Tip 5
Position items so you don’t twist your back; screens should be at a comfortable viewing height in front of you. Ensure your back is supported.
Tip 5
Position items so you don’t twist your back; screens should be at a comfortable viewing height in front of you. Ensure your back is supported.
Tip 4
Don’t rest wrists or forearms on the edge of desks.
Tip 3
Alternate between thumbs and fingers when typing on smartphones.
Tip 2
Hold your head so ears are above shoulders. Don’t stick your chin forward or bend or twist your neck.
With more and more of us working from home and spending hours hunched over a computer, back and neck problems are on the increase. Without a healthy and safety policy and constant training and reminders we can quickly slip into bad habits (I know I’m guilty!).
Over the next few posts we are going to be sharing with you BTs Ten Top Tips from Get Fit for Mobile Working.
Tip 1
Use the backrest of your chair. Don’t slouch forwards. Keep shoulders in line with your hips.
Listen to your instincts. They can protect you from making poor business decisions and guide you down the right path.
Relationships with people are key. Business and personal relationships should be cherished. Treat people how you yourself would want to be treated. Always remember that people are the lifeblood and engine room of any business.
Tycoons go the extra mile. Perseverance, sheer determination and tenacity are core characteristics of the mindset of a Tycoon. Successful entrepreneurs battle against all the odds to build their business and always appreciate when it is time to get out. Try to have flexibility to work outside your own comfort zones in order to bring your dreams to fruition.
Anticipating the changing needs of the market and partners is crucial. Timing when to enter a market or not will help optimise success, as will knowing the right time and circumstances to start your business.
Action is the bridge between your vision and results. Action involves figuring out how to get from where you are now to where you want to be. Without action there would be no results.
Tycoons make things happen. They are driven by results. Planning for your success is as important as achieving success. You need to know exactly how you got there so your success can be duplicated, scaled up and multiplied, and it is that which turns an entrepreneur into a Tycoon.
Committing to follow through once a decision is made is an invaluable ally on your road to success. Be prepared to work hard and make sacrifices. Commit to a common goal and make it happen, but commit to yourself and your health too.
If you don’t believe in yourself or your idea, why should anyone else? Gain confidence through gaining experience, skills and knowledge. Change your perception of failure to realise that it provides feedback. Feedback provides essential learning to help know what not to do the next time.
All businesses need business partners to grow. Tycoons know the importance of filling the gaps and weaknesses in their own skill set or business idea, by finding the parts of the jigsaw puzzle to create the best chance of success.
Peter Jones is a proven businessman and star of the BBC’s Dragons’ Den. He is also a judge for the BT Business Essence of the Entrepreneur 2008 awards. His entrepreneurial journey started early when, at the age of 16, he founded a tennis academy. He then set up a computer business, along with other business interests.
Peter has won many national awards, including Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year in 2001. Now in his early forties, Peter is considered to be one of the UK’s leading entrepreneurs.
Over the next few posts, we will be sharing Peter’s top tips for an Entrepreneur:
Your vision is your destination. You’ll need a map to help you reach that destination, which will be made up of goals and results. The vision is the vital part, otherwise, you won’t know where you are heading and your goals will be irrelevant.
6. BUSINESS SURVIVES ON THE BOTTOM LINE. NOT THE TOP LINE
Don’t worry about growing revenue. Worry about growing profit…. Make sure you understand what drives profitability in your business. To spur demand, you may have to get creative with pricing and product offerings, and you don’t want to put something out there that is actually unprofitable.
Consider diversifying to make the most of potential opportunities. Others’ weaknesses and instability could work to your advantage. You never know – you may identify a new market.
You can find more free advice and useful resources like this at www.venturenavigator.co.uk
VentureNavigator is a state-of-the-art online business planning tool designed to help start-ups and small businesses improve their chances of success. Anyone can log on to the VentureNavigator Web site, submit a potential business plan, and receive a personalized assessment on its strengths and weaknesses. VentureNavigator also offers a user forum, where users can interact with each other, discuss current topics, and offer their own business advice. The service is funded by the UK Government Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF), ensuring that the service is free of charge to end users.
