Category Archives: Personal Musings

August 31, 2010 – 2:02 pm

What Are You Most Proud of About Yourself?

I can’t remember what got me starting thinking about this, but I know it was some little, innocuous thought that eventually led me to musing about some things that I’m really proud of about myself.

For one thing, I’ve always created my own opportunities. Like when my daughter was a little less than a year old and I was ready to get back in the workforce. I was still really young and at the time, the job market wasn’t that great. I ended up hearing about a volunteer opportunity at a family services organization and I thought it would be a great way to brush up on my existing skills, learn some new ones and gain some more recent references.

And it turned out to be just that… a really wonderful experience and opportunity all the way around that eventually helped me get into a great job working for the city/county and later, an even better job working for a labor union. I have always been proud of the fact that I created my own opportunity in that respect, as well as the fact that even though it was a volunteer position, I treated it as if it were a paid position. I showed up on time, every time, on the three days per week that I committed to work. If the organization had had more money in the budget, they would have hired me in a heartbeat, but even so, I gained an enormous amount of respect and admiration (and references) because of the dedication and helpfulness and skills I demonstrated while I was there.

Another thing I’m really proud of is the fact that I always pay those who do work for me. I got to thinking about this from a conversation I had recently with my guy. Somehow we got on the topic of this one really icky client I had way back in the day. I tried making a go of things with this client for about year, but I finally realized his lack of honesty and integrity simply wasn’t going to change.

This was back when I was still doing bookkeeping, in addition to administrative support, in my practice. This guy was always paying vendors late, he wouldn’t submit employee monies to the agencies they were supposed to go to, etc., etc. For example, he had a couple employees who were having their checks garnished for child support. Well, he was having the money taken out of their checks, but he wasn’t sending it in to the agencies. (I did the bookkeeping and completed and filed the various tax/business forms and reports, but he wouldn’t let me do any actual bill paying or transferring of funds.) And it ended up causing some very serious, stressful problems for these employees.

He also wasn’t turning in the social security, medicare and other taxes to those agencies. I tried to impress upon him that these weren’t monies that were his to play with. They belonged to the employees and it was really going to end up coming back to haunt him if he didn’t take care of these things. He was already going through employee turnover like crazy because of his shoddy treatment and practices. And all the while, he was buying himself Harleys, living in a condo beyond his means, and generally not depriving himself of anything whatsoever while stiffing everyone else. He’d make a show of acknowledging what I was saying whenever I brought it up, just enough to make me think he wanted to make things right. Always wanting to think the best, I ended up being strung along for far too long because the bottom line was he didn’t care who he screwed over or how.

Anyway, we were talking about that situation and it reminded me of how I have always paid everyone I’ve ever worked with. I’ve never stiffed anyone, tried to cheat them, or made them wait for payment. I think that is absolutely wrong and I’m proud of myself for always living up to that value and walking my talk.

So those are just a couple things I’m proud of myself about. What about you? What kinds of things in your life or business are you most proud of? I’d love to hear your stories!

By Danielle Keister | Tagged | Comments (6)
August 27, 2010 – 10:00 am

Another Reason I Can’t Stand Internet Marketers

I was just listening to a podcast and something that was said reminded me of an Internet marketer who contacted me awhile back. She sent me a message on Twitter asking to talk with me. She didn’t say what it was, and I’m not interested in talking to just anyone, expending my time, unless I know what it’s about and I’m interested in it. Duh. So I replied with something to the effect of “Possibly. What is it you want to talk about?”

Never got a response.

Lord, I hate it when people do that. Don’t fricking waste my time asking me a question if you’re going to ignore me when I reply.

So whatever. Didn’t give it another thought until my phone started ringing off the hook a few weeks later. And I’m talking literally every single day, at least two calls or more from the same phone number, never once leaving a message.

Can we say I-R-R-I-T-A-T-I-N-G?!

Well, I don’t answer the phone. I simply don’t. I don’t need to. I’m not looking for more clients at the moment and if I were, I only talk to the ones who come through my website and go through my consultation form. And I’m sure as heck not answering anyone who refuses to leave a message. It’s phone harassment, plain and simple. If you don’t want to leave a message clearly stating your intentions–who you are and what you want–then I’m not interested. Simple as that. I might be running a business, but I’m a human being first and I refuse to deal with anyone who thinks they can treat people like a number and expects me to prostrate myself for their purposes. Have more respect for those you are calling and, gasp, you might get some back.

