The Gritty Virtual Assistant Blog

Dear Gritty VA:

I have a client who signed a three month retainer which will end next month. The client is a publicist in Los Angeles. Working with this individual has become a job. I work 50 hours a week. The reason being that I have become an assistant vs. admin support. I like this person and it is clear that she needs help. My challenge is how to steer this so that she’s working within my business model and not the other way around. I’m not making nearly what I should be. I took less to build the relationship. Is there a way to bring this around or should I just thank her for the wonderful experience (while frustrating at times, I’ve learned a lot) and move on? –TK

This is SUCH a great question. It’s a common pitfall for so many Virtual Assistants. I’m sorry you are going through this, but on the positive side of things, as you recognize, it’s a really valuable learning experience.

There are so many business concepts this touches on so I’m just going to enumerate things to consider. You may have figured some of this out having gone through this now so a lot of it may  just be a validation that you’re getting on the right track from this point forward.

1. Never bargain with your fees. You never want to make bargains with the very thing that earns your living. All you do then is teach clients to devalue the work and the relationship, and give them the idea that everything is up for negotiation.

And really, it amounts to bribery. It’s saying, “I am not worth what I’m charging so I need to bribe you with discounts and freebies in order to get you to work with me.”

That’s a horrible, powerless way to start a relationship and attracts all the worst kinds of clients. I know we see people doing this a lot, but just because we see it doesn’t mean it’s working.   There’s a whole lotta people out there who are NOT making any money and whose businesses are going nowhere due to this thinking.

If what you have to offer is valuable and worthwhile, it’s worth charging fully for right from the get-go. There will be more mutual respect, and your business and relationships will grow more successfully and healthily from there. There are other–better–ways to start new client relationships and make it easier for them to say yes that don’t entail discounting or otherwise bargaining with your fees.

2. Never take on anchor clients. An anchor client is one who ends up monopolizing all your time and energy. They are called “anchor” clients because they weigh your business down and keep it from going (and growing) anywhere.

It doesn’t help that we’ve got Virtual Assistant training programs telling folks that these kinds of clients who hire them for 40, 60 or more hours a month are the bee’s knees. If you are someone who is only doing this work as a side income and more of a hobby, then that’s fine and dandy. But it absolutely does not work at all for those who are trying to build a real business that earns a real, full-time income (and more!) that they could actually live on.

That’s because working with those kind of clients doesn’t leave you the room or energy to work with others and grow your business. I can’t tell you how many VAs I personally know who are struggling because they are working like full-time assistants to their clients. They aren’t making enough money to live on and they barely have any time to think or do anything else.  And they’re definitely not living the freedom and choice-filled life of the self-employed they dreamed of when they first started. If you have read my blog for long, you’ll frequently see me referring to this as “operating and working with clients in ways that don’t give your business room to grow.”

A good rule of thumb is that no one client should make up more than 20% of your business. If you are working with one client for 40-50 hours a week, you’ve got yourself an anchor client who is probably making up 75% or more of your entire business.

You aren’t making the kind of money you want and need, yet you haven’t given yourself room to work with anyone else.

And what happens if that client says bye-bye? There goes almost (if not all) of your entire income. On top of things, you’ve been so busy working with this one client, you haven’t had any time to market your business to keep those prospective client pipelines open. Not that you had any room to take on new clients anyway.

Quite the dilemma and not a good place to be, right? So this is what you do…

3. Recognize when what a client really needs is an employee. As you’ve stated, this has become a job and it’s time to let this client know that what she really needs is an employee, one who can be solely dedicated to that level of workload.

You want to always remember (and tell this to clients, too) that a Virtual Assistant/Administrative Consultant is an alternative, not a replacement for employees. There is naturally going to be a significant difference in the way and when you work together as well as what work you take on. There are going to be many clients and many workloads this simply isn’t a fit for–and isn’t supposed to be.

There are a lot of people out there who just aren’t going to understand this (sometimes folks have to be a little further along in their business for certain things to make sense), but I gotta say it anyway–when a client starts needing you for more than 20-30 hours a month, what they really need is an employee.

Because once you start getting into those kind of hours for one client, the work starts to require more constant, daily monitoring and it overwhelms everything else. And that is a condition that will not only lead to burn-out and keep you chained to your desk every day, more importantly it will limit your ability to work with others and deprive you of the “space” you need to move around easily in the work. Daily on-demand work causes crowding which also leads to poor performance and inconsistent delivery.

The more profitable, sustainable model that also allows you to keep the higher value, one-on-one, true partnering relationship is to work with several retained clients whose individual workloads don’t exceed 20-30 hours a month. It’s a much easier business to manage, it gives you space and leaves room to grow and offer additional services and project work. In that model (and as long as you are also charging properly), it only takes a handful of clients to really do well financially, and because you have “space,” you can supplement that line of business in many different ways.

4. YOU need to set the parameters and the definitions. This is where I’m always saying that being an administrative expert and being an assistant are not one and the same thing. And if you’re a business owner, you aren’t anyone’s assistant.

What I want those two statements to do is help people get conscious and intentionally define their role. You can be an administrative expert without having to be anyone’s assistant. Problem is most of the information you get in the VA industry today is telling people that they have to be assistants. And that’s not a new paradigm whatsoever. It’s just a different name for the same thing–employee.

When you get clear about that, you understand that your value isn’t in being and doing everything for that client. You CAN focus on just the administrative support in your clients’ businesses without being an assistant and instead being an Administrative Expert. If you want to also be an assistant, that’s up to you, but like I say, they aren’t one and the same thing. You get to choose, but understand this–your value isn’t dependent upon also being an assistant. It’s all in how YOU define the work and your role in your business.

Likewise,  you need to define what administrative support is. And the reason this is important is because so many VAs are giving everything away under the administrative support umbrella. So you want to define what kind of work is administrative support and what work logically falls into other categories of business. This will not only help you define parameters, making things more manageable and leaving you room to grow with that client as well as others, but you also create additional revenue sources by charging separately for those things that don’t fall under the administrative support umbrella.

Obviously, I can’t say one way or the other if this is a salvageable relationship. I can tell you, though, that once you’ve spoiled a client and allowed them to have expectations that you can’t sustain and that keep your business from growing, it’s often really difficult to wean them off those things. As you grow and your standards change and improve, always expect that you may lose some clients. It’s just natural that you will outgrow some.

If it’s a relationship you’d like to try to keep, all you can do is be open, honest and direct about the changes that must take place in your business in order for it to grow, and let the client know that you hope she will come with you. Don’t be invested in the outcome beyond that. If she chooses to come with you and accept the adjustments you need to make, great! You can now move forward on more mutually beneficial footing. If not, it just leaves you room for more ideal clients to come into your business.