The Gritty Virtual Assistant Blog

Hey, that sounds like a song. But really, it’s an important idea to examine if you are a self-employed business owner.

Here’s a common scenario that happens with new Virtual Assistants as well as many other self-employed service providers:

You’re a self-employed service provider. You don’t want to run some big business or become a manager of people. Doing the hands-on work is exactly why you went into self-employment. It’s as much about meeting the needs of your soul, having an outlet to express your talents and skills, and fulfilling your purpose as it is having more control over the quality of your life and income. And that makes you perfectly happy.

But you’ve never run a business before in your life, and are blissfully unaware at this point what you are really in for.

You go about trying to get clients, any clients, any way you can. And because you’ve never run a business, you go about this as if trying to land a job instead of clients. You don’t know any differently (yet).

So you get a client. Yea! You’re so excited! At first it’s all hunky-dory.

But then this client starts “bossing” you around, and asking you to do things that weren’t part of the bargain. You do them anyway–you’re nothing if not flexible! But you start to feel the inklings of resentment. You don’t like the way you’re being addressed. You don’t feel like this client respects you as a fellow professional, and you attempt to get things back on track with the client. The client on the other hand doesn’t appreciate that you’re “getting uppity” with him; after all he’s paying you to do his bidding (at least that’s his understanding) and doesn’t want any flak.

This client also has no sense of boundaries. You’ve been so “flexible” with him that he now pretty much thinks it’s okay to call you at all hours of the day or night, intrude upon your personal life, and that no matter what hoops he asks you to jump through, you simply say “how high.” And he expects things to be done as soon as he’s barked out the order. After all, you’ve based your whole brand identity on “flexibility” and “instant, on-demand assistance.”

So now this client is putting demands on you that you never bargained for. In an effort to ever be the people-pleaser, you try to accomplish his every command and expectation. And that’s another thing–this client’s attitude has become one of self-entitlement. You rarely get a thank you or good word on a job well done. And now he is starting to ask you to do stuff that isn’t even administrative, much less part of the skill sets you informed him of.

You now dread dealing with this person and find yourself avoiding answering the phone. This client’s work is piling up. You keep procrastinating out of resentment and overwhelm. He’s piled so much on your plate that you are completely miserable and stressed out by it all.

You (finally!) get a clue that this client thinks he’s your boss, not your client. A lightbulb goes off and you realize this is really your own fault because that’s exactly how you marketed yourself and your services and how you’ve been delivering them. Like an employee. An employee who has no say in who she works for, what work she will provide and in what way and when that work will be accomplished and delivered. Like spoiling a child, you’ve created your own monster client by setting no limits or parameters for working together. And like a spoiled child, this person has become someone really unpleasant to be around.

You’re also not making any money because you’re spending a ton of unpaid time trying to please this one demanding, self-entitled client. You’re definitely not charging enough. You haven’t earned a penny’s profit, and this client is sucking the life right out of you.

Miracle of miracles, you do manage to land another couple clients throughout everything, but you’ve got absolutely no control over your schedule, the work nor the demands placed on your time because you’ve established no control and no boundaries. Your every waking hour is now spent trying to keep up with everything, putting out the biggest fires first, and succeeding well in neither. You also now find yourself spending your weekends, evenings and family time on work, and still missing deadlines.

Your newest clients are much more ideal for you–hey, at least you learned a thing or two about choosing who to work with! They’d be dreams if you didn’t have so much darn “flexibility” in your life, but now they, too, are getting frustrated with you because you aren’t living up to the promises you made. You try to hide it, but deep down you know you aren’t doing good work for them because of the way things are in your business, and it wouldn’t surprise you if they bailed on you tomorrow.

Forget taking on any other clients. You’re unhappy. You’re existing clients are unhappy. You have zero room on your plate for anything else. Ironically, in trying to be totally flexible and make everybody else happy, you now have no flexibility (and no life) whatsoever. And none of the reasons and rewards of working for yourself exist anymore because in trying to chase this “flexibility” ideal, you haven’t taken care of your needs and those of your business first.

This is what happens when people don’t have a deeper understanding of what “flexibility” is really about. Flexibility comes with boundaries, standards, processes, and thinking things through. What kills flexibility is not having those things in your business. Sometimes, in order to do the best job possible for your clients, all your clients equally and fairly, you realize you have to say “no” sometimes to things that are ultimately going to zap your ability to be flexible.

You will have flexibility to give if you instill a foundation that actually creates it. But flexibility for flexibility’s sake is no flexibility at all. It’s a precurser to chaos, unmanageability and unprofitability in your business. Taking heed and learning what that really means in your business is going to help build a foundation upon which you can get the right kind of clients, do the work you enjoy and do well, and have space and flexibility to delivery the absolute best services to clients that you can.