"You Lack Focus!"

My nephew, 8 years old, told me that I lack focus! (HE apparently lacks the ambition to live to be 9 years old.) OK, he was talking about my poor Wii Lego Star Wars game skills at the time, but seriously, “You lack focus, Aunt Leanne” is kind of harsh criticism.

Truth be told, I’m nearsighted and uncoordinated in the real world and these handicaps show up in my video gaming abilities. While I’m confessing things, I’ll also tell you that I collect chess sets, but tire of playing chess after about 5 minutes and people have been known to laugh at me when I dance. On the plus side, I’m pretty good playing soccer, so my eye-foot coordination is better than my eye-hand.

Oh, and even though I’ve been known to occasionally lead music in church, I can only direct the music LEFT-handed (unusual to say the least) and I have to concentrate really hard to keep the beat. To even things out, while I am left-handed, I can only use scissors with my right hand, but the scissors are often upside-down. (Don't ask, it just is.)

With all of my inabilities, however, the one thing I really don’t lack - at least when I’m doing bookkeeping - is FOCUS. When in the middle of a particularly interesting bookkeeping problem, or just busy day, I’ve been known to look at the clock and 2 or 3 (or 8) hours have passed unnoticed as I’ve been working.

Just yesterday afternoon as I was working on a client’s payroll, banks, and APs, I was surprised that 1:20 had become 3:45, even though I had accomplished a lot of work - checks were ready to mail, payroll was complete (checks cut and distributed, taxes paid and 401k contributions made) and made a lot of progress toward making sure the December banks are ready to reconcile when I get in next week. I remember vaguely thinking at about 1:30 that I was hungry, but never actually got around to eating. I didn’t lose my focus until about 3:45 when I was interrupted by a co-tenant telling me he was leaving and I was the last one in the building. I realized that I hadn’t been all day and really needed to visit the Ladies’ Room.

Time flies when you are focused.

So, what have you learned about me?

1. If you want to win at a video game, I should be your opponent of choice.

2. There is a valid reason I was picked last in gym class.

3. I do NOT lack focus when I work.

I’m pretty sure the last is the most important – unless you are 8, then the first is of far greater interest.

Figuring Credit Card Payoff Amounts

In the course of providing financial and cash flow management for clients, one of the challenges I face is figuring credit card payoff amounts. Sure, early on, I tried the method of calling the credit card company for the payoff amount, but they usually were very wrong. Some had us overpay; some had us underpay; one even had us overpay by almost $100.

I knew that credit card payoffs couldn't be that hard to figure close to the correct amount, so I took on the challenge and developed a spreadsheet that I will share with you. You can find the Excel worksheet on my website. Feel free to use it. If you want to use it on a blog, or your website, please be kind enough to attribute it to me, my company, or my website.

Rethinking the Business Office

I was at a Chamber of Commerce mixer this morning and my thoughts drifted to my previous business experiences and how a virtual assistant would have been possible and beneficial if we'd had the technical abilities and forethought at that time.

I spent many years learning my craft at Terminix (yes, the bug people). where I once worked in an office supporting a regional manager and a regional technical manager. Both men traveled, which left me many, many hours alone in the office in a week. I had a few reports to do (at least 1 each day), mail to sort, distribute, deal with, and send out, faxes to read, an occasional memo to type, and calls to make and take. So, I had at least an hour each day of productive work, and up to 12 hours a week of actual productive work. I held back as much work as I could for days when the boss was in the office. I was bored - a lot. This mostly happened in pre-internet years when an actual body was necessary in the office.

I moved into a traveling job with Terminix where I trained, supported, and audited branch office staffs and procedures. The regional office I worked from was larger, but that meant that there were more people out of the office on any given day. I spent a lot of time on the phone to the office assistants, but I only saw them (or my office) intermittently, sometimes not for weeks at a time.

Fast forward to now. There was nothing in those offices that couldn't have been done remotely (except for some minimal filing). We started emailing the reports the regional office compiled as soon as Terminix caught up with technology. Email, for all intents and purposes has made the fax machine obsolete. (Although I have a fax number, the faxes come into and go out from my email.) The mail can be delivered anywhere and can be sent out from wherever. Telecom has come a long way and Telesphere has some great solutions for remote offices (and other offices also).

Besides saving money on office space, Terminix could have saved a lot of money on employment costs (salary, benefits, taxes) by using the assistants' time much more productively. Terminix did change before I left and closed regional offices, disbursing the staff to a small office space in a local branch. Reports started being compiled electronically. Email became de rigeur. Resources have been distributed more wisely.

Businesses often think (like Terminix did) that they have to have an office and an administrative employee. It is model we saw when we were young and starting out. That isn't necessarily true anymore. By using virtual assistants, outsourcing the office support functions becomes a viable business solution which conserves resources for core priorities and profitable activities while still having the professional support and representation businesses need. When deciding on an office model, consider using a virtual assistant instead of a full-time assistant with too little to do.

Certification and Accreditation

I just took a survey about virtual assistant certification and accreditation. ( In essence, you can't call yourself a "Virtual Assistant" unless you meet whatever criteria someone decides.) I don't know that the survey sponsor was expecting my visceral and ardent rejection of the idea. Here are my reasons why I think the idea is unnecessary, ineffectual, and potentially damaging.

1. Each virtual assistant has different native abilities, skills, and experience. Quantifying some arbitrary skill set as being virtual assistant worthy negates the whole marketing point we use of being versatile. For instance, I know virtual assistants who provide social media marketing, SEO services, real estate agent support, bankruptcy (lawyer) support, legal assistance, bookkeeping, transcription, etc. I could be an accredited VA, but I doubt you would find that I am your best option if you want SEO support or transcription, however I am a great bookkeeper.
   
