Being a business owner means dealing with decisions that balance cost with return on investment constantly – and you want to make sure that you’re always acting wisely. Hiring team members, or outsourcing a portion of your admin tasks, is something on every financial planner’s list of expenses to consider. You’ve likely heard from colleagues who have hired a virtual assistant, and now you’re wondering whether hiring a VA is right for you, too.
Hiring a virtual assistant can help you to accomplish so much in your financial planning practice. From assistance with social media management and marketing tasks, to providing a streamlined experience for your existing and new clients, your virtual assistant can help you take your practice to the next level. But, if you’re like most RIA owners, you’re not sure where to begin when it comes to working with a virtual assistant. You may be asking yourself:
What tasks do I outsource?
Shouldn’t I hire someone in-house?
Won’t my clients know if my virtual assistant is running client-facing communication? Will that impact the quality of service I’m providing?
These are all savvy questions, and at New Heights Solutions, we hear them all the time. Luckily, for most people, hiring a virtual assistant ends up adding even more value to their practice than they had originally imagined. Let’s go over a few of the key benefits to hiring a virtual assistant, and how to determine what you should outsource to your new team member!
Assistance Without the Responsibility of a Full-Time Employee
Hiring a full-time assistant costs significantly more than just their total salary. Offering salaried employees benefits, vacation, and more are all expenses you’ll need to consider. Bringing on a virtual assistant (or a team of virtual assistants) can bring you all the support of having an assistant in-house without the responsibility and added expenses of taking care of a full-time employee. Virtual assistants are all contract employees. They’re in charge of their own benefits and taxes.
Stay Organized
As a business owner, you may have grown used to the organized chaos that comes with running your business. But what happens when something gets misplaced? How are you managing your calendar and still meeting client expectations? Scaling a financial planning practice requires streamlined processes and organization. The easier it is to run your practice, the more effective you can be when working with clients. A virtual assistant can help you to get organized, document processes and procedures, and streamline all client-facing processes and communication to make their experience even better.
Get Social
As your business grows, the time you have available to dedicate to marketing will slowly dwindle away. A virtual assistant can often act as your social media manager and help to amplify your online presence. By executing social posts, managing engagement, and helping you to set up lead nurturing funnels through both social media and your email marketing software, your virtual assistant can, essentially, help you to run a few of the key elements in a successful digital marketing strategy. This task often takes financial planners several hours a week – but not anymore.
Improve Your Client Experience
When you first founded your RIA, you were likely desperate for clients. You’d do anything to sign on clients who were an ideal fit for your practice, and you had all the time in the world to develop rock-solid relationships with every single one of them. As you continue to grow, your client experience could potentially suffer as you get busier. If you have a virtual assistant, this doesn’t have to be the case. By managing your inbox, responding to client requests, and building processes that include regular client touch-points, client appreciation events, and more, your virtual assistant will be able to elevate the experience you’re providing through your financial planning practice.
Maximize Efficiency
When you’re a business owner, you often become the bottleneck in many of your processes through no fault of your own. Your to do list is several miles long, and it can feel like every task on the dockett holds equal weight and importance. Unfortunately, we’re all working with the same 24 hours in a day. Even if you’ve mastered the art of productivity, that doesn’t mean you’re going to have enough time to get everything completed and grow your business and take care of yourself and actively participate in your personal life. Passing off tasks where you’re clearly holding up the show to a virtual assistant can help sidestep inefficiency and make progress.
Working with virtual assistants who specialize in only serving other RIAs means they will also be efficient at most technology and custodians that other advisors use. VAs also learn what is working, and not working, in other practices and use that knowledge to help improve all their clients’ back office.
Gain Peace of Mind
Your virtual assistant should be able to help you with a wide range of tasks, and those tasks may differ from one month or season to the next. At the end of the day, no matter what you choose to outsource to a virtual assistant, they’re always going to give you one outcome that’s invaluable: peace of mind. It can be exhausting to constantly be responsible for every small detail in your business. Having a virtual assistant who can help you split up that responsibility and take ownership of a few of your “to do’s” can help you to avoid business burnout and continue to find success in your RIA.