I have a client who only sells wholesale products with an occasional retail customer. I have convinced him to think about sending a mass email marketing campaign/newsletter for his wholesale customers since his previous website designer never even introduced this idea to him. His response was that he only sells to wholesale customers and is not sure what to send to them.  My suggestion was to send loyalty rewards, small one-time bonus, or a small gift thanking them for their business. Do you have any suggestions for a marketing campaign from a wholesale company to its customers? –LN

Nah, I don’t get into advising clients on how to market their businesses. That’s not administrative support and marketing consulting isn’t the business I’m in.

I might offer my views and suggestions from an administrative standpoint. I would also provide them with the administrative support related to executing and implementing many of their marketing activities and initiatives.

But beyond that, how they market their business is up to them. Or between them and their marketing consultant.

I think too many VAs are pressured into thinking that they have to fill ALL these other roles in their clients’ businesses. And that’s just not the case. The ONLY role you have to fulfill is the one you are in business to fulfill–administrative support. You will burn yourself out really quick trying to be all things, do all things, for clients, not to mention greatly diminish your effectiveness with all the constant switching of gears.

I mean, would you ask a plumber to fix your car? Of course not. They’re completely different kinds of expertise and lines of work.

Have opinions. Share ideas, resources and suggestions. Being a partner to clients means they get the benefits of your experiences and input. That’s definitely of value and they might learn or hear about something new because of that that they wouldn’t otherwise. But don’t feel like you have to take on roles you aren’t in business to take on.

And definitely don’t expend your time and energy being more invested in helping with something that the client isn’t even interested in. You can’t care more about their business than they do themselves.

You’re someone who deals with plumbing, pipes and fixing toilets, not someone who works on cars.

So if people are asking you to fix their car, perhaps you aren’t making it clear exactly what business you are in and what your expertise is.

Or, let’s say you are both a plumber AND a mechanic.

Would anyone with a properly working brain think that plumbing and auto repair are the same thing?

Of course not.

They’d expect to be charged and processed separately for each because they are two completely different things.

Just because you might do both things doesn’t make them the same thing.

Get clear about what you are in business to do. Distinguish the one main thing from other, differing things you might offer as well.

Because “anything and everything” isn’t a business category or a profession, much less an expertise.

HINT: Administrative Support is a niche, profession, business category, specialty and expertise all its own. You might also do web design, bookkeeping and any number of other things, but that does not make all those other things the same thing as administrative support.

One thing I am always trying to get through to Virtual Assistants and Administrative Consultants is to take certain words out of their vocabulary when it comes to their marketing and conversations with clients.

First, the word “assistant.” If you are a business owner, you aren’t anyone’s assistant. You are a professional providing an expertise. In our case, that is administrative support. The only connotation people understand when it comes to “assistant” is the employee kind. If you want clients to approach you as a fellow business peer with a valuable expertise to offer, stop calling yourself an assistant.

Second, the word “employee.” Stop making all those comparisons to employees (how much they save over employees, those ridiculous cost comparison charts, etc.). What we do isn’t about replacing employees. It’s about providing an expertise and a service for people who need it. When you compare yourself to an employee, all people hear and understand is the word “employee” and think that’s what you are.

Third, stop using derogatory words about our work like “menial,” “mundane” and the like. People don’t value grunt work and if that’s how you are portraying your work, they certainly aren’t going to see it as an expertise, much less pay professional fees for it. Words like that only portray you as a flunky and a gopher. If you don’t value and respect your work, no one else is going to either. You will never be able to help clients see and understand your work as valuable in the bigger context of their business if you keep using words like that.

Our work IS important. It is the backbone of every business and it absolutely does help business owners grow and move forward.

Don’t confuse the fact that there might be some mundane tasks and steps involved with the work overall (every expertise has those). Because it’s not about the tasks, it’s about the results–how your work helps clients grow and progress and keeps their businesses humming along smoothly, professionally, effectively and profitably.

For more words to be take out of your vocabulary, see a couple of my older posts here, Delete These Words from Your Business Vocabulary and here, Affordable Should Be Taken Out Back and Shot.

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!)

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, manage, train…

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.

1. To conserve energy. You waste vital energy by trying to do everything yourself in your business. Energy is a finite commodity that comes at a premium when you are running a business. If you spend it all on back-end work, it will deplete the reserves you have for creativity, brainstorming, marketing, developing your business and working with clients.
2. To create more time. You have better things to do with your time as a business owner than trying to take care of your own administrative work. When you allow an Administrative Consultant to shoulder some of the burden, you can double–even triple–the time you have at your disposal for more important things, such as working with clients, marketing and networking, creating new products and services, or taking time off to recharge.
3. To stay focused. Trying to take care of every detail yourself in your business will keep you distracted and overwhelmed. Don’t do that. Hire key partners–such as an Administrative Consultant–to help shoulder the load so you can keep your eyes and mind on your goals.
4. To make faster progress. You can’t be a master of all things. Not to mention the fact that if you don’t excel at certain work, it will be harder and take you longer to accomplish. You will get so much more done, far more quickly, working with an Administrative Consultant than you would trying to do it all by yourself.
5. To make your life easier. Trying to juggle every single ball in your business all by yourself will stress you out and burn you out. Guaranteed. Working with an Administrative Consultant will cut that stress out and make your life much more peaceful.
6. To double your resources. Two brains are better than one. When you partner with an Administrative Consultant, all of that expert’s knowledge, expertise and resources are lent to your business. You create a smarter, stronger business foundation as a result.
7. To make more money. When you have more time, energy and focus to devote to working with clients, marketing and developing your business, you will make more money. It’s as simple as that.