5. TALK TO YOUR LENDERS
If you have debt financing, stay in communication with your creditors. Don’t wait until it’s too late before speaking with your lender. When you are already in a crisis and haven’t provided any warnings, situations may prove tricky. Maintain constant communication. It will help you should you ever need to renegotiate terms.
4. YOU CAN ALWAYS CUT MORE
You can forecast expenses, you can’t forecast revenue. Look for places to cut expenses. When times are good, companies tend to add staff and expenses that are nice to have, but not critical. It’s time to take a fresh look at those.
Keep focus on core markets and spend money solely in those areas. Avoid putting cash and time into areas that have proven less profitable.
Many companies begin by cutting advertising / marketing budgets. This can be a mistake. Instead of cutting these budgets, review the methods you are using. Are there more cost effective routes to market? Does your current strategy bring in the right results? If not, rework your efforts to deliver the best possible results.
3. DON’T DEPEND ON ANYONE
Keep a close eye on your suppliers, and have alternatives. In a downturn, some of your suppliers may become troubled as well, and you need to think about alternative sources for your critical inputs.
2. COLLECT WITH PASSION
On a related point, manage receivables aggressively. Businesses are holding on to their cash longer than before, resulting in late payments. These late payments are having a ripple effect through the SME community. Receivables will trend up, and some of your customers may become troubled as well. Don’t keep extending credit.
How are you finding the economic downturn? Is your business booming as you pick up new clients love the flexibility that a VA can offer as they are less inclined to hire staff at this uncertain time? Or are you finding that clients are cutting back on their hours with you and taking longer to pay? Entrepreneur and former Dragon Doug Richard shares his Tips For Survival In An Economic Downturn.
1. CASH IS KING
Manage cash – if you’re out of cash and out of credit, you’re out of business. You need a good 13 week cash forecast, generated NOT from the income statement but from a detailed understanding of receipts and disbursements. Monitor trends in your cash flow to keep on top of any sticky situations.
Keep on networking.
This is often the first thing that gets dropped when you become busy with clients work. I know; I’m guilty of it myself. But when you suddenly disappear from groups you have been a regular at, often the assumption is that you are no longer in business. Accept that networking is part of the ongoing development of your business, choose one or two groups that you will remain a regular at and keep going. Even if you are not looking for more clients, you will still establish relationships that you will benefit from later on.
Review your marketing activities.
Set aside time each month to review your marketing activities. How many enquiries have you had in the previous month and where have they come from? Have a look at what is working for you and what could be improved.
Social networking.
If you have a profile on sites such as Ecademy and LinkedIn, it’s easy to spend hours each day on and off the site responding to requests to link. Set aside some time each week for social networking and respond to invitations then. Also user this time to seek out new connections of your own, join and post to groups, etc.
Happy New Year! Are you sitting comfortably? Then we’ll begin…
Writing your blog.
The same writing advice applies here as it does to newsletters but with the added bonus that you can schedule your posts for in advance. I’m actually writing this on the 30th October but you’ll be reading it weeks later!
Writing your newsletter.
If you write a newsletter, be it weekly, monthly or whatever, try to write in blocks. It can be hard to find a quiet time to sit and write but when you do, often you feel like you could write for hours. Do it when you feel inspired and then split the content over several newsletters.
Now get packed up and close the office for Christmas and we’ll see you in the New Year!
Check and update your web site.
Check your web site is up to date and current. Set a side time, perhaps once a month, to check all the information is current and add anything new your clients and prospects might find useful.
Create checklists.
Have checklists for every process in your business. For example, when you take on a new client, have a checklist that prompts you to check you have received back the signed contract, you have sent your Welcome Pack, you have set up an appropriate email address, you have their stationery, etc. This saves time and prevents things being forgotten.
Do your filing.
In addition to your client files, have files for everything related to running your business. Then set aside time each week to file everything you have dealt with that week. I use the last half hour on a Friday for this.
Book keeping and invoicing.
I’d recommend allowing time on two days of the month, about two weeks apart, for paying all your bills, inputting all your expenses, raising all your invoices and checking payments have been made.
