The Virtual Assistant Handbook
Nadine Hill
First Published In Great Britain 2009 by www.BookShaker.com
© Copyright Nadine Hill
Smashwords Edition
This book is available in print at
Amazon.com & Amazon.co.uk
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Typeset in Trebuchet
For each and every one of my valued clients, thank you.
Acknowledgements
I’ve always wondered what I’d say in an ‘Oscar acceptance speech’ – this is my version of it!
I want to start off by thanking my super support team! My mum, Celia Johnson and my mother-in-law Val Hill. They help me week in, week out with childcare and without their help and loving support, it would have been impossible to find the time to write this book! Your help means more to me than you could ever imagine ladies, thank you.
Thank you to Gillie and the team at Telebizz for their support, friendship and encouragement – we work really well together.
Thank you POW girls, CCC girls and the MYM team. Your continued support, friendship and belief in me means such a lot.
Thanks Dad for always being there. Thank you Debbie Jenkins and Joe Gregory from www.bookshaker.com for helping me bring this book to fruition. Thank you to the fabulous friends and clients who’ve been in my life over the last few years.
And the biggest thanks of all go to my beautiful children for making me happier than I ever thought possible and to my husband Simon - my soulmate, childhood sweetheart and best friend.
Praise for Nadine’s Advice
"The book is crammed full of really helpful tips and is heaven sent for a complete novice like me. It is a thoroughly enriching and inspirational read with very clear and easy to understand references. I would thoroughly recommend this to anyone considering making the leap to becoming a VA."
Alison Wright, Co Durham
"The book is a fantastic read with loads of excellent practical things that people can do if they aspire to be a VA. Also I think there is great stuff for everyone, not just VAs. I took note of a few things myself!"
David Slane, Regional Director - Local Business, Barclays
"I am a new VA and feel that this book was written just for me. It is so open and honest and points out many mistakes that I was unaware of, even after completing a recognised VA diploma. Nadine has given me such good ideas about how to focus on my niche and I have found her book very useful."
Sharlene Smith, VA, www.e-virtuality.co.uk
"Although I'm not in the VA business I found the book easy to understand, written with a clear, friendly writing style."
Catherine Gregory, Senior Career Development Adviser, University of Bradford
Introduction
When I started my business, The Dream PA, I was one of the first VAs (Virtual Assistants) in the Yorkshire area. I had originally intended to be a ‘freelance VA’ – working from home supporting several small businesses and choosing my own hours. I wanted freedom over my schedule and a work life balance. Little did I know that I’d end up creating a formal business, employing staff and renovating a property to become an office for this growing enterprise – a new way of working in an emerging industry!
When I started, there was nothing else like my business to emulate. There was no ‘model’ in existence for a business that supported other businesses in this way, virtually. The nearest example was that of a temping agency, but I didn’t ‘send anyone out’ to do work on site, as my clients didn’t have ‘sites’! My clients all worked from home as I did, so in creating The Dream PA, I was effectively writing the blueprint for a new way of working. I’m not saying that what I’ve done is the only way to run a VA business, but it’s the way I have developed, through trial and error, to find a successful formula that suits me. However the beauty of being a Virtual Assistant is that you can create the kind of business you want, to suit your schedule and your own boundaries – It’s as flexible as you want to make it! It’s only the affordability and accessibility of broadband technology in the UK that makes this kind of ‘new working arrangement’ possible at all and it’s such a new area that there aren’t many places to go for information.
‘A small business that supports small businesses’ is what The Dream PA has become, although it took me the best part of 18 months to arrive at this simplicity. I brought the elements that a small business needs for support under one roof in an affordable way, to allow Sole Traders the kind of executive level support that previously only corporations could enjoy. I started off doing administrative work for a few clients, but when I kept being asked if I could answer their phone as well I started to look for a way to allow me to do this at a price that my clients could handle. The result was my Virtual Receptionist service that puts a full time Receptionist on their business phone-line for just 10p an hour and it is now my most popular service. However business wasn’t always this clear cut.
I started off trying to be all things to all people – classic mistake! By saying I could assist anyone – from a Sole Trader to a large company who just wants outside help on a project basis, I assisted no-one. My marketing message wasn’t clear enough to appeal to large companies who could always use a temping agency if they wanted help, and saying that I can assist anyone from small to large business just put off the small businesses who perceived that this meant ‘expensive’. After all, if a large company can afford this kind of help what chance does a growing one-man band outfit have, for whom cash flow is tight and who is desperately trying to get their own business established and into a flow of regular work?
