Taking your business higher!

15 years ago websites were mysterious. You HAD to know HTML or Dreamweaver and later CSS.  This is no longer the case – yes, a little HTML knowledge is good to have, but content management systems like  WordPress makes it easy. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the first in a series of blog posts about things that you should look for in a virtual assistant. Today’s post is security of paperwork. Read the rest of this entry »

You are organizing  a webinar, networking meeting or other training seminar so you set up events on LinkedIN and Facebook. Now your work is done, you’ve put up an event and people are going to find it and sign up for your event in droves.

  Read the rest of this entry »

Talking about Christmas on June 24th. “Are you crazy?”, I hear you ask.

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A 2010 survey by Career Builder on work life balance for working fathers who are the sole breadwinners in their family reported that “close to four- in-ten (37 percent) of working dads said they spend two hours or less with their children each work day. More than three-in-ten (35 percent) reported they missed two or more significant events in their child’s life due to work in the last year”.

Are you a consultant who is missing out on that important family time too? You’re too busy facilitating meetings and meeting clients during the day and at night you have to play catch-up with your admin work. Do you spend your evenings:

• transcribing wall charts from meetings
• compiling results from evaluations
• formatting reports and presentations
• entering business cards into your contact management system

You are the only one who can write the reports and presentations, but do you need to spend that precious family time formatting those documents? Given the choice of doing your admin work or attending your child’s baseball game or piano recital, which would you choose?

Prime Admin Solutions can help you make that choice so that you can accomplish both tasks and it probably won’t even cost you any money. If you are a consultant who bills your time to clients, you can build the costs of Prime Admin Solutions’ time into your billings to your clients. The large consulting companies do this, why not you?

So think about this on Father’s Day when you are being served burnt toast in bed by that smiling child who is so proud to have made Dad breakfast. Consider how you can be more involved in his or her life. One of the reasons you went out on your own was to have more freedom but you got so successful that you ended up working longer hours than you did when you were in the corporate world. Give Prime Admin Solutions a call today to learn how you can improve your work life balance.

Happy Father’s Day!

I recently signed up for the Premiere edition of Google Apps for Business with the expectation of being able to receive and send email wherever  I am and thought, “for $50, it’s not a lot to lose if I don’t like it”

I discovered another feature that makes me absolutely LOVE this application – the ease and speed of sending large attachments. I sent off a message with a 6 MB attachment the other day and it zoomed out of my mailbox. I remember watching emails be sent from Outlook with large attachments and the painful slowness of it.

I highly recommend this product to anyone who is considering the switch.

I check out a lot of blogs and many are very interesting. More and more people are also building their website around their website blog because it is so much easier to maintain and update.

One thing I notice when I see people’s blogs/websites and that is the fact that they use one of the free themes (templates) available. This is easy but has a couple of drawbacks. One is that customizing can be time consuming and the other is that many others will probably use the same theme.

How would you feel if you went to a party and saw three other people with the exact same outfit as you? Why not consider the web a  party?

Prime Admin Solutions can help you not see yourself coming and going on the web. We can create a custom template for you that reflects your personality, both in your business and personal life.

Contact us using the form below if you would like to learn more about having your own customized WordPress theme.

A laptop was stolen this week from a hospital. Luckily it was found and the person who stole it charged (http://www.newstalk1010.com/news/565/1132306).

This drove home the importance of backing up. Whether you back up your files to an external hard drive at your home or use an off-site service like Carbonite, please back up your files. A computer can be replaced, your family photos can’t.

Just a thought.

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Some business people think it’s cheaper to hire a high school student to come into their office and do their email campaigns and other admin tasks. I’d like to present one example of why it sometimes can be a false economy.

I had a call this week from a lady who owns a little store who was totally panicked. She had hired high school students to do office work for her while she was out front selling. She trusted them to do their jobs and found out that her mail campaigns hadn’t been going out, that when they were sending messages, they were taking a very long time to send them out.

After a short conversation I was able to calm her down and offer her a solution to her problem. I gave her a service to sign up for an account to send email campaigns and when she gets her account set up, she’ll be forwarding me the information to import her list into the mail service and send out her email blast.

Sometimes it is more cost effective to pay a little more to someone who is experienced and professional versus an inexperienced high school student. This is one of them.

I keep seeing blogs and articles in Google News Alerts about starting a virtual assistant business. They talk about how if you have a home computer, you can be a VA.

This concerns me, especially around areas of confidentiality. If you are looking for a virtual assistant, this should be one of your main questions to a prospective service provider, “what procedures do you take to ensure confidentiality of my data?”.  The computer is a big one. Is the computer only used by the VA or is it a shared family computer in the kitchen or dining room? Do the Virtual Assistant’s children (and their friends) have access to it for games, surfing and Facebook activities?

For example, Prime Admin Solutions does the following:

• My computer is password protected and only I know the password.
• Our internet connection is protected by a firewall.
• I have a locked shredding box and only I know where the key is (many VAs like to say they are paperless, I readily admit that I am not, I don’t feel that you can proofread properly on screen, and when I receive instructions by email, I like to be able to print them off to check off and refer to while I’m working, saves time from switching between my email program and back to my work).
• My office is in a room of my house that is only used for my business.
• Only I have access to my computer.
• Does the VA take his/her laptop to a wireless hotspot to do your work or is it done at home?

Just a few things to consider when you are looking for a Virtual Assistant.