Well, after literally over a MONTH of this, whoever is calling from this number FINALLY leaves a message. At the same time, I get an email from this person. She states she is the Virtual Assistant to So-So Internet Marketer and launches into a short spiel about some program this Internet marketer is gearing toward Virtual Assistants, yada yada. Blech. I HATE those things because they are just exploiting Virtual Assistants. I absolutely detest those people. NO ONE has any business teaching VAs anything about Virtual Assistance except other VAs (and then, only the successful ones who have actual experience and substance to offer).

At this point, I’m thinking, how many hundreds of unanswered calls does this person need to get the message that “I’m not talking to you unless you tell me who you are and what you want.” And this is besides the fact that I’m really annoyed at this point and definitely not interested in speaking with anyone who engages in phone tactics like this.

So I reply to the email in the most direct way I can: “Not interested.”

And do you know they still continued to call me several times after that?!

This is all neither nor there. Just musing out loud. But it sure does bring me some feelings of gratitude today:

  • Grateful that I have absolute clarity about what I am in business to do (and what I’m not).
  • Grateful for my standards and boundaries.
  • Grateful that I make a lot of money and get to say “no” to crap (and people) I disdain or have no respect for.
  • Grateful that I’m not the poor schmuck having to take on that kind of work and make those kind of calls to people to earn a buck.
  • Grateful that I don’t have to be a telemarketer to make a living.
  • Grateful that I work with clients I love and respect (who do work I love and respect).
By Danielle Keister | Also posted in Rant & Raves, Virtual Assistant/Virtual Assistance | Tagged , , | Comments (3)
August 4, 2010 – 10:00 am

Don’t Be Confused

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.”

By Danielle Keister | Also posted in Business Savvy, Cool Stuff | Tagged , , | Comments (0)
July 16, 2010 – 10:12 am

This Is All a Journey

Starting a Virtual Assistant business, or any business for that matter, is going to be a journey. You won’t just open your doors overnight and bam! you’ve got clients, you’re making money and all goes perfectly, smoothly. It will not all fall into place and come together neatly with a bow on top without any glitches or stops and starts along the way.

You will grow in stages. Your learning and business evolution will be ongoing. What you know and understand now will be nothing compared to what you come to know and understand a year from now, two years from now, and so forth. After five years, you’ll look back and marvel at how much you didn’t know (but thought you did). You may even chuckle and feel a little sheepish about how you railed at and resisted the advice of those who have gone before and, as you realized later, actually knew what they were talking about. ;)

Not that any of this is a bad thing. It’s all a normal part of the process. It’s also why these kind of conversations exist on blogs and forums and so forth and are beneficial to your growth. People naturally want to help others. So even though you are not going to know everything right off the bat–and no one expects you to–they will raise your business consciousness. You might never have seen a path otherwise without it having been brought up in a discussion. Or things might have taken you much longer in business than need be without hearing about the mistakes of others. Without these conversations and help from your colleagues, you might keep banging your head upside the same old walls. Likewise, some things might not make sense to you in the beginning, but you come to understand them more clearly later after you’ve gained some experience under your belt. You suddenly “get” it.

Part of what got me to thinking on this was some recent correspondence with a colleague I hadn’t heard from in awhile. She related how she was agonizing over perfecting things. She was also so busy that she’d finally gotten to the point where she was actively seeking her own VA. She lamented that a few recent prospective clients she had consultations with weren’t so ideal. And while another one was really great, she still wasn’t happy with her consultation process and felt she could have done better.

And while she was angsting over all this, I’m seeing nothing but marvelous stuff! She’s established a pipeline and is getting consultations! She’s also got a way better idea where she wants to head with them than she did a year ago. She’s fine-tuning things to suit her needs and she’s able to more quickly identify who is right for her and who isn’t. These are all signs of business maturation and growth!

So many people who play it safe, who are so afraid of failing or making a mistake they never try anything new, who never open their minds to advice that goes against the idiotic status quo, never, ever reach these stages. Which is really sad.

So you’ve got to remind yourself now and again that growing in your business isn’t necessarily always going to be comfortable. You are going to agonize and twist and turn as you hone your processes and try new things. You simply aren’t growing without some discomfort and mess. And you will make what you feel are mistakes and gaffes, but they really aren’t. They are merely learning processes.

And honing is something that will occur throughout the life of your business. That is, if you’re doing it right. You will never reach “perfection.” I think it’s entirely the wrong word to be associating with in the first place. I like to think of business as an artwork in progress. And “progress” is something that is always evolving, forwardly and upwardly.

