The School Holidays

School holidays are a nightmare for most working parents.  How do you juggle the kids who have up to 12 weeks a year at home on school holidays and most working parents only get 4 weeks holiday a year?  Clearly the way our working lives are structured  is not conducive to stress free parenting.  Spare a thought also, for the Virtual Assistant, or any self employed small business owner.

Taking time off is not really an option and what happens in reality is most end up doing two jobs at once, parent and business owner.  My own stress levels usually sky rocket over this period as the “clear  headspace” for thinking during the day just never happens and I feel pulled in all directions.

However, I have found some coping mechanisms which may help others in the same position.

Early morning walks

I wouldn’t call myself a natural ‘morning person” but early starts are a way of life when you are a mother and I have got used to getting up early in the morning.  I like to walk and I usually head out at 5.00am for an hour or 45 minutes, before I need to make school lunches or get the kids up.  The walk is my clear thinking time and I can mentally run through my day and what I need to achieve.  I have also found it a stress buster and I arrive at my desk with a clearer head and better able to cope with a demanding day.

Early starts or Late nights

During the holidays if I can get an hour or two of work in before the rest of the household is awake, I have more family time with my children and I’m not constantly checking my email during the day. Obviously this works just as well at the other end of the clock.  If you are a night owl you may be able to squeeze in some productive hours once the household is in bed.

School Holiday programs – The cheaper the better!

Most school holiday programs are heinously expensive and if you utilise them for more than a couple of days,most of your income is going to be  lost on paying for it.  However, there are some lower cost alternatives that will give you 2-3 hours of productive kid-free time to work on your business. 

My local Gymnastics club runs a fabulous program with a variety of activities lasting 2-3 hours over the school holidays.  The RSPCA also runs some great low cost programs.  It’s inexpensive and my children enjoy it.  Most importantly I get those vital few business hours to get through my workload.

Sharing the load

If you are lucky enough to know another mum in the same boat, often you can “share” the minding, by one of you taking both your own children and someone elses for the day and then the next day swapping.  It means cramming your productivity into just a couple of days a week but may be just enough to get the important work done.  You can even do half days if full days are too daunting.

Telling your clients

If you are struggling to meet deadlines and have limited availability over this period, don’t forget to let your clients know.  If they have children themselves they may well be in the same boat and will be able to empathise.  Let them know if they need to call during certain hours or time periods.  Ask them if you can contact them after hours if you need to (however, be considerate here and let them know this is a temporary situation).

Try to stay sane.  Tell yourself the situation is temporary.  Mark the days off the calendar.  They do go back to school eventually.

www.theexceptionalassistant.com.au

The Big Fish

In the beginning of my own Virtual assistant business many of the first jobs I was hired for were relatively small and not what you would call big money earners.  Then, I landed the BIG FISH client.

My Big Fish Client was great to work for.  I liked them a lot and they were very happy with the work I was doing.   Their bank balance was growing and as they hired me for more and more work, so was mine.  This was it.  Here was the income I’d been waiting for. Life was good!  Then, ……they left...

What!  NO!

It was nothing I’d done.  Their business had simply reached the tipping point where they were ready to hire permanent staff.   I’d been a reliable (and essential) stepping stone to their continued success.  A role the Virtual Assistant is uniquely placed to fill for growing businesses.   I’ve exaggerated a little bit here.  My Big Fish didn’t leave me completely.  I still do project and overflow work for their company but the day to day, income generating workload I had come to rely on was gone.

This was a very important lesson in the development of my VA Business.  I realised very quickly that I had become too reliant on a single stream of income and what was missing in my client folio was diversity.  I’d also put much of my networking and lead generating activities on hold.  I already had a BIG FISH.  What I hadn’t planned for was the departure of my BIG FISH.  There should have been a number of BIG FISH and a number of LITTLE FISH to balance out my folio and I should have been positioning myself for the next one.

Obviously,  I did recover from this downturn.  It was a good lesson to learn and now I try not to let my marketing slip when things are cruising along. Enjoy the success of the big fish but realize change is inevitable and you want to minimize the impact should your big fish swim away.

www.theexceptionalassistant.com.au

The Holy Grail Client

Everyone in business has a picture of what their ideal client would look like.  Virtual Assistants are the same and one issue that comes up a lot amongst the VA”s I coach and mentor is where to find “The Holy Grail Client.”   I’d argue that the Holy Grail client doesn’t exist, or rather it does, but you can’t recognise it from the picture you have in your head of what you think he/she should look like.

Some Virtual Assistants specialise in particular “types” of client and we all talk about our “Holy Grail Client” that is going to turn up out of the blue and offer us heaps of fantastic exciting work and pay fabulous rates for our talents.  However, I wonder how many of us are passing up outstanding opportunities with clients that at least outwardly are perhaps a little less shiny than our Holy Grail ideal?

When starting a Virtual Assistant Business most budding VA’s will take any job that comes their way until the business is up and running and they can afford to be more selective about the clients they work with and the work they take on.  It’s usually about this time, on examining their portfolio of clients, most VA’s discover some of their clients have characteristics in common.  Either they all are authors/presenters/workshop clients, or they all have a technical or scientific interest, or perhaps most of them are high net worth entrepreneurs.  A niche, if you will, they are attracting.  This is also around the time most VA’s start creating the fantasy of The Holy Grail client and what they would look like.

When the “filtering process” begins and the Virtual Assistant becomes more secure in their business, they might start to weed out less lucrative clients and begin directing their attention towards the quest for more “Grail-like clients” that suit the niche they have created.  This makes good common sense.  However, a word of caution.  Sometimes the Holy Grail is right under your nose and you missed it.

