I have an interesting subject to talk to you about today — Kryptonite of Virtual Assistance. I call it kryptonite because, just like Superman, if you get encounter this phenomenon, it can really turn your business into something that’s extremely unproductive and you just wither away and it’s horrible.
In terms of virtual assistance, kryptonite is like working with clients who, for reason or another you don’t like, to be honest.
There are some occasions when I interview a prospective client during an early consultation and deep down inside I feel that this is probably not a good match for us and trouble might be on the horizon. You will come across this, most especially earlier on and I remember when I was starting out as a virtual assistant, I had the mindset that I needed to take on every client that I could possibly come across. That was before I came across a book by Tim Ferris called the “Four Hour Work Week,” which really opened my eyes to this situation. At that time I learned about the 80/20 rule, which I had never come across before. Then it occurred to me that it was absolutely true in terms of clients that I was working with because, really, 80% of the problems in my business came from 20% of the clients.
I thought about this further and calculated that the clients that I really got on well with and who worked with me on everything were the least problematic and were taking up the least amount of my time. What I needed to do was focus on the billable time related. This was an excellent relationship. It was a exchange of services. There was a great deal of productivity associated with the people whom I enjoyed working with. The people that I didn’t enjoy working with so much proved to be extremely time consuming because we would be going back and forth with different things. A lot of the time it was with people who didn’t really understand virtual assistance or what a virtual assistant was and I really tried to explain to them but they weren’t really grasping it. They were expecting a lot from the work and sometimes never happy, even though I was really trying my best. You may well come across your own version of these people.
Just so you understand, I don’t work with any of these people anymore and I knew that I shouldn’t have initiated the relationship as I had a gut instinct before we even started that I would be better off going somewhere else and we shouldn’t be engaging. I’m trying to explain to you what I mean by kryptonite of virtual assistance and how you should be only working with people who you get on with and not those who really don’t value what you do; I am almost sure that all these clients (and there weren’t all that many, maybe three or four at the time and a small proportion of the total), really didn’t extend much respect and understand that I was also a business owner, just like they were. They kind of thought that because I was doing what I was doing that I was assisting them that I was sort of an underdog.
I wouldn’t be surprised if you came across this. It is quite commonplace. If you just look at YouTube, some of the videos, they are wrong there about how you should train your virtual assistant and what you should do with your virtual assistant. I think this is quite degrading. It’s beyond me why people should look at it this way. As entrepreneurs and business people, we all want to succeed. Of course from my perspective, I just want to see my clients succeed with their own businesses, but if they don’t understand that and don’t trust in your ability, then it can all go pear-shaped pretty quickly and can be a nasty experience all round. I urge you to heed my advice here and trust your gut instinct, as if you really don’t feel that you should be working with a client following your initial consultation, then you should come up with some kind of excuse so that you don’t actually end up working with them, or if you do push forward and start off with something relatively small, just to see how it goes. See how you work together.
There is nothing written in stone that says that you have to continue working with a client, just because you have initiated a working relationship. Don’t ever think that you need to work with a client just because you put your services up online. Just because people contact you it doesn’t mean to say that you want to work with them and it doesn’t mean to say that it’s going to be a good match. You have every right to be selective. Have a lot of pride in what you do and respect for yourself. Without respect, what is the point? Trust me when I say that if you follow the 80/20 rule, your business is likely to be much more successful. And to take advantage of this quickly, seriously consider taking on someone looking into how to become a virtual assistant, or even a team looking into how to become a virtual assistant business, to maximise your efforts in a very short period of time. Always remember that someone looking into how to become a virtual assistant can help you with your workload, at a great price, simply because they’re still “learning the ropes” of the business.
Really focus on the clients that you like working with. Focus on the clients that you enjoy working with and that you have an excellent working relationship and there are no problems there because they’re the clients who are going to bring on other clients for you through recommendations. They’re the clients who are going to keep sustaining your VA business with long-term work.
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