3 Growth-Driving Virtual Assistant Services for Financial Firms
As the entrepreneur at the head of a financial services firm, you’re used to wearing many hats. On any given day, you may serve as a customer service representative, a tax expert, an office administrator, a delivery person, tech support, and even a janitor. Although the lifestyle of an entrepreneur in the financial services industry can be exhausting, you’ve taken on the challenge and your business is growing. Your clients are happy, and it’s time to push forward.
But now that you’ve gotten this far, you have a dilemma: how do you continue to strategically scale your company on a tight budget? How do you know when it’s time to hire help? How can you fit extra assistance into your operating costs?
Virtual assistant services are an increasingly popular option for CPAs, bookkeeping firms, accountants, and tax specialists who are ready to grow their business and expand their client base. A virtual assistant solves your hiring problem: rather than hiring someone in-house who can work within your budget, you can use a VA on-demand and as-needed, cutting your cost significantly. A trusted, U.S.-based virtual assistant company can give you the flexibility and affordability you need to get tasks off your plate, leaving you more time to focus on business-critical work. Here are a few of the ways a virtual assistant could help you.
Get Organized: Calendar and Inbox Management
You double book yourself. You forget to respond to important emails. Messages get lost in your overflowing inbox. You can’t stay on top of your appointments. Sound familiar?
If you’re still trying to serve as your own executive assistant, your productivity is taking a sucker punch to the gut every day. You simply can’t focus on improving processes, serving clients, and developing your company if you can’t even keep up with your emails.
One of our most popular services for CPAs and bookkeepers is calendar and inbox management. With these services, our VAs start with cleaning up and organizing your emails, perhaps setting up designated folders with your direction to calm the chaos. Next, they start serving as your executive assistant, keeping your daily calendar straight and keeping you up-to-date. Our clients often request a daily summary email from their VA with the following day’s important events and meetings, reminders about tasks and projects, and synopses of incoming messages. If you’d like, you can also set a VA up with an email address on your domain so their interaction with clients is professional and makes a good impression on potential customers.
These services with a VA are much more affordable than if you were to hire an in-office assistant. No more double-booking, no more chaos, no more inbox floods—all at a reasonable price.
Get Noticed: Web Content, Marketing Support, and Lead Generation
Do you feel too busy to give a second thought to your web presence? Does it worry you every once in a while that your website is out of date or you haven’t published a marketing email in months? A virtual marketing assistant can be the solution to your problem. Here are a few ways a virtual marketing assistant can help your firm grow.
- Website updates: Maybe you’ve been meaning to update your “About” page for six months, or you want to publish a few blog posts to help with search engine optimization. A virtual marketing assistant can write new web copy, ghostwrite blog posts, strategize SEO, and keep your website up-to-date.
- Email marketing: Many CPAs and financial advisors aren’t needed regularly by their clientele. Email marketing can help you keep in touch with clients with informational and helpful content. A virtual marketing assistant can write and format emails for you, strategize content, and manage your email marketing software.
- Lead generation: You’re a wealth of financial knowledge and you know offering some of that information to potential clients would generate more leads. A virtual marketing assistant can help create, format, and publish content offers such as white papers and ebooks for your website to boost your lead generation.
Get Growing: Project Management and Customer Relationship Management
Finally, a virtual assistant can support your project management and customer relationship efforts. Whether you’d like to plan ahead for your busy tax season or revamp your internal processes, a virtual assistant can help.
- Improve your processes: A virtual assistant can organize your documents, improve your client proposals, manage your LinkedIn and social media presence, and more. Our experienced virtual assistants may even be able to recommend project management tools you haven’t heard of before and implement new workflows for higher efficiency.
- Follow up with clients: Satisfaction surveys and regular follow-up can increase client engagement and help you keep the customers you fought hard to earn. A virtual assistant can develop surveys, interact with customers, and follow up with leads.
- Manage ongoing projects: One of our CPA clients was overhauling a website during tax season and we served as the project management during the process, communicating with the web developers and handling the day-to-day tasks. Without a virtual project manager, our client would never have had the bandwidth to tackle the chaos of tax season and the back-and-forth of a website revamp.
We’re proud to call many CPAs, bookkeepers, and tax experts our clients and love nothing more than supporting entrepreneurs as they make their dreams happen.
