The Gritty Virtual Assistant Blog

Often, new Virtual Assistants will ask questions on the various Virtual Assistant listservs and forums that  indicate they haven’t done any business planning at all. Like with most small business owners, many have never run a business before and are really learning things from the ground up.

Luckily for them, ours is a very welcoming industry and there are always lots of folks ready with helpful guidance and advice. One of the things us veterans are always repeating like a mantra is “Do a business plan!”

A business plan isn’t just for securing loans and finding investors. It’s foremost value to you is in helping lay the groundwork for building a successful business.

This is one of the reasons I created the Virtual Assistant Business Plan template (FRM-32 in the VACOC Virtual Assistant Business Forms store.)

I first want to say that you should NEVER just buy a template and think it’s going to do all the work for you. That defeats the entire purpose of doing a business plan! And that’s certainly not what our Virtual Assistant Business Plan is for.

The point of doing a business plan is to go through the exercises of mapping out the details and strategies for your business success. The problem for many people, however, is that they don’t know enough about business, or perhaps even how one should look, to know where or how to even begin.

I created the Virtual Assistant Business Plan to help with this. What my plan gives you is not only a template for how a good business plan should be put together and look, but also many concepts about business and marketing strategies that have proven very successful for solo-run businesses such as Virtual Assistance.

The idea isn’t to do the work for you, but rather to give you really detailed, in-depth information to get your juices flowing, and get you excited about the process of mapping out your business’ strategies for success.

For example, many people don’t realize that there are huge differences between a retainer-based Virtual Assistant business model and a project-based one. But when you sit down to do a business plan, diagram the processes and crunch the numbers, you begin to realize that there are different operational and resource necessities involved with each. Each has different cashflow models, administrative demands and profit margins. And they necessarily have to operate and grow in different ways from one another in order to attain the owner’s income objectives.

But you would never begin to learn and understand these things without going through the actual process of completing a business plan. And the VACOC Virtual Assistant Business Plan helps you do just that.