For a small business owner in Orange County, California, the process of choosing and setting up the right type of business entity is just the first step to building a successful business. Budgeting for, hiring, and managing staff can be a much bigger headache. Virtual assistant agencies – one method of easing the cost, HR issues, and management headache that has worked for us at Incorporation Attorney, is to make use of an offshore virtual assistant staffing agency for a lot of our staffing needs.
Our Story – How We Came to Hire Virtual Assistant Offshore Staff
Historically we maintained a team of local California-based administrative staff. Like everyone else we had them come into the office every day. They were responsible for administering a wide range of complex tasks. Communicating with our clients to get business details, updating signature documents, and answering questions.
As with any instance where you have in-house staff, we also had our fair share of internal dramas and disputes. Also, the staff turnover was higher than we would have liked. When a highly trained individual left, we would scramble to hire and train a new person.
Does that sound like your business?
It was during one of those periods of turnover when one of our most experienced announced out of the blue that she wanted to leave as her husband had just been relocated to Houston, Texas. Here’s where things got interesting. She pointed out that she could continue to work for us as she could just as easily do her work remotely. Working from home in Houston. Everything she did was done using a computer and she could do it working out of her home office. All she needed was an internet connection, oh and by the way could we fund it for her?
That was when the penny dropped for us. Why go through all the issues of maintaining an out-of-state worker, when if everything can be done via the internet, we could hire a person offshore at a fraction of the cost? We came to this conclusion because we had seen another business we worked closely, with doing precisely that.
Since then we have maintained a team of virtual assistant-style offshore staff. As a result, we have realized:
- Lower costs
- Less management overhead
- More stability
- Greater and more consistent output
- And no dramas or office politics
Will Virtual Assistant Style Offshore Staffing Work for My Business?
We have found that offshore staffing works well when:
- You have technical tasks that need to be completed on a regular basis
- You have repetitive administrative work that must be completed consistently
- You have complex customer support tasks
- All work can be completed using a computer and an internet connection
- Video training can be created
Hiring a virtual assistant from the Philippines – How to Get Started
When you consider the costs of hiring staff particularly in Orange County, California, the offshore staffing equation can look very good indeed.
Consider not just the core per hour cost add to it all the additional overheads associated with taxes, insurance, workman’s comp, and HR issues. We believe once you take all these things into account hiring offshore virtual assistants becomes a staffing no-brainer. At least it has for us.
Consider, you can hire a degree level, English speaking, work orientated, computer savvy, loyal individual for around 20% of what it might cost otherwise.
How to choose the right Offshore Staffing Agency
At Incorporation Attorney we chose to work with Holistic Web Presence because they practice what they preach. They have provided excellent web development services to us for years. They have done that by maintaining their own offshore workforce. They had built a service of their own and been able to make it work to provide us with first-class services over an extended period. They had learned all the pitfalls of offshore workers and how to avoid them.
They have made the process easy and painless for us adding value beyond just the hiring process but also in performance managing the staff.
