How You Save Money by Hiring a Virtual Assistant

Breaking Down the Costs

Being in the virtual staffing business, we at Team Double-Click? are often asked, ?why should I hire a virtual assistant and how would it benefit me?? The answer is simple: you will save money (nearly 50 percent) and time.
I don?t think it?s any secret that when an employee is in the office 40 hours a week, that they are not actually working all of those hours. They have numerous distractions a day from children and spouses calling to chatting with their coworkers. A study by Basex, a New York research firm, found that office distractions total 2.1 hours a day for the average employee – more than 10 hours and 25 percent of a regular workweek. That doesn?t even take into account the amount of time an employee spends on personal tasks at work. That is time that the employer is paying them for. With virtual staffing, you only pay for the exact amount of time your virtual employee works.

In addition, you don?t pay for office expenses such as utilities, desk, chair, computer, and the office space itself.
Then there are benefits expenses including, vacation time, sick time, and insurance coverage. With virtual staffing, the virtual employee (who is an independent contractor) is responsible for those costs. With a virtual employee, you pay for their hourly rate and reimburse for any costs incurred for the job (mailing costs, etc.)
As you can see from the charts below, hiring a virtual employee is extremely economical for your company.
Wage $15/hour x 40 hr/week = $31,200/year
Social Security (.062 x 31,200) = $1,934/year
Medicare (.0145 x 31,200) = $452/year
Workers comp (.15 x 31,200) = $4,680/year
Sick time 1 week/year = $600/year
Vacation time 2 weeks/year = $1,200/year
Health Insurance Average = $7,800/year
FUTA (.008 x 7,000) = $56/year
Cost of hiring According to Business Week = $3,270/year
Office distractions* = $8,190 per year
Office utilities $300 per month = $3,600/year
Computer Computer for the assistant = $1,000
Desk and chair Modest desk and chair = $700
Add?l phone line Phone line install & monthly charges = $1,300
Office space Moderate office $900/month = $10,800/year
Total = $73,782 per year
Or
= $35.47 per hour
*A study by Basex, a New York research firm.
Wage $24.86/hour x 30 hr/week
= $38,782/year

Social Security N/A Independent Contractor = $0
Medicare N/A Independent Contractor = $0
Workers comp N/A Independent Contractor = $0
Sick time N/A Only Pay for Time Worked = $0
Vacation time N/A Only Pay for Time Worked = $0
Health Insurance N/A Independent Contractor = $0
FUTA N/A Independent Contractor = $0
Cost of hiring Team Double-Click? requires no start up payment = $0
Office distractions* Working from home there are no office distractions = $0
Office utilities N/A Independent Contractor – they pay their own utilities = $0
Computer N/A Independent Contractor – they buy their own computer = $0
Desk and chair N/A Independent Contractor – they buy their own desk and chair = $0
Add?l phone line N/A Independent Contractor – they pay for their own phone = $0
Office space N/A working from home = $0
Total = $38,782/year
Or
$18.65/hour
*Workweek is listed as 30 hours because Team Double-Click? only charges for time worked; the Virtual Assistant would still be on call 40 hours.
When all is said and done, you spend nearly double the amount for an in-house employee than for a virtual one.
Time is money. Hire a virtual employee and save on both.

Team Double-Click?We don’t just tell you where you can find a virtual assistant. We assess your needs and match you with one of our highly-skilled and Team Double-Click? trained virtual assistants. Then we monitor and nurture that relationship so you get the most out of hiring virtually. Think of us as your virtual Human Resources department!. To find out More about our virtual assistants and service click on following banner:

Key #3: Training

Are you struggling with the thought of how to train your virtual assistant? Is that preventing you from getting started? I hear that a lot. Maybe you are concerned with the amount of time it might take to train her. I hear that too. The first thing to remember is that if don?t train your virtual assistant to take over those tasks, you?re still stuck doing them yourself. Are you ready to move forward and get back to doing what you do best? If so, then let the virtual assistant do what she does best. She?s the skilled administrative assistant. She LOVES doing that kind of work.

Now, there are a couple of ways to go about training your assistant. While your assistant is already a trained administrative professional, you will still need to train her to your specific ways of doing things. Yes, it may take you some time to go through each of the steps, but once you do and she?s off and running you can move on to those things that you have been wanting to get to. If the training is complex or lengthy, consider recording the training call. That way she can go back over her notes and make sure she didn?t miss anything.

