilst the online office systems themselves are well priced and the investment is well worth the regained time, the time savings allow a greater ability to focus on your clients, income generating tasks and business growth, leading to more sales and ultimately more income!

Among many other benefits, outsourcing to a VA provides you with professional assistance at a fraction of the cost of employing staff. It also secures a productive workforce, focuses on delivering specific tasks by agreed deadlines, and completely eliminates time wasted due to lingering office politics, or regular interruptions by colleagues. Ideas of tasks you could outsource to a VA a greater than you can think but I actually listed them in 10 groups. I wrote about the first two in more detail on my blog already and the remaining 8 will follow shortly.

  1. Admin tasks
  2. Social media
  3. Daily schedule
  4. Design projects
  5. Website development
  6. Multimedia projects
  7. Blog maintenance
  8. Financial record-keeping
  9. Content creation
  10. Project management

The individual worker experiences many benefits from working online, in both financial savings and positive lifestyle changes. By way of example, replacing that often horribly long commute with more time to productively spend on tasks or extra time to enjoy with family, being able to work from almost any location with Internet access, reducing travel and clothing costs as well as improvements in well-being, all lead to higher productivity!

6 Reasons Why Implementing An Online Office Will Help Your Business – especially Now

by | Aug 19, 2019 | Business, Cost of work, Office, Virtual Assistance

Over recent years the many advances in technology have ensured that almost every aspect of running a business is now supported by an online system. Many of these online systems offer different versions that can be selected according to business needs and budget. These systems combine to create an online office and offer a powerful transformative effect for efficiently running business operations.

 

It's likely that when you started your business you imagined yourself as the cool, calm, wonderful business owner, with everything organised and very little stress affecting you. You didn't imagine that you'd be rushing around, stressed out and frustrated that you're wasting time on seemingly unnecessary tasks. You have probably never considered your business being forced to shut down due to the situation like we all facing now.

When we are staying at home, have to work from home an Online systems, as well as hiring a brilliant VA could very much help you run a better business and restore your work / life balance, not to mention your original business vision and here's 6 reasons why...

 

1 Increase Efficiency

If your systems aren't working for you, it can feel like you're working harder but not moving forward any faster. You end up with less earning time and less time to yourself to wind-down.

Streamlining your business to reduce inefficiencies and wasted time with readily available online systems means there's no need to 'reinvent the wheel'. A suitable process and system almost invariably already exists and can be integrated with your procedures to support your business, reduce your to-do list, increase efficiency and free up your time.

2 Free up Your Time

You want to be focussed on the income generating tasks and business strategy, not bogged down by the day-to-day management of your business tasks. You want to run your business, not have it run you!

With increased efficiency, your workload is reduced and a large amount of your time freed up. This allows you to better manage your time and focus on more important things, such as your clients and the wider business strategy, either that or some much needed time to switch off and de-stress.

When you add home-schooling that will be back after the mid-term your time will out of the sudden be even more precious.  

 

3 Improve Client Experience

Using online systems will help improve consistency in your business processes and allow you to focus on meeting your clients' needs and expectations - so you can deliver a better experience overall, for instance through a service like Asana, which has been specifically designed to assist you with actively managing client experience via ticketed support.

 

4 Increase Your Profit

With a more efficient business, and the wasted time now freed up, you're able to turn your attention to income generating tasks, your customers and business strategy and steadily increase your profits.

Always remember, an improved client experience also leads to more recommendations, increased sales and repeat business.

 

5 Build a Better Team

Using online systems you can outsource tasks to VAs more readily and are no longer limited geographically when it comes to finding the best resource for your business. You can take advantage of a global talent pool and collaborate online using communication and project management systems such as Skype, Asana and Active Collab.

 

6 Be Competitive

If your competitors are more efficient than you, there's potential that you could lose business, for example they may be able to respond quicker to enquiries, or offer a better service to their clients. It's important to continuously refine your systems in order to stay competitive.

 

So, now more than ever it is the right time to start to improve your business systems, engage the services of one or more VAs and get your office online today!