Loading ...In my position as founder of the Virtual Assistance Chamber of Commerce, I see lots of new people wanting to enter the profession.
I also see a lot of misunderstanding about what it is to be a Virtual Assistant and run a professional service business.
One common misconception is that we are telecommuters, or freelancers.
Another is that newbies, not knowing how to market, will try to market and run what is a solo/micropreneur business as a secretarial service. Doesn’t work, and they often don’t understand the distinction.
New Virtual Assistants who operate under those misunderstandings will lots of times think that the value they are trying to sell is that they are “instant” assistants or work “after-hours” or “24 hours a day.”
And maybe that is the only value they understand. But it’s not the Virtual Assistance value/brand proposition.
What I think goes on in their minds is that they haven’t thought the process through enough to realize they are creating expectations by sheer virtue of the words they choose in their name.
Do they really want to work 24 hours a day?
Are they really sitting at the end of a phone just waiting for that one client to call with their emergency so they can drop everything else they are doing, other clients be damned?
When they envision what their business would look like as a full practice, they start to realize, “Hey, I can’t run a solo business like that!”
They realize that everything they do and say in their business creates expectations in prospective clients.
They realize that the expectations and standards they create need to be in alignment with the way they want/need to operate their business and are able to deliver–consistently, to each and every client.
They realize that in order to sustain a productive, profitable, efficient Virtual Assistant practice, they have to take their own personal and business needs, expectations and limitations into account.
As a Virtual Assistant, you aren’t McDonalds, and you’ll never be able to sustain the kind of pace that creating the expectation of “on-demand” and “24 hour” service entails.
(Unless you want to be a secretarial service. Which will require far more resources and labor than just one person alone can deliver. Which is also not what most people in this industry went into Virtual Assistant business to do.)
No, all it does is reduce the perceived value of your services, and serves to foster disrespect for both you and the work, and creates demanding, unappreciative clients who will also expect you to work cheaply.
Your value–and true customer service–lies in creative, intelligent, skilled administrative expertise delivered at a controlled (not emergency) pace with intentional standards set in place.
Excellent service doesn’t require you to beat the clock or work yourself into the ground. And a resentful, burnt-out Virtual Assistant who ends up avoiding clients isn’t any help to anyone.
