Hire a Virtual Assistant for the Holidays and Keep Work Moving

Introduction

Holidays are coming, and the festive vibes already surround us. Streets are plenty of bright blinking lights, embellished windows, and aromas of family recipes being baked coming out of the kitchens fill the air. In the meantime, your calendar is filled with appointments and to-do lists. Have you considered hiring a virtual assistant for the holidays?

Customers expect quick replies, sales increase, suppliers run behind, and your employees want time off. You feel like you’re viewing the festivity scenes as if you were watching a movie.  You’re not part of it; you feel like an outcast. You need help.

Being a participant, a character in the holiday movies, is just a decision away. The decision is yours, and it is as simple as hiring a virtual assistant for the holidays. 

Let’s see how they can help you and your business! 

7 Holiday Takeaways at a Glance

• Hire a virtual assistant for the holidays to keep work moving when demand spikes and staff members are away. 
• Holiday virtual assistants can cover admin tasks, 24/7 customer support, and omnichannel client interactions.
• You can outsource marketing, social media, and content management to stay visible during the season while you focus on sales or personal life.
• Virtual assistants can process orders, manage inventory, and arrange logistics so the flow continues while you are away.
• A remote assistant for holidays can make travel arrangements, gifting, and personal errands so your plans don’t clash with your workload. 
• Outsourcing during the holiday season lets you enjoy the celebrations and rest while your business continues serving your customers and bringing in gains. 
• With a virtual assistant helping you with data entry, reporting, paperwork, and scheduling, you can start the new year with clean books and defined priorities. 

Why Holidays Both Help and Overload Your Business

For many small businesses, holiday shopping for gifts or self-consumption, or the increased demands for services, can bring close to half of the yearly revenue. In a recent survey by Intuit+ of 1,000 small business owners, 93% expressed that this holiday season is crucial to this year’s success, expecting to obtain 47% of their total annual revenue from it. This turns these festive days into a make-or-break period. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, 8 in 10 small businesses state that the holiday season is significant for their profit. Understandably, no business owner will want to lose this earning opportunity, including you. Likewise, you’d also like to enjoy yourself a bit and share with your loved ones these traditional celebrations. 

But holiday demands do not rise neatly or gently. Instead of a gradual rise, businesses typically experience a sudden surge. Moreover, online campaigns, in-store events, and year-end promotions all happen at one. 

Simultaneously, the season decreases your regular staff availability. People take days off, get sick, or request to work shorter shifts. 

So, depending on your business field, you find yourself dealing with most or all of the following:

• The same opening hours
• Increased demand for your products or services
• More customer demand (inquiries, sales, returns)
• Logistical challenges (inventory, shipping arrangements)
• Internal administrative avalanche (year-end reporting, planning for next year, financial closures, etc.)
• Fewer employees available

To cope with all, owners frequently end up trying to fill in every gap themselves, working till late at night or even during weekends. At the same time, the social overload (the excessive amount of social, personal, and work interactions) brings added pressure and stress. 

Holiday months bring more work and less local staff time, which makes extra remote help useful and necessary.

Why Hiring a Virtual Assistant for the Holidays Is a Smart Solution

Hiring a virtual assistant for the holidays gives you flexible backup without having to hire a full-time in-house employee. Virtual assistants (VAs) work remotely, follow your processes, and perform tasks that don’t require your direct or immediate approval. They can work independently. Their operative autonomy allows you to detach from having to be constantly working or supervising. 

Because at Virtudesk, our virtual assistants are based mainly in the Philippines, you can have early mornings, evenings, or night hours covered without paying extra to your local team. In fact, not only do you save money from paying extra to your team, but also from paying less than what you pay your local staff on regular work hours. Labor costs in the Philippines and other regions where our VAs are based are lower, and we reflect that difference in our prices. 

Hiring outsourced virtual assistants for the holidays through a business service provider like Virtudesk, you:

• Cover your staffing needs
• Can scale as needed (up or down, as per market demands)
• Gain time for yourself, reducing the stress that comes from pressure.
• Ensure business continuity, potentiate productivity, and count on available 24/7 support 
• Save time and money on recruiting and training local hires

Spoiler alert: At Virtudesk, our prices start as low as $9.55, regardless of the day or shift time. 

10 Ways a Virtual Assistant Can Help You Through the Holidays

Being the range of functions virtual assistants can cover so ample, it’s hard to summarize them in a few points. Anyway, let’s see the most common tasks business owners delegate to their VAs during the holiday season. 

1. Round-the-clock customer support

Customer inquiries skyrocket during the holiday season. And customers expect fast answers and solutions. This is understandable; they are also dealing with work, social, and family responsibilities. They might be requiring services to be ready for the celebration day, buy goods they need for the festivity, or buy gifts to give or ship to family and friends. Holiday virtual assistants can provide full customer support 24/7, handling simple customer inquiries, returns, or updates. 

2. Communications management 

This comprises email sorting, tagging messages by topic and urgency, replying to frequent questions, escalating refunds, and managing follow-ups, ensuring a smooth, continuous operation. 

As part of your communications and interactions management, your VA will also handle your calendar, scheduling wisely so nothing overlaps, and so you don’t have to rush from one meeting or call to another. 

A professional virtual assistant can flawlessly do it for you. In the meantime, you can turn your laptop or phone off and have a joyful gathering with friends or help to décor your home for the upcoming events. 

