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Monday, October 20, 2008
Starting out as a Virtual AssistantBy: Patricia Hughes
Yes, I am a Virtual
Assistant. It is a fairly new term and all Virtual Assistants always give the same definition of it, an Independent Contractor
who provides administrative support to clients, yada yada yada. The only thing is when I give that definition to someone in
person I get a blank stare and a forced smile and a slow nod that says they still have no idea what I do! So now I just say,
basically I am an Administrative Assistant who works from home! Once that is said then the questions start, How did you get
into that? Who are your clients? What types of things do you do? And after those questions are answered I am told what a great
idea that is! As if I created the term Virtual Assistant, mind you I wish I had!
I always knew I wanted to start
my own business and I had so many ideas! The difficult part was doing it! There is so much fear in starting your own business,
the biggest of which is failing at it and losing money! Having none to begin with is also a factor. So how did I get the courage
to start a Virtual Assistant business? Well, honestly, I just stumbled across it by accident... I'm not kidding!
I love researching the web! So after my son was born I started researching freelance jobs I could do from home so I didn't
have to put him in daycare. I was finding all sorts of sites but nothing promising, until one day I heard of a site called
'Elance'. Naturally, I checked it out and started bidding on jobs, I had no idea what I was doing, I was charging
way over the rate most Elancers charge for their services! Who would have thought of charging $2 - $4/hr! Not me! That's
for sure! I was an administrator for a number of years before my son was born and it's not an easy job and my experience
is worth way more than $4/hr! Well before I knew it I had a client! He was the one who informed me of all the low bids but
said he was willing to pay more for Quality. Did I get lucky or what?!
After doing this first project through Elance,
I started researching Virtual Assistants. There is a whole network of VAs that I never knew existed! The more I learned about
the Industry the more I knew this was going to be my home based business! My cousin, who is also a stay at home mom was looking
for the same type of work so I asked if she wanted in on it and she agreed right away, so we decided to partner and build
a VA business together. The only thinking we did next was trying to come up with a business name. We wanted something that
wasn't out there already but summed up the business too. We finally came up with Administrative Solutions, it took a bit
to get used to the name as it is a very important part of a business, but then we realized since it started with 'A'
we were pretty much on the top of every site we registered on! And we registered on tons of networking sites!
It's
been 8 months now and we have 6 regular clients based in Nova Scotia, Vancouver, and as far away as the UK! One
of those clients is still the first person I started working for via Elance. Not to mention we still get clients who only
need our help on a per project basis.
The traffic to our website is increasing all the time, we are being referred
to by other clients and we already have a Google Page Rank!
Being a Virtual Assistant is an amazing
job! We get to meet so many people from all over the world and who specialize in different types of businesses and I
get to stay home and raise my son at the same time!
6:25 pm est
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