Working with a Virtual Assistant is sometimes a scary proposition for a client and sometimes they hold back on the more exciting, interesting work till they feel confident their VA can handle it and also till they get more confident in delegating responsibility to a VA.  Like all relationships, sometimes the client/VA one needs time to blossom.  Make sure you are not discarding a client with more potential than was immediately apparent.

Some of the best paid and most exciting work I have done as a VA has come from clients that, at least initially, didn’t fit my Holy Grail client ideal.  It took time for them to see my potential as an assistant and also for me to see their potential and realise my ideal was right under my nose the whole time.

www.theexceptionalassistant.com.au

The Office Psychopath

This post is going to have a very personal flavor to it and is probably a little off the usual blog topics for a Virtual Assistant.

A friend came to me recently describing some issues she was having with a new employee at her company.  Issues that were to me, hauntingly familar.  This new employee was stealing her work and passing it off as her own, lying to her manager and colleagues, making unrealistic promises to customers and destroying my friend’s credibility and reputation within the company.  The new “star employee” was very good at destroying any evidence and positioning themselves always in the rosiest light with management.  My friend’s complaints were falling on deaf ears with her boss and her boss’s boss and she was seen as being petty and simply feeling threatened by a good performer.

Many years ago in my corporate life, I was unlucky enough to encounter  an  “Office Psychopath”.  What on Earth is an office Psychopath?  Let’s be clear here.  I’m not talking about the average pain in the backside or difficult person that you encounter in every office or life in general or a simple personality clash.   Not all difficult to work with/for people are psychopaths.  

It is estimated that true psychopaths only make up 1-3 percent of the population, so your chances of encountering one are pretty slim.  These people have very specific behaviours and characteristics that distinguish them from your average pain in the arse.  And the worst part… there is no cure.

An office psychopath is is cold, calculating and not able to feel any empathy for another human being, largely unable to distinguish between right and wrong.  Usually highly intelligent, they operate purely to satisfy their own pshycological gratification.   If you have been lucky enough to go your whole working life without meeting one, consider yourself lucky.  

The term was coined in a book by John Clarke entitled “Working with Monsters”.  A book I read after having worked with one.  If you haven’t read the book, get it.  It’s a fascinating read.  If you think you might be in the same boat as my friend definitely read it.  It will help you understand what you are dealing with.

John Clarke is a trained psychologist and criminologist by trade.  He now works as a consultant to corporations experiencing problems with suspected workplace psychopaths and repairing the damage just one of these individuals can wreak in an office.

If you think you might be working for one, I’ll offer you the same advice I gave my friend “Get out, get out now” .  The only “cure” for the situation is to leave.  These people destroy careers and destroy self esteem.  As painful as it might be to leave an employer you really like, you cannot win this battle. 

John Clarke gives much the same advice, as often by the time management wakes up to ‘who’ the problem is, too many good staff have left and the ones that stay are miserable.  If you are an employer who has staff leaving in droves and can’t understand why, maybe you need to read this book too.  You are probably going to need professional assistance to resolve the problem.

Now that I am a Virtual Assistant I have a lot more say in who I decide to work with.  Should I ever be unluckly enough to encounter another one I will give them a wide berth.  Sadly for my friend she does not have the same flexibility and she is looking for a new position.

To anyone else in the same situation, I wish you luck with your search.

www.theexceptionalassistant.com.au

The Death of Powerpoint

There was a time when, as a medium for getting your message across, Powerpoint was king.  I read an article recently that expanded on the idea that Powerpoint is dead as a presentation medium.  After reading it I had to admit, if it wasn’t dead it is at least looking a little sickly around the edges these days.

When I first started my Virtual Assistant business, I was churning out dozens of Powerpoint presentations every month.  Powerpoint was the bread and butter of my business and every client used one.  Now days I have to admit, it’s been a while since I have put one together.

Many of my clients are presenters and run workshops or speak at other peoples workshops and seminars.  A quick survey of some of them revealed what I had already suspected.  Hardly anyone uses Powerpoint anymore, or certainly not to the extent they previously did.  Why is this I wondered?

There is a term created for presentations where slide after slide of graphics and statistics are shown and the presenter just reads from the slides like cue cards.  It’s called “Death by Powerpoint” and it seems presenters everywhere are so conscious of subjecting their audiences to it, that other methods of getting your message across are now being trialed.

Many speakers are choosing to use their own personalities and presentation styles as means to hold their audience’s attention.  In an age of digital saturation sometimes it is refreshing to just hear a person speak. Props like the old fashioned white board and flip chart are still being used but less reliance is being placed on the need for a “whiz-bang, bells and whistles” Powerpoint .  One of my clients commented: “We’ve got Utube and other social media now to engage with people . “  It seems people don’t want to see more of the same when they come to a workshop they the want practical stuff.  Many of my clients are also doing more webinars now than face-to face workshops.  The overheads are lower and the attendance rate is much the same with the added bonus of being able to “package” your recorded webinar and use it again and again as a training medium.

So where does that leave me and my business of producing Powerpoint presentations?

Like all businesses, the Virtual Assistant industry is not immune to change.  It stands on the cutting edge of technology and there is nothing changing faster than technology at the moment.  Most VA’s are extremely “tech savy” and  as long as there are people in business,  there will be a need for an extra pair of hands in every business.  Changing and evolving are part of the territory.

 www.theexceptionalassistant.com.au