February – 2010 – The Gritty Virtual Assistant

Monthly Archives: February 2010

February 22, 2010 – 10:00 am

So, What Does an Administrative Support Consultant Do for Me, You Ask?

(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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Here’s a little video for ya… feel free to use it on your site if you have trouble explaining to clients what you do as a Virtual Assistant and Administrative Support Consultant.

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By Danielle Keister | Posted in Cool Stuff, Marketing, Virtual Assistant/Virtual Assistance | Comments (11)

February 11, 2010 – 10:00 am

How to Price & Package Your Support

(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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So I’m conducting my first-ever business class for Virtual Assistants and Administrative Consultants next week on February 18 and I’m really excited. It’s taken me a long time to get over my aversion to offering classes. It seems like so many VAs open their doors and two seconds later they’re coaching other VAs. What is up with that? Especially when so many of those folks have no clients themselves and are making diddly squat–exactly what can they offer anyone else if they haven’t succeeded in their own businesses? I just did not want to add to all the noise and crap out there.

My business is administrative support to clients, not coaching other VAs. I freely share my knowledge and guidance in my blog here, in my Virtual Assistant forum, and I often talk with VAs on the phone. I have my own business to run and I can’t help everyone so I’ve packaged much of what I have to teach in my Virtual Assistant business forms and self-study guides. But I’ve come to realize there are just some things that are best taught and learned in a training-type platform.

I’m not interested in offering certifications and “coaching.” Blech. If you are a highly skilled and experienced administrative professional, you don’t need anyone’s certification to prove your worth. But I see all these women struggling so much in their Virtual Assistant practices… they come into the industry with all these hopes and dreams for earning a living and having a new way of life. And then they are immediately taught by our industry how to run their business in ways that allow them to do anything but earn a real living and have time and money for the things they dream of. Most of them are barely scraping by and making under $10,000 a year.

I know it’s not fun to hear that, but it’s the God’s-honest truth of the matter. And as Dr. Phil says, you can’t fix what you don’t acknowledge.

You know exactly what I’m talking about, don’t you? You know I’m speaking the truth.

This is what drives me to want to help. As I see survey results come in from our Virtual Assistant survey, I see the same issues over and over and over:

VAs not being able to find clients and not knowing how to attract and connect with them;
VAs finding clients, but working with them in ways that don’t leave them any room for growth and making more money whatsoever. Forget about any kind of freedom;
VAs working with 10 clients on up… slaving away around the clock yet still making $10,000 or less a year!

It’s absolutely crazy and it doesn’t have to be that way. They just haven’t been shown or given the right tools and knowledge in order to change this path to burnout and the poorhouse for themselves. And look, turning into a multi/team VA practice isn’t going to change anything. If you couldn’t do it as an independent consultant, it’s going to be 10 times even more undoable for you as a staffing agency.

So that’s what I want to do… share with you a completely new and different way of thinking about what you do and give you the tools and knowledge you need to turn your practice around. I’m going to be offering three very targeted learning modules–I’m calling them Biz Smart Intensives–the first of which is how to price and package your support based on value and expertise, not selling hours.

You may be going, “Wha?! Not selling hours?” Yup, not selling hours. I’m going introduce you to the concept of VALUE pricing and show you several ways you can package your support in innovative ways that don’t have anything to do with tracking hours. Really. It’s going to blow your mind and, if I can be cliche, revolutionize your business. There is so much I’m going to share in this class… it’s going to be really interesting, fun and a radical departure from everything you’ve learned before in our industry.

I am offering an early-bird registration special, but it ends Sunday, February 14, so you’ll want to get registered right away to get in on that savings. Learn more and register here for my “Pricing & Packaging Your Support” class on February 18, 2010.

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By Danielle Keister | Posted in Business Savvy, Don't-Miss-It Events, Virtual Assistant/Virtual Assistance | Tagged Virtual Assistant Training | Comments (0)

February 10, 2010 – 10:00 am

Dear Gritty VA: How Do I Keep Everything Separate?

