When people first hear about outsourcing and its benefits, many think there must be something wrong about it because it sounds too good to be true. When they hear about a less than perfect experience a business had with an outsourcing company; they are immediately thinking “aha, I knew it!”.

The virtual assistants in the Philippines outsourcing industry has always been the subject of some controversy, and how could it not be when there are so many (conflicting) interests at stake? The competition is fierce in the field – between companies, between professionals, between politicians and economists, even between nations.

The most common misconceptions are these:

#1 Outsourcing is just for big companies

What offshore virtual assistant services outsourcing does to help new entrepreneurs thrive (so not only the big established businesses) is to increase the value a few hundred dollars hold for buying work hours. If you outsource your time-sapping tasks to part-time virtual assistant in the Philippines, you are freeing your schedule to do the work that will push your company further. The same amount will not help as much if you are restricted to hiring locally. Your time is worth more than $6/7 AUD/hour, so when you are outsourcing what you’d normally do yourself for your small business, you are basically making your time more valuable.

#2 You cannot know what you pay for

This is so untrue the claim is just ridiculous. When you work with a recruiting company, and you hire a part-time or full-time remote assistant, not only that you get their resume, info on conducted background checks, work samples, a free work trial, but you also get screen grabs of their desktop as they work. You can clearly see what you pay for, even before having to pay for the work.

#3 Different time zones fragment good communication

For the IT industry time zones were never a problem, and with the way technology is evolving, geographic proximity is not a real advantage anymore. A 4-hour overlap is usually improving productivity because people are working in two different time zones, keeping that window for collaboration and the rest of their work schedule as maker-time, where they focus on complex tasks that require more attention.

Outsourcing cuts labor and office space costs and improves productivity. If you invest enough time and effort into finding the best outsourcing partner for your company, you’ll discover that even though it seems too good to be true, it is as real as it gets.