So embrace these things! What you’re going through is absolutely normal. You’ve got to pat yourself on the back for stepping up and allowing yourself to make mistakes and feel uncomfortable! Be proud about where you are now compared to where you were when you started!

By Danielle Keister | Also posted in Business Savvy, Virtual Assistant/Virtual Assistance | Tagged , , | Comments (4)
July 13, 2010 – 10:00 am

YOU Are the Captain of Your Own Ship

YOU have to decide–specifically and clearly–what you’re in business to do.

If you fall to pieces and think you have to start over the second one uninformed client doesn’t get it or looks at you cross-eyed…

If you blow with the wind every time a client thinks you should be doing this and doing that, you’re never going to get anywhere, and your life and business will be anything but your own.

You can’t please everyone. Not everyone is going to get it. And you can’t be in business to do everything that everyone wants.

By Danielle Keister | Also posted in Business Savvy | Tagged , | Comments (12)
June 1, 2010 – 10:00 am

Stealing is Not Love

What does love mean to you? How about in the global sense, toward people who aren’t your family or friends? Strangers even.

I mean, we probably don’t “love” people we don’t know in the same way we do our family,  friends and those closest to us. But isn’t it safe to say that most of us wish our fellow human beings well?

I think so. If you spend any time on the Internet, you really gain an overall sense of what I think is a predominant sentiment: That we are all here on this Earth to help each other and do good. Get to the core of anyone’s passionate purpose and my bet is you’ll see that as the root (well, maybe most of the time, LOL).

Fame and fortune aren’t what make people truly happy. They are often byproducts of finding one’s passion and purpose, but it’s doing something good and helpful for others where people find their true purpose and sense of accomplishment and fulfillment.

Would you agree?

This is how I see the world. That we are all here to help one another. It’s a form of love, if you like. It’s what makes the world go ‘round.

Those of us who have been in business awhile, who have actual expertise and success, often create products and training that we charge for. And rightly so. There is nothing wrong with making money from the expertise and intellectual capital you have fairly and squarely earned and want to share. In fact, it sets a good business example for those who would like to become successful in their own businesses as well. Catering to the poverty mindset is not helpful to anyone whatsoever.

Unfortunately, there are many folks out there who aren’t experts, who have no background, who haven’t accomplished any level of success in their own business, who haven’t in any way, shape or form put in the time and sweat to earn and develop their own intellectual capital, but will stoop to stealing from those who have and offering it as their own.

Stealing is not love, folks. It’s not a form of flattery. It’s not a compliment. It’s theft of the recognition and remuneration of the rightful owners. It breeds distrust and dishonesty. And we can’t tolerate that kind of thing in the world, much less our profession, if we expect to make it a better place.

By Danielle Keister | Also posted in Business Savvy, Virtual Assistant/Virtual Assistance | Tagged | Comments (2)
May 31, 2010 – 10:00 am

Today I’m Grateful for Our Service Men and Women

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.

By Danielle Keister | Comments (0)
May 27, 2010 – 12:35 pm

Another Reason Why Sending Emails to Your List and Customers is Helpful to Them

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.

By Danielle Keister | Also posted in Business Savvy, Rant & Raves, Uncategorized | Tagged | Comments (1)
May 6, 2010 – 10:00 am

Why Technology Will Never Replace the Human Brain

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.

By Danielle Keister | Also posted in Business Savvy, Virtual Assistant/Virtual Assistance | Tagged , , , , | Comments (2)
April 30, 2010 – 10:00 am

Why Aren’t You Involved in Other Organizations?

There are a few particular people I don’t care for in this industry because of their ethics. To be clear, I’m not talking about personal differences. Just because you dislike someone does not make that someone unethical. I’m talking specifically about people who have a history and ongoing pattern of telling bald-faced lies and engaging in unethical conduct.

Why on earth would I (or you) want to have anything to do people like that or their organizations? If you knew the truth about someone like that, how do you ignore it? How do you reconcile it? How do you make yourself un-know what you know? And knowing what I know and how I felt about it/them, wouldn’t it make me an inauthentic, two-faced phony to smile in their face just so I could have access to their group?

Live and let live, I always say. Whatever those folks’ life lessons are to learn, it’s not my problem. The world is big enough that we can go about our separate ways and not be bothered with each other. I don’t have to be concerned with them or deal with them in any way. And so I don’t.

My feeling is that if you don’t like someone or you find them to be dishonest and unethical, you should own it. That doesn’t mean you have to go out of your way to shout it from the rooftops at every turn, but jeez louise, stop trying to play both sides of the fence and talk out of both sides of your mouth.

By Danielle Keister | Comments (0)