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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Dear Gritty VA:

It is that time of year… taxes!!! And I was wondering if there were any helpful tips or tricks that you could share for a new Virtual Assistant to help stay organized. What you do to keep track of your business expenses from your personal expenses? My tax accountant told me that it is very difficult to write off office expenses from home because you have to keep track of EVERYTHING. She also stated that being paid as an employee is better than being paid as an independent contractor for tax purposes. Is that true? I would love to hear your thoughts. –MB

Omigosh, you need a new accountant! The one you have doesn’t sound like she understands small business at all! First of all, you aren’t an employee so you don’t have a choice about that, just like clients do not get to choose to pay employees as independent contractors. That’s called misclassification of employees and it’s against the law. You are either an employee or you are a business. Independent contractor is not a third option. It’s just another name for someone who is in self-employment and self-employment is a business, just like any other. The first thing I highly recommend is that you find an accountant who understands these things as well as the fact that you are a business owner, not an employee. Of course, you have to be clear about that in your own mind as well.

In response to your accountant’s claim that it’s very difficult to write off office expenses from home: No, it’s really not. EVERYONE in business has to keep track of everything; where your office is has nothing to do with anything (except for maybe the square footage of your office space).

Here is what I recommend: If you don’t have a dedicated room in your home for your office, at least have a dedicated space, whether that is a desk in a corner or a tabletop in your den. Wherever your space is, keep it off-limits to anyone and anything else. That becomes your dedicated business space that may not be used by anyone else or for anything else other than your business. The square footage of that space is what you then get to use to calculate that business expense when you file taxes.

As far as keeping track of expenses, yes, of course, save your receipts. If a receipt isn’t clear about what it was for, you will need to make notes on them by hand. Whatever you buy for the business is pretty much a business expense, as long as you don’t use it for anything else. Just keep that in mind and you’ll be good. It’s only when you mix things for personal and business use that you have to start figuring out percentages and calculations and make things complicated so the way to keep things simple is to just not mix them. Get dedicated everything.

It is never a good idea to co-mingle business and personal funds, and, in fact, the law can dictate that you may not do that. Therefore, plan on getting a dedicated checking and savings account with a debit and/or credit card that you use strictly for the business. (Depending on the bank and account, these can earn you rewards points that might come in handy as well.) Each month, transfer funds over to the savings account to set aside for taxes. Your new accountant can advise you on the right percentage to set aside. That way, when it’s time to pay estimated self-employment taxes, you don’t have to scramble.

Also, if you haven’t already, I really recommend investing in a proper business accounting software like Quickbooks Pro. Not only will it make entering and keeping track of things a breeze, but the reports you can pull up in analyzing your business and seeing how it’s doing will be invaluable. Your tax preparer will love you more, too.

I also want to be clear that when it comes to anything financial, legal and tax-related, you should never, ever rely on the advice, and especially not the opinions, of laypeople and colleagues, no matter how experienced that may be or how smart they think they are. Always, always go to the source and seek the guidance of those who are educated, licensed and qualified to be giving the information (ahem, accountant and attorney). In your case, you did the smart thing by consulting with an accountant; you just need to find one a little more knowledgeable, current and supportive of the small home-based business owner.

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By Danielle Keister | Posted in Business Savvy, Dear Gritty VA, Virtual Assistant/Virtual Assistance | Tagged accountant, accounting, business expenses, Virtual Assistant | Comments (0)

February 9, 2010 – 10:00 am

Living an Intentional, Conscious Life to the Fullest

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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Wow, it’s always surprising to see what resonates with folks, especially when it’s something that is just a given in your own life that you don’t really think twice about.

Case in point, I always write a little personal note relating to that week’s feature article topic in every issue of the VACOC’s ezine, The Portable Business.™ As this week’s topic was about the problem with multi-tasking, this is what I wrote:

“Without a doubt, one of the secrets to my success is that I simply do not multi-task. I learned long ago back in my corporate days that it is simply counter-productive. You can’t really and truly be present in your work and for your clients if your mind is divided and distracted. It’s not fair to them. This is also part of the present and conscious lifestyle my guy and I intentionally choose to live. I absolutely love technology. I used to be the type who had all the latest gadgets about as soon as they hit the shelf. But I found that I couldn’t live fully and presently in the moment if I was always hunched over the keypad of a Blackberry. Life is so much more delicious when your eyes and ears and fingers and mind aren’t constantly preoccupied. So we say “no” to too much technology. I have a simple cell phone that does one thing–it makes and receives phone calls. Imagine that, LOL! I don’t text and I don’t tweet. When I am away from the office, I am fully engaged in LIFE and ready to savor experiences with all of my senses.”

I received such a flurry of emails on this from folks who identified so much with the idea of NOT having all the latest gadgets, purposely so, yet who are made to feel guilty or “less-than” about that.

I hear you guys! It’s like peer pressure. I see this as the old “keeping up with the Joneses” mentality, but for the Internet (Internet marketers are responsible in large part for that, in my opinion, because they prey on people’s insecurities and hopes) People are made to feel like they aren’t successful if they don’t have all this stuff, and that’s just crazy. Stuff isn’t what makes people happy. Nor is it what makes them better or more successful people.

It’s okay to be conscious and purposeful about how much stuff and technology you allow in your life, and how you leverage the technology tools you do allow in your business without letting them taking over your life.

I remember a movie I saw once called The Bridge (you can watch the full movie on Hulu). It was a documentary about all the suicides that occur at the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Apparently more people take their lives there than anywhere else in the world. What the filmmakers did was set up a camera, it may have been over the course of a year or something like that, and documented these very tragic events that were all too common. They learned more about some of the people who committed suicide and interviewed family members, bystanders and rescuers.

It was quite controversial because some folks thought it was exploitive. Personally, I thought they did a very moving, respectful treatment of it. At any rate, one of people interviewed was a bystander who ended up saving a woman from jumping to her death (a woman who had attempted it before and later attempted it again, that time succeeding in taking her own life). Or maybe it was a guy he ended up saving; I can’t remember, it’s been so long.

Anyway, he was someone who was just sightseeing and taking photos like all the thousands of other people who visit the bridge. But something he said stuck in my memory. He had been looking through his lens and watching this person who was about to commit suicide, and he said that you really are in a different world when you are behind the camera. It’s like it’s a movie and not real and he really had to shake himself out of it in time to help that person and save their life.

I know that’s kind of a dramatic story and not something that would happen to us everyday, but I remember so totally understanding what he meant because at the time I’d been really infatuated with a new camera and was being Miss Shutterbug–until I realized I was missing so much other stuff because I was always behind the lens. It’s like you aren’t really taking part or experiencing what is going on. You are just an observer and at the same time, not seeing or feeling everything fully. I still love taking pictures, but I’m more conscious about not taking it to extremes and putting it away so that I don’t miss out on all the truly good experiences–those are the things that enrich your soul. Not gadgets.

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By Danielle Keister | Posted in Personal Musings | Tagged gadgets, technology overload | Comments (1)

February 5, 2010 – 8:48 pm

Virtual Assistant Industry Survey: Last Little Bit of Participation Needed

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We just need about 125 more participate to close out the 2009 Virtual Assistant Industry Survey. I was wondering why on earth we hadn’t been getting any further survey submissions. Well, I happened to be talking to a Virtual Assistant today on the phone and she said she had tried to complete the survey but it said it was offline. So I go take a look and sure enough, it indeed had been taken offline!

Oy vey! LOL

Obviously a human error by one of my assistants. Not a big deal and easily fixed (survey is online again), but I do want to remind you to tell all the administrative support consultants you know to take the survey if they haven’t already. We just need that last little bit to reach goal and get the results report compiled. So mention this on your blog, post in your VA forums and listservs, sound the bell to your VA Facebook friends and however else you can pass the word along.

Thanks for your help and understanding!

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By Danielle Keister | Posted in Business Savvy, Virtual Assistant/Virtual Assistance | Comments (0)

February 3, 2010 – 5:07 pm

What Webconferencing Ware Do You Use?

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I will be conducting some learning modules this month and need your webconferencing recommendations. What services do you or your clients currently like/use? Or, have you been on a webinar recently where you liked the webconferencing interface? If so, what were they using?

Here is the snag I’ve been running into. In the past, we’ve used GoToWebinar which allows plenty of room for attendees (GoToMeeting only allows up to 25 attendees, if I remember correctly). GoToWebinar was fine when all we were doing was conducting webinars, but I now need something for conducting classes and it just doesn’t cut it. I never really liked the interface. For one thing, attendees couldn’t see who other attendees were. Plus, you can’t unmute everyone all at once. You have to unmute each attendee individually and then, you are only allowed to have 25 attendees unmuted at one time. This is a problem because what I’m using it for is an interactive class and I need for people to simply be able to talk without having to go through a bunch of rigamarole.

The workaround is to use our own bridgeline, but then (since I want all the classes recorded), GoToWebinar can’t record the audio portion. I could try to integrate the audio and video together later using Camtasia, but that’s just an irritating extra step/work that I’d prefer not to have. So that just isn’t going to work.

So here’s what I need in a webconferencing service:

1. It must provide screensharing, not simply file sharing (CoolConferenceLive only provides file sharing, not screensharing, if I’m correct).

2. A conference line that allows everyone to be unmuted all at once and not have restrictions.

3. Ability to record everything (audio & video).

4. Ability for attendees to see who other attendees are.

5. Support at least 50-100 attendees.

I could really use your recommendations stat!

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By Danielle Keister | Posted in Business Savvy | Tagged web conferencing | Comments (8)

February 2, 2010 – 10:00 am

Do You Understand the Difference?

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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Sometimes I’ll read things from other Virtual Assistants and I have to wonder whether they understand the difference between a project and providing support. In case you’re confused, I thought I’d talk about it here…

A project is something that is basically one-off, one-time work. It has a start and a finish. Web design is a good example of project work. It’s a one-time thing where you are hired specifically to do that one thing and that one thing isn’t ongoing because there is a finish, which is the completion of the site design.

Support, on the other hand, is something that is ongoing. In the case of administrative support, it’s a body, a package, of any number of administrative tasks, roles and functions in a business that are recurring and continuous throughout the life of that business.

For example, you don’t just return one customer’s call and that’s it, you never have to call another customer in your life, right? Of course not. So customer service is just one aspect, one area in a business in which you will have to engage in any number and kind of tasks and actions throughout the life of the business. There is no beginning and ending like with project work. It is ongoing.

When you understand the differences clearly, you can begin to better distinguish categories of work and services in your business so that you can create more revenue streams and make more money. So that means, you can group all kinds of administrative support into retainer packages and then charge separately for specific projects and other work unrelated to administrative support.

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By Danielle Keister | Posted in Business Savvy, Virtual Assistant/Virtual Assistance | Tagged Administrative Support, Virtual Assistants | Comments (1)

February 1, 2010 – 10:00 am

“A Matter of Time”

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(This is a personal musing post rather than anything to do with Virtual Assistants or administrative support, just so you know, LOL.)

We don’t watch very much TV at all, but there are a few shows I like to keep up with. I love that I can do this online by using Hulu.com or going to the station’s website. Technology, you are just too cool!

Anyway, I was catching up on some of my shows over the weekend, one of which is NBC’s Dateline. One of the episodes I’d missed was from a couple weeks ago called “A Matter of Time,” which was about a doctor accused of trying to save the life of one patient by hastening the death of another (to borrow the description from their website). The patient whose death he was being accused of hastening was a young man who suffered for years from a rare degenerative neurological disorder and had been in a coma for quite some time and was being taken off life support.

What especially broke my heart was that this young man’s mother couldn’t be with her son on his last days as he lay dying. She was very poor and could only stay by his side until she ran out of money. After that, she had nothing more to pay for food or a hotel and had to return home. Can you even imagine being in that position?! This was in California, but if I had been there and somehow heard about this poor lady’s plight, I would have taken her into our home in a heartbeat so she could be with her son as he took his last breath and passed on.

My mind got to wandering about how something like this could be prevented. No one should have to leave the side of a dying loved one because they ran out of money. That just seems especially cruel and heartbreaking. And I thought, you know, they have those roommate matching services and couch-surfing websites… why couldn’t hospitals set up something similar based on that concept? They could establish some kind of online registry and the intake and servicing could be managed or at least assisted in some part by volunteer help. Those who are looking to help and have an extra couch or guest room to spare could be matched with low-income family members of patients who have run out of money like this poor woman and need somewhere to sleep and get cleaned up while they look after loved ones in the hospital.

Isn’t that a good idea?! Maybe someone, somewhere has already thought of it. I haven’t heard of anything like that in our area, but it sure would be a nice thing for those people. And it would be a wonderful gesture of good will and community relations for the hospitals.

The other idea I had (because I was thinking about how people have to eat, too, and this basic need was something this poor mother ran out of money for as well) was that hospitals could set up cafeteria gift cards and benefactors could donate funds for prepaid meal cards for low-income family members who have run out of money. The hospitals could then give out these prepaid meal cards to those who have the need.

I think I’m going to call up or write our local hospital and offer them these ideas. It will be interesting to know if anyone has ever thought of this before.

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