Entries Tagged 'Virtual Assistance' ↓

Your job should always be to get and keep customers and clients. The more time-sapping tasks that you can delegate to your virtual assistant or virtual assistant team, the more time you have to concentrate on building and growing your business as only you can do.

This is a list of things that you should consider handing off to your VA. This is not by any means an exhaustive list, but it should get you started on building your process list which gives you a very clear idea  of where your “time-seepage” is.

• Email
• Phone calls
• Mail
• Customer Service inquiries
• Processing manual orders by phone, fax, email
• Processing refunds
• Scheduling business and personal appointments and interviews
• Scheduling coaching or consultation calls
• Business and personal travel arrangements
• Confirming appointments, calls, interviews, travel arrangements
• Mapping driving directions to locations of meetings or conferences
• Contacting new prospects (telephone, mail, email)
• Entering business card / contact information into Outlook, ACT, etc.
• Signing you up and scheduling you for teleseminars, teleclasses and workshops
• Produce your workshop or event
• Ship products and handouts to locations where you are exhibiting or speaking
• Invoicing clients / customers
• Receiving and paying bills
• Reconciling bank statements
• Tracking expenses and track records
• Working with your accountant or tax preparer
• Assisting with paperwork to incorporate or LLC your business
• Business and personal shopping: Business software and hardware, gifts, Christmas cards, etc.
• Ordering of office supplies - postage, shipping materials
• Comparison shopping for health plans, credit card deals, business loans, joint venture partnerships, etc.
• Creating information products - CD’s, reports, manuals, etc.
• Design simple marketing materials
• Design business cards
• Design forms for internal use, or for use with clients / customers
• Format e-books and create PDF files
• Design PowerPoint presentations
• Website and Blog creation and maintenance
• Squeeze pages
• Track website statistics
• Shopping cart creation and maintenance
• Manage affiliate programs
• Setup e-mail autoresponders
• Article Submission
• Ezine management
• Newsletters
• Product Launch
• Handling registrations for teleseminars, teleclasses, workshops
• Promoting teleseminars, teleclasses, workshops
• Creating teleseminars, teleclasses, workshops for your business- Reserve bridge lines, send confirmation email to attendees, load email reminders into autoresponder, upload recorded call to website, send MP3 link to list, etc.
• Social networking - Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
• Press releases

As you can see, the number of tasks that you can delegate to a professional virtual assistance are limited only by your imagination.  You can’t build a million dollar online business by doing $20 an hour jobs! Delegate, delegate, delegate! In other words, do what you love best and outsource the rest.

Your Virtual Assistant is uniquely situated in the virtual assistance world.  We can do it all. Our forte is working closely with online entrepreneurs who know exactly what their business should look like and can perfectly envision it, but who quite simply do not have enough hours in the day to do all that needs to be done. Not only can they hand over a huge amount of projects and tasks to us, but once the burden of learning how to build squeeze pages, write html code, launch products, create blogs, etc., is lifted from their shoulders, they are instantly able to get back in touch with the creativity that brought them to the internet and become more joyful and excited about their online business.

We quite literally become your “partner in success”. As you grow and learn, so do we.

Please give us a call  at 888-719-6710 to schedule your free 30 minute telephone consultation to see how we can help your business become a million dollar baby.

We are here to help!

What is a Virtual Assistant?

As a thriving Virtual Assistance firm this is a question that we heard a great deal in the early days, but now potential clients have a very clear idea of just what a virtual assistant is and how they want their virtual assistant to partner with them. 

Our clients are not looking for simple administrative support any longer.  Rather they want, need, and expect their virtual assistant to become a strategic partner, almost a manager if you will, who will work energetically and proactively to help them build and grow their brick and mortar as well as online business(s).  Our clients recognize that we are not only home office based contractors, but entrepreneurs in our own right who bring a rich knowledge base to bear on client projects.  We live and work on the internet!