3. Social media management

The holiday season is ideal to promote and expand your brand. This requires posting product launches, promotions, and interacting with your followers. Monitoring analytics to detect the most engaging strategies is another important task a social VA can take on to ensure your brand stays at the top trends. Hiring a VA for the holidays allows you to spend your working time on your core money-making activities or toast with your friends while they take care of all, and increase brand awareness and customer loyalty. 

A social media assistant keeps your brand visible while you focus on sales, not on posting.

4. Content management

Customers are seeking the best options before spending their money on a product or service. For that reason, your website must be up to date with the latest content and news. Virtual assistants can create holiday-centric articles, update your website banners, design and upload promotional content, create ads, and entertaining polls (those will help capture your buyers' preferences). VAs can even create contests or sweepstakes (remember, your customers buy gifts but also love receiving them and being surprised). 

5. Order processing and inventory management

Holiday season provides a wonderful opportunity to increase your sales. And that raise involves a growing number of orders. Let a trained virtual assistant for the holidays manage your orders influx, track shipments, coordinate the logistics, and update your inventory in real-time.  Imagine waking up in the morning after a sound sleep and finding out that everything is already organized and running smoothly. 

6. Marketing

Although content and social media management can be considered part of it, marketing involves much more. The holiday season changes the market’s dynamics. During the holiday season, virtual assistants can:

• Monitor industry trends and spot gaps to turn them into opportunities. 
• Observe what your competitors do and analyze what works for them or not
• Examine how your clients and prospective clients are reacting to your posts
• Suggest the next course of action accordingly
• Handle your email marketing campaigns and track client responses.  

Relax and close your eyes at night knowing your VA has their eyes wide open for you. 

7. Data entry and reporting

As your commercial activity increases, it’s vital to keep your data up-to-date. Registering orders, refunds, and purchases, maintaining a timely client database, or updating your CRM with your in-house staff's days off and payroll, takes time, but can’t be neglected. When everything is in place timely, your VA can pull reliable reports so you know what’s going on and how. 

8. Organizing travel plans

Holidays usually involve some traveling. Sometimes you’ll travel to visit relatives, or to take an escape away with your family, or to attend a corporate event. No matter why, organizing a trip is time-consuming. From buying airplane tickets and researching and booking accommodation to making a list of “places to visit”, to organizing the documentation or getting travel insurance, the time it takes is huge. Let your virtual assistant take care of all; just get your bags and -suitcases ready and have fun.

9. Gifting

This isn’t a shallow or minor item in this list. Actually, it can be stressful to think about what to buy for every family member or friend. Because you’ll want them to feel unique and cared about, you’ll want each gift to be different and relatable to the receiver. Grandparents, spouses, partners, kids, nieces, siblings, besties…too many people whose age, lifestyle, and relationship with you to consider. Then you have the corporate gifts. You’ll want to honor your clients with stylish gifts that will keep your business in their minds. Think of something useful, durable, and with your logo printed or stamped. Finding the product, asking for quotes, ordering and then shipping the gifts takes effort and hours.  

10. New Year Preparation

We already mentioned a few aspects associated with the holiday season. But there’s much more to New Year prep. You have to face two fronts with efficiency: your business and your family celebrations. 

When it comes to your business, you’ll have to do financial closures before the 31^st December. This requires reconciling accounts, making accounting adjustments (depreciation, provisions, preparing your Balance Sheet, P&L (Profit & Loss), and Cash Flow Statement. And of course, comply with IRS obligations. Yes, VAs can also help with taxes. Certainly, organizing documents such as 1099s or W-2s forms requires attention to detail and patience. Of course, having personnel leave on vacation or sick leave also implies work.

Now speaking about the fun side of the New Year, we have the corporate event. Most small to large companies hold events to celebrate with their teams, stakeholders, and, in some cases, clients or providers. It begins with making a list, searching and booking a venue, picking the catering, printing and sending invites (some companies do this digitally). Many professional assistants undergo some training on event planning. Let them display their organizational magic. 

Last but not least, you’ll also have to organize your family celebration. If you don’t have a partner or family member assisting you on that, your virtual assistant can take care of that, too. 

A virtual assistant can handle year-end financial and admin tasks, company events, and family celebrations, so you start January organized and full of energy instead of exhausted. 

To have a more comprehensive idea of what virtual assistants can do for you, check our services page. And if the tasks you need to delegate aren’t listed there, contact us. We’ll find you the needed talent, a personalized match for your business growth and your mental well-being.

Conclusion

The holiday season is an amazing time full of joyful moments and renewed hopes. It’s to be fully enjoyed. But if you’re a business owner, you know how overwhelming it can be unless without proper planning and support. 

The year-end season doesn’t have to mean late working nights, missed events, and a long recovery in January. Hire a virtual assistant for the holidays and keep work moving, inboxes controlled, and campaigns or launches on schedule while still moving away from your desk. 

Make this holiday season a different one by acting now. Instead of rushing from task to task, decide what matters to you the most and let your VA handle the rest. Visit our services and pricing pages, then contact us by phone at 1 (800) 470-8136 or schedule a free discovery call with any of our representatives. 

Give your business a new push forward, and gift yourself a pleasant holiday season by hiring a virtual assistant for the holidays.