Become A Successful Virtual Assistant

by Melissa Smith

  Sometimes I can run my business the same way. My business coach once looked me straight in the eyes and told me I was “addicted.” If I didn’t find a way to survive without my work, it would be a slow death.

  I didn’t know what he was talking about, and I almost resented him for saying it. The previous few weeks in my business had been great! I signed a big contract with an amazing new client, and I sent out another contract of the same amount for another client I was excited to work for as well. My Admin to VA Summit went live. I was booked with podcast interviews, consulting, and writing. It’s everything I had ever wanted. And oh yeah, I was traveling the world!

  In this situation, the first thing most people usually suggest is delegating tasks to others. That isn’t my problem. I take my own advice and have virtual assistants for a variety of different tasks. My problem is that I add work into any time I gain. I see open time on my schedule as an opportunity to do more. Earn more. Grow faster.

  Does any of this sound familiar? Don’t allow the love of what you do and the potential of growing your business to kill your business or take you to the point of exhaustion. If you are addicted to work like me, sometimes you’ll have to take drastic measures to reduce your workload. For me, it’s taking a vacation at a moment’s notice. I’m best at disconnecting when I’m on vacation. That’s the drastic part. You must disconnect and get away from things.

  It blows my mind when people wonder how some people can work virtually. Not only can you work from anywhere in the world, you can also overwork from anywhere in the world. I’m possibly one of the worst offenders. No one ever tells me to work harder or stop procrastinating. They tell me to slow down and take time to rest—something you might think is easy since I’m hanging out in some pretty great locations. But it’s still hard for me to stop and rest.

  Wherever you are, love yourself more than you love what you do. Not everyone will understand what I’m saying. Great for them! I’m trying to get to the place they already are. For the rest of us, work will always be here. We won’t ever get back to this time and place.

  Did You Burn Yourself Out?

  Do you still have warm fuzzies about your virtual assistant business? Are you excited to get up in the morning and work with your clients? You know, the ones you tried so desperately to get when you first started. The clients you didn’t know were out there. Before you realized you could make it on your own. You should be.

  Business ownership can be a dream. However, for too many, it’s become a nightmare. We, as virtual assistants, have pulled our clients’ business lives together so they can have time for their personal lives, which so closely overlap. Yet when it comes to our own businesses, we drop the ball in this area.

  We forget about creating automation and planning strategy sessions. We work too much. We don’t make plans for the weeks and months down the road. We don’t pay attention to the upcoming workflow or the sales pipeline. It’s time to show your business some love again.

  First, automate you. Don’t ask for another you. That will only create more work for yourself. Do whatever you need to do to so things function automatically. This could mean hiring your own VA. Don’t skimp on this task. If you don’t have the time now, you won’t have the time later. Plus, if you wait until you need to do it, then it’s too late.

  Work a four-day week. You can certainly be available to your clients five days a week but make plans to get the work done in four. Should something come up during this time that puts you behind, now you’ll have an extra day instead of possibly working late or on one of your scheduled days off.

  Have a three-week to three-month strategy. Begin planning your time out in three-week blocks, whether or not your clients give you work that far in advance. Be proactive and anticipate your clients’ needs before they ask you for help. As you master a three-week time period, keep moving forward until you can plan three months in advance.

  Again, it is your job to be proactive with your clients. Last minute items you keep completing at the last minute will always be requested at the last minute. You’re not providing a service to your clients; you’re enabling them. Think of the stress they’re under to be constantly working against the clock. Help your clients make the change. They’ll thank you for it.

  Now plan. Plan vacations. Plan to attend conferences. Plan to learn a new skill. Don’t wait until you have time. Make time. These are the things you wanted to do when you began your business. Remember how you dreamed of what you would do when you weren’t chained to a desk and had someone looking over your shoulder? Remember when you had downtime at work and wanted to go to a yoga class, play with your children, read a book, or run errands? Do those things now! Well, running errands isn’t super exciting, but if you time it right—while everyone else is at work!—it can take you half the time.

  Do the things you need to do to love your VA business again. It doesn’t happen by accident, and it doesn’t happen overnight. Imagine what you want it to be and make it so. Love yourself and your business enough to wake up excited every day to do your work. This is the life you gave yourself. You became a VA business owner. Love it or leave it!

  Why Vacations Are So Important

  While traveling the world in 2017, I took a record number of vacation days. I had a lot of people wonder why it’s necessary for me to take a vacation while I’m traveling the world. For starters, just because I was traveling the world didn’t mean I wasn’t working. Whenever you’re working, you need to take time off. No matter how excited I was to travel to the next country, I was aware that my mind and body needed to disconnect.

  Additionally, launching three new products in a single year meant I was putting in a lot more hours. Business was booming, and all my launches had to be created during the same time I was matchmaking, assisting, and consulting with clients. More work time made it a must for me to take more vacation time. Here’s a tip: Anytime you’re working so hard you feel like you don’t have time for something is when you need it the most.

