Alan Weiss, the self-styled king of consulting, tells business owners they should “do it themselves and save time.”
So if an attorney emails him about a matter, is he going to say, “Tell your client to call me himself!”
Of course not. That’s patently ridiculous. He may be the absolute genius when it comes to consulting, and I definitely respect his knowledge in that, but on this point he is dead wrong.
There’s absolutely no difference between clients having their Administrative Consultant (Virtual Assistant) take care of certain matters on their behalf and having their attorney or accountant or any other kind of professional handle matters related to what they were hired to do.
It has nothing whatsoever to do with one person’s time being more important than another person’s.
It has everything to do with that client who works with an Administrative Consultant (Virtual Assistant) being a smart business person who knows that his time and energy levels are finite commodities. That business person realizes he shouldn’t be spending his own personal time on certain details, but instead should prioritize and reserve those limited resources for taking excellent care of clients and focusing on marketing and revenue generation. He knows he is able to give more support and higher quality service to his clients when he doesn’t squander those things trying to do everything himself.
But Weiss’s position is that if you’re going to say you are a solo, you should be COMPLETELY solo. And that’s just as ridiculous.
Solo doesn’t mean you literally do everything yourself. It just means that you are the primary brain power and craftsman in your business. Using his logic, solos would never hire ANY professionals whatsoever to help them in their business. They wouldn’t hire an attorney, an accountant, a bookkeeper or literally anyone. Again, patently ridiculous. No man is an island and that man’s business and clients will suffer if he tries to be. Guaranteed.
Choosing to be supported (and in some cases coached and advised) administratively by an Administrative Consultant (Virtual Assistant) is no different than hiring any other kind of independent professional to help in their business. We are hired for our expertise of administrative support and guidance in those matters.
However, this once again underscores the fact that the term “Virtual Assistant” is completely misunderstood and does us a great disservice by causing people to automatically perceive that we are “mere” assistants or lackeys.
If that person’s accountant had contacted him for the information, I really doubt he would have had the same attitude. He automatically has less professional respect because he views us as some kind of underlings–much like a maid or butler–and all because of the term “Virtual Assistant.” But as business owners and professionals who are hired for our particular expertise and support, we are no more assistants to our clients than an accountant or attorney or bookkeeper is an assistant to their clients.
Of course, to be fair, there are some real turkeys in our industry who seemingly have no brain cells with which to think independently or critically and take initiative. Those folks do give us a bad name. And it’s the reason why I see the smarter, more experienced people in our industry–the ones who have professional self-esteem and view themselves as true business owners and masters of the expertise of administrative support–embracing the term Administrative Consultant as a better representative and more respectful name for who we are and what we do.
Thanks for commenting. Yeah, the virtual assistant term is really completely idiotic to...
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I had trouble with the fact that he assumed that virtual assistants weren’t virtual. I don’t think he even knows what we do. Granted the way he told the story about the phone call made me wonder about who called since the caller sounded unprepared, but that could have been his interpretation of the actual call as it was quite vague.
No, he doesn’t really. But that’s the case with lots of clients. And it’s our fault for referring to ourselves “assistants.”
If you are a business owner, you aren’t anyone’s assistant. And the term “assistant” comes with all kinds of negative and misrepresentative connotations.
I thought the same thing as you about the VA who called him. Of course, most people are never going to react the way he did; they would think nothing of it and provide the requested info or they would simply ask for clarification. Which is exactly what this VA should have done in the first place: introduced herself for context and used her client’s full name and not assumed he would remember someone by first name alone after two year, which can be a lifetime.
A thinking VA will catch those kind of possible snafus and make some preemptive effort to communicate clearly on behalf of her client. Not doing so makes her and her client look bad. This will hopefully be a learning experience for that VA. She’ll know to provide more fully detailed info and require her own clients to provide full and clear info beforehand so neither of them ends up looking foolish and irritating a business contact unnecessarily in the process.
I could barely understand his blog post and it’s not me, it’s him. I do think that the VA who called him should have had more information and sounded more professional and he may have responded differently.
But, to me, he seems a little self-important in his assumptions that he’s too good to deal with an assistant, consultant, or other professional rather than the main client. Naturally when dealing with invoices he’d have to check with the actual client to make sure it is okay to release them, but he didn’t have to be rude and nasty about it.
I don’t think the rude phone cell phone caller has anything to do with the idea of dealing with middle men either, but it sure does show how he thinks he’s the most important person in the world and somehow “middle men” are unimportant.
Yes, he definitely is a little too self-important, LOL.
I agree with you on the middleman thing, too. There’s a big difference between having certain professionals handle certain matters on your behalf and pawning off all your dealings with clients onto your “team” and never dealing directly with the client whatsoever which is the other end of the spectrum.
I actually prefer to deal with my clients myself too. But as to certain tasks, (like posting blog posts ugh) I might get someone else to do them but I don’t think less of the people who do those tasks, like he apparently does. I’m thankful someone wants to do it!
That’s the point I’m making. Just having someone make a simple call or email about an incidental matter is not pawning off the relationship or thinking you are too important.
For example, I don’t answer clients’ phones or act in any way like a receptionist for clients. However, I do make phone calls occasionally and frequently email their clients on their behalf for certain information-gathering activities.
Does that mean my clients are pawning off their relationships and not providing personal support to their clients? Absolutely not because the primary and most important work and communication is ALWAYS between my clients and their clients. Any contact their clients have with me is ancillary and supplemental and in a support capacity. That’s a big difference between someone who is in business to simply pawn clients off in an assembly line-like manner onto employees and team members as a matter of course. HUGE difference and completely different scenario.
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