I love listening to NPR in the evenings. This week, they’ve been doing a three-part series about doctors in primary care. In this series, they reported on the catastrophic shortage of primary care doctors who provide basic health care (they make around $150,000 a year compared to the multiple six-figure incomes of specialists), and took at look at primary care doctors who were opting for solo practice.

As all of us solopreneurs know, going solo comes with some special challenges. We have to be more concerned about profitability and leverage. At the same time, as I’ve long been saying, small is the new big. Nothing wrong with those folks who want to be a big as they can get, but at some point, “big” begins to lose it’s structural and quality integrity. The left hand too often doesn’t know what the right hand is doing or thinking. And people become numbers and transactions instead of, um, people.

So anyway, in listening to this series, it occurred to me that primary care docs in solo practice might be a perfect market for an enterprising Administrative Support Consultant (Virtual Assistant). Some kind of knowledge or past background and experience in healthcare or family practice is likely to provide an advantage.

Big companies and corporations don’t really need what we are in business to do because their workloads are so big they really need in-house, dedicated staff–and can afford it–and because when they are interested, it’s more in the vein of impersonal, commoditized, transactional outsourcing as cheaply as they can get it. That’s not an easy way to make a living for the provider willing to offer that kind of service, and it inherently requires a much bigger business model that depends on volume business.

It’s the smaller companies and solos who really make for the best fit because they place more value in having a more personal type of ongoing support relationship that allows them to stay small (which many of us do by choice) while being as profitable and efficient as possible so they can give the best quality care and service to their clients. They see, understand and appreciate the value much more easily so it’s a much easier “sell.”

If I was someone interested in this market, what I would be doing is calling up a few of primary care solo doctors, taking them out to lunch (individually) and picking their brains about how they are running their practices, what kinds of administrative work are they fielding, who is doing what now and what areas might they see as not needing to necessarily be in the office, and offer up ideas and get feedback on other areas the doctor didn’t think of. Said enterprising Administrative Support Consultant (Virtual Assistant) could in turn, armed with this intelligence about how these businesses are run, what work is involved and where the doctors’ interests are, build a whole compelling message and practice around administratively supporting this very specialized target market. I see all kinds of potential and opportunity here!

It’s a group that certainly meets the first three criteria of a target market: 1) must be able to afford, 2) must have a need for the solution you’re in business to offer and 3) there must be enough of them that you can find them easy enough and there are enough to fill your practice. And because they are consciously and intentionally interested in being small, they are going to be very interested in your support because it will help them keep the quality of their practice while allowing them to be more efficient, streamlined and profitable.

Heck, I go so far as to say for any of our clients, we offer them an opportunity to actually improve or increase the quality of their own businesses because they can be more profitable and get more done with our help. On top of that, it will allow existing in-house staff to focus more on their core work, all of which again helps streamline and increase efficiency and quality. Just think of how much more and better patient care in-house staff can focus on giving (“practicing at the top of their license,” or doing what they are most trained to do) when they are freed from back-end administrative work that an Administrative Support Consultant can take on for them.

Here’s a link to one of the articles (which also provides an audio recording if you prefer to listen): http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129422386

Happy enterprising! (I’d love to hear from any of you who are already targeting this market or who are interested in looking into it. Let’s hear your success stories!)

One reason I think administrative expertise has for so long or so often not been given the same kind of respect as other expertise is that it is/was always paired with being an assistant, which is automatically/inherently subjugating.

You don’t have to be an assistant to be an administrative expert. Beware of Virtual Assistant “gurus” (many of whom weren’t successful in their own businesses or who haven’t run their own practice in decades–or worse, ever!) and training programs that are simply training people to be glorified assistants who only call themselves business owners. That’s not a new paradigm; it’s just another name for the same old thing.

I see so many Virtual Assistants struggling because of the very fact that they’ve been taught to be “assistants.” Which is exactly what limits their earning potential and creates practices that enslave them. It’s why we see many of them turning into virtual staffing/multi-VA businesses or starting their own training programs or professional organizations instead of supporting and collectively strengthening the established ones already in existence for the betterment of the profession. They think that’s the only way they can begin to earn better and not be buried in the work. But it’s a lie.

If you are running a business, you are not anyone’s assistant. The term “assistant” itself causes all kinds of problems, misaligned expectations and confusion about the nature of the business relationship, which forces you to do double-time in educating clients. Our lives could all be a lot easier without it. It’s why I’ve moved on to the term Administrative Consultant/Administrative Support Consultant.

