You are here: Home / Archives for vact

Why businesses need a VA

October 8, 2012 By Leave a Comment

In the current economic climate,  many people are choosing to setup their own business or buy a franchise.  However, smart business people know that, in order for them to focus on the key activities that will enable them to push forward their business and continue to raise their profile, they can only but delegate.

People set up their business with amazing passion and energy, with great visions of where they believe their business will take them.  Then, they start to get bogged down with the detail of every day tasks that actually take their eye of the ball, away from the important actions that will guarantee they reach their goals within the time frame they expect.

With more and more business owners are realising the importance of delegating to keep their business from failing, we also have the scenario that larger organisations are choosing to downsize and instead of taking on or keeping their employees, they are delegate to freelance professionals.  These freelance professionals can be VAs, as well as HR consultants, Accountancy firms and so on.

So for businesses to thrive and succeed, they need to outsource the activities that they find hard or do not enjoy to professional freelancers like VA’s and concentrate on the areas they can make the most impact and money from.

If you want to understand more about the VA industry without taking a massive leap, then attend one of our half day Taster Days for only £37.

Filed Under: Becoming a VA Tagged With: , , ,

Do you need VA Training? Part 3

October 4, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Here is the last part in the series on why you could need VA training. Here is part 1 and part 2. Here are the last few questions you need to consider to decide if VA training is right for you.

Question: What do you need to improve on or develop specifically?

  • This could be your persuasion skills or how to conduct a prospective client meeting to then convert into a client.
  • This could be the process of taking on associates, managing them effectively for client support.
  • It could be specifically in networking both online and in person and building your confidence.
  • Perhaps you need to develop your own social marketing skills understanding what to say and how to market yourself through Twitter, Linked-In, Facebook, Blog writing etc.

Question: What do you need to improve on or develop specifically?

Question: Have you identified opportunities which means you have to add to your skills set?

  • You may be a new VA however you have identified a niche market, and in order to help support that niche to meet industry demands, you have identified a boost in possible income if you were to add certain skills such as social media, web design, copy writing, shopping cart building etc.
  • As someone who wants to set up as a VA you may have established a niche market and want to know how to work on building clientele in this area.
  • What skills do you need to boost your profile and income?

Question: What are you aware of that could create a threat to your business opportunities and growth?

  • Is it that there is already a high volume of VAs in the area or in your country?
  • Are there VAs who are also offering what you want to develop specialist skills in?
  • Are there VAs already working with the niche you want to work in?
  • Is it the weaknesses you have identified?
  • Is it your lack of confidence in getting going?
  • Is it the lack of support from others?
  • Is it the lack of time?

What next???

Have you identified you areas of weakness, strengths, opportunities and obstacles?

What do you need to do to:

  • eliminate the obstacles,
  • improve on your weaknesses to create strengths,
  • develop the areas where you are currently strong and
  • turn them into opportunities for your business?

Be aware of ignorance, if we don’t know what we must know, how do we know what we must know in order to succeed???

Want to find out more about the Taster sessions and VA Mastery course we offer, click on these links.

Filed Under: Becoming a VA, VA Training Tagged With: , ,

What Now?

October 1, 2012 By Leave a Comment

by pakorn

If You Can Only Do One Thing, Do Something!!

If you could explore just one small opportunity, then it would be worth
taking that one small opportunity…would it not? Small actions lead to big
results. Even if that action is making one phone call,  act now, otherwise you WILL regret it.

The fact that you have been reading this has been the first positive
action; perhaps you’ve already been taking some action, so I congratulate
you.

What was your intention, what outcome do you want to get now? If you are stuck in a rut what are you prepared to do next about it?

Because, otherwise, as I’ve said, you will stay in your rut.

There is a lot there I have tried to cover over the precvious posts and as I have said this is not about a quick fix, this is about a start of your journey, so I’m here for you if you need support.

If I sound or appear to be the type of person that you would love to work
with and you would love to part of this new enterprise “Confident Women”
then just contact me

And…hopefully, this has inspired you to take some course of action even
it’s just thinking about the action to get out of your rut, then I’ve done my
job.