Back everything up.
If you’ve ever deleted something accidentally or suffered a computer crash, you won’t need to be told about this. Back everything up at least once a day. I use Carbonite and it automatically backs up my whole system everyday at 6pm. Then if I lose something or my system dies, I have a copy of everything easily accessible online.
Create email templates.
If you answer an email to the same question more than once, create an email template so that next time you are asked the question, you already have an email ready to send out.
File your emails.
In a similar vein to the last point, have a filing system for emails that have been dealt with. When you have replied or dealt with each email, file it away or delete it.
Sort your emails.
Hands up who has an inbox with more than 10 emails in it? If you have, it can be a huge waste of time trying to find what you are looking for and the clutter can be overwhelming. Have files for incoming email and set up rules for all mail that can be dealt with later so that it goes directly to those files.
Schedule your email.
Whilst you may be monitoring email for your clients and have to collect this regularly during the day, collect your own business email just twice a day and deal with all enquiries in batches.
When you are a virtual assistant, especially when your practice is becoming full, you spend a lot of time juggling your schedule so you can fit in all the needs and requirements of all your various clients. As you become more and more busy with client work, it is often easy to forget to schedule in time for the workload associated with running your own business. Tasks such as keeping up with your book keeping and invoicing, making time for your marketing activities and getting outside of the front door to do some networking often fall by the wayside.
If you let these things get away from you, they can quickly become the downfall of your business. I mean, there’s no point in working your fingers to the bone if you aren’t invoicing your clients, or lose track if you’re being paid on time. If you stop marketing your business, what happens if you lose your main clients? With marketing it takes a long time to build the momentum back up again. And if you have stopped networking, a lot of your old contacts will simply assume you have gone out of business. Not a great impression for them to have of your business.
The following series offers some simple steps that you can schedule into your working week to effectively work on your business so that it remains healthy and robust.
I’ve always tiptoed around using Skype for the simple reason that I have quite enough telephones to deal with already and when I first used it many moons ago, I would have the situation where I’d be on the office phone and during the conversation my mobiles would ring, followed closely by my PC speakers as someone else tried to get through on Skype. But recently I’ve thought it deserved a second look and now I’m converted.
For more about Skype click the link below:
Did you know that according to a recent survey, the average office worker is unproductive for 960 hours a year? That’s over 50% of their working day spent chatting, emailing friends, surfing the Internet, anything but actually working. Now there’s a nice fact you can use when asked to justify your hourly rate!
If you are using Microsofts Office 2003 you may have started to notice that you are receiving documents ending with .docx. These have been made using the 2007 version of the software and can cause endless frustration as you can’t open them in previous versions of the programme. That is of course unless you have downloaded this patch!
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=941B3470-3AE9-4AEE-8F43-C6BB74CD1466&displaylang=en#QuickInfoContainer
Hands up who backs up all their data regularly? And as well as backing up everything onto another hard drive, memory sticks or CDs and DVDs, who also backs up online? If you don’t what happens if your office catches fire, or on a very topical note, if you have a flood? Aside from those catastrophes, how many times have you backed something up only to find that when your computer dies and you need those backed up files, the back has failed or you simply forgot to do it? Did you know online back up is easy, cheap and secure and once it’s set up you can forget all about it? Welcome to Carbonite, a genius little programme that backs up everything you need without fuss or drama. Install the software in minutes and tell it what files you want to back up and let it get on with it. Then once it’s completed the initial back up of everything you need, it just sits there in the background, updating files and documents in the backup folder as you update the files on your computer. You don’t have to remember to do anything, it does it all for you. And all this for just $49.95 per year, which at today’s exchange is a little over £25. Not much for complete peace of mind is it? Oh yes, and did I mention the free trial?
For more information visit:
http://www.tkqlhce.com/click-3154309-10544221
Mistake 10: A website that is “me” focused.
While back in part 1 of this series we talked about personalising your website, don’t spend all of it talking about yourself and how wonderful you are? Although your visitors need to know a bit about you, what holds their interest is the knowledge that you understand their problems and issues and have ready-made solutions that resolve those problems. Your visitor will always ask, “WIIFM?” (What’s In It For Me). Answer that question by making your web site about your visitor, not about you.
