How Much Can Not Hiring a Virtual Assistant Cost You?

It is well-known and heavily talked about that hiring a virtual assistant can be very beneficial and remunerative, but do you know exactly how much not using such services (if you really need it) can cost you? Well, there are no exact numbers, but we can provide a very clear range to give you an accurate estimate.

Understanding how this delegation-delay can cost business you can gain a better understanding of how advantageous virtual assistant services are and then you can make an informed decision.

The effect of delaying to outsource is costlier than many realize. You know that executives nowadays have to spend up to 3 hours per day on average to manage administrative tasks and other non-core tasks (which take even more time).

These routine tasks are essential to running your business sustainably but often are indirect drivers of growth. That’s why they are not (and should not be) on the priority list of these business leaders. But they give away valuable time staying involved with these tasks.

The impact of this time-drain is significant. A global productivity study found that office workers spend on average 552 work-hours a year (meaning, 69 days!) getting repetitive administrative tasks done.

Assuming you pay your full-time employee $15 per hour, you lose over $8,000 per employee per year. Now imagine what it means to your business. Across industries it can total as much as $5 billion in annual costs.

If you consider the monetary value of each hour of a CEO or a C-suite executive, it gets even more detrimental for a business to continue burdening its strategic, creative, and innovative centers to burden with routine or specific tasks that are out of their field of expertise.

Many business owners or founders fail to notice the hidden costs behind not hiring virtual staff and doing everything by themselves. Evidently, it costs them in various ways:

Think this from a leader’s point of view. You are juggling too many tasks and constantly shifting between roles and responsibilities, and priorities. This is creating stress and draining your energy. You constitute the crux of the business’s assurance of growth. Now imagine how a stressed mind and body will directly affect the well-being of business. Although, putting a price on physical or mental well-being is tricky, you understand.

Let these numbers from Harvard Business Review (HBR) give you the employee side of things. According to HBR, the physical and psychological problems of burned-out employees costs a business far greater than their healthcare spending due to the loss of competent employees, and low productivity across businesses. And that healthcare spending is estimated to be $125 to $190 billion a year!

For argument’s sake, let’s imagine, you are the CEO of an organization and you are not physically or mentally stressed or strained by the burden of routine uninspiring tasks. But still, you are doing tasks like calendar management, email management, data entry, and bookkeeping while paying yourself a CEO’s hourly rate. Isn’t that misusing valuable resources?

This is a legit way of looking at the situation. You are hiring yourself (or someone else for that matter) at a premium rate ($57 to $427 per hour) for low-skill administrative tasks that can be easily outsourced to a remote assistant at a fraction of this cost. Do some math and calculate how this misuse of resources will add up throughout the year.

Tasks that demand specialization (which is not your area of expertise) or tasks that demand low skill but consume a lot of time and energy eat away at your concentration and make you lose sight of the bigger picture. You miss out on things that absolutely need to be done to optimize growth.

Most of your time is supposed to be spent innovating, strategizing, or focusing in core business areas. But you don’t have a personal virtual assistant yet, so you ended up handling non-remunerative tasks like managing emails, projects, or scheduling meetings. By delaying necessary delegation you make getting new opportunities more difficult than it already is.

Wondering what hiring a remote assistant can do for your business? A managed remote professional can take over your tasks and assure you of the timely completion of the task with guaranteed satisfaction. On top of that, it will free up your time and let you focus on what truly matters.

Go ahead and refer to your own estimate that shows how much you can save by outsourcing tasks just because you get to avoid the employee benefits and other overhead costs. Now, include the U.S. minimum wage law too! Yes, you can save on that too if you hire remote staff from countries like India.

If your in-house employees handle all your tasks, you are bound to face some serious stress and scaling issues when faced with changes in business scope or workload. You can avoid this by outsourcing specific tasks to your virtual employees. As remote teams have no problem adjusting to the changing needs you get to enjoy the scalability without expending a dime.

Employee retention and recruitment have become very difficult when it comes to building and nurturing in-house teams. That’s why it is becoming a trend to outsource tasks to fill essential skill gaps and manage risks during economic agitation. This situation is clearly reflected when survey’s state that 83% of small businesses outsource for these reasons.

On average 20% of the tasks that you regularly handle directly generate the biggest impact for the business, while the other 80% of the tasks only have a low direct impact. This is what the Pareto Principle entails. However, this is not the ideal situation. If you can spend most of your time and energy with the most impactful tasks you can have an even bigger effect on the business.

Multitasking makes you and your employees more prone to errors. Switching tasks frequently or internally processing how to tick off a long to-do list demands higher focus and triggers adrenaline and cortisol secretion. It makes simpler tasks complex, burns oxygenated glucose too fast, and tires people’s brains out. Get a virtual assistant who can help you and your team focus on fewer things and do the work better.

The advantages of hiring a virtual assistant goes beyond just avoiding the costs doing everything in-house incurs. While addressing the expenditure discussed above is important, it is also important to learn how to delegate effectively, it includes knowing whom to hire, what tasks to delegate, how to communicate with the virtual assistants and much more. The outsourcing process is simple but ensuring growth through delegation may not be.

If you want to remove any guesswork from your outsourcing endeavor, you can contact a veteran in this service, DedicatedVA. We can help you with any queries related to outsourcing and offer qualified virtual assistants matching your requirements.