Tech Tip: Setting Up an E-mail Account in the cPan...

If you haven’t heard, I’ll be presenting at the IVAA Online Summit 2010 on the subject of the cPanel.  You can learn more about my topic description here.  This post is in a new series we will be running on the blog called ‘Tech Tips’ and will help virtual assistants get through some of the pesky technical items that pop up on a regular basis.

This blog post will cover setting up an e-mail account inside of the cPanel.  The cPanel is the control panel behind your website.  It does not exist on every single website host but when it is there, it is a very powerful tool.  You can tell if your web host is running cPanel in one of two ways.  You can check their website to see if they list cPanel as a selling feature or you can login and see if the interface is called ‘cPanel’.

Setting Up an E-mail Account in the cPanel

To begin, you want to login to your website host.  For our website, we host it at Bluehost.com – one of our favorite website hosting companies.  Once you’ve logged in, scroll down to the e-mail section which looks like this:

You’ll see that there are many options for your e-mail accounts here but the one you want to focus on for this task is the “Email Accounts.”  Click on the “Email Accounts” icon or hyperlink to be taken to the setup screen.

On this screen, you can set the e-mail account name (for example, ‘info’ or ‘support’) and choose the domain name it should be connected to.  Then, you will want to set a password, confirm the password and watch the Strength meter to ensure it’s a strong enough password.  Then, decide what the mailbox quota on this account should be – that means the accumulative size limit of e-mails and files for that account.  If you are not concerned with space, choose ‘unlimited’.

When done setting all of the particulars, click “Create Account.”

That’s it!  Setting up your e-mail account on the cPanel is easy as that.  If you have any questions, please post as a comment to this blog post!

Hosting a Live Tweeting Event...

This past spring I had the pleasure of hosting a special event called “Twitter Tuesday” for the Tony Award-winning Alliance Theatre.

The theatre wanted to generate some buzz around the final show of their season, a very Cirque du Soleil take on Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass called Lookingglass Alice.  They also wanted to raise their involvement on Twitter, so I suggested that they allow select audience members to tweet during one of the performances.

From this experience I got several takeaways that would be relevant for anyone interested in hosting a live tweeting event:

• Make your participants feel special. I created a packet for each participant which contained a handout with some guidelines for the evening (tweeting must be done via cell phone, phones must be on silent, no photography/videography during the show, etc.) and some tips I found online at Twitter Journalism about how to live tweet an event, a copy of the show’s press release so that each participant would have some knowledge of what they were about to see, and a copy of a preview article that had been printed that day in one of the local papers.  I placed this packet on each participant’s seat so that when they entered the show they had something waiting for them, and we got so many compliments on that packet!  By treating our participants as special audience members we were able to put them in a good frame of mind before the event even started.
• Set clear expectations. By providing some tips for live tweeting, setting up a hashtag, informing participants of the correct spelling for the theatre’s username, and reminding them of the rules of the theatre we created a friendly environment that worked for our participants and the theatre.  In the survey we provided after the show, everyone said that it was very easy to participate and that they found the entire event to be approachable.
• Pick an event that is well suited for live tweeting. Lookingglass Alice was an extremely interactive, fun, whimsical show with lots of visually appealing scenes.  If we had done Twitter Tuesday with one of the theatre’s more serious, cerebral shows, I do not believe that it would have been so successful.  Live tweeting is very much about reacting to what it happening in front of you, so you want to make sure you utilize this technique when the presentation is full of energy and things worth commenting on!
• Prepare all of your audience and staff. Make sure that you let your staff (ushers, event volunteers, etc.) know that this particular group of people is live tweeting.  It may seem rude to some to see audience members using their cell phones during the show/presentation, so you want to make sure that the people monitoring the event know what is going on.  It also may be helpful to make an announcement before the event begins that lets all the other audience members know what’s going on.
• Make it work for your needs. We could have easily opened this up to everyone who wanted to live tweet the show, but instead we screened participants before we gave them free tickets by checking their follower counts and Twitter participation.  By doing this we maximized our bang for our buck with those free tickets.  We also picked a preview performance for Twitter Tuesday which meant that all of those great tweets and blog posts that followed were out there for the general public to see at the beginning of the run of the show, creating some great word-of-mouth to generate more audiences.

The live tweeting concept works well for performances, concerts, festivals, conferences, and galas.  I’d love to hear your ideas on how live tweeting has (and hasn’t) worked!  Be sure to check out my post at Tizzy Consulting with all the details from this live tweeted event.

Multi-VA Business Models...

After having coached many virtual assistants, including multi-VA business owners, it has come to my attention that everyone has a way that they prefer the multi-VA business to be setup.

