1) Have a good understanding of what you want the VA to do for you before you search. Keep an ongoing list next to your desk of responsibilities you really want to delegate. List those items which keep you from doing the work you enjoy.

2) Prioritize that list. Break the list down to three categories: Items which should have been done yesterday; those which need to be done this week and those which can wait until next month.

3) Decide how much your budget will allow to contract with a VA. If you can spend $200 a month then stick to that budget.

 
4) Post a request for proposal (RFP) on the Virtual Assistant Forums for free. (This is the premier virtual assistant forums website. VAs are not charged for services here, so the site is open for all VAs and business owners with diverse backgrounds.) Make your RFP as detailed as possible and do not forget to include your website address and alternate email address. Most VAs will research your business online before posting for a position so any information you offer ahead of time only helps to weed out those who may not meet your needs.

5) Give a timeline as to when your request for proposal response has to be submitted but give a fair amount of time to respond. Anyone who is really interested will respond right away but it does take time to reply properly to RFPs as they are often customized to clients’ needs. Specify what you want the VA to send you in the first pass…i.e., links to sites, blogging samples, graphic samples, articles, etc. It is not necessary to ask for a resume. This is not an employee-employer situation. A VA is a business owner as well.

6) Ask for references. And by all means send out for those references asking for feedback on the VA’s work and turnaround time.

7) If you know someone who uses a VA, then ask for a referral from that colleague. Many VAs handle multiple clients. If you like the work you see, then this can be indicative of a VA you might wish to work with.

8 When you have decided upon the right person for the job, expect that in the beginning you will need to ‘hand over’ passwords and usernames and business information to get started. Be sure that your VA has a confidentiality agreement. You will need to open up your business to another person with whom you have never been physically introduced. Trust will grow over time.

9) Review the service contract needed to begin and return back to the VA in a timely fashion. If you are not in agreement with something in the contract, say so upfront.

10) Communicate…communicate…communicate…Set aside time during the work week to answer your VAs emails and questions. The faster you return your replies, the faster the work will be completed. Share ideas…send your VA articles and blogs which spur conversation and brainstorm to grow your business. Suggest that the VA read online newsletters or mail her/him publications which are related to your business.

You will have more time to do the work you enjoy. You can focus on your business plan. Best of all you can partner with someone who has an interest in the growth of your business.

Janine Gregor

Hello,

I’ve had a ‘cherry’ good response to last week’s free online resources and tips that I may try to make this a consistent blog event.

I look for resources which not only help business owners improve productivity but those benefits which offer greater exposure and publicity. I have also decided to expand this selection to include ‘fun stuff’; namely sites that entertain without being terribly distracting.

www.helpareporterout.com Looking for ways to get your name and business recognized? Do you want to be quoted in major publications? Help a Reporter Out, also known as HARO, is a venue set up by celebrity blogger Peter Shankman to help reporters find material for article topics. Once you sign up at Shankman’s site, he sends a morning and an afternoon email listing of topics which reporters wish to address. Shankman organizes reporter queries with contact information so it is very easy to click on a topic for reply and then quickly send your expert advice to the inquirer. If your thoughts are deemed worthy and are published by the reporter, this can only mean greater exposure for your own business. Several of my clients have been quoted and published in books, major magazines, newspapers and online sites through HARO. (It can be a little tedious going through the email topics each day…which is why hiring a virtual assistant to do that for you is tremendously useful. Whether you do it yourself or hire someone to scan the topics for you, the public relations exposure from this public relations opportunity is priceless.)

http://www.15secondpitch.com/new/ Has anyone ever asked you want it is that you do for a living and you’ve replied with, “I’m a speaker” or, “I’m a publicist.” This type of a response does not always elicit great interest. If you are attending a networking event, people really want to know what it is that you can do for them. 15secondpitch is one of the neatest sites for creating an elevator speech, which is a short speech that you would give to someone explaining in brevity exactly what it is you do and what it is that you can do for them. Follow the prompts in the 15secondpitch link and the end result is a speech you can practice and fine-tune to use the next time someone asks you, “What do you do?”

