Virtual Assistant Training
Virtual Assistant Business or VA job?
Many people dream of becoming a virtual assistant, being their own boss, and having the freedom to only take on clients and projects they love. What they don’t realise, though, is that there is a huge difference between building a virtual assistant business and being self-employed as one. Business owners scale their income. Self-employed people…
Read MoreHow many billable hours in your Virtual Assistant business?
Billable hours: As a solo virtual assistant, how much of your time is billable? In other words, if you work a 40 hour week, how many hours do you charge out to clients, and how many hours do you spend on your own admin and marketing? e.g. if you work 40 hours and bill 20…
Read MoreWebsite Cookies: Me want cookies!
Website Cookies: So we’ve just about got everyone up to date with ICO’s GDPR guidance… and along comes an update on their cookie guidance. (I’ll admit – I grimaced!). https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/news-and-events/news-and-blogs/2019/07/blog-cookies-what-does-good-look-like/ Not least because we had to make some changes to our own cookie notices! Effectively the new cookie rules are: People visiting your website have…
Read MoreOffering Call Answering as a VA
Call answering – how do I charge for it? We get asked about answering calls on behalf of clients often enough that we started copying and pasting the answers from old call answering threads… So we thought we’d do a blog post on it instead! The first thing I’ll say about answering phones: You cannot…
Read MoreHow many secretarial skills do you use in your VA business?
Had an interesting chat recently with Rosemary Parr who runs Scottish PA Network – we were chatting about the different skillsets VAs and PAs have…and that’s why the transition can sometimes be difficult. I thought it might be useful to run a poll: Certainly on the SVA Forum there’s some debate about what is unique…
Read MoreVAT Registration – for VAs!
It is very unlikely that you will have to register for VAT, at least initially, as a virtual assistant. You only have to register if: Your turnover (the amount you invoice your clients) for the previous 12 months is more than £85,000, the threshold at the time of writing, OR You expect to go over…
Read MoreTackling Late Payments
The Small Business Commissioner, Paul Uppal, has been tasked with tackling late payments for small businesses… We all know the pain of juggling cashflow because a client has been late to pay. The knock on effect means you can’t pay your own suppliers – or maybe it means you are late paying household bills? Getting…
Read MoreVirtual Assistant Insurance
Virtual Assistant Insurance Over the years we’ve done a variety of articles on why virtual assistant insurance is needed: Virtual Assistant Insurance Claims – what can go wrong? VA Nightmares Policy Bee – our recommended insurer And we included professional indemnity insurance in our VA Standards for Approved VAs who appear on our FIND A…
Read MoreVirtual Assistant Training Standards
At the UK Virtual Assistant Conference this year, I shared with you the rising numbers of complaints which I’ve had about Virtual Assistant Courses or start up training. In the background over the past year or so, I’ve been working with industry leaders to discuss this issue. Why are virtual assistant training standards needed? It…
Read MoreVirtual assistant training scams
From the 2019 Virtual Assistant Conference – Caroline’s session “Skill or Scam” showing how virtual assistant training scams are on the rise and how you can help stop them. I’m very aware “virtual assistant training scams” isn’t the most positive title! However the objective is to point out how important collaboration is to the UK…
Read More