Virtual Assistant Services for Financial Advisors

When your advisory business is in growth mode, how you spend your time matters. Focusing on profit-producing activities such as client acquisition and retention is a top priority, but you might find your days being eaten up by time-consuming administrative tasks. Hiring a virtual assistant can ease some of your workload and free up valuable time in your schedule. Virtual assistant services for financial advisors can span a wide range of activities.

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What Is a Financial Virtual Assistant?

Virtual assistants help business owners to run their businesses. A financial virtual assistant is someone who specializes in working with financial advisors.

A VA for financial advisors may offer a broad range of services or focus on specific types of tasks. They do their work remotely and are typically independent contractors, not employees of a financial advisory firm. They can run their own independent VA businesses or work as part of a virtual assistant agency that serves financial advisors.

A virtual assistant for financial advisors typically has extensive knowledge of the financial services industry. They may even hold financial certifications or other professional designations. While their duties may vary, their overall goal is the same: to help advisors streamline business operations.

Virtual Assistant Services for Financial Advisors

What does a financial virtual assistant do specifically? The answer depends on the assistant and the needs of the advisors they work with. It’s not uncommon for financial virtual assistants to help with any of the following:

Calendar management and scheduling meetings with prospects or existing clients.
Email management, including decluttering your inbox, replying to messages and writing autoresponder content.
Making necessary phone calls or handling faxes that need to be sent.
Entering data into spreadsheets or software programs and generating reports.
Mailing correspondence or packages.
Managing client data through a CRM or client database and reviewing it to look for outdated information.
Creating marketing content for social media and/or managing social media accounts.
Managing paid ads.
Cold calling and lead generation.
Offering chat support to answer customer queries or handle client issues.
Onboarding new clients or offboarding former clients.
Client billing and invoicing.

The exact services that you hand off to a virtual assistant may depend on what you need help with most and what you’re comfortable allowing someone else to do. Or you may opt to outsource the tasks that you find to be the most tedious and time-consuming.

Benefits of Working With a Financial Advisor Virtual Assistant

There are many benefits to hiring a virtual assistant, and those benefits will depend on your unique needs and unique situation. Whether you’re struggling to get things done or just need to focus more time on finding or maintaining your clients,

Time Management

First and perhaps most importantly, it frees up time that you can spend working on other areas of your business. Time management isn’t a joke, and it’s something you just can’t get enough of when you’re building a business.

Allowing someone else to handle administrative tasks means you have more time for prospecting, marketing and of course, advising your clients. You don’t have to dedicate time to training and managing an employee since you can give your VA a list of things to do and a deadline for completing each one.

Saving Money

There’s also a money-saving element at work since you don’t have to invest anything in training new employees. You don’t have to worry about payroll taxes or offering employee benefits either, since the VA doesn’t work for you directly. An experienced virtual assistant already has the equipment they need to perform their tasks, so you don’t have to shoulder the cost of that.

VA Costs

How much does a financial advisor virtual assistant cost? The answer will depend on who you’re working with and how they structure their fees. An independent VA who runs their own business might charge by the hour or the task. An agency that offers virtual assistant services for financial advisors may charge by the minute instead to ensure that you’re only paying for the time the VA spends working.

It’s not uncommon to pay anywhere from $15 to $30 per hour for financial virtual assistant services. However, there are some VAs who may charge upwards of $100 an hour. As a general rule of thumb, the more experienced a virtual assistant is and the more specialized their services are, the higher the rate is likely to be.

How to Hire a Virtual Assistant for Financial Advisors

A quick internet search will turn up numerous companies that offer virtual assistant services for financial advisors. Choosing the right one starts with considering what you need a VA to do for you. The more specific you can be in the types of tasks you need help with, the easier it becomes to narrow down the list of potential candidates.

Once you have a few virtual assistant companies in mind, you can take a closer look at how they compare. Some of the things to weigh here include:

What range of services do they offer
How much experience do their VAs have
Whether they’re niched down to work with a certain type of financial professional, such as RIAs
What they charge and how their fees are structured
How long it typically takes them to complete tasks
How often you’ll be able to communicate and get updates

You might consider asking other advisors you know if they’ve ever used a virtual assistant and if so, whom they might recommend. You can also read through customer reviews if any are available to see what other people are saying about a particular virtual assistant services company.

Should You Use Virtual Assistant Services as a Financial Advisor?

Whether hiring a VA is the right move largely depends on your goals and where you are right now. If you’re trying to scale your business but feel as if certain tasks are being neglected, then hiring a VA could make sense. If you’re able to devote more time to growing your business, the long-term financial payoff could be well worth the fees you’re paying to a virtual assistant.

If you don’t have the budget to maintain a VA full-time, you might look into other ways to streamline your business. Using automation software to handle things like client onboarding, accounting and payroll, for example, can save time and potentially save money as well if you’re not having to hire an employee specifically for those tasks.

You can also look into ways to simplify prospecting and lead generation. With an online lead generation service, for example, you can get prospects delivered to your email. You can then choose which leads you’d like to follow up on, based on your ideal client profile.

Bottom Line

Virtual assistant services for financial advisors can make your job, and your life, easier if you’re able to get back some much-needed time in your day. In fact, a VA can improve your overall time management and actually end up helping you earn or save more money. Taking time to research VA companies can help you find the right one to work with if you’re ready to start outsourcing some of the items on your daily to-do list.

Tips for Growing Your Advisory Business

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More people are searching for advisors online these days and if you’re not building out your digital footprint, you could be missing some valuable opportunities. Developing a strategy for digital marketing, social media and email marketing can help you boost your visibility and attract your ideal clients to you. Those are all tasks that a virtual assistant can help with.