http://www.echosign.com/ Aiming for a paperless office? Bogged down by paper contracts, expensive postage rates and the lag time waiting for a client to return a signed document to you? Enter EchoSign. This is an exceptional electronic signature program which is great for sending contracts electronically for legal signatures. Sign up free for 5 transactions per month. Once a contract is created, upload a document to the EchoSign site where a signed copy can be sent to the client and returned to you with the client’s signature. Contracts can be stored and tracked in EchoSign for future reference allowing for a completely paperless sign, copy and file system.

http://www.hulu.com/ Hulu enables you to watch popular TV shows and movies online. There are no downloads required and there is no charge. This is not a YouTube-type site, rather this is a comprehensive directory of TV programming offering good quality reception. Quoted from the site itself, “Hulu has thousands of videos and movies from Fox, E! Entertainment , MGM, Sony, NBC and many, many more. Popular shows like The Simpsons, The Office, House, Firefly and others are archived and made available for audiences. They are all archived and you can view the content by genre, or alphabetical order, or by doing a search.”

My Hours http://www.myhours.com/ This is a time management, timesheet, time tracking solution. It enables you to track your work time, projects you work on and tasks you perform. It is web-based and can be used from any location at any time.

Pandora http://www.Pandora.com – If you like to work to music this is a great site to set and forget. It will play your favorite songs from any number of genres you choose. Nothing to download and no cost to the user.

RoboForm http://www.roboform.com/ Is an online program for managing, filling in, encrypting and generating random passwords. This is a great tool if you handle multiple client websites. RoboForm saves website passwords into Passcards. Then RoboForm can automatically fill in login information from these Passcards. RoboForm can save secret text snippets such as ATM passwords or lock combinations in to what is called Safenotes. Once registered, there are videos to take users through every aspect of this useful program.

I’ve got plenty more useful sites to blog so please check back next week for more.

In addition to working as a virtual assistant, I also work a few hours a week in a popular children’s clothing store. I took a seasonal position last year and was honored when the manager asked me to stay on as a permanent part-time employee. While news of layoffs was on every media channel, it seemed foolish to turn down any job and one that I enjoyed. The merchandise is of great quality, bright and trendy while the interaction with customers and co-workers served as a nice diversion from my frenetic but thriving virtual assistance business. Although managing my professional time around the two jobs has been a challenge, the flexibility of being a virtual assistant affords me such opportunities.

Retail work is very difficult. There is no other way to describe it. Anyone who has worked in retail knows how trying the job can be emotionally and physically. Each customer transaction is different, so a good sales associate has to be ready to handle a variety of personalities as well as have the ability to ‘stomach’ the way customers treat sales associates. Some customers feel I am the ‘bottom of the food chain’ while others are grateful for the service I provide.

Often we read about how a sales associate should treat the customer who is ‘always right’. But little is said about good customer etiquette. A positive attitude toward the associate can actually bring out the best in the sales transaction.

10 Rules of Customer Retail Etiquette

1) When checking out at the service desk and you only have a large bill to pay for your items, it is respectful to ask the associate if she can ‘break’ the bill first before handing it to her.

Reason: I am not an ATM machine and my drawer is usually set up with change (bills and coins) for about $100 for security purposes. If I just signed on for my shift, chances are I cannot make the change for your large bill. If you ask beforehand, often times I can tell you if I can break the bill or not and move the transaction along. Please do not assume I can make change.

If I cannot break the large bill…

2) Please do not take it out on me. There is no reason to get testy if I say I do not have change for a $100 and the receipt is for an $8.00 item. I do not have access to the store safe and I cannot open a co-worker’s register to make the change.

3) Please hand the money to me in my own hand. Please do not lay the bills on the counter with change. It takes time to pick money off the counter and the transaction will go much faster if you hand me the money. Although it is my job to take the money from you it is just courteous to hand the money to the associate just as I directly hand you the receipt and your filled bags.

