The Gritty Virtual Assistant Blog

A woman (not a VA, but someone in the real estate business if I understood correctly) posted to one of the Virtual Assistant forums recently expressing her frustration in finding Virtual Assistants (Administrative Consultants) to join her referral network. She said she receives at least one request a day from clients seeking VAs, but she was having a heck of time finding VAs to join her network and wondered if any of them wanted clients anymore.

She asked for feedback on what she might be missing. My response was this:

“It also depends on the request. Many Virtual Assistants/Administrative Consultants are turned off by requests that indicate the business owner does not understand the nature of the relationship (one of business owner to business owner), speaks in employment terms, or otherwise appears to be seeking either an employee or a flunky, rather than a skilled professional in the expertise of administrative support.”

Which is exactly what goes on so much of the time. So many potential clients these days have been misinformed about the nature of our work and the relationship (which, by the way, is our own fault, not theirs). Without knowing it, they speak to us in ways that raise our red flags that this is a client who “doesn’t get it” and “could be difficult to work with” and “sounds like he thinks I’m going to be at his beck-and-call like an employee.” And there you have that first disconnect.

It doesn’t help that the term “Virtual Assistant” has branded itself as the cheap labor pool of flunkies. So when you have a segment of the marketplace with that perception, that definitely colors how they look upon the work, what they’re looking for (cheap, which you can’t be if you’re in business) and how they approach VAs.

Anyway, after a few responses, the woman went on to lament that she was seeking skilled Virtual Assistants with “qualified references” and those who were interested in real partnering relationships. It also turned out that she charges a fee to join her network. She was really frustrated; she thought she had such a kick-butt idea but it was falling on deaf ears.

I could tell her that using phrasing such as “qualified references” is often an indication that someone doesn’t understand the nature of the relationship. Employees provides references. Business owners offer testimonials and case studies and such.  That would be my first red flag that this could be person expecting some kind of employment dog and pony show which is not how you approach a business-to-business relationship.

But here again, the term “Virtual Assistant” confuses clients and contradicts things and causes exactly this kind of misunderstanding and miscommunication. If you are a business owner, you aren’t anyone’s assistant. You are an administrative support expert. We keep saying we are business owners and experts in our own right, but then we go and negate all that by calling ourselves assistants.

It’s no wonder so many poor clients just don’t understand. Gotta stop that, folks. Moving onto a term like Administrative Consultant helps alleviate these kind of issues and better advances the perceptions and understandings we want and need for clients to have so that there is more alignment in understandings and expectations and we can have better, more productive initial conversations.

Getting back to this woman’s dilemma, I could tell her the other part of the problem which is that the kind of VAs (Administrative Consultants) she’s seeking don’t need those kind of referrals and therefore aren’t interested in paying for them. Those who are more established and successful have learned how to create their own pipelines. They don’t need to pay someone else to find clients for them.

And even if they did join, there’s nothing guaranteeing that the prospects they are sent are the kind of qualified prospects they want. Just because you have a boatload of potential clients seeking VAs doesn’t mean they are going to be the kind of clients VAs want to work with or that any of them match an individual VA’s particular target market and ideal client profile.

There are just too many other, more effective and direct ways for Virtual Assistants (heck, any business owners) to find exactly the kind of clients they want for free. And those who know how to create their own pipelines don’t want or need to pay for referral networks to do it.

UPDATE: 479 participants so far! Spread the word so we can reach goal by April 1!

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.