Virtual Moxie - The Cure For The Common Virtual Assistance Practice

Words are powerful. Use your own.

Two of the AssistU trainers found out yesterday that people had plagiarized from the trainers’ websites. It turned out to be a seeming misunderstanding and was corrected quickly, but it caused me to want to write about this topic today.

Several years ago, my (then) very recent ex-training director tried to take my entire training program and repackage it as her own to sell to another market.

I made her stop (legally), only to have her try it again several months later. When I went to her the second time, I used the word “plagiarism” which apparently unlocked all sorts of doors in her psyche, and helped her realize that what she’d done was inappropriate, unethical, and downright illegal.

I couldn’t believe that she didn’t KNOW that what she’d done was wrong (I mean, how can someone take a 20 week program and a 800+ page library of information and not know?), and joked with a friend that maybe she missed that day in elementary school when they taught that taking another’s work is bad.

But yesterday, when the trainers went through what they went through, I hearkened right back to that quip.

I genuinely don’t think that people know what’s ok to do and what’s not ok. I think they know that verbatim use of an entire body of work is out, but I think that beyond a certain point, it gets a little grey and formless for them, and they think that a few sentences here, a paragraph there, the same structure of a document if it has some differences—it’s all ok. I think seeing other people do it all around the Internet just adds to their confusion. If others do it, it must be ok, right?

I tried saying something like that to my mother once, in defense of something that was truly indefensible, and she gave me such a klop! She said, “Just because someone else does something isn’t a reason for you to do it. Would you jump off the Brooklyn Bridge if someone else did it?”

Point made. I hope it makes it for you, too. Because it’s just not ok to steal stuff--even if everyone else around you does it and gets away with it. And that’s what plagiarism is. It’s theft, as sure as if you went to the department store and walked out wearing a dress under your clothes.

To use another analogy, in childhood, every one of us learned to ask permission before playing with someone else’s toy. Now that we’re grown up, playing without permission is stealing, and carries serious penalties.

There’s a reason it’s called “intellectual PROPERTY.” You may not be able to pick it up--like a lamp, or see it sitting in the middle of a plot of land--like a house or a goat, or spy it on a rounder in a store--like a blouse, but it’s property, nonetheless, and using is wrong in every way that I can even begin to think about it.

That is, unless permission to copy/use it has been received by the owner of the intellectual property. What’s insane is…people steal even though permission can often be had by simply asking the person who owns the thing that’s wanted!

“Please, Jack… may I use your fabulous poem in a blog post, with attribution?” “Sure, Sue…feel free!”

How hard is that, huh?

A “yes” means you can do what you asked to do. A “no” means you can’t, and you should go look for something else. A “no,” or better still, a fear of even simply hearing “no” isn’t a reason to take something that belongs to someone else.

At AssistU, we give our students licenses to use some of our stuff. It helps them get started. We also tell them that as soon as they find their own voices, they should ditch our stuff flat out and write their own, in their voices, and using their own words.

This transcends stealing. And it’s today’s Bit O’Moxie:

My words are very powerful. For me. Your words are equally powerful. For you. And your words will resonate more with the clients you attract if they are, indeed your words. If they’re not your words, then the person attracting the clients is, well, someone else, and what’s the point of that when YOU are what you’re “selling?”

Be you. Do you. Share you. Leave everyone else alone unless you ask first.

Which comes first, the chicken or the egg?

It’s an age-old question that really usually has no answer. In most places in life, there’s no clarity about it—because if the egg didn’t come first, the chicken wouldn’t have happened, but if the chicken hadn’t come first, the egg couldn’t have been laid.

Blahblahblah...you can drive yourself batty thinking about stuff like that.

In your Virtual Assistance practice, I know of no other place that chicken/egg thing shows up more than in the discussion VAs have with themselves (and the stories they tell themselves and listen to from some industry leaders trying to sell them the latest and greatest success pill) around what needs to come first—clients or hard skills.

It’s not that you can’t get clients without first building your skill set---you can, by knowing how to handle the gaps between what you currently can’t do and what the clients need. It’s also not that you can’t get skills without having clients, first—you can, by focusing on learning things that help you make more of your strengths.

To believe anything else is to clutter your brain with lies.

