Virtual Moxie - The Cure For The Common Virtual Assistance Practice

Author your own fairy tale

Feeling guilty about not working from a business plan? Know you should--but you can't make yourself get around to it?

Lots of people do. But when I have a coaching client who’s been in business for more than a couple of years who hasn’t really kept hers up to date, and feels badly about that, I tell her to forget about it.

Just forget about it.

And instead, I suggest she create what I call a “Fairy tale business plan.” You can do it, too.

What you want to do is summon the vast knowledge you've gathered every second since your business launched-what you love, what you don’t, what’s working well, what you wish worked better, and then lay it out in fairy-tale format.

It might begin this way:

”Once upon a time there was a pretty girl named Anastacia. She lived in a beautiful cottage, close to the sea, in a burg called Baltimore.

Anastacia loved helping people. And the more success they saw, the happier she was. Every day she would go into her office at 9am, after a lovely and healthy breakfast and a walk among the fields outside her cottage where she would revel in the feel of the sunshine on her skin, and the sound of the birds singing in the trees.

Once In her office, she would choose a happy playlist on her iPod, turn on her computer, and get to work. Her clients were all women whose work and lives made a difference. She loved working with them because they were gracious, fun, smart, up to big things, and always clearly showed how much they valued her and the contribution she made to their businesses…

You get the idea.

Bit O’Moxie: The point is, in writing a fairy tale, where, of course, everyone lives happily ever after, you focus on very happy, positive details—and that focus shifts your vibration, your energy, and as a consequence, who and what you attract.

It’s also a great deal of fun to write; something, I'm sure, that will be far easier to get into, and actually complete, than redoing or creating from scratch a business plan!

When you don't know, don't pretend

Elyse wrote to me to ask me if I could teach her more about the old adage, “Fake it till you make it.” You see, Elyse is new to this whole VA thing, and has those feelings of being an imposter—you know, the ones just about everyone has when starting something new.

Here’s what I shared:

When you’re new at something, like being a VA, it’s natural to feel like you don’t have the “goods” to help clients. What I’d love for you to remember, Elyse, whenever you doubt yourself, is that you do.

You’ve been an admin for 20+ years, and you’ve supported your senior-level boss remotely for the past three years, doing everything from scheduling, to undoing messy situations, to making complex travel plans, to helping him get started with social media—all very much things that a VA might help her client with. And those aren’t your only skills, are they? I imagine that in the past 20+ years you've amassed a wide range of skills that you can parlay into remote admin skills. After all, sitting down the hall from your boss isn't that different from sitting half way across the country from a client. Whatever you've learned to do without being face-to-face are absolutely the goods you think you're lacking. That's really good news.

And based on what you shared with me, one thing you are lacking is the business know-how to run your own business. And that’s something that you can learn, for instance, through the VTP at AssistU.

So, “Fake it till you make it” in your context would be meant to remind you to act “as if” you are already doing the thing you want to be doing, to the degree that you can. And Elyse, to a great extent you aren’t faking. You’ve been doing the work of a VA, only without being in business for yourself. And as soon as you get that piece nailed, you’ll wake up to realize that you actually aren’t faking any of it any more, but you’re actually doing it, with great skill, finesse, and grace. And your clients will delightedly thank you.

And I have only one cautionary bit of advice for today’s Bit O’Moxie. Whatever you do fake--make sure that it's attitude, and confidence, rather than know-how. You don't want to lie to clients about what you can do for them. When you don’t know, don’t pretend. You can do lasting harm to the clients or their businesses and end up in a lot of hot water. Instead, approach literally everything with great confidence, and let the client know that although you haven’t ever done THAT before, you believe that you can figure it out (for instance), and you’d love to try. A can-do attitude can get you much further along than almost anything else.

Love those whoop-dee-doos!

We’re driving way out in the country last weekend, Dominic and I, when I went over a series of smallish dips in the road that made the car bounce like crazy.

“Love those whoop-dee-doos!” D sang out gleefully.

“Whoop-dee-doos?”

“Yeah… whoop-dee-doos. What do YOU call ‘em?”

Well, at the time, I would have called them “a series of dips in the road that made the car bounce like crazy,” (go figure) but now, I mean, how can I resist calling them whoop-dee-doos?

So what does this lovely tale have to do with your business? Glad you asked, my friend.

It’s cause business is just like that. You’re cruising along, doing your stuff, and everything’s fine, and suddenly, without warning, you hit whoop-dee-doos that make you bounce like crazy.

