“This is my letter of resignation.” Those are tough words for any leader to see come across their desk under any circumstance. Let alone with a recession looming! We’ve talked here about the so-called “great resignation” several times already. However, that’s kind of a vague oversimplification of a very real problem. What we’re talking about here today, is a very clear and present danger to the professional world. It doesn’t have a cute name that makes for a clever article title, it’s just called inflation. And it’s costing you, valuable employees, whether you realize it yet or not.
MyOutDesk realizes it. In fact, we’ve been helping businesses scale up in ways that specifically counter inflation since 2008. There are three specific pain points that many businesses encounter, even more so during times of inflation, which lead them to services like ours. We’re proud to be able to provide a quality of service that empowers companies to scale up in such a way that it practically makes them inflation-proof. Even when pricetags get as high as they are today. So let’s talk about how virtual assistants from MyOutDesk can give you a big discount on the real cost of inflation. Here are three of the most common pain points growing businesses face, along with our proven solutions to each.
Pain Point 1: Local Employees Want Better Compensation
According to a recent LendingClub report, 64% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. Even those earning six-figure incomes are feeling the pressure of inflation! As 48% of those households also claim to be living paycheck to paycheck right now. It’s easy to see that as the cost of living rises, so too does the stress of keeping up with it. Wanting better pay is the leading cause of resignations. No one wants to devote their loyalty and hustle to a company that doesn’t make them feel valued and important. Of course, it’s not as easy as it sounds, to just snap your fingers and give everyone on your team a raise or a big bonus. But what if it was?
Solution:
Hiring a virtual assistant from MyOutDesk can save you up to 70% of the cost of a traditional local hire. So you get the same quality of employee; experienced, educated, passionate and reliable, and English-speaking. But at less than half the cost of the same professional locally. Not to mention when you’re hiring a remote working assistant who is in another country, you get more flexibility with hours. You could have two assistants doing the same job it’d take 3 or 4 people to manage in your own timezone. That’s a lot of money saved! This means more money to reallocate where you deem most valuable; like your local team. Imagine saving so much while still growing your productivity, that you can give your local team a competitive raise and a little thank you bonus. That’s how you keep people happy.
“Virtual Assistants are key. Without VAs, it limits us and we have more responsibilities in-house. A VA is significantly more affordable to the business pattern. We get more value for the price.” – Charles Pulliam and Olivia Cooley of the Olivia Cooley Group, at Keller Williams Realty.
Paint Point 2: Local Team Feels Overwhelmed and Burned Out
American workers across the board saw increased rates of burnout in 2021, according to APA’s 2021 Work and Well Being Survey. About 26% of the employees surveyed reported negative impacts of work-related stress, like motivation or energy. While 32% reported being emotionally exhausted, and a shocking 44% reported physical fatigue. If a job is wearing you out, and it’s not paying you enough anyway, why keep putting up with it? Most aren’t, and they are leaving their positions in record numbers to find something better or start their own business. While that’s commendable for the individual, it’s leaving managers feeling stressed and cynical. So not only are you losing the employees that make up the foundation of your business, but you’re squeezing out the leaders and specialists too. For a lot of these people, a pay bump isn’t going to cut it. For them, their mental and physical health is just as, if not more important than the cash in their pocket. Often times even being paid well is still not enough justification for the physical and mental toll a stressful job takes.
Solution:
Adding a virtual assistant(or two, or three) to your team not only saves you money, but it helps you get more work done in more efficient ways. So many tasks at your business can fall under the term “busy work”, and can be done remotely(even some high-level responsibilities can still be outsourced). A lot of these tasks are being juggled by people you hired for more specific talents and abilities. By outsourcing that busy work to one or more virtual assistants, you lighten the load for your local experts. Free them up to focus on the specialized tasks you hired them for, while still knowing those other tasks are being perfectly handled. These can be entire departments you begin outsourcing, like administrative and customer service. Or they can be sub-tasks inside your busiest departments, like billing or marketing. Coupled with solution one above, the possibilities are staggering. Imagine telling your local staff that they have less to worry about and they’re getting a cost-of-living raise! You pull that off and they’re not going anywhere.
Virtual assistants were able to do the job that the local people were able to do … AND they actually raised the bar! – Mihran Berejikian, President of Belami, Inc(e-commerce)
Pain Point 3: Finding the Right People is Difficult and Time-Consuming
Researchers from LinkedIn’s Economic Graph team analyzed the profiles of 400,000 confirmed hires on their platform between June 2020 and March 2021. They were determining which jobs take the longest time to fill across 15 different industries. Technical positions in research, finance and IT take on average about 46 days to fill. The shortest time-to-hire was administrative, and that was an average of 33 days if you’re lucky. So on average, it takes at least a month+, if all goes perfectly well, to fill a job position. As you know, one business quarter is three months. So it takes about half a quarter at best to hire one person. That’s not very productive! And that’s also not to mention turn-over. Imagine spending all of that precious time bringing someone on, only to lose them shortly after and have to start the process all over again. Not only are you wasting valuable time and resources, but you’re also fueling pain point 2 above. Your recruiting and HR teams are going to burn out quickly, and then you’ll be rushing to fill their roles in addition to the roles they themselves were trying to fill. Yikes.
Solution:
The average time it takes MyOutDesk to provide a client with a perfect match for their needs is less than a month. That’s right, just a few weeks at most, and sometimes even less. This is because our ever-growing pool of professionals is already interviewed, vetted, and assessed by us before they ever reach you. We know what they’ve done before, what they can do now, and how well they can do it. You tell us the role you need to be filled and we give you 3-5 qualified candidates handpicked just for your needs. Our virtual assistants are experienced, trained, and often educated to the same level of qualifications as any US-based hire. They also speak fantastic English, and they’re all hungry for opportunities. They’ll bring their own knowledge to your team while learning your specific processes quickly and thoroughly. You can be up and running with a virtual assistant in almost half the time it would have taken with someone locally.
“Three of the four interviews you guys provided were very hireable. Typically out of 15 candidates you’re lucky if 2 are that hireable. We were picking from the best, rather than wondering if any of them would really work out.” Brandon Burg, Founder, and Attorney at the Burg Wynn Law Firm.
Conclusion
Those three common pain points are not exclusive to times of inflation. Compensation, workload stress, and professional matchmaking will always be speedbumps on the road to success. At a time when the world is experiencing multiple hurdles, inflation being just one, these issues become amplified. A speedbump becomes a brick wall. And right now time and money are of the essence more than ever. Businesses can’t afford unnecessary speedbumps let alone brick walls in their path to sustainable, ever-growing success. A MyOutDesk virtual assistant has been the saving grace for thousands of companies for over a decade, especially during times of turmoil and uncertainty.
If you want to more about how we solve these problems for businesses just like yours, or if you have any questions or concerns, we’d love to hear from you. You can use the link below to request a consultation with one of our experts. They will hear you out first, understand your concerns and needs, and determine if we’re even the right fit for you. If so, they’ll pitch a plan involving one or more virtual assistants to get you started. No pressure, no obligations. If you want to make your business “inflation-proof”, the choice is yours.
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