7 Ways a Virtual Assistant Can Help You Be a Better Mom

Balancing a successful business and being a devoted mom is a tough job. They both need your undivided attention. So how do you manage without losing your head? A simple solution is to outsource some of your recurring tasks to a virtual assistant. Hiring a virtual assistant will leave you with more quality time for your family.  And you won’t feel guilty that you’re neglecting your children because of your business. Here are seven examples of how hiring a virtual assistant can help you be a better mom while building your business.  

1. Save 1.5 hours in the morning to bathe and dress your children by letting a virtual assistant take control of your daily calendar.

When your day is organized, stress levels are reduced. You’ll be a calmer mom as you bathe and dress your children and prepare them for the day ahead. Susan is a mompreneur and specializes in cruise planning. She has three children. Two of them go to school and one stays at home with her. Mornings are the most hectic times of her day. She wakes the kids up, bathes them, and gets them ready for the day. She needs to make sure her day is planned properly. Susan has a fantastic virtual assistant who uses the calendar to schedule Susan's important business and personal dates. For example, school holidays, parents meetings, dentist and doctor’s appointments, meetings and interviews with clients, etc. 

Take action:

Create a free Google Calendar. A virtual assistant can access it from any computer or smartphone and set it so you receive reminders about appointments or events.   

2. Free up 2 hours each morning to make breakfast for your kids by having a virtual assistant manage your email.

Let’s face it, checking your email is addictive. So addictive that it might just be the very first thing you do each day. You can even end up spending the entire morning replying to emails or trying to figure out which emails are legit and which are spam. Having a virtual assistant manage your emails will give you the luxury of having breakfast and starting your day together. Sandra, an entrepreneur mom with a web design business likes to check her emails in the mornings. Trying to juggle that task along with making and eating breakfast with her children is stressful and time consuming. So, Sandra delegated her email management to a virtual assistant. The virtual assistant checks emails, delete junk and alerts Sandra of any important or urgent mail that she needs to deal with. 

Take Action:

Open a separate Gmail account for your business emails and have a virtual assistant manage that account for you.   

 3. Save an estimated 1 hour in the afternoon to take your child out for a walk by delegating data entry tasks to a virtual assistant.

You and your child will enjoy the physical and psychological benefits of taking leisurely walks together. It will clear your mind and expose your child to the wonders of nature. Maureen Campaiola, a business coach who runs DARE to Be Phenomenal, says that the demands of family, the need to have some personal space and working can be stressful. She added that smart mom entrepreneurs know that success comes when you’re aware of how to delegate tasks. Data entry is one of those tasks that's best delegated to a VA. For example, those business cards that you collect from networking events and conferences could be immediately entered into customer relationship management (CRM) software and tagged appropriately so that you can access their contact information whenever the need arises. Your VA can then follow up by sending a nice greeting or thank you cards to those contacts. 

Take action:

Start a free trial of Highrise, an online CRM software and have a VA use it to manage your business contacts.   

4. Spend 30 minutes reading to your children while a virtual assistant handles your online customer support.

Reading to your children will develop their knowledge, instill in them a love of reading and increase their vocabulary, not to mention a chance to spend time together. Frances is a single mom of two children who runs a growing nutritional supplements business. She hired a virtual assistant to handle the ever increasing "live chat" requests from her customers as they browse through her website. While her VA interacts with customers, answers their questions in real-time, makes sales and monitors web traffic, Francis reads kid-friendly books about entrepreneurship aloud to her children.  

Take action:

Make a list all the tasks a VA can do to keep your customers satisfied.   

5. Free up an estimated 2 hours daily for you to do homework with your child by having a virtual assistant help with your guest posting campaign.

Homework time will give you an opportunity to see what your children are doing in school. You'll also be able to give them the 1:1 support that’s not always available in the classroom. Melissa is a freelance writer, wife and mom of three who's up at 6AM looking after her children, making school runs, conducting research, meeting writing deadlines, updating her blog and doing housework. In order to get more customers and grow the buzz about her writing services, she decided to write guest post for popular blogs whose readers are her target audience. She hired a virtual assistant to help her identify the best blogs to write for and also contact the bloggers on her behalf. This gave her more time to concentrate on creating quality content for the bloggers. And, with her free time she can actually help her kids with their homework. 

Take action:

 Get a Virtual Assistant to research three blogs that accepts guest posts, then have a VA figure out the most popular types of content on each blog so that you can quickly write it for each one.   

6. Save an estimated 1 hour in the afternoon to relax and watch TV with your kids by delegating your bookkeeping task to a virtual assistant.

Imagine kicking back and watching TV with your kids. For many mom entrepreneurs, it sounds like a luxury. Angelina is an entrepreneur mom who runs an event planning business from home. She knows that bookkeeping is a necessary part of her business, but she hates working with figures. So, Angelina hired a VA to handle her bookkeeping easily using a web-based software that makes it convenient for Angelina and her accountant to monitor.   

7. Enjoy a 1 hour dinner with your family while a virtual assistant promotes and markets your business via social media networks

You’ll not only have time to make dinner, but you'll also have time to actually sit and eat it with your family! Kelly has two young children and runs a software start-up. Since she's bootstrapping her business without venture capital, she continuously thinks outside the box and implements new ways to market her business. But managing social media networks and tending to her kids is next to impossible. Kelly hired a virtual assistant to network on her Facebook page and Twitter account, monitor tweets that contain certain keywords and engage with folks need help or have questions. The VA tweets relevant information to customers about Kelly’s software start-up and how it can solve their problems. She also uses Twitter for market research to identify what customers need and how to improve service. And, since Kelly hired a VA to help with social media marketing, her kids no longer have to eat dad's cooking. 

Take action:

Set up an account with Hootsuite which your virtual assistant can use to manage your Twitter and Facebook accounts.   Some of the stories I told in this post are fictional. I created them to make each point clearer because my goal is for you to reflect on which recurring business tasks consumes your time and then strategically delegate them to a virtual assistant so that you can have more time to spend with your kids. Remember all you have is today and each day that passes by, your kids get a day older. Make the most of this precious time and create memories together that they'll never forget.