Lots of Virtual Assistant sites like to tout Virtual Assistance as the profession of "highly skilled" administrative professionals.
Hmmm, that’s a pretty big claim to make.
I’ve got news for ya…
Not every Virtual Assistant is highly skilled.
They’re supposed to be, and that is the expectation of professional Virtual Assistants who care about their profession. But right now in our industry (as in many other industries), anyone can jump on the Virtual Assistant bandwagon, slap up a website and call themselves a Virtual Assistant. And many, many, many… MANY do just that.
Many of those folks don’t have any administrative experience at all (and they’ll even go so far as to flat out lie about having administrative experience or embellish the number of years experience they have).
And that leads to many unhappy experiences that burned clients are all to eager to share with their business associates and the world… giving our industry a huge black eye.
I’m not saying it’s all the fault of the Virtual Assistant world (although industry organizations who don’t use any discernment at all in who they promote as representatives of the Virtual Assistant industry are a huge part of the problem. They let anyone and everyone into their ranks and demonstrate no concern for the marketplace whatsoever. Any why should they? Most of them are not organizations at all; they are merely sales vehicles for the site owner. But I digress… )
Many of those burned clients didn’t choose based on due diligence, quality and value. In many (dare I say, most) of those cases, they chose based on nothing but price…. looking for a cheap fix. And that’s exactly what they got – a cheap, subpar, unqualified and unskilled waste of money. They may as well have simply gone to the toilet themselves and flushed down their dollars directly.
That’s one of the reasons I wrote "How to Hire a Virtual Assistant;" to give business owners the information and understanding to help them choose more wisely based on other–more important–criteria besides price, and to better discern exactly what kind of Virtual Assistant can really help them in their business.
If you struggle with educating clients, send them over to the Virtual Assistance Chamber of Commerce Client’s Guide to Virtual Assistants. You can also refer them directly to the article "How to Hire a Virtual Assistant." It will certainly help both you and your prospective clients have more meaningful, worthwhile conversations.
Thanks for commenting. Yeah, the virtual assistant term is really completely idiotic to...
