Saying a little prayer of thanks today to all our service men and women. May you soon return safely home. My deepest gratitude to those heros who have given their lives in service to our country. God bless you and your families.
Which sounds yummier:
Product A:
Toast. White, wheat or English muffin… $1.00
Product B:
Toasted Bread. Two generous slices of our handmade Artisan bread (your choice multi-grain, stone-milled German rye or honey wheat) toasted to golden perfection. All our breads are baked fresh daily and made with 100% whole wheat goodness. Served with a side of farm-fresh whipped butter and raspberry jam… $2.00
One of the technology vendors I use, I actually detest. I have tolerated this particular vendor’s absolute lack of good customer support for far too long. It’s been a thorn in my side that I’ve put up with only because it was too much of an ordeal to move to another platform. But at my first opportunity (which is now finally arriving) I will be ditching them so fast anyone standing in the way will have their heads spun around like a top.
One of the reasons our relationship has deteriorated so much is poor/lack of communication. Tech companies (which is what this one is) are often the ones that fail miserably in this department. As in this case, they tend to think everyone’s world revolves around their product. As if the first thing everyone does in the morning is open up their program to check for messages and notifications from them.
I hate to break it to them, but almost no one does this. Ever.
Most people’s business lives still revolve around and rely on email communication. So when a new version upgrade is out or there are bug patches to be fixed, for example, we’re expecting to be notified by email… to get some kind of message alerting us and prompting us to go to their website or open up their product to place the order or download the upgrade or what-have-you. Without that prompt, you never, ever know. And what ends up happening is you completely miss any inkling of new developments and only find out by accident, sometimes months later, of something you would have like to have known or really needed to know at the time.
Yet that’s what this company and thousands of others do–they never send any kind of email and instead expect customers to go open the product and find out that way. And so those customers don’t ever find out. I’ll learn about some important security release in some completely random accidental way months after the fact and call up only to be told, “Well, we posted a notice inside the admin panel.” I am almost never in the admin panel and the place and the way they post this information, you’d never see it unless you were specifically looking for it.
It’s completely maddening.. and an absolute trust and relationship killer.
So next time you worry about whether your emailing is too much, don’t. Chances are it is completely helpful. Even expected. Better to over-deliver than under-communicate.
The 2009 Virtual Assistant Industry Survey is finally done!
As usual, those administrative support providers who met the qualifying criteria and completed the survey get a free copy and will have already received a message in their IN box over the weekend.
For everyone else, you can purchase a copy at the online store (in fact, you can get all four years’ worth of surveys—2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009—for the price of one if you order before May 31!). And, of course, those administrative consultants who missed taking part in the survey will have an opportunity to participate the 2010 survey and thereby get a free copy of next year’s report. Happy reading!
This was a question posed on the VACOC community forum recently. Systems, structure and smart, intentioned business policies are what allow me to find time for everything. Of course, there are always a few folks who rebel at the idea of structure, their usual argument being, “I went into business for myself to have more freedom, not more restriction!”
But here’s the thing: When you operate without structure, without foundation, without systems, you actually create more burden, more chaos and less freedom and choice. It’s systems and structure that give you more freedom and flexibility. So here are some of the simple policies and systems I have in place that give me lots of room to move around in my business with less stress and more time and flexibility.
1. Assign one day a week for administration. It can be any day of the week you like; mine happens to be Mondays. The point is that on that day, you focus only on administration of your business. This can also be a day you set aside to focus on training or skills improvement or research. Whatever you like. On my admin day, I am officially closed to clients and they all know this. I don’t talk to clients, I don’t respond to clients and I don’t do any client work.
2. Assign one day a week for meetings. Years ago I used to take meetings, both scheduled and on the fly, on every day of the week. At the time, I had a separate bookkeeping division in my practice and unintentionally fell into a routine of weekly office calls for those local clients. Omigawd! Talk about crazy-making. Don’t even ask me what on earth I was thinking back then, LOL. I definitely wasn’t thinking ahead about how doing all that would affect my business (and my sanity) and eventually I realized it just could not continue. It was very stressful, it put huge demands on my time (which reduced the number of people I could work with) and made it really difficult to transition into real work and concentration. My life and business did a complete 180 (for the better!) the day I decided a) never to make in-person office calls again, and b) to only take scheduled meetings, never on the fly.
3. Schedule all calls and meetings (especially when it comes to consultations). I know this is a repeat of #2, but it merits its own bullet. When you interrupt yourself to take a call, you are not only losing the time of the call, but also the time it takes to transition back into working concentration (which can take up to 20 minutes). Sometimes, your entire flow can be thrown off. Not to mention the fact that you simply can’t be on your best game flying by the seat of your pants. You’ll be far more successful and make a way better impression if you schedule and then prepare in advance for those client consultations and weekly meetings. What I do instead is focus folks on email communication. I can more easily coordinate scheduling that way. If they do happen to call the office, they can leave a message, and I have a set routine when it comes to checking Voicemail and returning calls.
4. Don’t work with anyone and everyone. I have a very clear and specific market I work with. Trying to do everything, be everything, for anyone and everyone simply does not work, particularly for solopreneurs like us administrative consultants. When you focus on a specific target market and know very clearly and definitively what you are and what you do for that market (and what you don’t), you end up not having to constantly switch all kinds of mental gears. The work then becomes easier and takes less time, your business gets easier and quicker to run and administer, and your service and responsiveness improves as a result. I guarantee you will make your business and your life so much easier and less stressful, with more time and freedom for your own life, if you do the same.
