So today we are talking about the very common question ... how to bill your Virtual Assistant clients. There is a misconception that billing by the package is better and smarter. But that's not always the case. Why do VAs want to charge by package? The main reason is they want to stop tracking their time. But you still need to track your time with packages! Well, in a manner of speaking anyway. Which is better, charging by the hour or by the package? The answer can be … either … it really depends on what services you offer and what kinds of clients you work with, and how you want to work. In t ..read more

Before a Virtual Assistant client signs on the dotted line, they may ask you for some kind of proof that you can, in fact, do what you say you can do. I have talked to lots of VAs who seem to get offended by this. Often because the request comes in the form of asking for references or for a resume. They stick their nose up and say they don't want to do those things because they are not an employee. I talked in last episode about what exactly we are asking of our clients when we ask them to invest in our services. The monetary exchange can be substantial. Never, ever take that for granted. They ..read more

Learning to do marketing is one of the most important skills you can master with your Virtual Assistant business. But sometimes we get overwhelmed by what we should be doing to get the word out about our business. Let's talk about it. What does marketing mean to you? To me, when I was starting out, it meant advertising. Promotions. Getting customers. Marketing is not selling, although it does produce that outcome when done well. Marketing is not advertising what you do, not really anyway. Marketing is about creating a system that works to do that. for you to get the word out about your VA busi ..read more

Starting a VA business is pretty simple. It’s a service business, so there isn’t a lot of startup cost involved - I always say if you have a contract and a way for your clients to pay you, you can start taking on clients. Of course there is more to it than that, but essentially that’s all you need. So many women get stuck on allllll the details and never get started. But if you have admin experience, you can say yes to a client today. You are ready. Today, though, I want to help you get set up the right way - with the right plan. In this episode, we'll talk about the five pillars I think you n ..read more

‌I get so many questions from Virtual Assistants about how to help our clients find us and notice us. The idea with marketing your VA business is to get noticed - get visibility. Yes it’s about getting clients but what we really need to do is to get ourselves and what we do to help our clients ‘out there’. Getting clients usually comes from having a conversation with someone who has heard about us. Marketing is the act of getting them to hear about us. So what I want to talk about today is how to stand out - to get noticed, ahead of other VAs. In this episode, we cover five simple changes you ..read more

So many Virtual Assistants make business too hard. We start by thinking we have to be someone else - a business person. Someone who speaks a certain way, who learns certain things, who does certain things. But I remind VAs every day that we are service business professionals. And that means that our product is ourselves. Us. So why would we need to be anything other than ourselves? First of all, it’s hard to try to be someone else. It’s often not even natural. And second, it can make it really hard to build our confidence - and make decisions. How can we know for sure that something is right f ..read more

Finding Virtual Assistant clients online is not hard. In fact, it’s very simple. If you are struggling to find VA clients online, then you are probably missing one or more important pieces of the puzzle. Today I want to talk about some simple things that you can do to find your best clients online. Everyone will tell you that the demand for VAs is increasing - they are right. Since the pandemic, the word of virtual working, or remote working if you prefer that term, has really boomed. It seems that more and more workers want to dictate their own terms - and some of them are able to do that, wo ..read more

I tell you all the time that time is money for Virtual Assistants. Literally time is money. Your time. Your client’s money. So everything you do - and how you do it - is costing the client a certain amount of money. And, you are also doing a lot of things. Possibly for a lot of clients Doing a lot of things at once for a lot of different people means that we can often get overwhelmed. Or busy. So many times people will ask me how my business is doing, and then they say ‘busy, eh’? I say oh yes, ‘busy’. We have created a world where busy sounds good. At the minimum, busy means good - people are ..read more

Today I am going to talk about email lists and why Virtual Assistants need one of their own. So many VAs I talk to do not have a newsletter, and I admit for a long time I didn’t have one of my own either, but it is a really good way to market your business. Let’s go! Creating a newsletter for your VA business probably seems like a waste of time. You don’t need hundreds of clients, right? Right - you don’t need a mailing list that has thousands of people on it. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not a good marketing tool for your VA business. Everything is relative, and you can get clients from yo ..read more

Being able to get where you want to go with your VA business takes getting out of your comfort zone. Sometimes it takes a lot of that. We feel scared because we have never been where we want to go - and we don’t realllly know if we can get there. We think we can, we hope we can, we try to plan to get there. But we don’t really know - and that alone can make us freeze in our tracks. So we don’t do the things that we know we need to do to get there. I know I give you a lot of advice about how to grow your business - and a lot of that is mindset work, that you have to push yourself - and we don’t ..read more