If you need to share any questions or maybe share some success stories then I’d absolutely welcome that, just send me an email, I’d love to hear from you.
Good luck on your journey and on getting out of your rut

Filed Under: Confidence, Get Out of Your Rut! Tagged With: , , , ,

Do you need VA Training? Part 2

September 27, 2012 By Leave a Comment

In part 1 we introduced the idea of taking training to becoming a VA and in this post we will ask some initial questiosn to find out if you think you need training.

Question: Have you had any business experience in the past?  Do you need to acquire (more) specific industry knowledge, guidance and tools in order to set up, run and boost a successful VA business?

Then yes training would be very useful as it provides you, from an experienced industry representative, with not only the essential tools to get started, but also what you need to know to ensure stability in your business, the common mistakes to avoid in order to avoid financial failure and knowing what works.

Question: What are your strengths and experiences?

  • At least 5 years experience as a PA or Secretary
  • An understanding of the operation of Microsoft software
  • Experience in strategic business planning
  • Implementing action planning and process management for those strategies
  • Advanced marketing, PR and sales strategies for client attraction and business growth
  • Networking and presentation skills
  • Social networking skills
  • Advanced client retention and management skills and experience
  • Virtual working and communication
  • Finance management including cash-flow management
  • Good copywriting skills
  • Understand how to build a team of associate VAs, manage, communicate with and delegate to them to support you and your clients or to build a passive income

Question: What do others perceive as your strengths? Where have you excelled?

Question: What are your weaknesses?

  • These will be where you have a lack of experiences or skills listed in the ‘strengths’ list.
  • If you are a new VA is your weakness in not having a niche market, promoting yourself effectively, client conversion low, limited experience working as a VA to effectively support your clients or having low confidence in yourself.
  • Generally a weakness is if you have identified an obstacle in either getting yourself started then established, especially if you are still employed and need to be able to make the transition on the salary you need to earn OR as a new VA it could be that you have identified a lack of specific skills which would enable you to effectively support your clients – what are they?

There are a couple more questions to follow in the next post. Answer these questions to get an idea of whether VA training is for you and then visit the site to find out more about the Taster sessions and VA Mastery course we offer.

Filed Under: Becoming a VA, VA Training Tagged With: , , , ,

Set Clear Milestones

September 24, 2012 By Leave a Comment

by renjith krishnan

Set very clear milestones for yourself, so you can start to measure your achievements, keep focussed on what is motivating you, and remind yourself of the negative consequence if you are not to take the action.

Have a flexible plan, focussed on your vision, going back to what I said
earlier, imaging now when life is different for you how would it be, what
would you notice happening, what would you notice being different?
So that you can start to mould your vision, have a very specific plan but allow it to be flexible because life does throw other challenges, whilst we are on a journey and that’s OK, we have to be prepared that could actually happen.

Just to give you a scenario; you’re setting off to go and meet somebody and maybe you’ve got a 20 mile journey, you look on Google maps and figured out the route you are going to take so you have a specific plan. Yet you are allowing yourself the contingency time to be flexible, just in case there’s traffic or any road works. And, Sod’s Law you come across some road works, so maybe you have satnav or your map next to you and you start to look at a different route, in order that you can carry on and achieve your end result, which is meeting that person at that particular destination.

It should never hold you back, so allow yourself to be flexible, have a
flexible plan and have a contingency for any of those barriers that could come up.

Then you start to implement some strategies to build your confidence and your self esteem. You build a stronger base and put yourself in a much stronger position to get out of that rut, otherwise if you take nothing on board from what you’re reading, you are just going to float through life, you will make on the spot decisions based on not really having a plan, and so don’t be surprised if you stay in your rut. But I’m sure that’s not you want is it?

So, have a blue print, have a plan. Have a clear focus and direction, have accountability, get support, have a contingency plan, have objectives, have flexibility, have faith in yourself, believe you can do it, learn from past experiences and mistakes and take that forward with you.

