Taking advantage of opportunities to promote your business

I recently answered a thread in a parenting forum of which I am a member. Another poster was looking for SAHMs to interview for a local magazine specifically targeting work/career options that offer flexibility in terms of timing, reduced daycare costs and supplementary income. As a Virtual Assistant, I have come to enjoy all those benefits and many more, so I offered up my business as a possible candidate.

Initially, the author was targeting other forms of career options, but decided in the end to include my profession as a viable option for other SAHMs. I am happy to say the article has been published and you can read more about my VA business and other stay-at-home career options in the November-December issue of Calgary’s Child magazine.

The article in question is on pages 16 and 17 and mention of VAs is at the very end of the article, which you can read here (note: PDF download). Enjoy!

One entrepreneur’s journey to find a Virtual Assistant

I recently came across this blog entry outlining David Risley’s experience in finding a suitable Virtual Assistant and while it isn’t a new entry, it has some very pertinent information. It lends some useful insight and helpful information in guiding anyone who may think of hiring a Virtual Assistant.

Thank you, David!

Finding a Virtual Assistant

June 6, 2007

I have been spending time here and there over the last week attending to a very important action for my business: hiring a virtual assistant. Now, let me say ahead of time that I have not yet signed a contract with the person I am going to try out, however I should be doing that before the end of the week. I would, though, like to blurb about my experience thus far on finding a VA.

First off, a virtual assistant (VA) is essentially an assistant that does not work in my office. In other words, they are not an employee, but an independent contractor. They provide their own material and they work remotely, doing whatever you ask them to do. With the technology we have today, there really is no reason that you HAVE to have people in your office. In my case, I operate out of a home office. Even if the VA needs to work with your own software, you can give them remote desktop access and they can use a computer in your office while sitting anywhere in the world. Hence the name virtual assistant.

My first attempt to find a VA was to go to Elance.com and post. Elance is a great resource for finding labor. It works similarly to Ebay. Service providers have profiles and get feedback. You can judge any service provider by their feedback and by their portfolio. I recently found a writer on Elance, and although she is not yet done with my project, I am happy with her so far. I decided to post for a VA position. They do have a category for Administrative Support, Personal Assistants, and all kinds of other categories. I got a total of 13 bids on Elance. The bids were hit and miss, and you have to do a good job on Elance of evaluating your bids. First of all, realize that you are going to get mostly overseas bids. A vast majority of bids I received were from India. Their hourly rates were very low to our standards – averaging $5/hour. I obviously like the price, but is that the only important criteria? Absolutely not. What I observed in the bids was:

• Many of them were not writing in correct English.
• Some bids were not really VAs, but programmers. That’s fine. I need a programmer, but I’m asking for a VA here.

The other thing to do is to clarify the hourly rate with them. Most of the bids would come in as whole amounts, like $50. But, $50 for what? An hour? 10 hours? So, use the private message board to clarify with them if they don’t specifically tell you in their initial bid. You also want to be careful with what they are bidding on. I had a couple companies bid where they say we would work out a price later, but they would bid something now to get my attention. In other words, I would choose their bid only to be given another rate once they find out more about what I want. No thanks.

All in all, Elance is a great place to find labor, but it can be a lot more work. I’ve worked with a few overseas people before. The lowball price is attractive. But, you get what you pay for. The language barrier can be a problem, especially when you’re trying to get them to deliver something specific. Another thing to keep in mind is that many of the really GOOD providers are probably not going to be out there bidding on projects on Elance. Why? Because the good ones are usually pretty busy already. To find the good ones, you usually need to go to where the good ones hang out and ask them to work for you. I recently watched a video of John Reese talking about finding a Flash guy to do his Flash intro for Income.com. Did he put a project out on Elance? No, he went to FlashKit and found somebody in the forums. That’s where Flash people hang out.

My next source for finding a VA is VANetworking. This is a site by VANA (Virtual Assistant Networking Association). I went and submitted a request for proposal (RFP) where they will then, in turn, post on their forum of VAs. I got just as many bids (if not more) from VANetworking as I did from Elance. The big thing to keep in mind is that most of the bids you will get from here are American. That means they cost more. Most of the bids I had were coming in anywhere from $20/hour to $40/hour. But, the quality of the bids was significantly higher than Elance. These women (and most of them were indeed women) really knew their stuff and offered good detail to me in their proposals. I even had a great VA bid who had an office in Tampa – only about a half hour from me.

Ultimately, I have found a lady up in Minnesota who I cam going to be working with. We have agreed on terms (at least preliminarily) and she will be getting me a contract tomorrow. She is a VA, but with a real penchant for internet work. That’s obviously great for me being in the business I am. I’m looking forward to getting out from underneath of some things as well as getting things moving on otherwise stagnant projects. For me, I think finding a good, quality VA is going to be an important step for me.