4) Please do not act upon any last minute shopping while you are on the line. Decide before you get up to the register if you want to buy something or not. I am responsible for keeping the line moving and other customers look to me to move everyone in and out quickly. Our time is as important as your own.

5) Please do not come into a store with open food container even if you do not see a sign that states so. Children are messy. I cannot take the time to clean up spilled ice cream or fruit juice. Please do not throw your food trash in my own counter trash can. There is a mall garbage can outside the store to dispense of food items. Someone handed me a leaking smoothie the other day that would have made an even bigger mess in my counter trash can.

6) Please keep your children busy while you shop. I cannot babysit your children while they pull down clothing from the racks or play hide-n-go-seek in the dressing rooms. I once saw a father throw a football to his son in my store near the store entrance. Teach your children that public shopping places should be respected. A store is not a playground.

7) Please do not take the tags off clothing and shoes and let your children wear them out the door. Wait until they are paid for. I will gladly cut off the tags for you. If you rip the clothing before paying for it while trying to take the tag off, we incur a loss which is passed onto the customer in the form of higher prices.

If you need something on a high display, please do not grab the hook yourself and try to take it down. Ask me, I will help you and I can do it much faster. Someone can get hurt trying to use the metal hook.

9) Please use the public restroom in the mall. Please do not ask to use our employee bathroom which is located in our busy and stacked stockroom unless it is an emergency. We cannot leave customers in the bathroom by themselves so it is not a good use of my time to stand in the stockroom waiting for the customers to come out of the restroom. If it is an emergency, I understand and can make an exception.

10) Please do not place your baby on the counter while you check out. Diapers leak and the counter needs to stay clean. This is my workspace. Please respect that. Children are curious, often grabbing my register supplies and credit card digital pens.

Thank you.

Janine

Email correspondence is an extremely powerful communication medium and with power comes responsibility. Poorly constructed e-mails have been known to ruin careers and cause mistrust among clients and employees.  It can be difficult to rebound from the effects that bad e-mail has on a business’ reputation because e-mails do not just ‘go away’.  People remember the bad e-mails and they are often saved for posterity in other e-mail folders, which also do not ‘go away’.  E-mails live, breathe and multiply across cyberspace so it is truly important to keep nine basic rules of e-mail net etiquette in mind:

1) Overuse of the ‘urgent’ exclamation tells the same tale as ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’.  If every e-mail you send is tagged with the red ‘urgent’ button, eventually your readers will ignore this tag.  Use the ‘urgent’ tag sparingly and only when it really is a matter of urgency.  Even then, do not expect your readers to open the e-mail even if it is tagged as ‘urgent’.  E-mail can be opened at any time.  If a matter is truly urgent, better to pick up the phone and let the recipient know the important information is on its way.

2) Be cautious of unseen recipients. Never use unsecured e-mail to send confidential documents.  A misstroke on the keyboard to the wrong-named person and the documents can make several trips around the world landing in e-mail boxes whose recipients could possibly hurt solid business relationships.  A quick slip in the use of ‘autocomplete’ in the TO line of an e-mail to someone with a similar name as your intended recipient and your documents can creep through communication channels you never knew existed.  Review the TO line before you hit send.

3) Make the last sentence of your e-mail count.  This is the sentence or question most readers will remember.  If you have numerous questions which need to be answered in an e-mail, collect them into one section and use a bullet or a number feature. Spotty questions throughout an e-mail may not be answered unless the reader is a meticulous e-mail-reader, and many people are not. E-mail is a fast medium, open one e-mail, move onto the next, so streamline the content and leave the ‘action’ question or statement for last. Your reader will more than likely remember the last item they read and act on it much more quickly.