Did I say notes? YES! Have your assistant take notes of your training calls, each and every time. At the end of the training, have her type up those notes and email them to you. Go over those notes yourself to make sure she got all the steps and that you didn?t miss anything. This is a good way to also ensure that she understood you correctly. Then have her save that document into a new folder called ?Training Manual?. Each time you go over something new, have her document the training and then again, email you those training notes. These notes are now building a training manual for you and your business.

As a business owner, having a training manual, or a procedures manual is really critical. What if your VA gets sick and you need to bring someone else to fill in? What if down the road you decide you want to add to your staff, virtual or otherwise? Having document training materials will truly make your life easier. So, please take the time to train your assistant properly. It is an investment that will pay off with high returns!

Team Double-Click?The original and still the best:? Team Double-Click?s thorough virtual assistant screening process, outstanding customer service, and innovative approach to virtual staffing has earned the company mentions and features in such esteemed media as Entrepreneur Magazine, Staff Digest, CNN Money, NBC News, and even Woman?s Day magazine.? Team Double-Click? is truly setting the standard for the virtual assistant industry.. To find out More about our virtual assistants and service click on following banner:

How Long Can I Expect My Virtual Assistant To Stay With Me?

That?s the number one question I?m asked by clients, future clients, and interviewers. So how long can we expect virtual assistants to stick? My answer is always the same: ?it depends?. It depends on many things. But first we need to realign our thinking a little bit and better understand today?s workforce.

As a small or home-based business owner, are you basing your perception of how long a worker stays in a position on your own work history? Yeah, me too. Big mistake. Personally, when I take on a position I intend to stay with it ? I don?t give up. I?ve enjoyed lengthy tenures at my places of employment throughout my career. All except one and that?s a story for later.

What we need to remember though is that everyone is not like us. Especially the current workforce. I mentioned in a previous article (http://www.teamdoubleclick.com/news/free_articles/workingwithnewgeneration.html) that the days of staying in your job for the rest of your life are long gone. As business owners, we tend to forget that and we are frustrated by it.

Let me say it again in this article: A recent study said that the average tenure in a job for Generation Y is 18 months. That?s realistically the max you can expect someone ? anyone, bricks-and-mortar or virtual, to stick with a job. Let?s leave that thought to stew for a while and talk about the ?that depends? I mentioned earlier.

Depends on what?

Things change in people?s lives ? everyone?s lives. Mine and yours and your virtual assistant?s. Think back to the reasons you have changed jobs in the past. What things in your past have caused a need for job changes? Pregnancy, sudden depression, death in the family, shift in financial obligations, relocation, change of career goals, a decision to go back to college, ill parents, ill children, ill spouse? Of course, and there are many more. Your virtual assistant is a human being too and they?re also subject to all of these normal human occurrences. Any one of these or many more reasons are cause for a virtual assistant to move on elsewhere or even stop working altogether.

Job likeability. You?ve got to like your job. I hope we can all agree on that. If you don?t like what you?re doing you?re not going to do your best and you?re always going to be shopping for a better job or better opportunity. Virtual assistants, as with bricks-and-mortar assistants, are not immune. I?m not talking about being a virtual assistant in general ? though that happens too ? where a virtual assistant decides she can?t handle the isolation and hangs up her computer. I?m talking about all of the tasks a virtual assistant does on a daily basis. For one client she may answer phones, for another she may do data entry, and for yet another she may be asked to cold call. If she doesn?t like those duties she?s not going to like the job and will ask for reassignment or quit entirely.

Boss likeability. For me, the only one I didn?t stick with for a good length of time was one where I was treated like a prisoner in a concentration camp, neck breathed down and so on. I left one day for lunch and never looked back. Have you ever had a boss you just couldn?t stand? How about one with whom you just couldn?t see eye-to-eye. Or maybe there was the one you always thought was creepy or shifty. Would you stick with a boss that gave you those feelings? Certainly not! Yet we expect our virtual assistants to do that and we can?t. With 6.6 billion people in the world every one of them is not going to like each and every one of us. And you?re not going to like every one of them either.

