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.)

Business Philosophy

I was at an educational seminar a week ago sponsored and hosted by ASBA, the Arizona Small Business Association. We were talking about branding our businesses to help recruit the best employees, which isn't really important to this post at all.

I was talking to Donna, one of the owners of Network Dogs, Inc. She said that she and her husband (another owner) would rather make $1 profit on 1,000,000 customers than $1,000,000 on 1 customer. Her reasoning was that they couldn't give the level of service they wanted to and didn't have the resources to handle the big contract, but they could help many small companies.

That got me thinking and today I finally found the correct articulation for my business philosophy. My philosophy is that I'd rather spend 8 hours a day working for 5 clients than 40 hours a week working for 1 client.

Here is my reasoning. My business is to provide administrative and bookkeeping services to small businesses on an as needed basis. This means that I am a contractor who sells my professional services to people who don't need a full-time employee. Spending forty hours a week, every week, working for one company makes me less of a contractor and more of an employee. There may come a time (rather soon) where I may need to go back to being an employee for a while, but I'd rather not. I'd rather have the experience that comes from working for a number of different clients. I've also found that I like working with small businesses. They are fun and interesting. Sure, I sometimes miss the corporate environment, but not enough to want to go back there forever.

Starting a Business

I’ll tell the truth…paperwork isn’t really a fascinating topic. Creating forms is fun. Collating results is fun, especially if I can create some charts to display the results. Filling out forms isn’t that much fun. It is something I’m very good at, however. No one can be a successful administrator for over 14 years without becoming good at filling out all types of forms.
If I had to fill out forms all day every day, I’d be crazy. Thankfully, office administration involves so much more than forms. If you look at your administrators, they usually answer phones, prepare reports, type memos, prepare presentation materials, research issues, file, organize, and are often the face of the organization to the customer. Most importantly, they have to keep the boss happy and make him/her look as good as possible. (How they do that is a topic for another blog post.) A good office assistant is the ultimate example of a great multi-tasker, performing any 2 or 3 tasks at the same time.
Now that I am also a business owner, I fantasize about the good ol’ days where I only had to juggle 2 or 3 things at a time. In addition to administrative work, I’ve added sales, marketing, networking, service, business management, and relationship management to everything else. It is an interesting transition to go from support staff to head honcho. So far, I’m not sure I know what a good balance is that will allow me to also have a life away from my computer. I have to find people to hire me to provide administrative services, but I also have to actually do the work – with superior quality and a quick turn-around. And my most important function is still making people look good – both myself and my client.
There are a lot of small business owners and managers in the same position as I am. That is why I decided to start my business. I realized that there are a lot of people who start a business and then they get so bogged down with all of the administrative stuff that they can’t spend the time they need to bring in customers, service customers, and see their families. It’s all about balance, and I want to help small business owners find balance and give them professional administrative support. I hope that my clients will eventually outgrow my services and need to hire an administrative employee (and use me for special projects), but before then, they may be able to invest in production employees before they incur all of the expenses associated with hiring an administrative person.
I am the middle-ground between doing it all yourself and hiring an employee. Go to the “Contact Us” page on my website to find out how to contact me about helping your business. I’ll be glad to help you determine how I can help you grow your business, not your workload.

Leanne

Virtual What?

Virtual Assistants are professional administrative support people who are independent contractors hired to do administrative work usually from outside of your office. Because they are professionals, you save training costs; because they are contractors, you save employment costs; and because they are virtual, you save space and equipment costs.

Virtual Assistants, VAs, can specialize in many different skills. I am a bookkeeper, executive assistant, have experience with small government contractors preparing incurred cost proposals (and I can explain the basic concepts), and create professional flow charts and organization charts . Other VAs specialize in transcriptions, web design, publishing, or any number of other skills.