With such a new industry I searched high and low for advice, guidance and assistance, of which there was little. In a growing market everyone is in the same boat - learning together - which is why I decided to write this book. I wanted to provide a guide to how to get started, what kind of questions to ask and who to ask them of – the kind of help I wish I’d had when I was at the start of my business.
Being a VA is a fantastic way to have a career (without the restrictions and politics that come with large companies) and to combine this fulfilling role with a family balance - whether that means caring for young children or having time for your other hobbies. The downside however, is that the kind of self promotion, boundary setting and supreme confidence that is required to gain and retain clients, doesn’t come easy to people like us, who spend their time happily in the background, just getting on with it. We might keep the wheels of daily business turning at our employed jobs and people know that they couldn’t accomplish what they did without our strong, reliable help, but openly ‘trumpet tooting’ about our achievements and how we keep things motoring ahead calmly whilst all around us there’s chaos, doesn’t feel natural. PAs, secretaries and administrators are largely great ‘number twos’ - excellent at support, a levelheaded sounding board and a ‘rock’ to the people we assist. However in this industry, we not only have to be all of that, but also an entrepreneur in our own right, as we are out there trying to win business, gain clients’ confidence and establish ourselves as VAs. And that’s before we get to the ‘doing the work’ part!
In this book I’m not going to tell you how to get a website, the legal requirements for setting up a business or how to act at a networking meeting - other ‘starting in business’ books will cover all of that. This is a practical guide to the unique challenges of starting up as a VA in the UK. You will find if you do further research, that lots of ‘Real Estate’ agents in the USA use VAs to book their advertising, administer their paperwork and organise their diary. I’ve tried all routes to market and I’ve yet to take on one Estate Agent as a client! Therefore this book is written for the British market, acknowledging our unique culture and working practices. I hope that it will provide you with a starting point of how to develop your business from here, provide some new ideas and help you to create something that not only ‘does the job’ but also suits your preferred lifestyle. After all, that’s what being a VA is all about.
So What Exactly Is A VA?
Virtual Assistants (or ‘VAs’ for short) are the latest buzzword in modern working. Completely unheard of just 20 years ago, the first VAs worked in the USA, Canada and Australia where they were often referred to as ‘Home Based Secretaries’1. In the early 1990s when the internet was gaining popularity with mainstream businesses and email was becoming commonplace, the term ‘Virtual Assistant’ was coined and this new industry was born! The first British Virtual Assistants started working from home about ten years ago but it is just within the last five years that this new way of working has really started to gain momentum.
A VA is a remote worker. They often work from their own home, but unlike a tele-worker who is employed by a company but works from home or in the ‘field’, a VA is self-employed with a variety of different clients to serve. The Virtual Assistant can and will do many different kinds of task, including secretarial work, personal assistance/administration, book-keeping, telephone answering, event or conference organising and virtual office management or co-ordination. Now the role has started to grow to encompass other services that can be done on a remote basis too, which can also include marketing activity and website design and maintenance. Not all VAs will be able to do all of these tasks nor may they want to, but VAs now can pick and choose the services that they will offer, tailoring their VA practice to meet their strengths whilst serving their target clients.
Many VAs will work from home which is a great way to combine work and their other commitments such as family, but VAs can also go to their clients’ place of work (even if this is the clients’ own home!) or they can work from office premises – often renting out space in a business incubation unit or local business park. The fact that they are ‘virtual’ doesn’t mean that the client never sees them (but it can mean this in some cases!) but just that the VA isn’t sat at a desk right outside their office – just as they might be located in a traditional office environment. The VA can have face-to-face meetings with the client, telephone briefings, communicate by email or even have a virtual meeting via webcam if geographical distance prohibits a physical meeting. Some clients are happy for their Virtual Assistant to get on with their tasks and report back when the work is done, some clients like a daily progress report, it’s entirely individual and each VA has to find out the clients’ preference.
The main thing to note is that trust and competence are extremely important when you are a VA or for a client when they are hiring a VA, because the remoteness of the working arrangement means that the client needs confidence in the person they have appointed to assist them – both that they have the ability to do the work and that they won’t fabricate the hours worked or cut corners. Fortunately, most VAs are professionals and act as such, and it is up to the client to do their ‘due diligence’ when hiring a Virtual Assistant. But in order to have the best chance of securing the client in the first place it is worthwhile for you as the Virtual Assistant to acknowledge the clients’ possible fears by assuring them of your competence and having a decent ‘Terms & Conditions’ statement in place.
Big or Small?