2. "Virtual Assistant" is a description of the nature of the work and can also be a job title. I have a cousin who is a life coach, but is helping to support her family by working as a virtual assistant to her life coach training program. She would probably never market herself as a virtual assistant, but she is one. (She probably would also never get certified, but it doesn't change the nature of her work.)
3. The tenor of the survey was one of trying to limit the people who can call themselves virtual assistants under the guise of protecting the integrity of the profession through some sort of certification. Like non-virtual assistants, the work speaks for itself. If your work is poor, it reflects on you. Competition is good for the profession - it weeds out the bad. Let people call themselves what they want. I doubt passing a typing test (or whatever) is going to make me quantitatively better than I am today. The converse is also true, failing the typing test doesn't make me intrinsically worse. (No one hires me for my ability to pass typing tests; they hire me for my ability to do what they need.)

So, some in my profession think that there should be some sort of accreditation. Seriously, things like this scheme benefits no one but the accrediting authority. I have skills (and patience) that managers and business people don't have; that's why they pay me. But the reality is that we're office administrators, not doctors. We may wreak some havoc if we are bad at what we do, but if a manager is doing his/her job right, it won't last long and the damage is minimal. It's not life and death.

I will conclude this post with the same comment I used on the survey. I didn't go to secretarial school; I will not go to "virtual secretary" school. My work stands on its own. (Yep, I know I'll be blasted, because we aren't secretaries, but the word gets the point across.)

Barter - A Tried and True Business Option

In a time-honored practice, I joined a barter exchange this fall. (Earned back my membership fee in 48 hours.) Bartering is a traditional way of exchanging goods and services. The barter exchanges make it better.

Through a barter exchange, you don't have to trade one-to-one. This means that if a plumber wants to barter for my bookkeeping services, I don't have to use his services. The exchange keeps track of debits and credits to accounts and I can take the barter credits I receive from the plumber, the entrepreneur, and the party clown and use them to barter for a vacation condo in Hawaii. (Don't I wish I had enough credits for the condo!) Bartering has been a really good experience. I have worked for people that would have muddled through on their own if the transaction had involved cash. Did I mention that I earned back my membership fee in less than 48 hours?

Cash is king right now. People are holding on to as much cash as they can, so barter opens a whole new clientele to me. A lot of times people are free with barter bucks. It's true that I can't live solely using barter, but I can defray some expenses. I'm hoping to find a barter landscaper who works on the west side of Phoenix, but until we get one on barter, I'll have to spend my barter-bucks on things like haircuts or business coaching. Both of which would be useful.

Lest anyone think that they can bypass taxes, the government gets their cut also, in the form of a 1099 at year's end. That means barter transactions are reportable income. Heaven knows - the government can't do without their cut of my work. That's actually the one way that informal barter is better than an exchange.

Do you belong to a barter exchange? Do you barter your products or services formally or informally? How has it worked for you?

Gift Certificates

In honor of the Christmas season (or Hanukkah for our Jewish friends), I now offer gift certificates for virtual assistant services on my website. You can get gift certificates in 3, 5, 10, and 20 hour increments. They can be used for any services I offer and are valid for all of 2009. Because I am a VIRTUAL assistant, proximity is not a big factor on my end, but I suggest that English is my language of choice. Don't be shy. Check out the gift certificates at: http://www.walkeradminsolution.com/giftcertificates.

Assessing the Business

As a new business owner with a little more than 6 months working full-time with no other visible means of support, I get to review the company a lot - mostly when a bill is due and I need to look at my financial position. I'm the first to admit that I have always been a little uptight about money, so not having a paycheck is very stressful to me.

Last year, I was put through the trauma of a 6 hour polygraph examination for a government security clearance (which I never got, because the company I was working for shed all employees except the owner - thus the decision to work for myself). Of course the examiner tries to focus on your weak spots to make sure you aren't a risk, so she found my weak spot - talking about my finances. (Yes, I also see the irony in a bookkeeper being exceedingly uptight about finances, but I don't mind dealing with OTHER people's money.) When I got home, I was talking to my father about the whole unpleasant experience and especially the grilling I got about being ostentatious and he said, "You? You're the tightest person I've ever met." Some people would be insulted, I replied, "I know!"

Truth about polygraphs - they are the most horrible things ever and now I understand how people can confess to anything while strapped into one of those things. I almost failed in the first hour, because I couldn't control my breathing. By the end, I would have confessed to almost anything - and they weren't even looking for a confession of wrong-doing.

DO NOT EVER AGREE TO TAKING A POLYGRAPH!

Back to the point of the post.

With all of the bad economic news that I hear everyday and the stress I see in some friends and family members, I feel very grateful that I have the resources and abilities needed to keep my business going and I'm extremely grateful that I am not at an employer's mercy for my well-being. I'm still in business through January, probably even February. Two months ago, I was doubtful about November. Every month, Walker Administrative Solutions' imminent demise is delayed a little longer. I wonder if this is how Henry Ford felt.

I'm beginning to see the fruit coming from months of diligent networking, talking, and meeting business people. I look ahead and wonder how to schedule all of my potential work if the jobs come in. (That would be a great problem to have in my business.) I've also been very blessed with small jobs coming in to beef up the regular revenue. I just count all of my work as blessings from paying tithing and a lot of prayer and yes, I pray that this business will l work out I'll be able to support myself, and I'll be able to bless a few people along the way.

SIX MONTHS DOWN - MANY MORE TO GO!