Are you a start-up or a small business owner who seems to have fallen into the trap of doing everything by yourself. From juggling accounts and sales to database management and website designing, to making calls and doing client follow-ups. If it wearies you down but you feel like you have little choice, then you need to do two things, and do them fast. First, change your mindset. You cannot do everything yourself otherwise you risk a burnout. Second, you do have a choice; you just need to look around.

Cyber world is replete with stories of how entrepreneurs found relief and success by offloading some of their burdens to the competent shoulders of outsourcing partners. And nit just any outsourcing partner, mind you. Many a naive SME has fallen into the hands of rogue outsourcing companies and, consequently, has shied away from outsourcing altogether. However, a little research should prove valuable in helping you find yourself a reputed outsourcing vendor who would give you exactly what you wanted. In this case, not some freelancer but your very own virtual employee.

How can hiring a virtual employee actually save your business? In several ways.

1. You are hiring a dedicated resource who will work exclusively only for you and no one else. So, no worrying about your resource working for a rival company as well or giving your work low priority because this is 'your' employee. With freelancers, there is always a niggling worry at the back of the mind ‚¬€ 'what if they abandon my work midway or do not complete it on time?' Arguably, the vagaries of freelancing have been documented all too often and they are certainly not the best of options where long-term and interaction-demanding work is concerned.

2. You get a professional at a fraction of the cost that a locally hired resource would have cost you. Cost savings is one of the first things that attracts companies to outsourcing. However, a for a long time, the SMEs and the individual business owners could only haplessly stand and watch the 'big players' raking in the profits by offshore outsourcing their entire operations to India and other outsourcing destinations. But, the revolutionary new concept of the virtual employee opened the doors to the scores of SMES and start-ups who now found themselves in a position to outsource as well. And not to any freelancer but to a full-fledged remote employee. So, the highly qualified ASP Dot Net developer in the US or the UK that was threatening to set the budget aflutter is now very affordable if he can be hired from India. So, talent and cost savings are now both yours.

3. Your employee can be made to work the same shift hours as you, so even time zone differences cease to matter. Worried that essential time will be lost if the work hours collide and essential communication gets delayed? Not when you hire a virtual employee from an established outsourcing service provider. Your remote employee can easily work the same hours as you, irrespective of whether you reside in the US, UK, Europe or Australia.

4. Throw aside all skepticism of having to deal with one-sided conversations (emails mostly) and enjoy face-to-face interaction with your virtual employee, and that too in real time. The really reputed vendors have advanced communication technology such as video conferencing, Skype webcam, instant messenger, telephone with a local number of your country, enabling both the client and their remote employee to easily collaborate and communicate.

5. Your virtual employee frees up your time enormously, thus leaving you with sufficient time to plan and concentrate on furthering your core business. All the tedious, repetitive and time-consuming (data entry, cold calls, creating a database, blog writing and so on) tasks can be efficiently handled by your virtual employee who can do it better and faster since they have the necessary expertise in those fields. So, this means that instead of managing everything yourself, you now have experts who do the job better because they have been trained for it.

The bottom lone is that you become better organized and more sorted out, and efficiency is the cornerstone for any successful enterprise.