During times of an economic downtown, everyone seems to tighten their spending belt in one way or another. Hiring or even continuing to employ an administrative assistant can often be moved to the bottom of the list of must-have resources, especially for a small business owner and probably even more so for a solo entrepreneur. Partnering with a Virtual Assistant for assistance with your administrative, business or office support needs can be a cost-efficient option for surviving and possibly thriving during a recession.

A Virtual Assistant is a skilled administrative professional and entrepreneur who provides off-site administrative assistance and specialized business services from their home office. Because Virtual Assistants are contracted services providers then there are no extra employee related expenses, no benefits to pay for, and no overhead cost such as those associated with having an in-house employee.

It is estimated that small business owners spend as much as 40-60% of their time on administrative tasks. Working with a Virtual Assistant is one way that small business owners can minimize the costs of their administrative overhead while not sacrificing service or compromising their business. A Virtual Assistant can keep your business running efficiently and effectively while creating more time for you to focus your core business tasks and income generating activities.

Continuing to market and advertise your business during a recession will be the key to staying connected with your customer base. Business analysts often recommend that companies not reduce their marketing or advertising activities during an economic downturn. However, you may want need to consider lower cost alternatives for your marketing and this is where a Virtual Assistant can help you. Many Virtual Assistants have knowledge and expertise to help the small business owner or solo entrepreneur with marketing activities, especially with online marketing ideas such as setting up and maintaining a blog. A blog is an inexpensive way to provide fresh, new content about your business online. Further, a blog linked with your website can help to improve your visibility with the search engines.

Social networking and Web 2.0 has quickly become one of best ways to get known and stay known online. Virtual Assistants are familiar with most of the social and business networking sites because many of them utilize these sites for their own business needs. Since Virtual Assistants can work with clients from anywhere in the world, the establishment and maintenance of their online persona is vital to the success of their business. This makes them the perfect resource for you to use to set up and maintain your online social and business network profile and persona.

Staying connected with your current and existing customers is also important. Your current customers are already familiar with your business, services, or products so showing them the added value that you bring will help you maintain that customer base. A Virtual Assistant can help you to send out personalized cards or make phone calls on your behalf to let customers know that you appreciate their business. Setting up, revitalizing or maintaining a newsletter is a low-cost way to continue marketing and keep in touch with your customers. Typically, Virtual Assistants have the training and experience to do this either in a hard copy format or for distribution via email.

Economic analysts suggest that one of the best ways to ride out a recession is to remain flexible. Small business owners can stay flexible by thinking outside of the traditional way of doing business and embracing the technology available that makes outsourcing their administrative tasks to a Virtual Assistant a cost-effective and time efficient option.