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.)

Managing Virtual Meetings...

If you decide to grow your virtual practice at some point to include more than 1 person or you want to host successful meetings with your clients, you will want to take advantage of some of the technology that is around you.  This will make these meetings more efficient, less time consuming and far easier to conduct.

The first thing to think about when managing a virtual team is a project management tool. This will help you with your meetings as well as you can check in on open to-do’s, milestones / deadlines and project messages that may not have been answered yet.  The project management tool that we currently use and recommend is Basecamp.  Basecamp allows you to setup a project and add as many people as you like to it.  It keeps all of your communication and files for that project in one place.

The second thing to think about when managing a virtual team is voice communication options for meetings. Most of my virtual team meetings are done over the phone.  For group calls, I highly recommend using a bridge line service like FreeConferenceCall.com.  This way, you can all call into one line and have a group discussion while recording it for any members of the team who can not be present.

The third thing to think about when managing a virtual team is alternative communication options for the meeting itself and for afterward. For this, we highly recommend and use Skype.  Skype allows you to create group conversations that can be tagged with a topic which makes managing type chat much easier.  Skype will offer your team the instant chat that is sometimes needed for quick questions.

The final thing to think about when managing your virtual meetings is the agenda. In Basecamp, you can setup something called a Writeboard.  It’s not a bad idea to create a Writeboard for each meeting and allow that Writeboard to be edited and contributed to by the team.  This will give your meetings some structure so that when you get on the phone, everyone’s time is valued and everyone’s concerns, thoughts and questions are addressed.

If you manage or organize virtual meetings, what other tips do you have to make them successful?

Using Skype in Your Virtual Assistance Practice...

If you’ve been on a computer for any length of time, you’ve no doubt heard about Skype.  It’s an amazing communication tool that uses the Internet as its platform for everything – voice, video chat and regular chat (amongst other features).  One of the ways that we have started using Skype in our virtual assistance practice is through the use of conference-style conversations.

I’m not just talking about the regular instant messaging back and forth here… I’m talking about setting up your Skype experience to be a strategic place for discussion and conversation.  This is particularly helpful if you have a virtual assistant team that works with you on client work or if you pull an outside resource to assist on a project.

In our business, we have multiple projects (aka clients) and multiple team members.  Since we put together “power teams” for every client, sometimes the same team members are not always involved in the same conversations.  So, we create conference style chats and label them with an appropriate title to make conversations easier.

To illustrate this better, here is a screenshot of a sample conversation:

As you can see, we have the group conversations down the left-hand side in the “drawer” part and on the right, the actual conversation.  This conversation includes my friend Josh Schnell from Macgasm.net and as promised in the chat above, I’m adding a link to his site.  It also includes Trina Lamarche, one of our BSETC team members.

Any group conversation can have a topic added to it and you can add any number of people to the conversation.  The beauty is that you can then have organized, focused conversations around specific clients or, you can add your client and have a group chat that is setup specifically for them to post questions into.

The other thing that is nice about group conversations is that you can choose when you want to be notified about new messages.  Sometimes, group chat will not always pertain to you so you may want to set a filter that I often set.  Generally speaking, I’ll set it so that I am only notified if / when someone uses my name.  To do that, I right-click on the chat topic in the drawer part and choose “Notify me only if these words are mentioned:” and then I’ll add my name here.

Begin setting up group conversations for yourself and your clients to make tracking those convos easier.  We also use it to create an “A-Team” chat where the entire BSETC team chats about whatever we need to / want to.  It creates a sense of community even with all of us being so far apart.