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In The News… Back to Archive
Virtual Assistant Training – Who Needs It? By Justine Curtis
What vital things do you need to know when starting out as a virtual assistant, apart from how to manage a busy schedule and deliver an impeccable service?
People who consider setting themselves up as a virtual assistant often come from an administrative or PA type role. They have flawless administrative skills and know their way around the various software packages they need in order to complete those tasks for their own clients, if they decide to forge ahead with their own VA business.
But what don’t they know? And do they even know what it is they need to learn before starting out?
The idea of having your own business and using your talents to be your own boss and earn a better living is a very appealing one. But how do you actually run a business? Providing the skills you have to help clients complete tasks or projects is indeed part of that. But there’s a lot more that you need to know.
For example:
- How do you set your rates?
- How do you make sure you get paid?
- What equipment do you need – and what don’t you need?
- How do you register a company – or do you need to?
- Do you need insurance, and if so what kind?
- What policies and procedures do you need?
- Where do you find clients?
- What effective and inexpensive ways are there to market my business?
- How do you stand out from the crowd?
When making the transition from employee to business owner you suddenly realise how much there is to learn and the number of additional skills you need to adopt in order to become successful. The quicker you can learn all this information and the faster you put it into practice, the more likely you are to succeed. With a huge number of new businesses failing in their first year, quality information is critical to ensuring you get everything right first time.
At the very least you will need guidance about how to start your virtual assistant business. About all the basics of getting everything set up correctly, your systems and processes, registering yourself as a business or self employed, and what that means.
At that point, when you are all set up and ready to go, you will realise that clients do not actually come knocking at your ‘virtual’ door. You need to let the world know what you are doing and why they need it. This is where marketing and networking come in. All these are skills that can be learned so make sure you dedicate some time to educating yourself. Your determination and your level of knowledge will be the deciding factors in your success.
For more information about virtual assistant training visit: http://vasuccessgroup.co.uk
About the Author:
Justine Curtis is the director of her own successful virtual assistant business My Virtual Assistant http://www.my-va.com and founder of The UK Association of Virtual Assistants (UKAVA) which offers free resources and information to its subscribers – sign up at http://www.ukava.co.uk. Justine is the author of Setting Yourself Up As A Virtual Assistant and is delighted to be able to pass on the benefits of her vast experience of the VA role to aspiring and progressive virtual PAs as a co-founder of the VA Success Group. If you are thinking about starting a virtual assistant business, visit http://vasuccessgroup.co.uk
In The Spotlight:
Start Your Virtual Assistant Business Online Course
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Online Book Keeping With Kashflow – Accounts Made Easy!
As a virtual assistant, we deal with many different customers, using varying systems and programmes to complete all sorts of tasks. If you offer book keeping services you will have come across everything from basic spreadsheets, to complex systems such as Sage, we’ve seen it all. My personal favourite has become Kashflow. It’s incredibly simple and designed specifically for small businesses.
Kashflow is an online system which has several overriding benefits, firstly your accounts are held online so you can access them from any computer with a browser (after entering your secure login details). This means several things; if your computer should crash you haven’t lost everything, you can give live access to your client and you can give access to your clients accountant to compile their required information. As there is one live copy of the accounts, the changes are available instantly to everyone given access so you don’t have multiple out of date copies everywhere.
Secondly, as you pay a monthly subscription for Kashflow, rather than a large upfront software cost, it is easier to budget as a small monthly fee. Critically within this fee the software upgrades are included. Anyone who has purchased accountancy software in the past will know that purchasing upgrades is necessary when you have several people updating your accounts at different locations. Generally the software is not backwardly compatible so as soon as one person upgrades, you all have to and upgrades can be very costly.
What is more, you get to try before you buy. You don’t even have to give a credit card number that you might later forget to cancel should you decide to use an alternative program.
Try it today completely free here
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