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5 Ways to Stay Productive in the Summer (When the Kids are at Home)

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Stay productive at work in the summer with kids at home

Ahh, summer’s here. The cold cocktails on the back porch, the morning pool time, the gardening. All of these temptations that you can’t wait to get to. If only your kids would leave you alone to get some work done for your clients first.

Lisa Rollins is a virtual assistant and a mom who has found a way to still stay productive when her kids are home on their summer break. Here are Lisa’s tips!

Ah, summer … I have been waiting all spring for the long days and warm sunshine. I ease my way out of bed, happy to see the sun streaming through my windows. It should be a great day to work and really get some things checked off my list, complete my virtual meeting with my new client, and get my billing done for the month … and maybe even eat lunch outside.

Then I remember: today is the first day of my kids’ summer break.

They will be home with me ALL. DAY. LONG.

I love my children, but how am I possibly going to get any work done with them around?

How am I going to manage without spending thousands on childcare?

How am I going to manage to work and be a good parent at the same time?

Can you relate? Here are five solutions that I have used to get work done and not neglect my kids or have them vegged out on technology all day long.

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7 Essential Virtual Assistant Skills That Will Help You Grow Your Business

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7 Virtual Assistant Skills to Help Your Grow Your Business

Becoming a virtual assistant is no different than starting any other business.

You’ll need to have (or be willing to learn) a marketable skill—something you can offer your clients in exchange for a fee.

You can start with a single service and add others over time. Or, you might decide to stick with a single specialization and charge a premium for your unique expertise.

The choice is yours to make.

Regardless of how specialized your VA services are, you’ll still need to become somewhat of a generalist when it comes to running your business. Sales, check. Accounting, check. Customer service, check, WordPress knowledge, check. This is the life of a solopreneur—there is always something new to learn.

The truth is there are so many things to learn, it’s hard to know where you should start. To call it overwhelming might be an understatement.

It’s okay. I get it.

To be honest, the learning process never stops. I think that’s part of what attracts many people to the idea of becoming a virtual assistant. There is constant variety—every day is different and a new challenge is just around the corner.

But one question that seems to come up over and over again is “where do I start?”

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Case Study: Bringing a Virtual Assistant on Board to Foster Excellent Customer Experiences

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In our previous case study, we’ve talked about why you should hire a VA to improve a process that already exists in your business. This week’s case study comes at the issue from a different angle. We’re going to show you how you can work with a virtual assistant to implement a customer experience program that will set you apart from the competition.

Here’s how Mallory Underwood helped her client stand out in a sea of creative agencies.

Everyone wants to feel fulfilled in their business, right? One of the main ways to do that is by having meaningful connections with your clients. In order to foster deep and lasting relationships, your clients must have exceptional customer experiences when they interact with your business.

But what exactly does “customer experience” mean?

Customer experience, or “CX” for short, is defined by the Harvard Business Review as “the sum-totality of how customers engage with your company and brand, not just in a snapshot in time, but throughout the entire arc of being a customer.” Basically, it is how customers perceive their experiences when interacting with your business.

If you are a company with clients, then you’re responsible for customer experience. Period. The only decision is whether you invest time and resources into trying to create an experience that surpasses your clients’ expectations … or if you let it simply be what it will be.

You should decide to do the former, and here’s why: According to the ‘Customers 2020’ study by Walker, a customer intelligence consulting firm, by 2020 customer service will be the key brand differentiator over price and product.

Simply put, customers will pay more for a product or service if they have a better experience working with one company over another.

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Do You Need a Virtual Assistant or a Strategist? Here’s the Difference

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We’ve made it our mission to train people who serve the needs of small businesses. And we’ve been working really hard to support entrepreneurs of every kind, whether they’re the entrepreneurs who are hiring service providers, or the ones doing the actual providing of services.

Having our VA Finder service gives us a unique perspective on the types of tasks small business owners are trying to “hire out.” Many of our clients have a plan or processes in place that simply need to be executed. Others, however, need someone to help develop their plans and/or processes.

The Basic Principle of Finding the Right Virtual Assistant

When you’re trying to find the right virtual assistant for your business, it’s important to understand what exactly you need help with doing. The more specific and defined your needs are, the more likely you are to find the right person to meet those needs.

But what if you have no idea what your needs are and you just know you need help?

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9 Ways to Level Up and Achieve Expert Virtual Assistant Status

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What does is take to take your business from amateur hour to expert status? Is it luck? Knowing the right people? Or maybe (just maybe) it’s all about hard and targeted work? Vanessa Infanzon is here to share how to start taking your business seriously and the mindset shift that you can work on to achieve expert status.

For four years, I stumbled along writing for just two clients.

I didn’t think of myself as a business owner until I started Gina Horkey’s 30 Days or Less to Freelance Writing Success course. Within days of starting, my mindset and attitude changed.

