The Gritty Virtual Assistant Blog

Outside of sheer incompetence and lack of skills, almost every complaint between clients and Virtual Assistants can be traced back to one problem: working with clients and allowing them to think of you as a substitute employee.

If you are running a business, you are not anyone’s assistant.

If you market yourself as a replacement for employees, clients naturally expect that you are going to work with them and be available to them and do the same things for them just like an employee would. But that’s an expectation you will absolutely be unable to sustain, and you’ll kill yourself in the process of trying to live up to that kind of promise. Because that’s what an expectation is–the perceived or actual promise of something. And I say “perceived” because, if you don’t take charge of what expectations are set, clients will make their own assumptions, assumptions that might not be correct or that simply won’t work for you.

The problem is not that you need to be more, do more, be more available, create a bigger business model or turn into something else entirely. It’s that clients aren’t understanding what you are, what your role is and the true nature of the relationship. And most of the time, that’s the fault of Virtual Assistants and how they are currently marketing themselves in the industry.

You have to understand that you are not a contract employee. You are not a replacement for employees. You are an alternative to employees. And when something is an alternative, there are necessarily going to be differences and trade-offs in how and when you work with clients. Your value isn’t in doing everything, being everything, meeting every need or solving every problem. You can absolutely provide top-notch ongoing administrative support without being available on a daily basis or trying to fulfill every single role in the same way that an employee would. It’s what I call strategic support–even just a little helps clients make great strides forward in their businesses, keeps them humming and running along smoothly, and creates vastly more time and space at their disposal than they had before your help, even beyond the time they pay for in your retainers.

And since you are a business provider, not an employee or contract worker, you may need to make clear to clients that there are certain things you simply can’t do for them and that they may not expect, such as on-demand work or any work that requires daily maintenance and check-in. This sometimes means letting some clients know that what they really need is an employee rather than an independent administrative expert.

Once you start grasping this, you can begin to change the expectations, change your message and how you market. YOU’VE got to clearly and consciously create the definitions, set the expectations and discuss these things upfront. That’s when we’ll start seeing more harmony and alignment of understandings and expectations between clients and Virtual Assistants.