If you’ve considered but still hesitated to hire virtual assistant services to assist you with your business, chances are you haven’t fully learned what virtual assistants are truly capable of. Learn further how skilled virtual assistants can help startup founders and SME owners with our virtual assistant case study blog series. Below are two examples of cases that we retrieved from our valued clients.
Virtual Assistant Case Study #1
Client
A US tech startup founder/CEO and UK consulting firm founder/CEO.
Challenge
US Tech Startup
The client is a founder of a tech startup based in Los Angeles, US, which just got its operations off the ground in June 2020 after securing its pre-seed funding in 2019. The founder had to start somewhere somehow–set up various accounts, including accounting, banking, project management, etc. They got no time to create and set up everything from scratch. Due to the limited funding and time, they had to hold off hiring accounting and finance professionals, whose fees would surely make the startup’s burn rate go up faster.
Moreover, the team members weren’t based in the US. The devs were mainly located in Russia and Ukraine, which created another problem. The international transfer cost for their monthly payments wouldn’t be cheap if they chose to use conventional bank transfer, and searching for an international money transfer service that complied with Russian banking regulations was difficult. They decided to hire Virtary to help set up their day-to-day operations, choosing tools needed for administrative purposes, paperwork preparation for their newly hired contractors, and calculating the startup’s monthly financial updates for investor reports; including the startup burn rate, runway, and financial projection.
UK consulting firm
The same client also owns a UK-registered marketing consulting firm which they founded in mid-2020. Similar to the US startup, the UK firm also needs everything set up from scratch, down to online tax account creation. It was more or less a one-man company with a non-resident owner and many things needed to be done. They wanted to start with finding a transfer service for businesses that complied with the UK regulations, online tax returns account setup, and credit card application with added benefits, especially frequent flyers miles since the client travels very often.
Solutions
US Tech Startup
- Administration: Financial/accounting tool setup, integration, and management which included:
- Bookkeeping and expense monitoring: Quickbooks setup and integration with the business banking accounts.
- Bank of America delegate account
- International transfer services: Brex and Wise (formerly Transferwise) which were integrated with Quickbooks for expense tracking and accounting purposes.
- Project Management: Notion account set up for the company’s project management platform and workspace.
- Legal: PandaDoc setup and management used for the company’s legal documentation as well as legal paperwork tools and storage. We occasionally draft additional paperwork, such as overtime approval letters, contract/agreement amendments, etc.
- Finance: Startup’s financial calculations, including average burn rate, runway, and financial projection for monthly investor updates.
- HR: Legal paperwork preparation, onboarding checklist, company account setup for team members (Google Workspace, Notion, etc), and company policy.
UK Consulting Firm
- Administration: Financial/accounting tool setup, integration, and management; which included:
- Bookkeeping: Xero setup and integration with the business banking accounts.
- FloatApp
- International transfer service and company card account: American Express Business Card and Revolut Business account, connected with Xero for expense tracking and accounting purposes
- Legal: HMRC/Government Gateway account application and setup for tax returns, company name change, etc.
- CMS: Domain registration/hosting, company website design and creation, SEO, and sitemap indexing using GoDaddy, Wix, and Google Console.
- Travel booking: Flight, hotel, and other travel-related booking activities.
Outcome
- Smooth-running company administrative workflow since the beginning of its inception.
- Monitored company budgeting and expenses, including cost-saving and adjusting to the planned runway and financial projection.
- Overall business cost-reduction.
Virtual Assistant Case Study #2
Client
Founder/CEO of an aviation school based in Arizona, US.
Challenge
The founder of this US-based aviation maintenance school wanted to optimize their Hubspot CRM subscription to maximize sales conversion and workflow setup. Before hiring Virtary, they only used Hubspot’s contact feature to store leads’ contact information without using its main CRM features, particularly workflow automation. They also needed sales support to draft and schedule sales follow-up emails to effectively engage with prospects and help convert leads into sales.
Aside from Hubspot, they wanted customized sales funnels for special promo events, such as webinars. Since the management and instructor team were either former or active duty US Air Force personnel, they barely had time to learn the basics, such as sales page and copywriting. They could use all the extra help they could get from a person capable to realize their plan.
Furthermore, they also needed customer support to deal with inquiries coming from their website or Facebook page, due to the company’s scarcity of manpower and specialists when it comes to sales.
Solutions
- CRM: We create Hubspot sales pipelines as well as workflow automation, periodic pipeline cleanup, and are responsible for their CRM overall so they’re clutter-free and the clients will always have their deals updated.
- Sales Funnel: We create and build an all-in-one sales funnel and process automation using Clickfunnels, including sales page design, website copywriting, and SEO. Since the sales funnels were integrated with the company’s Hubspot using Zapier, all inbound leads are transferred into the CRM system, which will trigger automatic new deal creations.
- Invoicing. Quickbooks and Clickfunnels integration; any new lead signing up via sales page is automatically sent a sales invoice.
- Admin and Customer Service:
- Customer support and admin
- Daily KPI
- Weekly revenue monitoring
- Sales conversion monitoring
- Training: We also provide training to the company’s instructors for basic operations of tools we helped set up and optimize, among others were Hubspot, Clikcfunnels, and Teachable.
Outcome
- Organized automated workflows free of clutters.
- Trained instructors which lead to optimized usage of the software and tools.
- Increased sales due to the workflow setup and basic administration cleanup.
- Satisfied customers thanks to excellent support.
So there you have it in case you still have hesitation hiring a virtual assistant. We don’t only work as your personal assistant, we offer many more services which could be cost-saving alternatives to your business. Look forward to more virtual assistant case study posts in the near future!