I also knew I had to get serious if I wanted to succeed.

In the last two years, I’ve grown my business, taken on more clients and made more money by learning new skills – ones that I continually work on.

And this is the point of this post. You can stumble around for years without a clear direction, or you can decide to get serious, get real, and focus on leveling up from an amateur to an expert, whether you’re a writer, a virtual assistant, or any other type of freelancer.

Since Horkey HandBook is focused on helping readers become professional VAs, let’s not beat about the bush.

Here are nine tips to become an expert virtual assistant:

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Case Study: Tech Startup Hires a Virtual Project Manager to Close the Customer Feedback Loop

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Why would I bring a virtual assistant on board when I already have a team on location? This week’s post brings the answer to that question. There’s no need to overburden your team with temporary projects outside of their scope when you can hire a virtual project manager instead.

Here’s how Hailey, a virtual PM extraordinaire, helped an e-learning startup close the feedback loop and improve internal communication between the product team and the marketing department.

Let’s play pretend for a moment: You’re the leader of a small and nimble tech company working on significantly restructuring your headlining product. We’re talking the kind of changes that could shift roles throughout your business and notably impact your revenue. This is the important stuff.

(Cue Rocky-style montage of you on video calls, scribbling on whiteboards, and feverishly coding, your brow furrowed and a few tasteful beads of sweat dripping down your face.)

You want your research team to build the right thing, your marketing team to have the verbiage to talk about it confidently, and your customers to go gaga over it.

In short, this next pivot needs to be anything but mediocre!

The only thing you need to make it happen is access to your customers for regular feedback.

But there’s a catch (there’s always a catch, right?); you have nothing in place to make this happen.

All of your employees are rocking it in their respective wheelhouses, and it’s imperative that you spend your time orchestrating things (read: you don’t have the manpower to pull this off).

For any organization that relies on regular customer feedback to build and improve upon their products, this scenario spells disaster.

Letting this process fall by the wayside means depriving your team of data necessary to make critical product decisions. The wrong choice could mean major financial losses, a dip in team morale, and wasted focus and energy as the business course corrects.

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Branding and Designing a Logo for Your Virtual Assistant Business

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The day you decide to launch your new virtual assistant business is an exciting day.

You have visions of creating a new income stream, ditching your 9-5 and/or being your own boss. We don’t blame you. It’s pretty awesome (most of the time).

And although there’s plenty of work out there for hard-working and reliable VAs, it’s still important to create an above average first impression. And more often than not, your first (or second) point of contact with a potential client is via your website. For that reason alone, it’s vital that you start things off on the right foot — that means a great looking logo and consistent branding.

As appealing as side-hustle income and calling your own shots might be, logo design and business branding probably aren’t something you’re stoked about. And let’s be honest, spending days, weeks (or months) trying to draft your new logo or select your ideal brand colors and font combination isn’t necessarily the smartest way to spend your time.

(Hint: 90% of your time should be spent prospecting for clients, not perfecting your logo or website. But having a website is sort of important too…)

So this is a topic we’re are going to take a closer look at today. Basically, we’re going to teach you how to pull together some basic branding elements (including a simple logo), so that your VA website creates an awesome first impression — without taking up a ton of your (prospecting) time.

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Student Success Story: Robert Flood

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We’re back with another post in the Student Success Stories series.

Why are we doing this? Glad you asked!

It’s because we want to feature people who took Gina’s 30 Days or Less courses and actually got serious about working on their freelance career.

Every story in the series is a little bit different from the others. That’s because they’re real journeys, and everyone is on a different path.

Every now and then, we get questions along the lines of “But I don’t want to give up my full-time job. Can I still freelance?” The answer is: absolutely. And today’s success story, Rob Flood, is living proof that it is possible to freelance on your lunch break and still make money.

Here’s Rob!

Name: Rob Flood
Website: robertfloodfreelancing.com
Course enrollment date: October 2017 (writing course), early 2017 (VA course).
Business launch date: 2015
Hired by first client: January 2015
Hours worked per week: about 10-15
Average monthly income: about $300 in 2017 (in addition to a full-time job). Projected to rise in 2018.
Top three niches: Content creation in the alternative health niche, B2B and B2C. I also offer research services and other VA services.

Hi, Rob. Please tell us a bit about yourself.

First of all, thank you to Gina for letting me share my story! She has been an amazing mentor and support.

I am a self-published author, therefore starting in the writing area was a logical step for me. I put my website up in 2015 and started marketing myself a bit. I have a few specialties, but as of late, my biggest passion has been and probably always will be writing. I love putting my thoughts down and creating great content for my clients!

What about your business?

I started my business because I wanted to earn some more money doing what I love! I approached my first client in 2015 and never looked back. I’ve had setbacks and dry spells (basically of my own making) and made some MAJOR mistakes but I’ve grown and learned from them all!

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