If you are not sure how to WIIFM your text, hire a professional sales copy writer if you can afford it or try the following format:
Do you struggle with getting your VAT return in on time? We offer a full book keeping service which means that your VAT return will never be late again and you will save expensive fines and a whole lot of stress.
Replace the italics with their pain followed by your solution and the bold italics are your WIIFM.
In summary: Your web site can function as an attractive online brochure, or it can be a client-generating tool to help you grow your business. As a virtual assistant, you need to generate clients from your website in order for your , make the necessary changes and you will get more clients online.
For more tips subscribe to UKAVA: In The News at the top right of this page.
Mistake 9: No testimonials or case studies to demonstrate your expertise.
One of the easiest ways you can create customer confidence in you and your business is to post testimonials on your web site. Don’t even think of writing these yourself (I’m sure you wouldn’t) but ask your clients to write something that clearly states what you do for your client and how working with you has improved their business or life, etc.
If you are new to virtual assisting and don’t yet have clients you can ask for testimonials, prepare some case studies outlining a problem and how your service helped solve it. These case studies are also very powerful in convincing a potential client that you can do what you claim.
For more tips subscribe to UKAVA: In The News at the top right of this page.
Mistake 8: Lack of additional resources and links.
One way to gauge the usefulness and helpfulness of a business is to have a look at their websites resources and links section. For example, the Resources and Links section of the UKAVA website lists a whole range of resources to help new and established virtual assistants and they are often featured in my email newsletter. In many cases the Association receives no compensation for the resource I recommend-I just know that it’s the best source to do a particular task.
Your clients want the same help and advice from you. The more you know about your industry, its problems, and how to find solutions – whether you offer the solution or not – the greater the perception of your expertise and, consequently, the greater value you offer your client.
For more tips subscribe to UKAVA: In The News at the top right of this page.
Mistake 7: Copying every other virtual assistant web site.
As part of vetting the websites that we list on the UKAVA Directory, I have the job of personally checking every potential members website before it is added. It is quite obvious in a lot of cases that virtual assistants have simply visited the websites of their competition and formatted their own site in a similar fashion, but with their own information. I have found elements of my own VA website and articles on many of them, one time even finding a whole website that contained nothing but my website text added to a different design. The designer was blamed for this and it was soon changed but you see my point.
Don’t fall victim to such behaviour and make sure you pique your readers interest by injecting your personality throughout your site. Give visitors a great experience of “you” when they visit. And, flagrantly flaunt your Unique Selling Proposition (USP), so that your visitor instantly realises why they should do business with you instead of your competitor.
For more tips subscribe to UKAVA: In The News at the top right of this page.
Mistake 6: Not mentioning what makes you different, your USP.
When I’m doing online research for a particular product or service, I want to know right away what makes any company unique or different from their competition. Most virtual assistant websites just display a whole list of services they provide. While I agree that you do need to let your prospects know all the bases you can cover, if you love designing databases or have a passion for project management, tell the world about it on your website.
The beauty of this is that you will then tend to attract clients that need those services so you will be doing more of what you love. How great is that?
For more tips subscribe to UKAVA: In The News at the top right of this page.
Mistake 5: Missing or hidden contact information.
Have you ever visited a web site that you think offers the ideal solution to your problem, but you’ve got one question to ask before makÂing your purchasing decision? You go to the Contact Us page to look for the phone number or an email address, and all you find is a contact form to send your question. How annoying is that. There you were, credit card in hand, and already to buy and now you have to fill out a form and wait…
Web site owners are often reluctant to have their contact info readily available on the web site, as they fear having their email address harvested by spamÂmers or having their phone number added to a telemarketing list. There are ways to lessen the likelihood of either issue by using an email spam filter on your computer and, if you a residential line for business, registering the number with the Telephone Preference Service.
For more tips subscribe to UKAVA: In The News at the top right of this page.
Mistake 4: Not Turning Your Website Visitors Into Prospects.
