Small Business Owner’s Sanity Checklist...

For virtual assistants, it is sometimes difficult to explain to prospective clients why it is so imperative that they have a virtual team.  Having a list of questions to get us thinking or to pose to them is really valuable.

I recently received an e-mail from Virtually Successful that I thought was really helpful so I wanted to share it with you all via the blog.  I’ve posted their intro and the first 10 questions here but please visit their website to read the rest of the blog post.

This checklist is designed to help potential small business clients see the benefit of working with a virtual team. The point is to make you, the virtual support professional, look great, save you time and more effortlessly attract the right clients to you. It’s a took that you can print and use cleanly with your clients (pdf format is available at the link below).

May I suggest that you answer these questions as the business owner of your own business. Maybe it’s time you hired your own help?

Instructions: Circle the number of statements that are true. If more than 5 statements are true, working with a virtual assistant specializing in small business may be the perfect solution.

1. I am working long hours each day and still can’t get caught up.
2. I’m working mostly in my business instead of on my business.
3. If I wasn’t here, the place would fall apart within a month.
4. I want to delegate more so I have more time to pursue new revenue streams.
5. I’m doing tasks that I do not like or am not very good at.
6. Sometimes I wonder if I’m spending too much money doing everything myself
7. Our customers aren’t getting quality service and we’re losing money as a result.
8. I have family members helping in my business and they are unhappy about it.
9. I want to take more time off with family without guilt or stress.
10. Unnecessary chaos in the company makes it hard to build a team.

Visit Virtually Successful for the rest of this valuable blog post.

Subcontractor Agreements for Multi-VA Firms...

When it comes to your multi-virtual assistance company, you want to be sure that all of the people who are working inside of your company sign a subcontractor agreement.

This agreement should contain a non-disclosure / confidentiality clause to prohibit them from sharing details about your client’s work and the work done inside your company as a whole.  This protects your business as well as your client’s businesses and can become a selling point when talking to potential clients about working with a team.

The other part that you want to be sure it includes is a non-compete clause.  Ensuring that a new team member can not come into your company and walk away with your client list is really important.  Your client list is where your business revenue lies and needs to be protected.  It’s also a good idea to limit your team members to only seeing projects that they are involved with versus seeing the entire list at all times.

The best way to get a subcontractor agreement in place is to hire a lawyer to draft one for you.  This will ensure that you are properly protected in your state / province and will ensure that it does not contain any loopholes or false language.

To get ideas on what your subcontractor agreement should contain, here are a few sites that feature sample subcontractor agreement templates.  Again, it is advised that you get a lawyer to draft your subcontractor agreement as templates do not always hold up in court.

• http://www.biztree.com/Templates/Subcontract-Agreement.html
• http://www.docstoc.com/search/free-subcontractor-agreement-forms
• http://www.agreementforms.org/Contractor-Subcontractor-Agreement-Form.html

(As with any legal issue, please seek the counsel of your attorney.  They will be able to advise you on the best practices to take.)

Organizing Clients in Basecamp...

When it comes to managing your clients and projects, you want to setup the easiest system possible.  For our company, we utilize the services of Basecamp.  Inside of Basecamp, we organize each of our clients by creating separate projects for each.  These projects are blanket labeled with the client’s name and inside of that project, various tasks are broken down by messages and to-dos.

To illustrate, we have created a fake client account in our Basecamp and we have included screenshots below.

Step One: Create a New Project

You can see that when we create a new project, we call both the project and the company by the same thing.  This will then alphabetize our clients in our main Basecamp list and also show the client that it is truly their project.

Step Two: Setup Messages to Define Individual Projects / Tasks

Once we have the client’s project setup in Basecamp, we then use the messages area to setup individual projects / tasks.  This allows us to segregate out the conversation around each item.  We also use labels like [In Progress] or [Complete] to give our client an easy way to see the status.

Step Three: Setup Corresponding To-Do’s

The to-do lists let us assign the work to multiple people and organize the individual to-dos for each project / task.  We always reference back to the original message thread so that we don’t lose the conversation and so that the client has easy access to it as well.

As you can see, segregating out Basecamp for individual clients is actually quite easy.  There are many more options for organization and we cover those in our Basecamp 101 course.  Learn more about that here.