Found this great article in the FT Recruitment pages explaining the benefits of Virtual Personal Assistants. Click here to read more:
The Personal Assistant I Never See
An excerpt below:
When Sylvia Doyle started using a virtual assistant – a stranger, working from a remote location via the internet – to handle administrative tasks, she made a point of not meeting her face-to-face.
“To me, it was critical to grow my business in a 21st century way,” says Ms Doyle, founder and director of Reward First, a specialist compensation consultancy. “It had to be possible to build a relationship that was sustainable on a virtual basis. I was testing myself as well.”
Having had conventional personal assistants in her previous corporate career, she had misgivings about hiring someone she would not see. How long would it take to find the right person and build a relationship of trust, she wondered.
“I did some research and a lot of checking around and setting up calls to understand how they worked, and I talked to their clients,” she says. She also checked what systems and security they used to manage client data. Positive experience of collaborating via the internet over a distance – working virtually – with a fellow consultant in the US gave her confidence.
After one false start, she found her ideal virtual assistant by word-of-mouth recommendation. “I’m still learning, but the benefits are huge,” she says. “I’m outsourcing everything other than the things I do very well myself. I feel I have the capacity to grow the business and the confidence to do it successfully.”
To read more click this link: