SMEs: The Survival of the Fittest

Everyday somebody starts a new business. Everyday somebody launches a business hoping that he or she will at last be doing something that they have always dreamt about doing but never got the chance. However, the budding new entrepreneurs rarely realise that launching their own business they are signing up for a great deal of things that they never wanted to do in the first place. Who in the world would start a business because of their genuine love for accounting, taxes, legal issues, people management and other boring administrative tasks? Of course, you can be good at one or two things but there is little chance you will be able to handle everything. What often happens is that the new managing director tries to ignore the problems for as long as possible and when he or she finally realises that the problems need to be solved it turns out that it is already too late. Hence many businesses go into administration and the beautiful projects their owners had do not survive the test of reality.

In fact, the business owner’s expectation that they will be doing what they are good at is an illusion. Many business owners say that at the start of their business they only spent 5% of their time doing the thing they liked to do and most of the time sorting out all those issues that happen behind the scenes, the things you only face when you start your own business. Is there absolutely no hope of fulfilling your dreams then?

Well, not exactly. For proof, look at all those who do succeed in their undertaking. So, here are the three ways you can remedy the situation. For one, you commit to deal with all those issues by yourself. This requires quite some will power but also time (which equals money), energy and other resources. The second option is to hire somebody or find freelancers that will do the job for you. However, having several freelancers doing bits and bobs here and there is not so efficient, plus you will need to constantly exercise control over their activities, which can be time consuming. And what happens if with all your attention and control they still mess something up? You would want to avoid that at all costs, but you can still keep those to a minimum.

Virtual Blue Bird virtual assistants can take away the most part of your burden, be it the administrative tasks, recruitment, people management or anything else that you simply do not have time for. What counts however, is that your business will be assigned a project manager who will control the work of the VAs and ensure that everything that needs to be done is done on time. The project manager will in fact take care of all those issues that you want to delegate so that you do not have to spend time on finding the right people and making sure they are doing the job properly. All this will be done by the project manager in charge. Just like a talented conductor, a project manager will know who to assign the tasks to and how to ensure the highest quality standards. The organised work of our responsible VAs is aimed to make your life easier and to finally free up your time to let you do what you enjoy doing most. In fact, the time you spend on the administrative tasks or hiring and controlling the freelancers is the time that you could have otherwise spend developing your business and getting new customers. It is also a fact that people earn more by doing what they are best at whilst carrying out day-to-day administration may have a diminishing effect on your very motivation of having your own business. Virtual Blue Bird offers you to take care of what we do best – managing and organising, while letting you do your favourite part of the job – growing your business.

Can a VA run your wedding?

Planning a dream wedding can prove to be a logistical nightmare, however, there are only 3 things you need to have to run an outstanding wedding:

1. Common sense,

2. Hard work and

3. A little bit of imagination

Personally, I have made a big mistake by delegating the organisation of my wedding to 2 wedding planners. Considering that I’ve ran over 500 events myself, the only reason why I’ve delegated my wedding was because I was running 16 large projects at the time and simply did not have the possibility of taking on another “project”. The planners were given 9 months to plan the event… 3 months before the wedding I have asked them for a project plan that would list all of the updates (outstanding tasks and those already accomplished). What a shock it was to actually find out that nothing has been done apart from booking the venue, which I did myself. As it turned out, they did not even have a project plan – apparently, you don’t need one for a wedding!

Armed with 1 of VBB VAs, we’ve pulled a project plan together in the space of 2 days. By the end of the first week, all the flower arrangements were booked, the cake was chosen, the decorations were bought, invitations were sent out (we designed a hard and a soft copy in-house); the website was put together (guests do want to know what is going on) and entertainment was selected and arranged for (I was flying in 7 musicians from different parts of the world). By the end of the second week, drinks and food were selected; makeup and nail specialists (for guests and myself) were booked; local quartet was provided with the music (my wedding was to be held in Switzerland – so everything had to be done virtually); visas for all of my guests were provided; flights were booked; accommodation allocated; transportation booked; menus designed and printed; photo/videotographers booked; wedding outfits bought; presents selected and guests were communicated regarding the events to take place over the weekend. Having finalised all my wedding preparations within this short time, all that I had left to do for the rest of the 2.5 months leading up to my wedding, was to spend 1 hour a week just keeping an eye on the developments and sorting out any of the arising little issues.

Therefore, my honest opinion is: a virtual assistant can run your wedding. In fairness, event management is not a very difficult task – it’s just hard work. I also do not believe that it takes more than 1 month to organise every single detail of the event even if you are dealing with something as complex as running a wedding in a foreign country. As long as the venue is booked and the entertainment is selected – everything else is a “piece of cake”. On the plus side, VAs do not charge you as much as the wedding planners would, as we are used to getting things done very quickly and efficiently. It is our job to make sure that you are happy and we make every effort so that every single penny you spend on the planning is made worthwhile by working as hard as possible to protect you from the organisational hassle. To ensure that everything runs smoothly on your wedding day we will fly out to the wedding itself to run the operational side of the event for you.

Armed with experience in organising large scale business events VAs are well equipped to arrange a wedding with the precision and attention to detail second to none. In organizing my own wedding, reliable and effective, one VA proved to be more efficient than two wedding planners, and I honestly cannot think of anything in the wedding planner’s responsibilities that a VA could not accomplish. Can you?

How to choose a right PA for a CEO?

Every CEO knows that a personal assistant (or executive assistant - EA) is essential for the smooth running of their business. Your PA is someone who knows everything about you, knows how to handle your direct reports, understands how to make sure that you are not in a bad mood, knows exactly which contacts should be given a priority and protects you from a lot of unnecessary details that you do not have the time for. A good PA is your protective shield from the world of small issues.

Not surprisingly then, finding the right person for this role is essential. Most of the CEOs will usually take their PAs with them, whenever they move from company to company. Starting a new job and hiring a new personal assistant all at the same time might be very challenging. If your PA does not move to the new company with you, best to keep the one that the new company provides, as that person will at least know the business well. However, what happens if the chemistry is not right?

When hiring a PA, it is very important to remember that you are dealing with extremely well organised people. Therefore, most of the candidates will pass the interview stage with ease for two reasons mainly, with the first one being that they have the answers to everything prepared beforehand and the second - being professionally trained to be liked. Therefore, there are only 2 things that you will be looking for:

a) The right chemistry (a 20 minute chat should be enough to figure that out) and

b) The ability to handle your business affairs and cope with the amount of work you will be providing.

The second point is more difficult though, because there are no known tests to check that. You will therefore have to take the risk and hope for the best. If at first you do not succeed, the search will need to start again, leaving you without a competent PA for a period of time.

Realising how important the role of the PA is, we start looking after CEOs when they first leave their previous position. We get to know them in the interim period, before they start the new job. We also help them find the right full-time professional PA, because by then, we know everything about your professional and personal likes and dislikes, and therefore become equipped to identify the kind of person to be able to assist you. We will manage you up until the moment you get the right person on board. If you are concerned about how this can be done virtually, talk to us and we will be happy to answer your questions.

What's the point of Twitter

We all know that Twitter’s popularity has grown enormously over the last year. Everyone seems to be on it. “I don’t get it – what’s the point?” – our customers ask us. Well, from a business perspective, there are two very good reasons why you would use Twitter – to get more traffic to your website and to find the right people.

The reason why it’s so difficult for our customers to understand why Twitter is so popular is because our customers do not have the time to deal with it. Twitter requires effort, time and consistent maintenance, that is why many companies might need to use personal assistance services to look after their Twitter profile. To the naked eye it looks like a large amount of unrelated, useless chatter with quite a lot of promotion, that, frankly you don’t need. However, if you will look more closely, you will see that after about a month at least 30% of your traffic will come from Twitter. Furthermore, most of those will actually be customers, not just people who are casually browsing.

But how can that be, considering that people who chat on it look like the type of people who have too much time on their hands (and hence probably have no real spending power). Well, that’s the interesting part of the Twitter world. Twitter is a 21st century answer to traditional “buzz marketing”. If you want the news to spread – you need to be on Twitter – because, guess what? That’s where the journalists, researchers and PR get their news from. However, there is one catch: the content needs to be good. The beauty about Twitter is that if you are not a good Twitterer – no one will be reading your profile. You might have followers, but the buzz marketing effect will not take place.

I have been on Twitter since March 2009, and own around 20 profiles. The reason is simple – each profile reflects my audience. Hence, this allows me to message information that is relevant and therefore the traffic I get is very high. Furthermore, I do not work very hard at getting followers – they all come to me, as people keep recommending their friends to follow my profiles. My work is in providing the content that will be of interest in just 140 characters. For example, look at the following profile: http://twitter.com/portnik I use this for Virtual Blue Bird. However, most of my content are jokes, why? Because that’s what time-expensive individuals will actually read if they come to Twitter and want to take a break from their busy lives. My other profiles have completely different content.

Give us a call and I will be happy to put a strategy together for you on how to use Twitter effectively for your business. Our virtual assistants can do all of the maintenance for you (including the design of your profile background).

Kind regards,

Anya Portnik

How to delegate?

The formula is very simple: if your customer pays you £100 to do a project and your Virtual Assistant can complete it for £40, then you are making £60 profit simply because you have a good relationship with your customer. However, as we all know, making the theory work in practice is a lot harder than it seems. Or is it?

Almost all of our customers know that they cannot cope with the amount of work that needs to be done and that they simply must delegate their work. But how do you delegate something that only you can do? Furthermore, what if something goes wrong? At the end of the day, it is your business and you are fully responsible for the consequences. And where do you start? – won’t you need to explain the whole thing to your Virtual Assistants before they can even start to comprehend what you are trying to achieve?

I get asked these questions a lot, especially by those customers who have never used a Virtual Assistance service before. To answer this, I will explain how you should delegate. But first, a few truths…

Truth 1

There is absolutely no way that we will be able to duplicate you – only you know where your business is going and all of the details that surround it. However, what we can do is help you with the tasks that will free up your time, so that you can concentrate on the work that you should be concentrating on.

Truth 2

Your business is unique. Your relationships, approach and thinking are also unique. However, the list of tasks that take up your valuable time and stop you from spending it on more important aspects of your business is not unique. We work with a large number of customers from very different fields, all with very different backgrounds, personalities, approaches, thinking, ideas and strategies – and yet, the tasks that we are assisting them with are very similar. This is not because we are limiting our services, but because there is only so much that a business can delegate. We undertake these time consuming tasks, including administrative support, leaving you to concentrate on more important aspects of your business.

Truth 3

There is always a “Catch 22” scenario when customers start to delegate tasks. On the one hand, you will need to test that your Virtual Assistant is capable of doing the job and not going to cause you problems. On the other hand, if you give out too much information there is a higher risk that something might go wrong (if it works out that your VA is not capable). So, how do you get the best balance? You can do this by testing us. Our VAs can perform a small number of tasks and you can judge our performance. Only then will you see the true benefit of a VA.

Step by step plan

1. Outline the tasks that we can do for you
2. Give Virtual Blue Bird a call and let me know what’s on your list
3. We then work together to prioritise the tasks to your requirements.
4. We will complete those tasks for you in the timeframes you have set for us.
5. You review the results and decide if you would like to allocate the Virtual Blue Bird VAs with more responsibility.

If you have trouble putting this list together (for example you have never delegated work before), call me and I will be happy to help you compile this.


Kind regards,

Anya Portnik