Think about how you can start to behave and be and think differently, use the support of other people, positive people who could positively influence you and help you to make that change.

Measure your success and if you need to make any adjustments, then
that’s fine because you are working at your own pace. And take action
every single day.

Filed Under: Confidence, Get Out of Your Rut! Tagged With: , , , ,

VA Training: Do you need it? Part 1

September 20, 2012 By 1 Comment

Do you need VA training? How can you identify what training you need either if you are starting up, already in the first couple of years or very established –  and who should you train with?

Right let’s get you started…ready?  There are 2 possible areas to this:

  • Are you considering becoming a Virtual Assistant?
  • Are you a new Virtual Assistant who needs a boost?

The question is do you need training to set up as a VA or take your new VA business forward?  Well I do always stress that this is not about showing you how to be a PA, the training is how to be effective as a VA in providing an outstanding client management system to support your clients to achieve their outcomes.  It is also about how to become successful as a VA business person.

In the following posts we will be addressing key questions on whether you think you need training to become a VA or to take your VA business forward and where to find the right information.

To find out more about the VA training VACT has to offer please take a look at our VA Taster sessions as well as the VA Mastery Course.

Filed Under: Becoming a VA, Biz Booster Tips, VA Training Tagged With: , , ,

Less Talk, Take Action

September 3, 2012 By Leave a Comment

by Stuart Miles

Making changes to get out of your rut requires confidence in making a
decision. It was interesting whilst having a conversation with someone
recently, they said that one of the things that they really hated about
themselves was that they would make a decision, they’d take the action to
make the decision and the decision was put into action but, then they
started to doubt themselves, doubt that they had made the right decision.
Sound familiar?
It’s a behaviour that they really hated about themselves, that they doubted
the decision that was made, and then worked over and over and over
again, mulling over the decision. One of the things that they would do,
which is positive, would be to look at the consequence of making that
decision, but even when that decision was made they would doubt
themselves. Is that you? Do you doubt some of the decisions that you
have made?
I think you need to be a little bit more lenient with yourselves, because
actually, you make decision based on your current situation, based on the
resources that you have available to you right now, based on the people
around you that perhaps mentor you, or someone that you could ask
advice of or maybe you’ve made decisions based on past experiences or
past mistakes.
So really you have to be confident about a decision and make it, but of
course you’re not just going to make the decision on a whim, it shouldn’t
be necessarily a knee jerk reaction although sometimes making a knee jerk
decision is probably the best thing for us, because it prevents us from
going over and over again, wondering if this is the right thing to do.
When you are making or creating your vision, thinking about how you want
things to be different for you… where you start, how you want things to be
different, how you want things to be more positive, what you are being
motivated towards and what you are being motivated away from…start to
think about what options you have available to you right now.

Filed Under: Confidence, Get Out of Your Rut! Tagged With: , , , ,

Start Leaving Your Rut

August 27, 2012 By Leave a Comment

by renjith krishnan

I have seen many different people that I’ve coached, in a variety of very
challenging situations, and to hear their story you’d think “My gosh how
on earth did they get out of that situation?”.

Now of course, I can only cover so much and there is only so
much you can work on by yourself without support from an expert, so
please bear with me, but hopefully, as I said, this for you will be the start of a very happy journey for you.

First of all, I think it’s about being clear about where you are now. What is your current situation? What is actually causing your rut? Is it a financial situation? Is it a job situation? Is it health? Is it a relationship? Is it your business or job? The focus is about all areas of your life. If any of you have ever had a coach or worked with myself, you will be familiar with something called the “Wheel of Life”. And you will see from that, your life is not made up of just one factor; it’s not just made up of health; it’s not just made up of money etc. It’s made up of a combination of different factors, that’s what makes you a whole person.

The trouble is, the wheel will sometimes be a little bit out of sorts, a little bit misshapen because some aspects of your wheel of life will be out of sync with something else. Therefore, think about your current situation and where you are now and I think sometimes, and this is something I’vemgone through myself, I’ve seen my client’s go through this, is that the first the step is actually facing the challenge, facing the problem, facing the fact that you are in a rut.

