Essential Guide to Outsourcing: Should You Hire a Freelance VA or Stick with a VA Company?
Virtual assistants are becoming even more crucial with the ever-increasing need for businesses to migrate online. The current health crisis may have disrupted the landscape, but it also underscores the importance of acquiring the necessary skills and tools.
These are best supplied by virtual assistants who are capable of handling a range of tasks, from database management to web development and web design. Sure enough, the demands for such services are growing at a consistent rate.
You just have to make the right decisions based on your enterprise’s needs.
If you are looking to outsource a major creative project (like brand-building) or a repetitive part of your operations (like lead generation or appointment setting ), you have to choose between a freelance virtual assistant or a virtual assistant company.
There seems to be hardly any difference between the two, but to be sure, let’s look at what they can offer you down the line:
These are basically individuals you can hire from places like UpWork and Fiverr. For sure, most of them work part-time for multiple clients or handle an office-based day job at a company.
Perhaps the best benefit you can get from hiring a freelancer is the fact that you have someone who knows the needs of the organization inside and out.
In other words, a single VA can learn enough about your company’s priorities and work closely with you in accomplishing specific goals.
On top of that, there is a high level of transparency since a single person is accountable for certain aspects of the campaign you are outsourcing.
However, not all organizations can make the most out of hiring a freelance VAs. There are several downsides to take note of:
Freelancers might handle tasks that align with their specialties. So, if you are looking to outsource your digital marketing campaign, the VA you hired can only handle your social media marketing and Facebook pay-per-click campaigns. If you need to come up with a new logo for your business, you might want to hire another VA if your current one is not proficient in graphic design.
Since not all freelancers have the skills your business requires, you need to scout and hire more talents for your campaigns. This would mean preparing a different contract for each VA you bring to the team. Imagine hiring different people for producing and distributing a single e-book. You need a writer, a graphic designer, and a digital marketing expert for the job, each offering different rates. You would be lucky if you can find someone who can do all these for a single, more reasonable price.
In cases where several freelancers work on your campaign, communication gaps can affect turn-around times and lead to errors and duplications. This is not ideal for outbound calling campaigns where different people need to collaborate closely to come up with a single script. And because they are also working for other clients, conflicting schedules will make it difficult for you to maintain a more seamless workflow.
Are freelance VAs good for your business? They could be if you are focusing on a single campaign or if you already have a clear plan for collaborating remotely.
On the other hand, if you have a vision for the long term, outsourcing a major campaign or project to a virtual assistant company would be the best possible move.
A company that provides virtual assistant services would be preferable if you have a long list of tasks you need help with.
Hiring freelance VAs might take a lot of time since you need to review individual resumes and draft different offers based on the requirements of each VA.
A VA company, on the other hand, can provide a dedicated team for such campaigns as lead generation, content marketing, and web development. Each member is handpicked based on your campaign’s preferred skillsets.
And since you are hiring an entire team, you only need a rolling monthly contract you can scale at any time.
But the best bits of hiring a VA company can be summed up in three different points:
Along with a team of virtual assistants, you also get team leaders or project managers who can be your eyes and ears on the ground to ensure your campaign meets all your targets. You can set up meetings with them to determine the campaign’s progress and resolve any issues along the way.
If you want to focus on getting the best results from your outsourcing budget, everyone in your team of VAs needs to be well-informed. And since all of them are working under one supervisor, there is greater cohesion in the workflow allowing you to maximize productivity.
Lastly, with a VA company, your needs are first and foremost. Whenever there are issues over quality and responsiveness, you can always contact the service provider to resolve them. You are assured that your budget translates into opportunities for growing the bottom line.
In terms of scale, hiring a company specializing in virtual assistant services should be the right fit if you plan on expanding your business within a year or two. It might not be practical if you are the owner of a startup that has minimal resources, but you can always find ways to adjust.
The best you can do is to find a company that provides services that align with your needs. Whether you hire virtual assistants for handling your CRM activities or building an e-commerce website, you need a company that gives you full control without much hassle.
At OneVirtual Solutions, we provide virtual assistant services tailor-fit to your needs. With full customer support and quality control, the results will always be at par with your expectations and at rates that fit businesses of any size or scale.
Learn more about how we can help you with your campaign. Click here to get started on hiring experienced virtual assistants and growing your business.