No Client Contact

This business model is usually setup when you have a team behind you but your clients don’t know who they are, don’t communicate directly with your team members and don’t get work given to them directly from the client. This method is used by a lot of people when they first start building a team because most entrepreneurs have an issue with control so we tend to believe that if we’re still managing everything, including work flow, there will be less of a risk of something going wrong with the client work and therefore, you as the business owner will be the one penalized.

The truth of the matter is, this business model is very, very, very labor-intensive for you as a business owner. You’ll have to flow everything from your client to your assistant, make sure it gets done, pass that message back to your client, let your client critique and tweak, send any changes back to your VA, get those changes back to your client, wait to see if the client is satisfied and if not, probably jump in and do it yourself just so you can get it done “right”.

As you can see, this method and business model can be very counter-productive.

If you are a small firm that only services a few clients, this might work. The only thing is, you’re going to want to ensure that you have a major difference between what you are charging your client and what your VA is charging you because otherwise, you’re not going to get paid for your management time nor will you be able to get in much billable time yourself.

Some Client Contact, Owner Still Very Involved

This business model is a great one to begin with if you tend to be the control-freak entrepreneur. I don’t mean freak in negative way but rather someone who has high sensitivity to that particular aspect of delegating out your work.

What this business model most often looks like is this. You’re still the face and the primary worker bee of your company and you’re doing most of the work. You might have one or two team members who do very specific tasks that you are still overseeing. However, you’re letting your virtual assistants communicate directly with the clients on their particular tasks and you’re letting this happen while still overseeing the work, the communication and stepping in where needed.

This business model is better suited for someone with a smaller client base as it will get extremely time-consuming as you gain more and more new clients. You can still pull this business model off and not work yourself into the ground if you setup good systems and you make sure every client has documented procedures for what you are doing for them.

In my opinion, this is probably the best place to begin and moving up from here comes with a larger team, more clients and you becoming less involved in the day-to-day service providing.

Full Client Contact, Owner Somewhat Involved

This business model is the one I had up until a few months ago. I was doing most of the work but my assistants had full contact with my clients meaning that I gave them permission to just jump into any project and any task that they saw open and available.

The only downside with this is that it definitely does require excellent communication inside of your team. You want to make sure that your team knows to notify everyone else when starting a project. You also want to be sure that you are only giving access to projects to those that have the skill set needed for that client.

The upside to this is that you are now entering the area of giving your assistants ownership of their role in your company and you are empowering them to make decisions about your clients and they start to feel like they are part of a real business and not just someone hidden out of sight that is used on specific tasks or projects.

When I made the move into this type of multi-VA business model, my assistants started doing more, learning more on their own about things they could then bring to my clients and my business and they just had a higher energy about them when it came to my clients.

Full Client Contact, No Owner Involvement Except in Business Items (Billing, Rates, etc.)

This business model is the one I currently run. Well, I in fact use a combination of the last one and this one depending on the client. That’s another great point, if you need to use a variation of these models to appease your clients and provide them with a working environment that feels good and is easy to operate in, do so. These are just general guidelines around business models but you can also tailor your own to find out what works best for you.

So, the full client contact model means that you appoint your clients an account manager – someone who looks after them completely, answers their inquiries, does their work, brings on other team members with specialities as needed, works with your project manager to get milestones and to-dos setup and is your client’s one point of contact in your business.

The reason this business model works well is because it requires very little effort from you. You can take a bit of time to setup the project, explain the client’s needs, look at your team to see who would be the best fit and then assign them. After that, it’s up to your team member to keep that client satisfied and most team members will treat them as their own.

The downside to this model is that it does require planning and procedures creation to make sure that your team knows what to do, how to do it and when to do it. I don’t mean the actual client work because your assistant and the client will more than likely figure out what works best between them but I mean your in-house operations.

Full client contact also means that more work will get done in a billing period because you’re not trying to juggle a hundred projects at once yourself. Unless there are issues, you may not even find yourself thinking about the client until you and your assistant speak.

Complicated Business Models

I have also seen a lot of virtual assistants try to complicate their business models and this is something I strongly urge you not to do. It’s easy to think that things would flow easier if you had managers managing people managing clients but it’s not.

In order to remain efficient with your team and to make it simple for your client to know who to go to and for what, you need to be clear and make your processes easy. The best thing to think about is this: if it’s a complicated setup for you to work out, how will anyone else understand it?

The other thing that comes into play with complicated business models is cost. If you have a project manager managing associates managing virtual assistants managing clients, the only person truly making you money for every hour worked is that virtual assistant who is managing your client and working on their tasks. Every other person is simply overhead.

The best way that I can conceive of running a team is to have you as the business owner, possibly doing the sales pitches and bringing on new clients, have one project manager who oversees all projects (and cap how many hours they are to spend each day to minimize and budget your cost) and then have virtual assistants who work one-on-one with your clients.

Like this post? We have an event happening on the subject of building a multi-VA team! Learn more here.