Jon Ostenson Teaches How Virtual Assistants Can Help You Improve Productivity

Can Virtual Assistants Have a Positive Impact on Your Productive LifeStyle? 

Jon Ostenson is a leading figure in this fast-paced productive world. For those of you who don’t know Jon, he’s an active member of the Entrepreneur’s Organization (EO) in Atlanta. He’s the co-founder and CEO of 10xfive, a firm solely focused on delivering par excellent contact center service to third-party organizations. They handle all the inbound/outbound activities from calling, texting, chats to emails. 

As a leader, Jon who has empowered many of his employees to become a helping hand for others believes that VAs (Virtual Assistants) can really increase your productivity 10x than others. 

What secrets does Jon know about VAs that we don’t? Here’s what Jon teaches us about the best practices for fostering the right environment of growth within his organization. Here’s what he knows:

Why Should You Incorporate Virtual Assistants in Your Businesses? 

From the beginning, Jon always wanted to brew up an internal environment at his firm which could empower his employees to become strategic, thoughtful and actionable. When it comes to utilizing time at work, Jon believed that VAs can really become the helping hand that modern-day employees need. To Jon, VAs are sort of “behind the curtains” team who can perform several repetitive and low-level tasks for you. Such tasks can really bog-down managerial employees and prevent them from reaching their true potential. Hence, by outsourcing these tasks, many modern-day employees can focus on bigger goals for their organizations and will definitely enjoy coming to work regularly. 

What Challenges Can One Face While Hiring a Full-Time VA?

According to Jon, hiring a VA is a great choice but it doesn’t fall short from facing drastic challenges. One of the common challenges that an individual can face while hiring a VA is communication. 

However, this gap can easily be fulfilled, when you are able to convey precisely what you are seeking. It can include timelines, expectations, goals, objectives, strategies, how to do things, and more. 

In fact, one way that Jon has found remarkably interactive were instructional videos. These videos can become the perfect walk-through and can work as a powerful guiding tool for the VAs to connect with the process. Screencast-O-Matic, for instance, is a great tool for recording screens and showing stuff. You can add a voice-over and provide highly detailed real-time instructions to guide your VAs correctly. 

What are the Best Practices of Utilizing a VA in Your Productive Plans? 

Since Jon runs an organization that merely focuses on outsourcing potential services to third party organizations, he believes the best practice to utilize a VA is to assign them repetitive tasks. 

These tasks can range from documenting to sending out sales or promotional emails to customers. Other than that, VAs can be best utilized for activities like performing research, small website development tasks, monitoring advertising campaigns, basic IT services, social media management, etc. Jon is currently expanding his own firm exponentially to include more skill sets to his firm. 

Even though VAs aren’t client-facing but they are professionally working the backend tirelessly. However, Jon advises that if you are working with financial-related activities, one must keep a check. 

How Does Having a VA Impact on Your Business ROI? 

If you’re outsourcing your individual tasks and focusing on the major ones, you can be the judge yourself how it’s going to impact on your business ROI. With a focused team working at the back-end for you, you can have more room to explore newer avenues on how to increase the profitability margin. 

However, it is incredibly important that you make sure the VA you are about to hire is highly professional. To ensure that, running a video conference or two with them will not hurt a soul. 

Many team members felt a bit too skeptical while working with a remote resource. Some of them don’t like the idea of having employees who are out of their control, those they are unable to manage. 

But, well if you have a talented person on your team, you don’t have to think about controlling them. As long as profitability and success is coming your way, you will hardly have to focus on anything else. 

With VAs, many modern-day employees can open the gate to becoming managers and leaders. 

A Great Example of Incorporating VA in Banking Industry

Apart from Jon’s work, my research has led me to find another great example of how VAs have set exemplary grounds in different industries including the ever-growing banking & financial industry.  

A COO of a company described how a VA helped him gather financial statements from five to six banks and perform basic mathematical calculations. It has enabled the COO to analyze the complete financial picture in real-time. Not only did it saved his time, but provided him to look beyond hassle. 

Concluding Thoughts

You will simply be surprised how talented some of these VAs are. Some of them are equally talented compared to qualified workers taking competitive salary packages; whereas many of them are better qualified than them and are able to deliver work that will simply surprise you. 

We live in a very tightly knit and highly competitive corporate environment. And, in order to stay at the top, it is better if we focus on achieving goals and objectives more precisely and accurately than others. VAs are a new way forward, making many of us the leaders we always wanted to be.