Last weekend it was Mother's Day in many countries around the world. I was privileged to be asked to give the message for that day at my church, based on my own personal experiences of the Proverbs 31 Woman, whom I believe to be a work at home mum in biblical days. I had written a book in 2006, bringing the Proverbs 31 woman into the 21st century and wove my life around the verses in the book 'Worth More Than Rubies'. During the previous week I'd visited two Mainly Music groups of mothers with … [Read more...]
Moonlighting as a Virtual Assistant
I became aware of discussion about an article regarding Moonlighting as a VA. I haven't seen the original article but did see the comments and hope that the writers will see my post as I'm unable to leave a comment on the site where I saw them. I've been running a Virtual Assistant practice for over 18 years now. It wasn't called that when I started, we were known as home-based secretaries in those days. The challenges in those days may have been more difficult as we didn't have the Internet … [Read more...]
Speaking of working at home…
A couple of days ago I shared how much I love working at home and that I don't miss the traffic out there at all. However, there are days (very occasional) when working at home can prove to be a challenge. Today was one of them. We got a letter a week ago to say the power would be off between 8.30am and 3.30pm for one day and we needed to ensure that all electrical appliances were switched off and unplugged, especially computers. What was I going to do? I started to put out feelers to see … [Read more...]
So glad I work at home
You know, in the busy-ness of our lives, even in running our own businesses, it's sometimes easy to lose sight of our blessings. In this case, just being able to work at home. I had to be up at 5am today. That's not much earlier than a normal morning for me. I'm often awake at 5.30 as I take my husband to the train station some mornings but other mornings I get to sleep in till 7am because he is working at home too :-) Today I was taking the son of a Canadian friend to the airport. He'd been … [Read more...]
A non-negotiable thought…
Hi everyone, we're back from the Australian VA Conference and I think this would have to be the best one yet. They've all been good but they get better and better! Below you can see a photo of the group at the end of the first day - we were definitely having a good time. I plan to share with you some of the lessons learnt at AVAC 2012 and the first one I have to share with you is one that was re-iterated by several speakers during the two-day event. Attending professional development events … [Read more...]
New Virtual Assistant Forum
Over the past month I've been setting up a new board forum for Virtual Assistants. While it has been primarily built with ACS members in mind, there is a portion of the forum that is open to any and all VAs. It is the VA Directory Forum and you are invited to come and check it out. While the membership and number of posts are low there currently, I expect it will grow quite quickly once the word is out. We have an active forum at yahoogroups (with over 1400 members) but there are some who … [Read more...]
eziStart Social Media
Some of you will be aware that I'm a member of a local BNI chapter as their Virtual Assistant representative. One of the members there, who is the resident website designer came up with a brilliant idea some months ago called eziStart. The idea is that a number of services is provided by a small select group of service providers to help people get set up and started in their businesses. These services include: web design, logo design, copy-writing for the website, video and social media. I'm … [Read more...]
How do I become a Virtual Assistant?
I get asked this question often and thought I'd share some hints and tips on things you can do if you would like to pursue this career. First you must have good computer skills but not only that, a good knowledge of how to do things online as well. They're not difficult things but if you don't know how to do them, then they can complicate your working day. Things like knowing how to upload or download files, attach files to email, send a large file to a client when it's too large to send via … [Read more...]
Virtual Assistants – Network or Agency?
I often get new VAs, or those planning to become a VA, contacting me to find out whether they should be joining my VA Network, or for advice about another group they are thinking of joining. I don't mind people contacting me to ask these questions and I'm always happy to help and give guidance. Ultimately the decision is their's but I like to give them things to think about, to help them with their decision-making. Let's look first at some definitions of these two words. On … [Read more...]