  If you work from home or a remote location as a virtual assistant, people may not realize you’re really working. They cling to an old-fashioned mentality of taking a vacation from the office and the commute, which is still true for many. Since 55 percent of Americans had unused vacation days last year, you can bet taking time off when you’re already working virtually seems odd. I encourage you to be the odd one!

  Average and successful are not synonymous. You’ll have to choose who you want to be. I’ll give you three reasons to take a vacation before you think you are successful enough to do so:

  1. Taking a vacation gives you a successful mindset.

  My vacations didn’t always include international travel. In previous years, most of them included staying with family to save on hotel costs. When I first started my business, it often seemed counterintuitive to take a vacation. On paper, I wasn’t making enough money to take time off. Everything I read told me to suffer through the first two years and make sacrifices. However, it didn’t seem right. Turned out I was reading the wrong things.

  I told my own clients to take vacations, but I refused to follow my own advice. How hypocritical! I couldn’t tell someone to do something I was not doing myself. Benjamin Hardy wrote an article called “The 2 Mental Shifts Highly Successful People Make.” The first shift is The Power of Choice. He writes, “The foundation of the first shift is the sublime power of choice and individual responsibility. Once you make this shift, you are empowered to pull yourself from poverty of time, finances, and relationships. In other words, the first shift allows you to create a happy and prosperous life, where, for the most part, you control how and on what you invest your time.” Not taking a vacation is a choice. You are choosing to tell yourself you are not worthy of a much-needed break. If you keep telling yourself this, you won’t ever escape from the poverty of that thinking. Instead, it will become true.

  If you’re not making enough money yet (YET!) to take the vacation of your
dreams, I understand. Save, plan, and still take a vacation this year. You don’t have to go far away to disconnect. Do a Google search to find every free attraction in a 50-mile radius of your home. Enjoy a picnic or a hike. Read a book or create movie nights. Find out if you have any friends or family leaving town and offer to house-sit so you can be in different surroundings. Vacation isn’t merely a destination. It’s a mindset, a choice.

  2. Take a summer vacation to be successful in the fall.

  In a Forbes article titled “10 Reasons You Cannot Afford Not to Take a Vacation,” we learn, “Whereas summer is a quiet period for most companies, autumn is a power session. Together with spring it’s the most important sales period . . .” If you were running a race tomorrow, you wouldn’t stay out all night tonight. You’d make sure you were well rested so you could do your best. Vacationing in the summer is the same thing. As the article goes on to say, “So rather than thinking of a break as something you do for yourself, then do it for the sake of your company’s future productivity.”

  Many virtual assistants think they can’t take a vacation if they don’t have a full client load. In fact, vacationing before you have a lot of clients is best. You’ll learn how to plan, automate, and manage the time while you’re gone. If you aren’t able to do this with a few clients, you won’t be able to do it with many.

  3. Taking a vacation makes you more productive and positions you for success.

  Our brains, like our bodies, need a break to perform better. You would never train for a marathon by running 26.2 miles every day. Your body would not have time to recover, and you could not avoid injuries, which cause major setbacks. Well, you might not feel mental fatigue as quickly as you experience physical fatigue, but it’s there and it happens sooner. “Since almost all of us are doing mental work these days, managing cognitive resources is not a nice thing to be able to do; it’s essential,” according to the article “The Secret to Increased Productivity: Taking Time Off” in Entrepreneur. As virtual assistants, it is extremely important that we take vacations. When we don’t, we’re not taking our own advice.

  If your business isn’t set up to run without you, you’re not creating anything sustainable, and you can forget about being scalable. Vacation isn’t something you wait to do until be you become successful. It’s what you do because you’re already thinking like a successful business owner.

  Being successful is a mindset. If you don’t think you’re successful enough to take a vacation, you probably won’t ever be.

  This isn’t fake it until you make it. I’m telling you to put good and best practices in place now so you can build and grow from a solid foundation. In life and in business, you can’t help or serve anyone if you aren’t already helping and serving yourself.

  Are You in a Funk? Give Yourself a Hard Reset.

  I vividly remember the last words my son said on New Year’s Eve 2016. As I rolled my luggage toward the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) station, fighting to hold back tears, preparing to travel the world (12 countries in 12 months), not knowing if I would see him the entire year, he yelled out to me, “Kick 2017’s ass, Mom!”

  While many people assumed I was taking a year off from work, or at least taking it very easy, those closest to me knew better. In 2017 I made some big plans, and since I work virtually, I can do them from anywhere in the world. Not only was I going on this yearlong journey for myself, I was on a mission to show how much can be done while working remotely—even if you are traveling the world.