This is often the question that prospective VAs ask when doing their research about becoming a VA. “What kind of businesses can I support?” The great thing about this new industry is that VAs are not limited to one kind of working arrangement. You could be a Virtual Assistant for a large company or a ‘one man band’ and in my career I have chosen to support small businesses – the Sole Traders and Partnerships. I chose the ‘micro’ businesses as there are millions of them to market to and also because that way I get to deal with the business decision maker, and together we can make things happen a lot quicker than can happen when there are layers of management involved. The VAs that I know who have worked with larger companies have taken on these clients as a result of actually working there – they gave up their jobs at the firm then immediately took them on as their first client! This is an extremely slick way of working as they already know the clients’ preferences and it takes the worry out of finding that all important ‘first client’. The majority of Virtual Assistants that I know of have aimed their services at the SME market (Small and Medium sized Enterprises) because these companies are busy enough to have overflow admin work to outsource but small enough to not have much resource ‘In house’, making it a perfect fit!
Because Virtual Assistants are professional business people in their own right they charge an hourly rate (plus expenses) to complete their clients’ tasks, and this rate can seem high when you work out what the annual salary would be if you worked your old job hours at that rate! However Virtual Assistants are not employees and don’t get the ‘perks’ that employed support staff would expect, such as holiday pay, a pension scheme, share options, professional training or even a desk to sit at! The hourly rate charged needs to cover all of this plus an element for tax and National Insurance payments, because the VA will have to pay their own Self Assessment tax return – there is no longer a ‘payroll’ team to work this out for you!
On the flipside, VAs are attractive to small businesses precisely for this reason. The small business owner can get their business support tasks completed by a professional, competent executive without having to negotiate the red tape of employment and all that it entails (such as devising employment contracts and ensuring that they are complying with Health & Safety requirements). They simply ‘pick up and put down’ the VA help as they need it - it is completely flexible, there is no ongoing commitment and it is a way of working that moulds to their own business peaks and troughs. It is a cost effective solution to their work overload, and once a business has used a VA many wonder how they managed before!
For the Virtual Assistant, this way of working involves a lot of juggling, you need to be super organised, but it is a great deal of fun. You might have half a dozen clients on the go at any one time and it can call upon all your patience and diplomacy skills when several of them all want you to do a job for them immediately, but the sheer variety of clients and sense of accomplishment you get when all the plates are nicely spinning is worth getting out of bed each day for!
The main reason that most VAs cite for starting up in this business is that they wanted freedom. Whether you term it ‘control’, ‘flexibility’, ‘autonomy’, ‘power’, ‘liberty’, ‘opportunity’ or ‘independence’ – it is the same principle – VAs want to:
Have the power to work the hours they choose
Be free of the ‘office politics’ that govern a lot of businesses
Be able to take a greater part in family life
Test themselves and their abilities
Achieve personal growth
Work in a comfy tracksuit!
End the long daily commute
Not spend money on work clothes, cappuccinos and the other knickknacks associated with office working
Try something new
Work on their own terms whilst making money
Be in control of their own destiny!
When it’s termed like that, doesn’t it sound fabulous?
Fabulous it is but don’t confuse ‘fabulous’ with ‘easy’. This is an industry that has grown rapidly over the past few years, so much so that at four years trading my business is widely considered as a ‘veteran’ in this field, rather than a ‘spring chicken’. The Government’s criteria for what is an ‘established’ business is one that has been going for 3 years or more2 but as the Virtual Assistance industry is still emerging in Britain there are few VAs that have been going even this long.
It is excellent news for anyone looking to start in business as a VA because there is so much opportunity around and the market is on the up. Depending on whether you look at this in a positive way or negatively, there is no ‘rule book’ for the trade; much of the commercial activity that we as VAs undertake is largely a ‘blank sheet’ – we are writing the rules as we go along. What I mean by this is that of course we are working to certain professional standards and clients wouldn’t hire us if they couldn’t see the value in the work we do, but as there isn’t much of an occupational history there is no framework to follow.
If we want to expand our business and hire staff we can get standard legal advice on how to do it, but a lot of business support agencies aren’t geared up to advise on the unique characteristics of working for clients who cannot see you or of managing staff when you don’t have an office. A local business advisor that I saw at the start of my business was a gentleman of advanced years to put it politely, and he couldn’t understand how my ‘little typing business’ (which is how he saw it!) could grow its operation and potentially franchise itself in the future. He just couldn’t get his head round the possibilities that a virtual and completely portable business could have. His only frame of reference was to think about the wives of tradesmen who will do their book-keeping and type their letters because the husband is busy installing boilers or erecting scaffolding!