Lots of virtual assistants complain that they get a lot of visitors to their website, but few of them convert into customers. Most marketing texts will tell you that it takes approximately 7 ‘touches’ for a prospect to decide to buy something from you. A visit to your website is just one touch. If you don’t have a system in place for capturing information about your website visitors so you can keep in touch with them, when they are ready to buy they will simply purchase from someone else they have got to know, like, and trust online.
The best tool you can have in place for this purpose is an email newsletter. You can create a regular publishing schedule to be in touch with your contact database, and you can easily demonstrate your expertise via the articles you write and resources your provide.
For more tips subscribe to UKAVA: In The News at the top right of this page.
Mistake 3: Nothing to demonstrate your expertise.
Virtual Assistant websites often boast about how profiÂcient they are at solving their clients problems and I’m sure that they do, but where’s the proof?
If you’ve been in business for awhile, you’ve got a good idea of the many problems your customers face, so providing relevant content that addresses these problems moves you into “expert” status. If you are an expert prove it by publishing articles, free downloads and resources for your prospects and clients.
Don’t think of it as giving away your expertise for free — think of it as developing a better educated consumer for your services and products. Will you lose customers because they read your information and implemented the solution without hiring you? It’s possible but unlikely because most prospecÂtive customers are unable to do it on their own and will need your expert assistance to help them solve their issues.
For more tips subscribe to UKAVA: In The News at the top right of this page.
Mistake 2: A Lack of a clear call to action on each website page.
Have you ever been to a web site and been completely overwhelmed with all the directions you can go from the home page? There’s navigation buttons left and right and so many options you don’t know where to go next? Then in frustration you click back to the search results and go on to another website. Sound familiar?
Or perhaps you have found a website that had some interesting content or answered some of your questions but you weren’t ready to buy what you were researching just yet. You want to remember the site for future reference but you’re not sure if you’d find it again. You may bookmark it but if it had a newsletter or a free download of some kind you’d sign up just so that you know they’d contact you from time to time and you wouldn’t have to go looking for them next time.
The most effective call to action you can have on your home page and every other page of your website is to offer something for free, whether it’s an eBook, Newsletter, White Paper or Report, but something useful that’s attractive to your target market so that they’ll be eager give you their name and email address to receive your offer.
Many times the call to action is to telephone or email the business for a free consultation. That can be effective to some degree, especially if someone is shopping for an immediate solution to their problem. Overall, however, people want more time to make a deciÂsion about doing business with you. They want to determine your credibility and make a decision about whether or not they trust you before deciding to have a personal conversation with you. Expecting someone to call you upon first meeting you (viewing your web site) is not very realistic. However, if they’ve seen enough on your site to want to know a little more, there’s a greater likeliÂhood they will part with a tiny bit of personal info (first name and email address) to get a better sense of who you are while still staying anonymous and without making a commitment. Once you have their contact information, they then become a prospective client, and you can market to them as you would to any other prospect in your business.
For more tips subscribe to UKAVA: In The News at the top right of this page.
As part of running the UK Association of Virtual Assistants I spend a lot of time researching online and checking other virtual assistant’s websites. Occasionally I see an outstanding website, but what I usually see is a whole range of similar sites, each one fairly indistinguishable from anther. When a potential client is shopping around online to find a virtual assistant they want to work with, the last thing you want is for that person to be bored in their search from continually reading the same thing over and over again and leafing through the same old format as virtual assistant’s ‘borrow’ from each others websites! If you want to get more clients from your web site, what follows in this series are 10 common mistakes to avoid:
Mistake 1: The business appears as a nameless, faceless corporate entity.
People do business with people, not websites. This is particularly true when working virtually as your potential client may never meet you in person but will always benefit from ‘putting a face to a name’. Before doing business with you a prospect will want know, like, respect, and trust you in order to let you lose within their business.
Put a photograph and a bio about yourself on the website and if you still want to maintain the illusion of size, put yourself as the Founder or Managing Director of the company and use ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ in your text.
For more tips subscribe to UKAVA: In The News at the top right of this page.