What is not going to help you is sticking your head in the sand and hoping that the problem goes away.
There is an absolutely amazing lady whom I’ve got to know, called Marie-Clare Carlisle, and she’s written a fantastic book which is called “How to Become a Money Magnet”. In fact, she will be one of our guest speakers as part of our Confident Women programme. One of the points Marie-Claire states in her book, is that the first start in being able to actually move forward is facing your negative belief, your negative situations, your emotions that go with it; it’s facing everything head on. When you start to face things head on, that’s when things actually start to change for you, which is really exciting.

Filed Under: Confidence, Get Out of Your Rut! Tagged With: , , , , ,

What Has Created the Rut for You?

August 19, 2012 By Leave a Comment
There could be a number of different reasons: it could be outside circumstances that you’ve really had no control over whatsoever, it could be a relationship breakdown which perhaps contributed in some way, and it could be redundancy, the list could be endless, so it’s not something
you’ve contributed to. Whatever the rut has been, you’ve had maybe some
control or no control over it.
However, I do very much believe that we attract our situation as well.
Someone might say “How could I possibly attract redundancy?”, well I really
do believe that there’s an element to all parts of our lives where we do have an element of control over an outcome – but why do we stay in the rut?
If it’s something we’re not particularly happy with it really doesn’t make
sense to stay there, surely we’d be much better off if we kicked ourselves out of this rut. But sometimes it’s a lack of confidence and sometimes it’s a lack of focus and direction. We sometimes really don’t know where we need to be heading and being in the rut isn’t always something we’re happy with. Sometimes, I’m afraid to say, it’s down to laziness. We just can’t be bothered to make a change; we might as well just stay where we are because you know what, after all it’s what we know isn’t it?
Quite a few people that I’ve coached have blamed it on other people, it’s other peoples fault! If it wasn’t for others then we wouldn’t be where we are today. We have a huge blame factor. It’s negativity – having a negative
mindset and I often believe that some of that can derive from past experiences.
It can also derive from having negative people around you and I think it’s
about time to start changing the people around you, who have an influence
over you. The thing is that whether it’s laziness, can’t be bothered, a
negative attitude, low self esteem, what happens is, the more that we are
in this rut and the more we believe there are reasons why we are in this
rut, we start to live this self fulfilling prophecy. It becomes us. We start to
act as if the rut is a natural part of our lives and it really does not have to
be that case. So the good news is that you can get out of your rut.
Filed Under: Confidence, Get Out of Your Rut! Tagged With: , , , , ,

Are You Stuck in a Rut? There’s No Quick Fix…

August 14, 2012 By Leave a Comment

by renjith krishnan

Feel like you are stuck in a rut, can’t get going or not sure what to do?

The one thing I’ve got to be very clear about is that there is no such thing
as a quick fix, so if anyone is expecting a quick fix by reading this then you are going to be slightly disappointed. I
think in life we come across so many different adverts, emails, anything
that really tries to promote a quick fix for us, whether it’s get rich quick,
build your business successfully quickly, lose weight quickly, get out of
your rut quickly and there isn’t a quick fix. We are looking for a short cut
as opposed to something that takes effort. There is no quick fix.
You have to put time, effort and commitment into you. Quite often when
we don’t see those fast results, we start to lose faith – lose faith in
ourselves, lose faith in products, lose faith in other people that are trying
to help us, and we must have this faith in order to make positive changes
and in this case get out of our rut.
Hopefully, this for you, is the start of a journey and I suppose it’s a little
bit like having a bad back, when someone goes to an osteopath or
chiropractor and they have had a really bad back and can barely walk into
the clinic, they are expecting to be healed immediately. But, think about
how long you may have had that back pain for, well it’s often like-for-like,
the length of time you’ve had the problem is then equalled by the length
of time to get it better again. So I’m really asking your permission to be
very patient with yourself and allow yourself time to get out of the rut.
Filed Under: Confidence, Get Out of Your Rut! Tagged With: , , ,
« Older Posts