Legislation?
Some VAs can be concerned about the fact that there is, as yet, no ‘governing body’ who qualify and regulate Virtual Assistants. This seems to be a concern of VAs rather than clients in my experience, as I’ve observed VA conversations in chat-rooms and had conversations with VAs who have commented about it to me. They would ‘feel’ better if they could put official VA qualifications next to their name or show membership to an officially recognised organisation. Conversely, in my career so far I have assisted upwards of 100 clients – all business decision makers in their own right, and not one has asked about my VA qualifications. They have bought my ability to do the job and fortunately were proved right when I delivered the work. They did not demand upfront ‘proof’ of my credentials.
A similar modern vocation to being a VA in this way is coaching. Life Coaches, Business Coaches, Executive Coaches, Personal Performance Coaches, Parent Coaches, Spiritual Coaches etc… This is a field that has rapidly expanded in recent years and started to see a ‘boom’. Coaching is not a licensed or regulated industry the way that a profession like the Law is, although in the UK The Coaching Academy3 is a private business that is leading the way to setting a professional standard for ‘best practice’. So far in the history of coaching there hasn’t been a supervisory body to oversee them or others working in this area and it hasn’t held them back – and the same can be said of our industry.
Confusion?
In a growing market the challenges faced by VAs include the usual direct competition, but also actual awareness of what VAs are amongst their potential clients and how a VA can help them. When I first started out, I would be asked “How can you answer my phone if you are not in my office?” by a business owner who didn’t realise that phone lines can be diverted to any location. I’ve had a man in civil engineering demand to know how I can open the post and do the office filing, because he didn’t understand that I assist clients virtually on a project basis. Of course in his profession he would have detailed Architects plans posted to him that would need archiving so it was a valid question, but it just highlights how some businesses are easier to support remotely than others!
Once you can accurately define your offer as a VA and succinctly put this across to people you meet at networking events or business meetings, the sometime initial confusion of ‘are you a Recruitment Company’ will pass! Each new VA will have to decide the area they plan to market to and learn how to educate people about the industry in the simplest way possible and at least whilst they are doing this they are cementing their own expertise in the mind of the listener, creating a possible future client. I find it useful to describe the kind of businesses I support rather than what I actually DO when I’m meeting people who have never heard of VAs. To explain that my clients are “‘one man bands’ who work from home and I assist them with work for which they pay me by the hour” seems to help them catch on and then their next comment is very often, “What a great idea for a business!” To which I always agree!
Cultural Differences
In countries outside the UK, it is widely accepted to use a VA to assist with the routine tasks that you could do yourself in business, but that you don’t have time to or choose not to. In a country with a more established pattern of outsourcing, VAs are an accepted port of call for businesspeople who need extra help, and the fact that they can pay by the hour for the help they receive makes it a cost effective way of getting things done. The UK by comparison, has a very different work culture to other countries which is why it was necessary to write this book – the first published guide for Virtual Assistants in the UK, written by a British VA. In such a new industry, Virtual Assistants of the future need to hit the ground running and the best way to do this is to arm themselves with information from established VAs who have nursed their battle scars and already learned the most effective ways to do things, what works and what doesn’t.
The working culture in this country has the population seemingly programmed to work long hours and to physically do everything themselves. A good VA will be able to gently guide their harassed client into workload delegation and away from the traditional model of ‘line of sight’ labour whilst ensuring that productivity is maintained. If you have ever worked in an office environment you will know that being able to see someone working does not actually mean they are really ‘working’ and thus being virtual without the usual office distractions can mean that work is completed in a faster, more focused way.
With more individuals set to launch and run new businesses each year their need for support will grow making it a fruitful stomping ground for Virtual Assistants. The UK Government launched an Enterprise Strategy4 in March 2008 to boost the UK’s enterprise skills and actively support businesses to start up and grow. Couple this with the current world economic climate which means that companies everywhere are looking for cost effective ways to do things in the future and you can see the ongoing potential for ‘freelance’ help such as Virtual Assistants. Outsourcing is becoming more commonplace and is certainly a way companies can work ‘smarter’ in the future making it a great outlook for people entering this business. One piece of advice on this note is to steer clear of people who don’t immediately see the value of using a VA as these people will be the ones who are most likely to haggle on price, pay late and take your efforts for granted. There are certainly enough of the former business owners around to make a decent living from as a VA.
The next chapter will start to focus your thoughts on what you personally want to achieve from being a VA and how to get started.