The bottom-line is that you squander more than you save by trying to do it all yourself. What you gain in time, energy, ease and progress will always be greater than any fees you pay for a competent, expert Administrative Consultant.

A one-time project is like a one-night stand. You are strangers and don’t know each other at all. You do it once and never see that person again.

Occasional project work with a repeat customer is like a booty call or friends-with-benefits. You might get in bed together once awhile, but you’re there for one thing with no other strings attached. There’s only a very superficial level of familiarity.

Providing administrative support is about being in a relationship with a client. You’re both there for the big picture and know that familiarity, knowledge and understanding can only be shared, grown and deepened in an ongoing, committed relationship.

If VAs would simply stop trying to call everything Virtual Assistance and learn to identify, define and separate business categories for themselves (and not let clients define that for them), they could begin to earn better. They could charge one retainer for administrative support and then charge separately for work and projects that fall under different business categories entirely.

A good example of this is the argument I hear new Virtual Assistants put forth constantly. “Well, when I was an executive assistant, I also did bookkeeping and web design and copyrighting and this and that and the other.”

So, you’re saying that because employers piled a load of other work onto the shoulders of administrative staff because they were trying to save a buck at your expense, that means as a business owner you should lump everything you know how to do under one banner and offer it as all one and the same? As an employee, you had no say in the matter and trooped along like a good soldier. And hey, learning new skills and tinkering with new programs can be just plain fun. But it is neither smart nor profitable to carry that kind of employee mindset over into your business. If you do, I guarantee sooner or later you will realize the consequences of this and the wisdom of the advice I give you today.

Just as a doctor is different from an attorney, there are different classifications of work and business. For example, Web design, a separate profession in its own right, is inherently project-oriented work. So, it immediately differs from administrative support in that respect. More importantly, it is something that requires entirely different skills, processes, knowledge and talents from administrative support. For this reason, it is a completely separate category of business and expertise for which you can charge separately as an additional income stream.

No one is saying that you can’t be a VA if you also do Web design (or bookkeeping or copyrighting or marketing or social media or whatever). You can be a VA and also a web designer (or bookkeeper or ghost writer, etc.) if that’s what you want to do. It’s just that they are not all one and the same thing. Once you start grasping this, you’ll begin to gain more clarity about which business you intend to be in and what to more appropriately call yourself. This will start you on the path to better earning because you’ll be able to see and think more clearly about what should fall under your administrative support umbrella and what falls under another business category altogether (you can call these “divisions”) and should be charged for separately.

YOU have to make these distinctions and classifications in your business. Don’t let clients dictate these things. Because that’s the other part of the problem–VAs doing (and giving away) all this other work beyond administrative support because clients keep trying to pile everything on without paying extra for it. And it’s keeping you in the poor house.

Of course, this is happening with your consent if you refuse to get conscious about these things. It’s not a partnership if you are being taken advantage of. By the same token, you aren’t being taken advantage if you are allowing it. If you keep lumping everything under the Virtual Assistance/administrative support umbrella, you will continue to deprive yourself of opportunities to earn better and grow your business in profitable, sustainable ways.

A project is something that is basically one-off, one-time work. It has a start and a finish. Web design is a good example of project work. It’s a one-time thing where you are hired specifically to do that one thing and that one thing isn’t ongoing because there is a finish, which is the completion of the site design.

Support, on the other hand, is something that is ongoing. In the case of administrative support, it’s a body, a package, of any number of administrative tasks, roles and functions in a business that are recurring and continuous throughout the life of that business.

For example, you don’t just return one customer’s call and that’s it, you never have to call another customer in your life, right? Of course not. So customer service is just one aspect, one area in a business in which you will have to engage in any number and kind of tasks and actions throughout the life of the business. There is no beginning and ending like with project work. It is ongoing.

When you understand the differences clearly, you can begin to better distinguish categories of work and services in your business so that you can create more revenue streams and make more money. So that means, you can group all kinds of administrative support into retainer packages and then charge separately for specific projects and other work unrelated to administrative support.

It’s certainly not attractive marketing-wise. It portrays what you do as unimportant and of less value or consequence. It implies that there is no special talent, knowledge, skills or training involved in your expertise (and we Virtual Assistants know that’s not the case). People simply hold specialists in higher esteem; they perceive greater value.

So I want to remind you that as a Virtual Assistant you are not a generalist. You have a specialty:  the specialty of administrative support. That makes you an administrative expert or administrative support specialist, not a generalist (unless, of course, you really are someone with no skills, experience or talent for this work). Remember that.