But there’s one place that’s really not talked about in the same light. Instead, it gets talked about rarely at all (except by me, evidentally!), when, in reality, it needs to come before either clients or new skills.

That’s in building a strong foundation under your business.

I’ve written about this before, and it really is worth repeating. It’s foolhardy at best, and grossly negligent at worst to start a business on a wing and prayer.

The foundation should absolutely come first. And not a foundation created by looking around the net, seeing what others do, and making it up for yourself. That’s not a solid foundation. That’s a wobbly floor.

You’d never let a builder put up the walls on your house before laying the foundation. And why? Well, because there’s an order to things, and because to do that would mean that the foundation, laid later, if at all, wouldn’t be especially solid. Slipping it in under the walls would really be backwards.

So why would you go into business without having a proper foundation?

Listen… I train around foundation. If there’s anything in the world I know it’s this. Why God chose to make me brilliant in this, I’ll never know, but that’s the gift I have. And I look at VAs, many of whom believe themselves to be successful, but who come to me and within my asking one question, let me know that they don’t have a solid foundation.

Let me pose said question to you.

How did you set your fee?

What I mean, specifically, is that your fee is $X. How did you arrive at that number?

If you say anything like, “I joined a group and saw what other people are charging,” or, “My best friend Sally and I kicked it around and thought it sounded good,” or, “A VA coach told me that’s what I should be charging,” or, “I used a calculator on xyz.com web site and it suggested I charge this,” then I guarantee you are walking on one really wobbly floor. Your walls may be really nicely decorated, but your floor? It’s scary.

Here’s the reality of things. I’d bet that the majority of VAs are not profitable in their businesses. It’s not that they don’t want to be. But they don’t know how to know if they are or if they aren’t, so they wing it. Looking at the gross income, they may think they’re doing really well. But after taxes, expenses, and the like… well, let me say that I heard about someone today who was KEEPING less than $5/hour of what she was billing.

She’s better off with a job at McDonalds.

And the money piece of things is just one piece of the puzzle.

With the skills you brought with you to your business, you can be a great technician. But the technician should not be running the business—the business owner should. And if you know next to nothing about being a business owner, running the business as a technician will, ultimately, do nothing more than keep you running on that gerbil wheel you probably find yourself on.

Want to get ahead? Just stop. Stop chasing the clients. Stop chasing the skills. Stop chasing the work. Take the time to get help with laying your foundation, and then move forward again. To keep doing what you’re doing and expecting to see different results—well, that’s the definition of insanity.

First impressions do count

I had an awesome idea for a post for today, but it'll wait till next week. Instead, I wanted to talk about first impressions.

I've been witness to more than 300 in the last week--that's how many people have been in touch with us at AssistU following our being mentioned on TODAY.

And truly? Only a handful of the people represented themselves well in any context of that word. In email, I've seen people writing in all caps and in all lower case; with typos and misspellings, punctuation, structure and grammatical mistakes; missing words; strange paragraph construction--you name it, I've probably seen it. By phone, ums, ahs, a clear lack of understanding of sentence structure...it's been disheartening, truly, that so many more people are making a poor impression than a good one.

I have to think they'd do better if they knew better, but that brings to mind this question: how do any of us know what we don't know? How do we know how to present ourselves well, and whether we are, or aren't?

I'm betting that at least some percentage of the people who contacted us believed they were looking pretty snappy And I, looking at them through my professional lens, know that the reality was anything but.

So I was thinking about how you, dear reader, come across to your prospective clients--both those you've identified as such and those you haven't. The world really is your proverbial oyster, and all you have to do to start mining those pearls is show up looking like you have brains and the skill to use them well--the actual version of "looking pretty snappy."

Bit O’Moxie: Think about your presence--it really is more than the "look" of your site, or the "design" of your Facebook fan page. It's the moment-by-moment way that you create a digital version of yourself, usually in type; often by voice.

What is it that you want people to see and experience of you? How do you know whether they do? And what would you do if you knew that they didn't? What course corrections would you make? How would things be different?

Inquiring minds really do want to know. :)

Do you dig a dangling carrot?