  By August 2017, I had already proved a lot. If you want to know what I accomplished in the first six months of the year, you can read my article “Want to Challenge How Much Work Can Be Done Remotely?” I purposely front-loaded the majority of my work for the year, knowing most of the long working days would be behind me by this time so I could start writing my next book. The plan I put in place had been executed. Then something unexpected happened—I got into this weird “funk.”

  At a point in the year when I assumed the easiest work was ahead of me, I started to shut down. I say it’s the easiest because I love writing, and the majority of the book had already been written. I did everything I could to shake the funk, and nothing helped.

  I was trying to pinpoint the exact thing that was causing me to hold myself back, but I couldn’t. It wasn’t just one thing. It was a multitude of things. Eight months into the year and two product launches later, dealing with the unexpected ups and downs of life had caught up with me.

  Until now I had adapted to the situation or powered through. It’s what we do as virtual assistants, business owners, and entrepreneurs. The problem was I had adapted so much that I got away from myself. Powering through works until you have no more steam. Worse, since I was no longer working like I do when I do have steam, I didn’t really know what to do with this unexpected funk. It was time to give myself a hard reset.

  A hard reset meant restoring myself to “original factory settings.” It meant no longer adapting to anything or anyone, rather doing it my way. I had to look back at the last year to remember when I was my best and what that looks like for me.

  The hard reset was about getting back to me—my schedule, my priorities, my work, and my play. Only then would I have control over the thing I can actually control—myself. I was in a funk because I wasn’t controlling the one thing I could. And worse, I was allowing other things to control me while being overly adapted to an environment in which I wouldn’t live for more than a month.

  My hard reset included:

  Waking up at 5 a.m. every day.

  Running three to five times a week.

  Reading every night before I go to bed.

  Every night writing down my three must-dos for the next day.

  Eating healthy foods and getting plenty of sleep.

  I have complete control over all of these things. Doing them is what it took to get back to me. When I do these things, I am much better prepared to handle all the situations I cannot control on a daily basis. As virtual assistants, we are natural givers. Sometimes we give until it hurts us, literally. You can’t serve or assist anyone when you’re not at your best.

  You may not have planned any product launches this year, and you may not be traveling extensively. However, there will be times when you find yourself adapting to your current situation. New firsts, new beginnings, new endings, and a host of other situations you’ve needed to adapt to.

  During these times, I cannot stress enough the need to take care of yourself. When you don’t, you will begin to question your work, your clients, and your value. If you cannot manage yourself first, you will not be able to manage your client relationships.

  Managing the Client

  Everything in your business needs to be managed, including your clients. If you don’t manage them, they will manage you. You’re already on the right track if you set boundaries for yourself. The next part of managing the client is acting like and speaking like a business owner.

  It comes from every action, every response, every experience, and every form of communication. Once you break one of these, you confuse the client. I can’t imagine walking into Tiffany & Co. without someone opening the door for me. That might be strange. Could you imagine if I left the store with a purchase, and it wasn’t wrapped in their famous blue box? I would demand one. They are managing their customer relationships every step of the way. The beauty of it is that it’s all for my benefit.

  The first step in managing the client relationship is in your onboarding process, which begins during the consultation. Onboarding requires effort on your part, especially proper communication. Most VAs get it wrong when they are trying to get the client to work for them. Instead, you should be creating expectations for your client. The difference is in how the client feels about the onboarding process. Sending a packet for your new client to read is not onboarding; that is homework. They hired you to have less work to do, and you’re giving them work before the real work even begi
ns!

  During your consultation appointment, you should have uncovered your client’s working style. This will give you insights into how your onboarding process should work. In the simplest of terms, onboarding is setting the expectations of how you’ll be working together, how you’ll be communicating, what work will be getting done, and the time frames to complete the work.

  When clients know what to expect, onboarding becomes a less scary process. When they don’t know what to expect, you are surprising them in the wrong way. Don’t assume the same excitement they had during your consultation still exists. In the 24 hours after your consultation appointment, they could already be experiencing buyer’s remorse. Be ready to answer more questions now if need be. Having a time line will help answer these questions each time you gain a new client.

  First, your clients must know they have been heard. Based on what they’ve shared with you, you’ve created a time line for your working relationship. This could be a new experience for the client.

  I use the same time line for all of my potential clients because the schedule for fulfilling their needs is always the same. This is not rocket science for me. For them it could be as frightening as getting in a rocket to the moon. They are handing over money and trusting I am going to do what I said I would do. Is there excitement? Yes. Are they scared? Yes. It’s more than working with me. Now they are going to have additional expenses. They are going to have to work differently. It’s scary and exciting to grow a business. When you onboard a client, it is to put him or her at ease.

  After sharing a project time line, next you must make sure you have a communication strategy time line. This puts you at ease. Don’t wait until you need something. Your client is busy, which is why he or she hired you. If you aren’t scheduled on your client’s calendar now, a time will come when you will need to speak to him or her the most, and there simply won’t be enough time on the client’s calendar. Suddenly, your project time line will start to diminish.