Then of course there?s Big Bad Team Double-Click?. At Team Double-Click? our job, as we see it is this: to help you determine your needs in a virtual assistant; to locate the best virtual assistant for you, our client, based on your personality needs as well as your skills needs; to locate problem virtual assistants and send them packing before they do damage to you; to nurture the relationship between you and your virtual assistant; alert you to potential problems with a virtual assistant; to stand by what we do and what we offer; and locate a new virtual assistant for you should things not work out. Now, sometimes the virtual assistants we contract don?t like this. This is when we become ?Big Bad Team Double-Click??. You see, we?re the good guys when we?re offering work to virtual assistants. However, when we have to take that work away or ask a virtual assistant for reimbursement for a client due to negligence in their actions, we?re no longer popular with that virtual assistant. This quite often causes a virtual assistant to quit. In order to protect you, our client, sometimes we have to tick people off to do it.

Theft. Yes, theft. Team Double-Click? is a virtual staffing agency ? we?re the middleman. We work hard to do the best by our clients and locate quality virtual assistants for them. And theft does happen ? even from virtual assistants who?ve shown no signs of being anything but above board. If finances get tough, the first thing most people want to do is cut out the middleman. Why? Usually to make more money of course! While we do our best to prevent it from happening it does from time to time happen that a virtual assistant will attempt to steal a client ? to make more money. I?m sure you can see how this opens a whole can of worms here and can easily mess things up for other clients. My question to you: would you want to directly hire a person with that kind of track record? Could you really trust they wouldn?t try to steal something from you later on down the road? I wouldn?t. In fact, this brings me to an interesting story. A virtual assistant (let?s call her Jane) recently successfully stole a client (let?s call him Dick) from Team Double-Click?. In this instance, rather than enter into a lengthy legal battle with Dick and Jane, we let it go. We of course discussed with Dick the potential for Jane the Thief to repeat her history again in the future. Three months later Dick came back and said ?Gayle, Jane just stole from me ? she embezzled my funds in fact.? While I felt badly for Dick we predicted that this could happen which is why we?d warned him. Dick chose not to listen to our years of experience and the information we had available.

Popularity. Team Double-Click?s virtual assistants are contracted ? not employed ? by Team Double-Click?. As with most contractors (think home builders, highway builders, and other competitive bidders) we too impose restrictions, benchmarks, and even penalties on our contractors for lack of performance. Again, this sometimes makes us unpopular and can cause a virtual assistant to quit. Would you want us to do anything less in the name of protecting our clients?

Knowing what causes people to leave should help you better understand how long a virtual assistant may stay in a position. About 25% of our virtual assistants have been with us and the same clients for well over a year and many more approaching the one year mark. In fact, earlier this year one of our virtual assistants retired from Team Double-Click? and the client she was assigned, after being with him for more than three years.

So when asked ?how long can I expect my virtual assistant to stay with me?. I always say ?It depends. As long as nothing goes wrong and there is no reason for the virtual assistant to leave, she will most likely stay.? As one of my daughter?s teachers used to say, ?It?s all about cause and effect.?

This article?s goal was to give you a better perspective of what to expect in this day and age of hiring and some insight into what can go wrong. I hope I?ve accomplished that. And with a better understanding maybe we?ll all be less shocked and better prepared when one of our workers ? bricks-and-mortar or virtual – departs.

Team Double-Click?The original and still the best:? Team Double-Click?s thorough virtual assistant screening process, outstanding customer service, and innovative approach to virtual staffing has earned the company mentions and features in such esteemed media as Entrepreneur Magazine, Staff Digest, CNN Money, NBC News, and even Woman?s Day magazine.? Team Double-Click? is truly setting the standard for the virtual assistant industry.. To find out More about our virtual assistants and service click on following banner:

Working Green

By Gayle Buske
These days everyone is talking about going green: green building, green recycling, and green commuting, green EVERYTHING! And with good reason; all reports indicate that global warming is on the increase; various animal species are on the decrease and near extinction. Much of this is due to the way we, and generations before us, have treated the planet.

As I read a recent copy of Backpacker magazine, the Global Warming issue, I thought about how truly ?green? working and hiring virtually really is. I?ve always had it in the back of my mind, of course, but until I read more in-depth how we?re destroying our planet and what?s being done about it, I had a hard time relating the greenness of it all.