Our online persona

The VA forum I participate in regularly has had a spate of threads regarding VAs and other professional’s online appearance, most notably that involving grammar, spelling and punctuation. Most agree that if your website, blog, professional correspondence and forum postings are poorly written, it reflects badly upon you and your abilities.

Too many newbie VAs come bouncing onto the forums full of questions that are riddled with poorly-written text and spelling errors. While I agree that it simply isn’t possible to write perfect text all the time, I believe a genuine effort needs to be made in every instance. If your writing includes a link or a signature to your business, it must reflect the image of that business that you are striving to achieve. If you want to look ill-educated and lazy and you don’t care, then, by all means, don’t bother. But, if you want your clients and potential clients to respect your abilities and view you as an expert in your field, then care must be taken.

I can’t emphasize it enough, proofread, proofread and proofread again. There are some tricks that can make it easier. If you use Firefox, it has a built-in proofreader and can catch some of the more obvious typos when making forum responses. Copy and paste your text into a Word document and spell check it. Read it backwards. And if it’s a really important document, ask someone else to proof it. If you can’t be bothered to take the time to put your best written-self forward, then why should your clients think you would do any different for their businesses?

Technology and the emerging Virtual Assistant: Help or hindrance?

As a new VA and a self-confessed “gadget-geek”, I love my Treo 650 as I loved my Treo 600 before it. It came along at a time in my life when having both a phone and a separate Palm was becoming a real nuisance, I was becoming weighted down with devices and it seemed to be a ridiculous state to be in. At the time, the Treo wasn’t even being offered in Canada and I had to purchase it online after numerous calls to ensure my current provider would actually connect it once it arrived.

The obvious disadvantages of the Treo I find are the limited use for the Palm software that came with the Treo. I have to this point refrained from purchasing a new calendar program as the obvious advantages to such a purchase would be the better integration with email. As I have opted out of the data plan that enabled me to connect to the Web and email from my provider as it was cost-prohibitive, it seems to be counter-productive to not take advantage of this. While I understand the cost of such plans have diminished over the past year or two, I am still reluctant to buy into them for fear of the ‘over-use’ billing I have encountered in the past. It has been exorbitant, to the tune of a charge of $20 for accessing a single e-mail.

Additionally, despite my love for electronic devices, at times I long for a straight calendar that I can simply open up and see my entire month at a glance. While the Treo does offer this, it is of such a size that I cannot identify individual date appointments without going further to pinpoint what is scheduled on any given day. A simple way around this would be to do a weekly print of my monthly schedule and I may end up resorting to such a task.

Lastly, the requirement to continually synch my Treo to my desktop to ensure an up-to-date database is sometimes a chore I simply prefer to avoid. The option to synch my Treo to my Outlook has proven to not be an option as when I followed the instructions to do such a conversion, I was unable to synch at all. Thereafter, followed a long 4-month stint in which my Treo remained a lone connection of little or no use and my desktop was updated and used more fully. I finally fixed the connection error by reverting to synching with the original Palm software, but one again wonders where the benefit to all this technology has led me? I fully admit that I have been an unwilling participant to aiding my own cause. Having a friend who picks up the phone to call his provider at the first sign of trouble or even an innocent query shows our relative schedule and personality disparities. He has the time to spend hours chatting to helpful call centre staff while I would rather bang my head against a wall than sit waiting on a phone (that’s costing me .50 a minute) on hold for hours on end to find myself being transferred twelve times before someone admits they don’t know the answer to the question.

Funnily enough, my usual solution to this particular state of affairs is to go out and buy something that is newer and better. I inevitably encounter a whole new set of technical difficulties and it is always interesting to see how I fare with each new device. My husband recently acquired the 700w Treo that is Windows-based, much to my excitement. It was a replacement for a Treo 650 that kept dropping calls. Continually, without fail, at every single phone call. It was the only thing you could rely on. You would phone him, knowing that the connection would suddenly disappear. His new Treo 700w replacement kept shutting down and locking him out, always in the middle of a call and after a 2-week stint of this behavior and no sign of improvement, he exchanged it for yet another 700w. We have had the new phone for less than 24-hours and have yet to get the ringer to work. It will be interesting to see if this results in yet another new phone or whether some obscure setting has been triggered. A quick search on the Palm boards shows this problem has no easy solution and I was amused to see that, in the 20 minutes I played with it this morning, I have already tried all the suggested fixes. Maybe I am not such a hapless geek after all, but it leaves me with the uneasy feeling that if all this technology is not helping us, why do we keep on using it?

 

All content © 2007 Kate V. Kerans. All rights reserved.