Being an administrative expert and being an assistant are not one and the same thing. Pick one. Or do both if you choose. But know this–you absolutely do not need to be an assistant in order to deliver value and expertise and have very personal, collaborative relationships with clients. I know I certainly didn’t go into business for myself to continue to be anyone’s assistant, but instead to provide my administrative skills and talents to help people and practice the craft and expertise of administrative support.

Here’s an article published this week in The Portable Business™, which you can subscribe to here.

I’m not much of a spring cleaner… I’m more of a fall cleaner. To me, it’s the perfect time to start gearing up for the coming new year. One of the ways I prepare is by purging, regrouping and organizing. Below are a few activities you might to consider doing as well.

1. Organizing Emails. I’m an Outlook user. Personally, I like using folders to store and organize emails. The search feature fails to find mail I’m looking far too often to be a reliable method. So what I do is create folders under the “Deleted Items” section rather than in my “In” box area. I don’t keep a lot of folders. The only emails I am a packrat about are those to and from clients. I give each client a folder and under each client, I create subfolders for each month.

2. Deleting or Archiving Old Emails. Around the end of the year, I go through my list of folders and archive those of clients with whom I am no longer working. I keep six months of current client folders and archive the rest.

3. Taking Stock of Your Online Documents. This is also a great time of year to do a quick run-through of your document files and folders and see where you can reorganize, consolidate and purge.

4. Cleaning Out the Supply Closet. Okay, I’m sort of an organizing freak so this is something I enjoy doing periodically. Supply areas are places where we tend to put “stuff” and forget about. Again, this is a great time of year to clean out the old, give away extra or old equipment to someone who can use it, and make room for the new year with a clean slate.

5. Streamlining Hardcopy Files. There’s a lot of paper that I put into PDF and store online. I’ve also gone entirely electronic billing and online bill pay. However, paper is still a fact of life. There are just some things that are easier to read when they are printed out. And scanning printed materials to turn them into PDFs does create an extra job that you might not have time for. So for the paper that I do keep, I have five different hanging folder filing sections:

Green – client files
Blue – tax, licensing and financial files
Red – accounts payable
Yellow – employee and contractor/subcontractor files
Clear – subject files

For those folders that deal with date ranges, this is a good time to add a new folder for the coming year. For example, say you have a file for bank statements and you keep these in a folder marked with the current year. Now is the time to create new folders for the coming year and stick them in the file. Then at the end of the year, when you are pulling out old files (such as old clients you no longer work with, for example), you can also pull out all your 2010 folders for storage and you’ll already have the new 2011 folders ready to go.

Dear Gritty VA:

I finally have a new client (who has signed the Virtual Assistance Retainer Agreement I ordered from you and customized for my business–thank you!). However, the client emailed me wanting me to sign a confidentiality/non-disclosure agreement which the owner forgot to give me at our meeting. Would that be necessary to do? –ST

Having a client ask you to sign a confidentiality agreement is a normal, reasonable request. And here’s why:

When working with clients, especially in our line of work, we are often privy and have access to their intellectual property and other proprietary knowledge, processes and information. Naturally, they wouldn’t want you to be taking their intellectual capital and proprietary information and using it for your own benefit, making derivative use of it in your own business, or in any way sharing or disclosing it to others. So the idea behind a confidentiality/non-disclosure agreement is that you’re basically making a legal promise that you won’t do that and if you breach that promise, they can seek injunctive relief and damages against you.

The reverse can also be true. You might have intellectual property and proprietary processes and information that clients become privy to that you wouldn’t want them sharing with others or repurposing for their own benefit. If you have any intellectual capital or proprietary information you want to protect, you might have clients sign your own confidentiality/non-disclosure agreement before working together.

But, as with any kind of legally binding contract, you want to be sure you know what you are signing and not signing away any reasonable right or recourse or be held to any unreasonable standard or liability. One thing in particular you want to look out for is any language that talks about you not working for anyone else doing the work you do. This is usually associated with terms like “non-competition.” (You’ll see this kind of language especially if they are using a generic agreement like you get at OfficeDepot or something—very, very bad idea as those things are fraught with terrible legal languaging and loopholes that expose both sides to liability.) If that kind of language is in there, you want to ask them to take it out before you sign anything. You’re a business and no one has the right to expect you to not work with other clients doing the very thing you are in business to do.