What Kind Of Life Do You Want & How To Get Started…
One thing I’ve observed first hand from working as a Virtual Assistant supporting small businesses, is that many people set up a business in the first place because they are great at their ‘job’ and want to do this for themselves rather than earn a company money – plus they want more flexibility. However being great at their job doesn’t make them natural business people, so rather than working ‘on’ their business, they work ‘in’ their business – doing everything themselves and running themselves ragged in the process! Business skills are something that can be learned, so this isn’t a barrier to setting up a business, but you should be aware of the tendency of some business owners to fail to relinquish control of every minute detail of the running of their business - ending up with the business running them; and ensure you don’t fall into that trap.
In order to create the kind of business and therefore life that you actually want, you need to start with the end in mind. My motivation for starting out on my own was having my first child. I had previously worked long hours in a corporate culture but after having my baby I found my priorities had changed and I no longer wanted to be away from her for 8+ working hours a day and still have an hourly daily commute on top of that! I wanted more freedom and longer term I wanted to be able to do the school run when she began her education.
Being great at organisation was and still is one of my strengths, and when I read a magazine article about a woman who had previously worked as a PA in the office world but had become a VA working from home, this was my ‘A-ha’ moment! I decided that I could do that and I started to build up a business plan and develop ideas and a name for my new venture in my free time with the plan being to quit the day job when I had secured enough clients to make the business work.
In practice it didn’t quite work out this way! I managed to choose my business name and secure the web domains and I worked with a friend who built my website. I wrote all the website content and also created my business Terms & Conditions and various templates such as for timesheets and letters. All of this was done whilst I was also employed and I’d even taken a couple of days holiday from my employer to go to business networking events and start to market my business. However, it was getting tough to devote 100% to my business whilst still being 100% on form in my paid job. I, like many VAs, am conscientious by nature – this is a reason why VAs often do very well once they have learned how to ‘sell’ themselves to prospective clients; because they know their stuff and will make heaven and earth move to deliver on a clients’ expectations. But trying to put 100% into both avenues wasn’t working – the maths didn’t add up! It was my ‘make or break’ moment; I could either remain in my reasonably secure, rather dull job that gave me certain perks including a pension, share options and a company car. Or I could commit fully to my new but untested business. The business where I had no idea if it would pan out, but a gut feeling deep down that it just might. The business that I had created from nothing and had just started assisting two clients; I didn’t want to let them down but I also had no guarantees that they would remain with me long term. I wasn’t making enough money from these two clients to survive and it felt like I was about to leap off a cliff. My stomach was fluttering with bigger nerves than I’ve ever felt before or since, but I’d tasted the future and wanted to grab hold of it with both hands. I went into work one morning and handed in my resignation, giving one months’ written notice. My immediate manager tried to talk me out of it, but my decision had been made and I immediately felt lighter and free.
I had previously booked a weeks’ holiday in Scotland before handing in my notice and the timing meant that I would serve out my month at work then that weekend head off for a weeks’ break before returning to… no job! I was bad tempered in the car all the way up to Scotland – a good 5+ hours’ drive and it was my nerves at the enormity of what I’d done manifesting itself. My husband gently coaxed out of me what was wrong and I had to admit that in all honesty, even though I just knew I’d made the right decision, I was sh***ing myself! (Pardon my language but this phrase is necessary to show my true feelings on the situation!)
After talking a little and putting my fears aside to enjoy the holiday I returned after the weeks break to the serious business of getting some work in, earning some money and learning how to ‘do’ being a Virtual Assistant. When you are sat at your desk in the quiet with the phone not ringing, it’s easy to ask yourself, “what on earth have I done?” When you don’t want to turn any income producing business away, it’s really easy to accept any kind of work because it’s a ‘job’ however it can quickly mean that you end up ‘stuck’ in a pattern of doing a particular type of work or having a certain kind of arrangement that can be hard to get back out of once a precedent has been set.
Planning Ahead
It is so important to plan out how you want your business to be before you embark upon the venture full time. It can be tricky to project your thoughts into the future to map out how your business will look without having experienced what it is like working for a client, and our plans for our businesses naturally change over time with increased knowledge, economic circumstance and what our marketplace dictates. However if you can have an idea of the basics of how you are prepared to work, it will help you to develop a strong offer that will see you in good stead when you are a bit busier and have several clients on the go. One of the basics that you might be firm about is how and where you will complete the work you do for clients.
