Virtual Assistant – THE Blog About Our Industry

About the Virtual Assistant industry for VAs and for clients

Monthly Archives: February 2010

AVAC – Only two weeks away

I feel the excitement beginning to mount as VAs around Australia anticipate meeting one another face-to-face – many for the first time.  Our colleagues in the US, Canada and elsewhere I know want to join us and hopefully they can for the next one.  I believe we might even have a visitor from Turkey – a lady who contacted me some weeks ago about attending and she needed to organise a Visa.

You can find out who’s coming by going to that page at the AustralianVAConference website.  Many of the delegates have left messages there.  Why not join them too?  It’s not too late.

Marketing – make sure you’re ethical

On a VA forum recently one of the members mentioned she’d discovered that another VA business was using the name of her business in their Google Adwords.  She has requested they take them down immediately and several other members came back with messages of support.

While I do also support the concern of this VA I wanted to let her know how I had inadvertently done a similar thing only a couple of years ago.  Here is my story:

That’s not good but it can happen accidentally too, believe it or not.
Google actually suggests words and phrases in a long list to add to your list of keywords.  A couple of years ago after they started doing this, I just selected all and added them to the list. I glanced through them but didn’t take them all in properly.

A month later I got a ‘cease and desist’ letter from a solicitor.   I’d been using the name of a virtual office company in my keywords. I didn’t know. I rang the company right away and was quite upset with them for sending me a letter from a solicitor without contacting me first to see if I’d made an error.  They could have given me the benefit of the doubt. I removed the keywords that day and am now very careful about what I add to my list at Adwords.

If you are setting up Adwords or any similar service where keywords are suggested to you for use, please go through them very carefully and make sure you’re not treading on any trademark or branding issues.   It is so easy to overlook these things until you find yourself in trouble.

Making the customer wait

I posted a new job lead to my team of VAs and one of the responses I got both surprised me but also made me realise that perhaps some VAs (particularly newer ones) probably thought it was ok to do this.  Make the client wait.

The response was:

Could you kindly forward on his details to me and I will contact him within 24 hours.

My reply to her was:

I strongly suggest you reply to him today, sooner rather than later. Clients will rarely wait 24 hours before hearing back from someone – they’ll just go to someone else. Two other members have already responded so important you make initial contact with him too.  Once you have built a relationship with a client then letting them know you’ll be in touch within 24 hours is ok, but not on first contact.

I feel it is really important that the client knows that someone has heard/seen their request and will be acting on it.  If you don’t reply then they’ll think that either you’re not interested or perhaps your email isn’t working. Either way they’ll move on to the very next VA they have contact with.

While I agree that you can’t be at your computer 24/7, that you do have a life and do need to sleep, the reality is if a request comes through during business hours (or perhaps waking hours) then it’s important to give some sort of response.  Let them know you’ve seen their email.  If you are going to be out of the office for a few days, then set up some kind of autoresponder or have someone else monitor your email for you.  Your business is important.

Put it this way. If the phone was ringing would you let it just ring out, thinking you’ll answer it tomorrow? Email is another form of communication but unlike the phone can’t make the urgent sound that demands you answer it immediately. Worth thinking about.

My celebration but you get the gifts

Next month (24th) marks the 16th anniversary of my business “A Clayton’s Secretary”.  It’s no co-incidence that the Australian VA Conference is being run next month as well – I like to have something special happening around the anniversary of my business.

But I want to make sure that others are benefiting from my celebrations too, so I have a number of gifts available to my readers.

1.  Double the affiliate payment for the top affiliate in March 2010.  Why not sign up today so you can get set up for the promotions in March?

2.  Between today and end of March 2 lucky new members of the “A Clayton’s Secretary” VA team will get 12 months’ free membership.

3.  1 lucky new student will get 50% of their training fee reimbursed at completion of the course.

4.  2 of any of the above participants (new affiliates, new members or new students) will be given 3 months free VA Coaching Club membership.  Or you could elect to sign up for the club and become eligible for that as well.

So, why not join in the celebrations?

Agency VA or Self-Employed VA?

Saw a comment recently on a well-known blog post about the use of Virtual Assistants.

Perhaps the biggest problem with them was that after putting in my dues to get acquainted with the VA and ‘training’ them appropriately, they got promoted or reallocated and I had to start from scratch. This happened at least 3 times in a less than 3 months. Unfortunately, I can see that happening at other firms as well. It might be tough, but see if you can ask your VA company to commit to the same VA for some period of time (I would have liked 6 months).

I found this comment very interesting as it highlighted a very real difference between engaging a self-employed Virtual Assistant versus one through an agency.

Self-employed VAs are often listed with VA networks and the general public might get confused not knowing the difference between a network or an agency when sourcing a VA for support but the experience can be vastly different.

A self-employed VA, because it is their own business, has an invested interest in looking after the client’s business and ensuring they get the best possible service.  It is also very unlikely that the client will be passed onto another VA because the first VA has been re-assigned or re-allocated to a new client.

Some self-employed VAs may find that they aren’t well suited to a job and offer to help find a new VA but for the most part, they’re looking for a long-term working relationship. Not something for only a month or two.

I personally have clients who have been with me for 10 years or more and my newest clients have been with me prior to Christmas 2009.  As one client moves on (because they’ve changed their business or their lifestyle) I replace them with another one or a couple, depending on the hours involved.  I usually have several clients I look after over any given month.

So, when you’re looking to engage the services of a Virtual Assistant, think carefully about what type of commitment you want from that VA and look in the appropriate places for them.