Another thing I want to mention that I see all the time in the VA world is this silliness about automatically providing clients with a confidentiality agreement. This is not your responsibility. That would be like a tenant providing the lease agreement to the landlord. Or a policyholder providing the insurance policy to the insurance company. The party with the confidential information at stake is the one who writes the instrument protecting and explaining the relationship, not the other way around.  So, if a client has IP they want to protect, it’s up to them to hire their own attorney and provide you with their own agreement. It’s not your job to do that for them and you could be creating more liability for yourself than is necessary.

And as the saying goes, I am not an attorney. This is not to be construed with legal advice, just my knowledge based on 14 years in business. I hope it helps, but when it comes to legal matters, you should always, always seek the advice and guidance of an attorney.

Saw another idiotic post about Virtual Assistants come through on my Google Alerts. Articles like these are responsible for miseducating the marketplace into thinking Virtual Assistants are some kind of substitute employee–which they are not.

It’s also why we have so many new VAs coming into this profession thinking they are substitute employees filling a position. Just about every freaking article they read anymore talks about Virtual Assistants as if they were still working for bosses. They use terms like job, position, interview, resume…

These people are such morons. Once and for all–Virtual Assistance is NOT a job. It’s not a “position” on your “team.” It’s a business. And it’s not any client’s place to be providing job descriptions. If that’s what they’re doing, then that person is an employee–a telecommuter–not a Virtual Assistant. Virtual Assistants are service providers who run their own businesses and specialize in administrative support. They tell clients how they can help them and what they can and will do for them (as well as what they can’t or won’t), not the other way around.

And Virtual Assistants and clients had both better get it straight because the IRS will get to you sooner or later if you don’t. (I’ve known about this coming and have been telling people so since 2005.) Getting people to work for you from home is not a license to misclassify employees and be tax cheats. Virtual Assistants: run your business like a business.

And by the way, contractor, subcontractor, independent contractor… those are all terms that mean the same thing–business owner. There is absolutely NO third classification where an employer gets to hire someone to work like an employee but not report them as such nor pay taxes on them. NO SUCH THING whatsoever. Someone is either an employee or they are a business owner, regardless of the term they use (e.g. freelancers, independent contractor, subcontractor). And any business that farms out workers, virtual or otherwise, is called a temp agency or staffing agency and those workers they loan out to people are employees.

Came across Bradley Moore’s post on “The Spiritually Astute Leader’s Guide to What’s Hot in 2010″ and loved his humorous, candid style. Number one on his list was of particular note since I’m a die-hard proponent of uni-tasking (perfect term!) and have been since day one. You just can’t focus on anything well and be fully present when you’re trying to focus on a million other things all at the same time. Be sure and read and follow the links to the studies confirming what us uni-taskers have known all along.

Media Multitaskers Pay Mental Price, Stanford Study Shows

The Key to Effective Unitasking

Really, really smart thinking by Admiral James Stockdale (tip of the hat to Perry Marshall for noting it):

“You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end (which you can never afford to lose) with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”

Whew! What a hectic last two weeks it’s been. I am always energized when I get to talk with fellow Virtual Assistants and Administrative Consultants, but I tell ya, putting on live events is a LOT of time and work. My “Value-Based Pricing & Packaging” Biz Intensive went really well AND I was able to package it up as a self-study course even quicker than I imagined! (Of course, I’d been working on it since February but I hit a block and had to set it aside for awhile. Once I took it back up again, everything fell into place.)

For those who missed the live class, you can now purchase it as a self-study guide from the store (includes 23 page PDF guide of tools, info, exercises and samples and two MP4 presentation videos).  Plus, I’m going to give you a HUGE discount for the next few hours only! There’s no special code or anything to enter. Just purchase the product and you’ll automatically get $50 off if you purchase by midnight, August 5 (that’s this Thursday).

Here’s an article published this week in The Portable Business™, which you can subscribe to here.