One of my VA friends started her business at around the same time as me and found that one of her clients wanted her to go into their offices to work, as they didn’t really grasp the concept of a VA working from home. She agreed because she didn’t want to turn the work away, but it gradually went from 2 days’ work a week to whole weeks when they had staff absences, and she ended up basically working a full time position with them without the benefits of being an employee (such as paid holidays and company perks, as she was a ‘sub contractor’). Everything was in the company’s favour and it took my friend a while to turn this situation around so that she could take on other work and still do her work for this firm from home without losing them as a client. They still have her on site regularly, but at least now this is balanced with her off-site work and she has reached a compromise she is happy with.
Boundaries
When I started out, I would always tell prospective clients that because I’m ‘Virtual’, the work is done from my home office, rather than me travelling to theirs. I had decided that because my motivation for starting up the business had been to work flexibly from home, then I should always work from home. There was no point in swapping one commute for another. However once I had got a few clients on the go and started to relax a bit, I found that it wouldn’t hurt to travel to a clients’ home office if they lived within a 20 minute drive of me and if this is what they really wanted. As long as working ‘on-site’ with a client didn’t take up too much of my working week. If I could balance it out then there would be no point in turning the ‘on-site’ work away.
This ended up being quite a nice arrangement. Because I had originally been so firm about where I will work, the clients’ I’d had until then had become used to working with me in this way and I could complete their work around my own schedule at home. As long as I met their deadlines, they were happy. Another client whom I’d travel to was also happy because it meant she could have me do her typing and data inputting from her own office, which also meant I could do some filing and take the post for her too which really helped her out. The work I did for her was a regular five hours a week, so each Tuesday after dropping off my daughter at nursery, I would go to my clients, work 5 solid hours (I’d take a packed lunch to eat at my desk) then I’d leave and return my days’ calls before collecting my daughter.
I could be more flexible as time went on because I had set firm boundaries as to where I would work at the start. If I had agreed to work at every clients’ home office from the start, I could have found that my day would be spent travelling to various places and being out of my home all day, which wasn’t what I’d wanted. Plus, travelling time is ‘dead’ time. I have occasionally charged my travelling time at half the hourly rate but mostly clients don’t expect or like to be charged for your time taken to get to them, so you are creating pockets of time during your day that you cannot charge for if you travel.
Another thing I’ve learned to be firm about with clients is the kind of work I will or won’t do. When I began, my first client was a man I’d met at a networking event. I was telling everyone that I am a Virtual Assistant and I provide PA & Secretarial services, and this chap asked if I would do cold calling as he needed appointments getting into other larger businesses so he could sell his services. I had no previous experience of cold calling but naively thought ‘how hard can it be?’ I have a tongue in my head and am fairly confident, it is only really ‘talking’ to people. So I agreed.
It was a disaster. I worked on this project over a period of about 6 weeks and in all that time managed to get him just 1 appointment in another firm. The process of calling up and being constantly rejected or avoided was soul destroying, and I realised that cold calling is not one of my talents - it is definitely a ‘sales’ skill and I am not a natural sales person! Luckily now I have a wonderful telemarketing firm as one of my clients and they are fantastic at cold calling, so whenever I have this kind of request nowadays I pass their enquiry onto the company who often return the favour by sending new clients my way for my telephone answering service.
The sting in the tail of this ‘cold calling story’ is that I later found out that the client who had come to me for cold calling in the first place had done so because he saw me as a ‘cheap’ way to get this work done. He had already approached several telemarketing firms and their hourly rate was much higher than mine, so when I came along he pounced! As a matter of fact, he also negotiated with me on price and got me down by £2 per hour too but that’s another story!
Experience
This client was definitely a learning curve for me, but I’m glad of the experience. It taught me the importance of setting your boundaries and sticking to them, whether that be on price or on what you are prepared to do. I’m pleased to say that since then I have been firm on pricing and it has not stopped me from getting new clients. Once people know where the boundaries are they will operate quite happily within them if they want what you are offering. So don’t be afraid to decide what you are prepared to accept and stick to it, although do remain sensitive to the business climate around you. Raising your prices in a recession may be an incredibly smart move or a really silly one – everything needs testing to ensure that you continue to have a steady flow of business coming in.
Decide upon the life you ultimately want right now so you can create a business that serves your dreams and doesn’t consume your life. If you have decided that you don’t want to commute to your clients let everyone know that whilst you are happy to have the odd face to face ‘catch up’ meeting at a convenient location, that the majority of the work you do will be virtual – from your own home or office. If you want to be a freelance temp then this is fine, but it may be easier to register with an agency and have them do the hard work of finding you jobs and giving you the benefit of weekly pay and accruing holiday entitlement whilst they get to chase the client for unpaid bills and negotiate prices!