Virtual assistants provide much of the same services as an onsite employee, but without the added tax and insurance burdens that the employer must bear.  VA’s work from fully equipped home based offices which are often better equipped than the average professional office.  At a minimum, your virtual assistant will have the following basic office equipment and software:

Powerful computer with high speed connection (DSL, cable)

Backup server

Fax Machine

Scanner

Copier

Shredder

CD / DVD burner

Professional telephone system with unlimited long distance

Professional voice mail (We use GotVM)

Postage meter

Office supplies (printer and copier paper, mailing supplies, etc.)

Software

Microsoft Office Suite (Excel, PowerPoint,  Access,  Word, Outlook)

HTML editor: Dreamweaver, Microsoft FrontPage, Microsoft Expression Web

Adobe Acrobat

Instant Messenger (AOL, Yahoo, MSN, Skype, etc.)

Anti-virus software

Bookkeeping software

Client management software

Your Virtual Assistant is a consummate professional who looks at your projects and tasks with an eye to automating processes, building long-term relationships and growing with your business.  We are here to assist you by taking care of the tasks and projects that grow daily more burdensome and prevent you from doing what you love best.  Our clients are excited to learn that they can turn over the minutia of their daily business and turn their minds to the creative thought processes that brought them into business to begin with.

Please call us toll free at 888-719-6710 to schedule a free 30 minute telephone consultation.  At the end of the call, you will walk away relieved, energized, and excited about all of the possibilities that will open up to you after you hire professional help.

I just found an excellent article about working from your home office written by Carolyn Kepcher, who was Donald Trump’s right-hand woman for a number of years, both in his company and on the Celebrity Apprentice television series until she left to start her own company. She started her new company by working virtually. We can all certainly relate to that!

Your Money columnist Carolyn Kepcher, author of the best-selling business book, “Carolyn 101,” is the former “Apprentice” star who thrived working for one of America’s toughest bosses. She’s now CEO of Carolyn & Co. (carolynandco.com), an enterprise created by and for career women.

I am a telecommuting convert.

Before this year, I spent nearly 12 years working for a large corporation where I was trained to believe people who worked from home could never get the job done. I believed that, if I couldn’t see my staff, chances were the work was not getting done. Real work meant time in the office.

My first experience disproving this theory was a revelation. It came on a day a few years ago when I was feeling so ill I couldn’t make it to work. Since I’m not the kind of person who can happily sit back with a box of tissues and cold medicine in front of a television, I grabbed my BlackBerry and laptop and decided to catch up on e-mails. I got more work done in my pajamas that day than I had all week.

I’ve since moved on in my career, creating a startup venture called Carolyn & Co. My business partner and I began by working from our home offices. As the company grew, so did our demands. We needed staff, but didn’t have office space. We found ourselves hiring people willing to work from home.

I’ll admit: The whole scenario made me nervous. Very nervous.

What a lesson I learned. Not only was the work getting done in a timely matter, the results were impressive. We were able to negotiate contracts, make decisions, plan, create, implement - efficiently and seamlessly - without sharing one square foot of office space.

I don’t believe telecommuting is for everyone. Some industries and positions aren’t well-suited for it. And there are those employees who simply lack the discipline and organization to effectively work from home.

But it works well for many, especially people with kids. As important as it is to have face time in the office, it’s more important to have face time at home.

When I work from home, I see my 5- and 7-year-old off on the bus in the morning, then get right to work. I take a lunch break at noon with my 5-year-old when she gets off the bus, and then it’s back to business.

Work is still work, but life is a little easier when you have more flexibility to balance your career with all your other priorities.

For employers, there are adjustments to be made to accommodate telecommuters. But there are enough advantages to make it worth it.

For starters: There’s a whole pool of barely tapped talent out there; people with great skill and experience who simply can’t or won’t work in a traditional job or office setting. Being open to telecommuting naturally enhances the desirability of any employer with jobs to fill.

In return for giving them greater flexibility with their job, employees who telecommute tend to be highly motivated and loyal, gracing bosses with a lower rate of job turnover. Also, many telecommuters want to work part-time, decreasing the cost of their benefits. And telecommuters cut back on office space overhead.

Employees and employers need to think it through, but I’m now a true believer that, when it works, it works for everyone involved.