It’s true to a certain extent that you may lose some prospects by not getting back to them right away. At the same time, you’d never get any work done if you answered every call the second the phone rang. It can be crazy-making to even try. As with most things, instituting smart policies and procedures in your business will help you improve your response times and communications. Here are a few tips:

1. Establish communication policies. Set a standard for responding to inquiries (e.g., “within 24 hours”). Decide which inquiries get priority attention (e.g., clients or prospective clients).
2. Post your office hours and response protocols. Tell folks, on your website and in your voicemails, what days and times your office is “open” and how soon they may expect your return email or call.
3. Require clients to follow certain procedures. While it might seem like letting clients call you for anything and everything at any time is great service, doing so will actually create conditions in your business that lead to poor performance and quality of service. To be successful, you need to have some protocols that let you manage work and communication well in your business. Don’t be afraid to tell clients how work requests must be submitted (e.g., you might require that they be submitted in writing by email only) or that phone calls/meeting are done only by appointment.
4. Get a receptionist. If you worry that a happy, informative Voicemail message isn’t enough, but still need uninterrupted concentration time to get work done, you can hire a live Virtual Receptionist service like Ruby Receptionists.
5. Map out a process for qualifying inquiries. There are lots of ways your website can do this work for you so you can reduce the time you spend on unnecessary calls and emails. You can design your website so that visitors are guided toward one action (e.g., submitting a form to schedule a consultation). If you prefer one method of contact over another, emphasize that method and make it the most visible and prominent. Another way to pre-qualify clients is to have them complete an online form that will help you determine if someone meets your minimum criteria for an ideal client and what your next steps should be with that person. In your Voicemail message, ask callers to be sure and visit your website (if they haven’t yet) and give them the url.

Remember, in order to give great service you have to set foundations (policies, standards, protocols, workflows) in your business that enable you to do that consistently and sustainably.

An Internet marketer recently announced (in the typical hypey fashion of Internet marketers) that she “shockingly” wasn’t going to do an ezine anymore.

My first thought was big deal. What’s so all-fired earth-shattering about that? If something isn’t working for ya, by all means, stop wasting the time and energy. And if you want to start charging for something that you previously gave away for free, just do it. No need to contrive any artifice as an excuse.

Of course, there’s always the possibility that maybe a thing that isn’t working could work if it were just done a different way.

Here’s what I know:

Ezines can be done well and they can be done not so well. They can be done simply or they can be done in way that makes them difficult, complicated, burdensome and unsustainable.

Having put out an ezine every Monday for, what, four years or so now, I can tell you that if done right, they can absolutely be a fantastic pipeline and additional marketing channel for your business.

I would also tell you (and the Internet marketer) that just because the feedback or participation isn’t readily apparent, that doesn’t mean it’s not working for you. I sometimes get frustrated with people’s timidity in our industry. But I have to remind myself that sometimes new thinking and ideas put forth are so completely different from the status quo, people don’t know what to make of it at first. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t paying attention. Because I can see very clearly, not just from my Aweber stats and reports, but also through all the times I hear that someone found me or connected with me via the ezine (or my blog, for that matter), that they are opening and reading and saving and forwarding it.

I wouldn’t abandon the idea of doing an ezine just because some Internet marketer dropped hers and now declares them dead for everyone. The key here is to really know your stuff as well as your target market. Because if you don’t, you’re not going to have much to say that is going to be of interest and value to them.

Ezines can be a great tool for growing the know-like-trust factor and nurturing relationships along. But for an ezine to be successful, there has to be some commitment on your part. You have to write about things your audience will find useful and interesting and you need to have a regular and consistent publishing schedule.

Another thing I think is really important is authenticity. So many ezines are following the most obvious 1-2-3 steps… they get so caught up in following the Internet marketer stock-in-trade formula (talk about your kids/pets, launch into self-promotion, feature article, resource) they end up losing their own voice. Hey, I’m sure your kids are great (just as I think mine is), but I’m really not interested in hearing about them week after freaking week. It’s just so obviously disingenuous and manipulative. Then again, maybe I’ve just got more of a nose for the bullshit factor than most people, LOL. (Anyone else feel me on this?).

Anyway, you want to keep it short and sweet so that a) it doesn’t become a drag, and b) you’re an easy read. There’s no point in doing an ezine (or anything for that matter) if you eventually hate doing it or it’s so long that it’s too much work for your audience to pay attention to. If you can remember who your audience is (that is, for God’s sake, stop writing for colleagues and focus on your clients and what they’re interested in instead) and keep it real so they can really connect with you as a person (and not simply as some Internet marketer trying to capture the money of the masses), an ezine can be a wickedly wonderful way to grow your list and nurture relationships. Of course, as with anything, an ezine isn’t the only way to do that.

You don’t have to do an ezine at all. Your business isn’t going take a nosedive just because you decide not to do an ezine. In fact, I would advise against it if you aren’t up the challenges outlined above. But then again, you never know unless you try it out.

Bottom-line, there are good reasons for not doing an ezine. Ditching the idea just because it didn’t work for someone else isn’t one of them.