Is This Really For You?
Being a self-employed VA is very different to the support role undertaken in many firms. Whilst in a company support staff below a certain level may just be given their work to get on with and managed on the job, a VA is more like an executive PA/office manager role in that the client won’t just lead you and give out the work for you to complete, you will be expected to be a self starter and bring your own experience to the table and offer suggestions to them. As a VA you are a business person in your own right so it’s up to you to ‘own’ that role and be as firm with clients as you’d expect a boss to be with you – you manage each other! If you are looking for a role with little responsibility that you can just do quietly from your own home without having to go and look for new work, then unfortunately this is not it! Be critically aware of your preferences as it’s easier to find out that this might not be for you now, rather than later on once you’ve given up your other means of income.
As with any new start up business, the early months are the hardest and it’s commonly reported that a lot of start up businesses will fail within their first 12 months of trading. To get your business off the ground there will be times when you have to work a lot - even if your plan was to have more freedom - as it’s often necessary at the start to get things moving. I found that in the early days it was hard because I was trying to become known locally and build up a track record, so there were times when I’d be practically working round the clock! I started at 6am some days to complete 2 hours’ work before getting my daughter ready for school, then I’d do the school run and back to the office until 5pm when I collected her and even then if I still had work to do I would get her comfortable at the PC on my other desk and put the CBeebies website5 on for her to keep busy whilst I finished. After taking a couple of hours off for the evening meal and the bath and bed routine, I’d go back to the office and do a few more hours.
Of course long term this wasn’t what I wanted, and it wasn’t even all ‘paid’ work – a lot of that time would be spent writing out my client contracts, creating invoices, doing some marketing to attract more paying clients and organising my book-keeping and business systems. But once you have established your presence and had a few satisfied customers you can build momentum by asking them for referrals or testimonials that you can then use to attract more clients. At times your workload might be ‘feast or famine’ but it’s the same for any small business in the early years and keeping your ultimate end goal in mind helps you to get through these hard times.
Now I have built up a good client base of people who are happy with the service and will actually recommend my services to their contacts so I get new work in this way. I still have to do my own marketing to raise awareness of my work and how I can help but it is a lot easier these days because I have a track record of satisfied clients who will vouch for my work if they are asked. Plus I know what the best ways of marketing are for me – what avenues produce the best results for my particular type of client. Unfortunately there is no short cut to getting to this stage – it is a matter of doing the work, getting out and about to meet people and marketing for new clients, but if you persevere and do a good job you’ll get there in the end.
Facing the Future
A good way to determine what you ultimately want in life so you can shape your business around it is to complete a ‘Wheel of Life’. This is a tool used by Life Coaches to help you uncover what parts of your life are of high importance to you and what areas need attention. You draw a circle and section it into 8 equal areas like a sliced ‘pie’. You can choose what areas mean the most to you but a good example might be: family, work, friends, money, ‘me’ time, spiritual, personal development, health. The purpose of this ‘wheel’ is to see on paper what your life looks like today, so choose a segment of your wheel – such as the ‘family’ segment to start. If ‘1’ is the centre of the wheel and ‘10’ is the outside edge, rate your ‘family’ score out of 10. If you feel like you get lots of time with your family, you might be a ‘9’ or ‘10’ in this area and if you get no time, you might be a ‘2’ or ‘3’, so wherever you feel you are on the chart, with ‘10’ being the most ideal score you can get, rate your family segment and draw a line across that segment in the part of the wheel relating to your score.
Then, do this for all the areas of the wheel. When you have finished, you will end up with a visual diagram that shows where the time in your life is being spent now and you can go round the wheel’s sections again with a different colour pen if you wish, to mark where you want the score to be. The most balanced, ideal life would look like a perfect circle, whereas our own circles might be very uneven. This tool helps us to see what areas need attention and helps us focus on them.
My wheel when I was still in my employed job, showed I was doing great on the ‘work/career’ and ‘finances’ sections of the wheel but didn’t have as much family time or ‘me’ time as I would like. My ‘health’ and ‘spiritual’ sections weren’t that good either! My end diagram showed a very unbalanced wheel but it helped me to focus on where I wanted to improve and what I ultimately wanted from life. When I did a wheel after starting my business, the shape was different once again and every year when I do this exercise the wheel is gradually becoming more rounded. Life will still throw events to dent the wheel in one area from time to time, but ultimately with the wheel, you can keep tracking whether you are ‘on course’ for the life you want and it is only from knowing this that will help you define and shape your business.