4) Never forward e-mails addressed to you to someone else without the permission of the initial sender.  Truly the highest form of etiquette! It takes a few extra minutes, but the best method is to create a new e-mail with a new subject title.  Some people will edit an e-mail before forwarding to the next person, but even this practice is questionable.  Sometimes the subject title does not match the forwarded topic and there are some unedited items left in the e-mails which can still be damaging (and embarrassing) to the initial sender.  Edited forwarded e-mails always look like they have been edited and that too can lead the initial sender to mistrust the recipient as well as the extended recipient wondering what it was that had been edited and why.  Forwarding e-mails without the sender’s permission is just plain bad business manners.

5) My time is as valuable as your own.  Sending e-mail to everyone, including those who do not need to read your e-mail is also bad business manners.  Adding a disclaimer such as “If this e-mail does not pertain to you, please ignore it” does not justify having sent an e-mail to someone who had to take the time to read this e-mail only to find out the information had nothing to do with them at all.  In fact, people get paid to read e-mail so if you send unnecessary e-mail to those who do not need to receive them; you are in the end, paying them for doing nothing. Take a few minutes to look at your TO line and rethink whether everyone in this line really needs to read your information.

6) Send bad news on a Thursdays. All too often Monday morning e-mail is filled with bad company news which can set the mood for a difficult work week. If you must send negative company news such as termination announcements, departures, decline in profits or stocks, budgetary cuts, company closings, etc. try to send this information later in the week, if possible.  Thursdays are a good day because it gives the recipient time to absorb the information; perhaps another day to respond and/or read what others might have to say and then offers two weekend days to soak it all in. When the new work day starts on a Monday, stress levels are lowered and people can begin the week on a more positive note.

7) Use ‘return receipt’ sparingly. If it is important for you to know whether someone has received your e-mail, the best method is to pick up the phone and let them know the e-mail is on its way. Overusing ‘return receipt’ implies that you do not trust the recipient to either read your e-mail and/reply to it. If you need your recipient to reply to your e-mail, politely ask within the body of the e-mail if they would reply via directly by hitting the reply button.

8) Never terminate someone’s employment via e-mail.  As intonation, facial and body language expressions are not transmitted via e-mail; this is the worse way to deliver bad news.  Out of respect for your other employees, department heads and the individual being terminated bad news should be delivered by telephone or if possible, in a one-on-one situation.  These more humane methods offer the individual an opportunity to ask questions and respond to the astonishment of being ‘let go’.  In the event that a wrongful termination suit might follow, notification by personal means would cast a more professional image on the company than using electronic notification.

9) K.I.S.S. Keep It Simple Stupid. Remember this slogan from the 1980’s? The same concept holds true 25+ years later when constructing an e-mail.  Keeping sentences clean, brief and without a lot of unnecessary chatter will give the professional impression you need to offer your readers in your e-mail.  Your e-mails represent not only you and your mark of professionalism but also that of the company you work for.  Keep fancy fonts, colors, backgrounds, extended closing advertisement and photos out of e-mails (for some industries such as real estate, and entertainment photos are important to the image, but it must be a professional photo.)  Photos in business e-mails playing with your pet should be left out of business correspondence.  Not everyone is a dog-lover and would only wish to view you as a well-groomed professional and not in overalls and a tee-shirt.  If someone wants to print your e-mail and its content is filled with pictures, colored background and fonts, this can be annoying as these types of correspondences ‘eat up’ expensive printer cartridges.  Play it safe and construct your e-mails in an easy-to-read black font, Times New Roman, Verdana or Courier on white with as little closure information as possible.  (Ever get an e-mail thread with closure information one page long per e-mail reply…this can become quite a task to scroll through this information to find the original message!) Your client in Peoria may like the polka-dotted background but the Los Angeles client may think it to be a bit ‘odd’ in your color selection. You would not want a potential client to doubt your professionalism based on a color scheme. Colors also create moods and give impressions of the type of business you are trying to project. If you sell baby products, it would be ‘cute’ to use blue or pink e-mail background if your recipients are new mothers.  But that same color combination may not be acceptable in an e-mail to your baby products sales people or company director.  Keep it white and there are never any color choice or font distractions in your e-mail to take away from what it is you really want to say.