"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.

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.