So what do we do to help the planet when we work and hire virtually?

Assuming you own a vehicle with a whopping 30mpg and your daily commute is 30 miles each way and you worked at a bricks-and-mortar office (or forced your administrative assistant to drive to a bricks-and mortar office each day) 5 days a week, you (or your assistant) would emit 9,860 pounds of carbon each into the atmosphere per year! So if you hire a virtual assistant, as well as work virtually yourself, you would SAVE an amazing 19,720 pounds of carbon emissions per year. Source: Stanford University?s emissions calculator: http://transportation.stanford.edu/alt_transportation/calculator.shtml. Be sure to stop by the website and calculate your carbon emissions.

While it?s hard to gauge exactly how much paper is used in a bricks-and-mortar office, what I can tell you is that our use of paper has gone down significantly since starting Team Double-Click?, a 100% virtual business. In the old days it was nothing to order as many as 10 cases (yes 50,000+ sheets of paper) in any given month. With a virtual business and by utilizing virtual assistants for 100% of the company?s work, we?re pushing a lot of paper if we use more than 2 reams (1,000) sheets a month. So again, working virtually wins: save on trees, save on carbon emissions caused by the processing and shipping of all those trees, which make all that paper.

If we?re using less paper; we?re using fewer ink toners and cartridges
What about the carbon footprint we leave when we eat all of that fast food when we eat out while working at a bricks-and-mortar office? One article http://openthefuture.com/cheeseburger_CF.html suggests that each of us, by eating three fast-food hamburgers per week, contributes to the emission of 1,188 to 2,013 pounds of carbon per year (this includes the energy used in the cooking of the burger as well as the commute to the burger joint). When you?re working virtually, you usually greatly reduce the number of times per week you eat out, thus reducing your carbon footprint once again. And you tend to use reusable containers instead of all those throw-aways.
Most of us who work virtually also utilize virtual fax and phone systems, which again reduce our carbon footprint through reduced electrical carbon costs as well as reduced paper usage.

If you have kids and you work in a bricks-and-mortar office (or if your assistant is forced to work in a bricks-and-mortar office) you?re contributing to greater emissions with all of those trips to pick up and drop off the kids at daycare.

While I couldn?t find any figures on the carbon footprint left from dry cleaning, we can safely assume it?s considerable. Working virtually significantly reduces the need for carbon-costly dry cleaning.
Think about the ?green? space we save by reducing the number of office buildings being put up.
We hear about green building (the use of reclaimed or recycled building materials) often, but what about totally eliminating the need for that new building. This act alone reduces the carbon footprint in materials-savings.

Let?s talk about the carbon-cost of powering a huge office space. Working virtually, you only have to power the room that you are working in Working virtually, you have the ability to choose green desks, packaging and materials And the most fun ?green? feature of working virtually is the envy of all of your bricks-and-mortar friends, family, and associates!

As you can see, working and hiring virtually makes a significant impact on the reduction of ozone-depleting greenhouse gasses and reduces your carbon footprint. Team Double-Click? and its staff (both internal and outsourced) have worked virtually since 2000 and are proud to contribute to a better planet for our children. If you?re interested in hiring or working virtually and helping the planet, be sure to visit us at www.teamdoubleclick.com.

For more information on working green, please visit http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/12/how_to_green_your_work.php#top10.

About the author:
Gayle Buske is the co-founder, president and CEO of Team Double-Click?, the country?s foremost virtual staffing agency. As the head of a virtual staffing agency with over 26,000 virtual professionals in its pool, Ms. Buske is uniquely qualified to aid clients? growth through virtual outsourcing as well as speak to the ins and outs of the industry. Gayle enjoys spending her free time with her husband, business and life partner, Jim, their daughter Madison, practicing Yoga, reading, hiking, flower gardening, and playing with the family?s three dogs and two cats.

Team Double-Click?The original and still the best:? Team Double-Click?s thorough virtual assistant screening process, outstanding customer service, and innovative approach to virtual staffing has earned the company mentions and features in such esteemed media as Entrepreneur Magazine, Staff Digest, CNN Money, NBC News, and even Woman?s Day magazine.? Team Double-Click? is truly setting the standard for the virtual assistant industry.. To find out More about our virtual assistants and service click on following banner:

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