A somewhat growing undercurrent in the Virtual Assistant industry is the notion of working for incentives offered by clients for creating big results. I was asked this morning what I think of it, and I thought I’d share it here—with all of you.

Right out of the gate, I want to be clear that I’m not talking about anyone's being asked to meet reasonable metrics—which are fine and appropriate in just about every conceivable business relationship I can imagine. I’m talking incentives that push people to try to go beyond the reasonable metrics, or that seek to make them responsible for outcomes that really aren't theirs to be responsible for.

So having said that, I hate incentives. But there’s a reason for that. I’m not extrinsically motivated. And I hate incentives for VAs because they tend to be used to make Virtual Assistants responsible for things that aren’t their responsibility (like increased sales—which is really something that either belongs in the hands of the client, or a sales person).

About this intrinsic/extrinsic thing…

If you are extrinsically motivated (motivated by things outside yourself, and enjoy earning bonuses, awards, rewards, and the like) then incentives probably make sense to you. You like the idea of competition—with others or yourself. You like the hunt. You like trying to go for something possibly unobtainable. You get juice from it all.

If, on the other hand, you are intrinsically motivated (motivated by things inside yourself, like what’s learned by doing, or how it feels to do something well, or the satisfaction gotten from making a great contribution, and the like), then incentives probably make zero sense to you. You do your best all the time—you don’t need or want someone trying to elicit more because if you had it to give, you’d already be giving it. For you, incentives probably feel demoralizing, or at least really icky.

But some clients try to incent VAs. Some business models, espoused by Virtual Assistants and often clients themselves, are based on performance-based incentives.

Are they good or are they bad? Neither. Or both, really. It just depends on what motivates you as to which side of that line you stand on.

If it’s extrinsic and you love incentive, risk, and the feeling of being a proverbial Lamborghini on a flat stretch of road with no cops in sight, then maybe you should take incenting clients out for a spin and show them just who’s boss.

But if it’s intrinsic, and the thought of someone offering you something to get on a gerbil wheel, and then dangling a carrot to make you stay on it, run faster, and do more, makes you want to sit down like a mule and refuse to budge, then just refuse. Don’t even waste a moment of your time with anyone who even hints about incentives, and stop listening to people who tell you that there’s a holy grail of skill sets you must master. Truly. You are enough. You do enough. Right now, even.

And this is the point, and today’s Bit O’Moxie: know what motivates you. You can’t fight City Hall, they say, and I’ll add that you can’t fight your own nature with any degree of success. So knowing what motivates you will absolutely bring you one giant step closer to the practice of your dreams. And if that’s not a truly good incentive, I honestly don’t know what is!

:::::tossing confetting::::: Yay, Moxie!

Moxie is five years old. It’s birthday was actually on February 25th—I was close to a week late in even noticing. When I did, it stopped me cold.

FIVE years? How could it be that five years had passed and I’d not noticed? More, how could it be that I’d been writing this thing for FIVE YEARS? Never mind that I only write weekly…to do anything for five years, on a schedule, committed-like is pretty damned awesome.

So kudos to me. And kudos to you—especially if you’ve been reading this whole time. If you have, and if you’ve been in business this whole time, too, then give yourself an extra-big high five—you’ve been more successful than the vast majority of people who start micro businesses.

This whole thing raises something else, for me, and maybe for you. It’s that we humans don’t give ourselves credit for the cool stuff we do. And I think it’s because we’re just too close to it that we have no real perspective on it. And, of course, that we get so busy with the doing of it that the noticing of it takes a backseat--assuming that it's even in the car with us at all.

That sucks.

We need to create our own noticing posses. Know what I mean? Groups of people who love us and who want to remind us of how fabulous we are, how big-deal our accomplishments are, and who want us to make sure we get and celebrate each and every last one of 'em. 

Because when we celebrate how far we’ve come, it entices us and inspires us to intentionally keep becoming who we're here to be, and it keeps us creating and doing according to our visions for ourselves. And that, in turn, entices, and inspires others to do the same thing. It's absolutely love in action.

Today's Bit O’Moxie is a wish. Here’s to continued our greatness. And here’s to even greater noticing. And to being a valuable witness for others. May we each have the moxie to step up and step into our greatness with even more presence!

(photo credit: tawntawns)