5. Charge good and well! If you don’t charge enough, you will have to work harder and take on more clients to make the money you need, while having even less time and being more stressed on top of it. And that’s a recipe for failure. For you and your clients. It literally doesn’t serve anyone for you not to charge properly, professionally and profitably. No matter what the penny-pinchers and the business ignoramuses howl, you charging well is actually a service to clients. It’s what will allow you to stay in business and work with fewer clients, which means you’ll have more high quality, personalized time and attention for those clients you do work with.
Dear Gritty VA:
How do you go about getting the pricing of the services offered? What do I need to take into consideration to have rates/pricing in accordance with the market and services? How do you work out the hourly rate you should be charging as a Virtual Assistant? –HJ
The answer to this question is a bit involved. It can’t be done in a blog post. Rather, pricing is a field of learning unto itself, one that will be ongoing throughout the life of your business. However, I’ve written a little guide called Danielle’s Pricing Primer to help get you started in the right direction. It’s free–just click on the image link below:
Feel free to share it with others or give them the link here.
People would much rather work with experts than with generalists. Because their perception is that an expert can help them better (which, if the professional truly is an expert, they can). People will pay more for experts as well. But what makes someone an expert? What is “expertise?”
Here’s a list of characteristics I’ve started to help define what “expertise” means and get you to thinking about your role as an Administrative Expert.
What Is Expertise/What Makes Someone an Expert
1. Specific (e.g., administrative support is a specific and separate expertise from, say, web design or bookkeeping).
2. Experience
3. Training/education
4. Creativity
5. Talent
6. Critical thinking
7. Business knowledge/acumen/sensibility
8. Understanding of clients and the market
Do you have any others to add to the list?
Every week, readers have been sharing photos of their offices in the VACOC’s weekly ezine, The Portable Business™. I get emails all the time from folks telling me how much they enjoy this feature. I’d like to keep it going, but while everyone seems to like it, not as many actually contribute photos. So I’d like to know if you enjoy this feature and would like to see it continue or if I should just bag it. Thanks in advance!
(If you aren’t already, you can subscribe to The Portable Business™ here… )
I had a gal email me with what she thought was a typo in one of my Virtual Assistant contract templates. While it turned out there wasn’t any error, I definitely appreciated the kindness of her effort to alert me. Other things have gotten past us before and it never hurts to double-check!
As it turns out, one of the reasons she alerted me was because the word in question was flagged by the spell-check feature in Word. This got me to thinking about why technology can never replace the human brain.
Take biz card readers–they’re neat and all, but they still require a human being to go through and make sure all the data converted over correctly and got inputted to the right fields.
Same thing with voice recognition software. There are folks out there who think that technology will make it so they never need another transcriber or proofreader. They could not be more wrong!
While the technology is pretty darn nifty and can be applied in all kinds of situations, there isn’t a voice recognition program out there that doesn’t still require an actual human being with a firm command of language to make sure everything was transcribed, spelled, punctuated and formatted correctly. Only a human being will know how to correct incomplete sentences and make sure all grammar rules are correctly applied.
Plus, like in this instance, just because a program like Word flags something, that doesn’t mean it’s incorrect. It takes a human being to know better.
The human brain has job security! Because only the human brain can distinguish between context and apply critical thinking. Technology can’t do that. It can’t think like a person, and it doesn’t have a human being’s ability for discernment.
Language and communication are the heart of everything we do in business. Which is why it’s imperative that administrative support experts have a firm knowledge and command of these things.
One of the independent experts who supports me in my business is my programmer, who has been working with me for about three years now. My tech guy (as I like to call him) and I are in the midst of several big projects. In working together, it reminds me about how awesome the dynamic is when you work with someone with whom you have an ongoing relationship. Not to mention just being able to delegate work so that my brain stays free for ideating (to borrow the term from the IBM commercial)!
That’s not to say that I just throw work at him and forget it. It’s a participatory process. I need to pay attention to his questions as they come up, and respond in a timely manner. I appreciate his skills and attention and responsiveness, and I give him the respect of responding quickly to him when he needs feedback from me. He is doing work that is important to me, after all, and it would be both rude and wasteful to make him wait on me for an undue amount of time. The wonderful thing is that there’s a mutual respect that occurs in this dynamic, one that creates a whole other creative level for brainstorming and innovation to occur.
And you know, it’s like this with Administrative Consultants as well. The participatory process that is inherent in the collaborative partnership is why clients are able to accomplish so much more with an Administrative Consultant. The back-and-forth give-and-take creates a synergy that allows you to work together at a higher, more productive level. And the longer you work together and get to know each other, the easier all of that gets.
You can’t get that kind of dynamic working with someone impersonally or only occasionally on a transactional basis. It’s something that only comes by working in close, one-to-one partnership with someone over a period of time. The longer you work together, the more your shared body of knowledge grows and the more cohesively and intuitively you are able to mesh, think and work in sync.
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Thanks for commenting. Yeah, the virtual assistant term is really completely idiotic to...
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NOTE: The terms "Gritty VA," "Gritty Virtual Assistant," and "Saucy business savvy for clients and colleagues from a Virtual Assistant industry veteran" did not exist in the public domain when this blog was launched August 2005. The author claims exclusive right to use those terms as identifying marks for this weblog and other written, digitized or electronic use, pursuant to U.S. and International copyright and trademark laws.
This weblog is published by Danielle Keister, The Relief Virtual Assistance and Virtual Assistance Chamber of Commerce. If you would like permission to reprint any of my published columns, please contact me at word@grittyva.com. At all times you may provide the link to these copyrighted columns when referencing them in any form.
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