Some people, when hitting whoop-dee-doos, get stuck right there. Rather than dealing with the few seconds of bouncing, they behave more like what they hit was a bloody sink hole. They exclaim and exclaim about the bouncing and the dipping, and it goes on and on for so long that they’re incapable, really, of noticing that road is again flat and smooth.

Bit O’Moxie: To survive, and more importantly, to thrive in business, long-term, you can’t be one of those people. Whoop-dee-doos can’t (and don't) last forever. And they don’t come so frequently as to be the norm. They are, in reality, just little bumps in the road, to be ridden over and forgotten. So instead of going to a place of upset (or drama), be the person who, like Dominic, exclaims, (c’mon…do it with me) “Love those whoop-dee-doos!” and smiles and laughs before getting on with the smoothness that’s returned. It will quite possibly change how you experience challenges forever!

Be the expert your clients expect

When you call a plumber to fix your toilet, your sink, or whatever you’re having a problem with, he arrives at your house, listens to the issue, and gets to work. You sigh in relief and go back to watching TV with the family.

What you don’t do is tell him how to do his job, or dictate to him which tools he’s going to use to do it. If you want to hang out and watch him work, he might tell you that info, but really, what he does and how he does it is up to him.

So it should be with you and your clients. You need to figure out what tools, processes and procedures make you most effective and efficient, and then tell the clients (should the clients care to know) what you’ll be using.

It’s not up to you to fit in to the clients' systems and processes, much less conform to their tool sets, unless they work for you.

Look, no matter what they say they want, clients are expecting you to be the expert. They came to you believing you know more and better than they do. And if you're playing your best game, you should absolutely be the expert. You cannot be the expert and morph yourself into something you’re not, using tools and playing with P/Ps that you know won’t work. The two simply aren’t compatible, and will probably lead you to a rocky relationship with an unhappy and fairly quick ending.

Bit O’Moxie: So pick the tools that you prefer, that you know work best for you, and that allow you to look like a super hero. Tell the clients what you'll be using. And when it comes to tools you need to share, be willing to strongly suggest, (or require, if you’re super moxie-full) that the clients use the tools that work best for you. Chances are, whatever the clients are using isn’t working well for them to begin with, and they’ll be open to what you suggest. And if not, and you know what's being used won’t allow you to do your best work, be willing to walk away from the engagement. Remember, not playing is still a win/win.

You do you

From Twitter, @scottpalmer tweeted: "Knee-jerk support interactions aren't effective for me - but they're still the norm. Do they work? Do cookie cutter answers satisfy anyone?"

My response? “Cookie cutter answers, like cookie cutter people who can't think critically for themselves/have no power, & satisfy no one."

When Scott tweeted this, I connected some dots that weren’t there, and I’m now happily blogging about them.

He, clearly, is talking about customer support—probably from people in call centers. My brain, OTOH, moved directly to Virtual Assistants, and how what he said applies here, too.

In our case, it’s more that soooooo many VAs sound alike. Randomly compare a couple VA sites and you’ll likely see what I mean.

I’m guilty of supporting that, to a degree; in the Virtual Training Program at AssistU, we want to make sure that our trainees are prepared, soup to nuts, to strongly start their new VA practices, so we give them some great language to use for a variety of circumstances, and we share some marketing materials they are free to customize and use in their practices.

What I know is that, when starting something new, it’s impossible to have great language for those situations, and there's next to no way to create truly unique marketing pieces, because there’s not enough knowledge or experience to do so.

So copying, or mimicking, or using templates are all very good ideas for newbies, because it gives them a way to make a strong start, and a way to think about working into having their own thoughts about those same topics. The problem I’ve seen is that many far more senior VAs are still copying, mimicking, and using templates--whether AU VAs who have gotten them from us, or non AU VAs who have gotten them elsewhere. What’s up with that?

In conversations with VAs over the years, some have told me they can’t think of how to express things better (the “why reinvent the wheel” argument). Others have said they know they should come up with their own stuff, but can’t get around to it (the “I’m too busy to worry about my presence” argument). Still others say their PCs seems to like what they read and they don’t see why they should change it (the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” argument). None of them hold water. Really.

Be yourself. Speak for yourself. Do you. Everyone else is already taken.

Bit O’Moxie: If you’ve been in your business for more than a year, you really owe it to yourself, your VA colleagues, and the client population to find your own voice and talk about what you do and offer in your own unique way. Continuing to copy, mimic, or use templates makes you look untutored, and unable to critically think for yourself. And while that may be fine for a newbie, that’s absolutely the wrong way to go for you.