Where to find a personal assistant in Hong Kong | Virtual personal assistant
Where can you find a personal assistant in Hong Kong? Check out Finesse Solutions and read about their journey of helping clients with all their daily business and lifestyle tasks. Have you ever considered to be a personal assistant? Let’s take a peek into the life of a virtual personal assistant.
Tell us about Finesse Solutions! What inspired you to start a personal assistant service?
Julia: “Finesse Solutions is an outsourced personal assistant service based in Hong Kong. We provide flexible and affordable administrative support to our busy clientele composed of professionals, working parents, entrepreneurs and start ups.
Throughout my 10 years working as an event planner, executive assistant and business operational professional, I started to become a ‘go-to’ person for friends, family and acquaintances for all types of solutions and connections. I jokingly said to a friend a couple of years ago that for all the time I am spending connecting people to each other, I should be charging for it! Funnily enough, this little joke became a reality and it has been an amazing adventure getting to do what I have always been so passionate about.
It has been so wonderful getting to take stress off our clients shoulders. Helping them to find ways to make life easier and being go-to people that our clients can trust across their personal and business lives.“
What's it like to be a personal assistant?
“Each client brings new challenges and opportunities for us to learn a wide range of very practical problem-solving skills, resources and ways of getting things done efficiently.
‘Admin’ takes many different shapes and forms for different people. One day we could be figuring out how to set up a payment system, logging in months worth of expenses, learning a new software and helping with customer enquiries. The next day we could be looking for unique, eco-friendly gifts, searching for the best water testing device in the market or planning a special birthday party!
In turn, we are able to power through to-do lists a lot more efficiently with and for our clients.”
What's something important you've learnt along the way?
“To always remember your ‘Whys’ but be flexible and adaptive as things don’t always go the way we planned.
Finesse Solutions initially launched in 2019 as a personal concierge business catering to only personal and lifestyle management needs. A year into running the business, Covid really forced me to take a step back. I had to re-evaluate my strategies in finding our niche and pain points to address our clients and would gain the most traction.
The upside was that many small businesses started popping up all over Hong Kong. The startup community came alive and it seemed that people were finally pursuing their dreams of starting their own businesses. Our turning point was extending our service scope to covering business admin needs, where Finesse started gaining a lot more momentum. We have now grown to a strong team of 5!”
Can you share your journey as an entrepreneur?
“Absolutely! If you took a look at my work history, you will see that I have worked in the hospitality, wellness and finance sector. While my roles always evolved around client servicing, business administration and operations in start ups, having to wear multiple hats and working in different scenes allowed me to continuously learn new skills while adapting them to the different industry needs. It was also a great way to connect and establish relationships with many different types of professionals and stakeholders along the way.
Being organised, resourceful and solution-oriented were skills I needed to have and hone to be successful in my career. With Finesse Solutions, I’ve been able to turn them into a very meaningful, wholesome business!”
Outsourcing your work in Hong Kong - ask for help!
“Hong Kong has a culture of working long hours, burning the midnight oil and being extremely under pressure. There is a huge work life imbalance but there seems to always be the feeling of needing to do more. We rarely acknowledge our mental health, how stressed and overwhelmed we often feel and that is detrimental to all of us!
Through Finesse, we want people to know that it is absolutely okay to ask for help. That sometimes delegating, dividing and conquering works better than working alone and that there are people like ourselves who are willing and ready to be a helping hand.”
The best part of being a personal assistant
“We service a wide variety of clients ranging from the working parent, the CEO to the freelance consultant and entrepreneurs from all walks of life.
The best part about doing what we do is that we come away with a lot of new knowledge and are able to quickly become experts at many things in a short period of time. We’re like walking encyclopaedias of the most random things!
Assistants really have to be a jack-of-all-trades with a growth mindset and it feels great to make a visible difference and impact in our clients lives.“
What are the most popular services you provide?
Some very common requests we receive are for help with:
- calendar and schedule management, travel arrangements
- light bookkeeping and expenses
- applications for passport renewals, driving licenses, digital file organization, registrations of all sorts
- handling emails, customer enquiries and follow ups
- drafting documents, research, data compilation
- assistance with newsletter creation and circulations
- Taobao/Alibaba item sourcing
- social media planning, event planning
- arranging courier deliveries, gifting ideas
- to be a point of contact to coordinate all the moving bits of a busy persons day!
How does your team juggle their full time job and being a freelance personal assistant?
Our team of client managers are professionals who prefer to work from home, allowing them to dedicate their time to tending to client requests very flexibly. Our job is to be our clients outsourced personal assistant always on standby!
What's the biggest challenge you faced so far?
“Being an independent business owner and working around the unexpected curveballs that were thrown my way during this covid period. I would definitely say aside from finding our footing in this industry as a new player, remaining resiliently positive and maintaining good mental and emotional health through it all has been my biggest challenge so far.”
Sometimes we have to learn to let go and ask for help 🙂 Can you share a tip with us for people who are also starting their business?
“Speak your customers language. As consumers, we are more prone to being intrigued by things (or content) that we can relate with on a human, emotional level.
Marketing-wise or when you are pitching your business, use language that speak to your audience realistically. Help them realise why they need your service and the relatable pain points you are addressing for them. While it’s great to have a great product or service, it’s paramount that it’s something that your customers are going to love and believe in as well. Word of mouth is an extremely powerful and effective way of generating new business!“
Connect with Finesse Solutions
Website: https://www.finesse-solutions.com/
Instagram: https://instagram.com/finessesolutionsco