Practically Speaking…
Now you have given some thought to how you want your business to eventually be, what are the practical steps and tools that you need to get started?
Setting up your office is both exciting and often expensive but you don’t need to be ‘all singing and dancing’ right from the start. The bare minimum that any new VA needs to operate is:
a PC or laptop computer (ideally with a printer)
a phone number (a landline or a mobile)
a quiet and safe place to concentrate and store any files (even if this is a corner of your bedroom until you really get going)
some business cards
Items such as filing cabinets, laminators, white boards, stock of stationery, fancy brochures of your services and your website can be created and included within your business when time and finances allow. Once you have money coming in you will probably want to ‘upgrade’ the things you bought early on in your business anyway, so there is no point in spending a lot of money at the outset. Also, the technology changes so swiftly and you may end up working with clients in ways that you couldn’t have imagined at the start, so items that you think you need may just gather dust. A good tip is to wait until a job demands a certain piece of equipment before you rush out and buy it. Learn from one of my mistakes! My four ring hole punch has never been used and I’ve only ever used my CD labelling kit once. Most of my clients prefer their work sending digitally in a Word Doc, PDF or MP3 format, so to stop it going to waste my stock of blank CDs was used to make my own computer file back-ups in the early days before I found more effective software.
Make It Easy
What’s important is to pay attention to ‘the basics’. To attract paying clients you will need to make it as easy as possible for them to buy from you. Part of this involves making it easy for them to reach you first of all! On your business cards you will want your name, company name, your address (It’s ok to put your home address – many small business owners do), your email address and your telephone number. Having a fax number isn’t essential nowadays and if you think your clients will want one, you can download low cost ‘fax to email’ software from the internet which will give you a fax number to put on your cards then any faxes sent to you will arrive in your Inbox as an email attachment.
You will need to carry your business cards on you all the time as you never know when an opportunity to hand one out will come along! It is expected that you will have a business card when you attend a business networking event, and if you don’t have one with you there might just be another VA there who does, so don’t miss out on any opportunities. The potential client will go with the assistant who appears more prepared.
As for computer software, it is likely that you will need:
a basic word processing package on your PC
along with the ability to work with spreadsheets
email software
and an internet browser as a minimum.
Over the years I have added all kinds of extras such as speech recognition software, audio recording software, a webcam, Skype6, PDF convertors and book-keeping software, but the basics that I use every day are the former four items.
Once your ‘office’ is kitted and ready you should start to get your systems in place before taking on any clients. Being prepared in advance will help you to portray a more professional first impression to your prospective clients, and thinking about this aspect of business and sorting it out before you start means you can forget about it once you become occupied with fee earning tasks, so it’s a better use of your time to do it now.
Systemise
The best way to stay organised when you are juggling multiple clients, each with differing priorities and staggered deadlines is to ensure that your systems are watertight, so that even when they don’t know what to do next, you always know where you are.
One of the main things you will need to organise is the tracking of your time so you know what to charge clients. There is software available to buy on the internet whereby you create a record for each client then ‘punch a virtual time-clock’ when you start and end on their work and it works out the time spent on each client each month for billing, but my advice is to keep it simple.
The system I use is paper based and involves a simple timesheet. I have a separate foolscap wallet for each client with their contact information on the front and inside the folder is their timesheet. I record the date and start time when I begin their work and note the end time when I complete their work. Then whatever time I work is rounded up or down to the nearest 5 minutes. For example, 1 hour 27 minutes would be logged as 1 hour 25 minutes but this is only because I charge my clients in advance. When I invoiced clients after I had done the work, I would round the time up to the nearest 15 minute interval. I will explain more about my billing system later. Alongside the time logged for each client is a brief list of the tasks I did for them that day. This way if a bill is ever queried by the client I can give them a break-down of where the time was spent.
The folder system for managing each client is really simple and it works. I also have a file set up on my PC for each client and I put copies of all the work I do for them on there too so I can easily email it to them or refer back to what we did several months ago. However the fact that I always have a ‘paper’ file on each client means I can keep my most current jobs for them in there so I know immediately what we are working on, and it is completely portable if I need to work on their jobs outside of my office or if we have a meeting off-site.
Formalities
Many new VAs that I meet ask if I get my clients to sign a contract when we start working together, and if so, “what should they put in their contract?” Whilst at the very beginning of my work as a VA I did have a contract which I got a couple of clients to sign as time went on I revised this into a statement of Terms & Conditions. I only had a contract at the start because I thought I should, but it hasn’t really proved that useful and can even be more off-putting to potential clients in some cases.