The Successful Virtual Administrative Assistant

The Successful Virtual Administrative Assistant

No matter how hard you try there are going to be times when a client cancels their account and stops using your services.  As virtual assistants, we get used to this happening from time to time.  Sometimes you know the reasons why and other times you don't.

Because of our experience in the virtual staffing industry, we've been in a position for many years to get real answers from clients about why they cancel their account. This article is being offered to virtual assistants everywhere as a point of reference on what makes a successful virtual administrative assistant. In other words, what are the successful ones doing that the unsuccessful ones aren't?

The successful virtual administrative assistants:

- Are communicating regularly with their clients

- Are keeping regular business hours. Yes, working virtually does allow for flexibility of hours.

BUT, it doesn't mean you can shirk your duties without repercussions.

- Following through with their promises.

- Giving their clients daily updates.

- Letting their clients know immediately when there's a problem.

- Giving their clients a heads up when they have a planned day off - as soon as they know about it.

- Are not treating their position as a hobby to be taken lightly.

- Are treating their position as a JOB and taking it seriously.

- Are taking a proactive approach to potential problems.

- Are taking ownership and responsibility for their work.

- Are not blaming others for their shortcomings.

- Are not blaming others for work that didn't get done.

- Are continuing to learn more about the software's they're required to use on a regular basis - Word, Excel, etc.

- Respond quickly to client requests.

- Promptly return phone calls from clients.

- Make themselves available when the client needs them.

- Realize that to EARN flexibility from the client, they themselves cannot be rigid.

- Don't make demands of the client, rather offer suggestions for improvement.

- Are offering to help the client grow his business realizing that this will make their position that much more secure and will allow their position to grow in the process.

- Are keeping their clients apprised of their marketing efforts, offering suggestions or solutions when necessary.

- Are up selling the client - letting the client know what other duties they might do to lighten the client's load.

- Are being respectful of the client, realizing s/he holds the purse strings.

- Are exercising patience with a demanding client.

- Are reporting their time accurately.

- Never talk badly about their client to others

- Never talk badly about others to their client

All of these things and many other factors, weigh into being successful as an admin/virtual/freelancer/contractor.

But first and foremost, you must realize that despite its outward appearance - this is a JOB. The client will expect you to treat it as such and not as something to be done when you decide you have time.

Most clients, for example, don't make any outlandish requests - just normal, everyday duties that they've hired a virtual assistant to do and they expect them to be done. That's really not too much for any client to ask, is it?

The Administration To Revolutionize Government

The Administration To Revolutionize Government
The administration were privatizing damned near everything as a pretty good move in direction of revolutionizing government.

 

Made sense. Every generation from boomers to bloomers has their personal axe to grind concerning how dumb government agencies are and how smart the private sector proves itself to be.

 

But it ain't necessarily so. To paraphrase George Gershwin,

 

Dey tells all you chillun

 

De gov'ment's a villun,

 

But it ain't necessarily so

 

In the enthusiasm of the early days, Donald Rumsfeld decided privatizing would enable a war without a draft (and save a gazillion as well). He sub-contracted out the war in Afghanistan to the Reserves. That worked so well, in the eyes of The Beholder, that he sold The Decider on subbing out the whole Iraq operation to the Reserves, Halliburton and Blackwater .

Privatizing in war zones has legal and ethical ramifications and raises unanswerable questions about chain of command, but no matter.

 

Committed costs so far--a $ trillion, maybe more. The costs in waste, single-bidder contracts, cost overruns, corruption and loss of operational control by the Army and Marines--beyond calculation.

 

Tom RidgeHeady times for The Privatizers during those dazed days after 9-11, when the strings seemed to come off of everything, including purses. A new Department of Homeland Security was cobbled together out of 22 separate agencies. Tom Ridge, the guy who got out quickly enough to let Michael Chertoff take the heat, pretty much fired everybody who knew anything.

He pared down what staff was left and then privatized everything from airport screening to Katrina housing.

 

Committed costs so far, in an agency that has yet to see its fifth birthday, are a 'who the hell knows?' throwing up of the hands in exasperation. What is known is that their budget for 2006 alone (before Congress starts fiddling with it) is billion. All they bought by privatizing and sub-contract, is thousands of unused and rotting mobile homes and a string of unprecedented embarrassments.

 

FDR, in his most wasteful days and during the nation's worst ever financial collapse, was never able to shovel money out the doors in similar fashion. But there are upsides;

 

* Because your and my kids didn't get drafted, we privatized abu Ghraib and off-loaded America's Geneva Convention compliance to civilian contractors.

 

* Over at the Pentagon, while Donald was busy with other things, they totally lost track of .3 trillion in payouts. Lost track. Like it was the petty-cash account. The Pentagon's own auditors admit it cannot account for 24% of what is spent.

 

* With a 0 billion budget for next year, an additional (and annual) 0 billion will be laundered, like it was a mafia organization (which, in some ways, it is).

 

Interstate highway signFor sure it is the responsibility of government to oversee and authenticate the costs of services. The Interstate highway system didn't get built by Senators with pickaxes. Connections maybe, but not pickaxes. Government contracts are by their nature watering holes for graft and the special treatment of special interests. It has ever been so.

 

What has not ever been so, is the wholesale firing of mid-level bureaucrats and their replacement by incompetent political appointees. That has gone on at a wholesale level across all segments of this administration. Worse, Republican connected businesses (some of them quickly formed for the single purpose of feeding at the trough) have been ushered in, given a single-bid contract and sent on their way.

 

What did they get in return for this largesse? Who the hell knows? Randy Cunningham got a Rolls-Royce and a couple million bucks defense contractor Mitchell Wade and Wade was a penny-ante player. Halliburton, the best known and best connected of these criminal organizations, pocketed tens of billions of dollars doing things we used to do for ourselves--like feed and shelter our troops. All that's privatized now.

 

When I was at Fort Leonard Wood, in boot camp, a scandal arose over a mess-hall cook who was trading butter for margarine and pocketing the profit. That was a scandal. It made headlines in the (local) newspapers. An investigation was mounted by the Inspector General and the cook was court-martialled.

 

IG Dept of DefenseConsider the case of one military accountant who tried to find out what happened to a mere 0 million at the Pentagon. According to CBS, Jim Minnery, a former Marine turned whistle-blower, risked his job by speaking out for the first time about the millions he noticed were missing from one defense agency's balance sheets. Minnery tried to follow the money trail, even crisscrossing the country looking for records.

"The director looked at me and said 'Why do you care about this stuff?' It took me aback, you know? My supervisor asking me why I care about doing a good job."

 

He was reassigned and says officials then covered up the problem by just writing it off.

 

"They have to cover it up," he said. "That's where the corruption comes in. They have to cover up the fact that they can't do the job."

 

The Pentagon's Inspector General "partially substantiated" several of Minnery's allegations but could not prove officials tried "to manipulate the financial statements."

 

I guess the IG at Fort Leonard Wood is dead, or at least retired by now.

 

Too bad.