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.)

Accidently Green

I really didn’t try to start a “green” business. It was never my intention. Quite frankly, I am a man-made global warming skeptic. (I don’t really want to debate it, so I’m not going to.) But trying to work in the virtual world makes me accidently green. Here’s how:

1. I don’t commute 5 days a week. When I was commuting, I was travelling 20 miles to get to work. Thankfully, I didn’t have to deal with rush hour often, but it was still a long drive. I still drive for business, after all, I need to network and find clients and some clients want on-site support, which I will happily provide if they truly need it.

2. I make dual use of my home. It’s home; it’s office. Whatever it is at the moment, it is a dual use space, but please don’t tell those sticklers in the HOA. It might be against the rules. Thankfully, I’m on the board and long ago (when I was still employed – for someone else) we decided that as long as businesses didn’t add to the burden of the neighborhood by adding excessive traffic, home businesses were acceptable.

3. Oh yeah, I also use a lot of CFLs i.n my home, if you want to count those. The main reason is because I’m cheap, so CFLs are a better value overall for lifecycle and electric savings.

4. I use almost no paper anymore. Because a lot of work is passed electronically, I don’t print the reams of paper I did when I worked in offices. Some of the change comes from using QuickBooks, which reduced paper use over a specialty accounting software, which printed every transaction, usually twice, sometimes three times. So now QB payroll produces 7 or 8 pages, where the old program produced at least 30 pages of reports, all vital for good record-keeping.

I feel bad sometimes, like when I attend my Chamber of Commerce “Green” events. Those people or at least some of them are true believers. I just fell into it because of my business model. I’m sure there are others in my situation, but few of us will admit it – at least at the green-themed meetings. I’m accidently green. None of this means that I won’t use my greenness to my benefit. It's a great marketing tool. I just may need to avoid the whole global-warming, the-sky-is-falling discussions so that I don’t out myself as a skeptic.

Maybe I can plant a tree to assuage my guilt. I hear planting a tree is an acceptable alternative to truly buying into the movement or something like that. Have you ever just accidently joined a movement you don’t really believe in – for the marketing possibilities or any other reason?

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.