Anti-Social Media?
Everyone has heard of social media – but have you heard of anti-social media? I recognize that I may get flack for this post, but I’m going ahead anyway.
‘”Woosterizing”
One of my favourite clients coined a term that I wanted to share.
Woosterizing
I think it is a really neat term. What is Woosterizing? Continue reading
The 12 Days of Christmas
You could be singing this song this time next year, if you partner with Prime Admin Solutions
On the first day of Christmas, my VA did for me
gave me more time for my family
On the second day of Christmas, my VA did for me
formatted my report
and gave me more time for my family
Where can you more productively spend your time?
You’ve consulted with your clients, done the workshop and now you’re:
- sitting at your computer in the evening compiling evaluations, typing wall charts, preparing reports and managing the output from the workshop
- or worse, you’re doing this during business hours when you could be doing more financially beneficial work
A client has signed the contract for you to do a three-day workshop. You have put together the material for the workshop and just like the example above, you’re formatting the prework, slides, etc. in the evening or during the business day.
Doing your own admin work either in the evening or during the day has a cost to you and your business. In the evening you are missing out on quality family or relaxation time and during the day you could be doing more lucrative work that you are an expert at.
Why not outsource your admin to Prime Admin Solutions. As a consultant you can build that into your client billing. The big companies, Mercer, AON, PWC, etc. all do it. As an independent consultant you can too!
Contact Prime Admin Solutions today to learn more about how you can increase your business, save money and have an excellent work-life balance.
Take a look at the two pictures below. Which scene would you rather see yourself in?
Prime Admin Solutions can take are of things so that you can be in the second picture while your word processing is taken care of.
Happy Father’s Day – How often do you see your kids?
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”. Continue reading
Google Apps for Business
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.
Why it makes sense to hire a professional
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.
Is your recipe for success missing a key ingredient?
I love to cook. I know that if you add too much of one ingredient and not enough of another, a recipe will not turn out as expected. For example, if you make a loaf of bread and add too much flour and not enough yeast, you’ll end up with a lump of baked dough that didn’t rise well.
Compare your business to a loaf of bread. You spend lots of time on your document formatting reports, fancying up your PowerPoint presentations and even compiling the evaluation forms from a session you facilitated. That’s the flour. You get so caught up doing these things yourself that you miss out on networking and other business building opportunities or doing the more lucrative work that you excel at (and has a higher dollar value per hour). That’s the yeast.
Knowing when to delegate is another key ingredient to your business success. Everyone’s time has a value. Chances are, your time is worth more than the cost of outsourcing your admin tasks to a virtual assistant. You may even be able to build those costs into the rates you charge your clients. Writing a report and getting it typed up in the rough and then handing it off to a virtual assistant to polish for you also allows you to move on to other client work. You are able to satisfy two clients’ needs instead of just one. What could be better.
If you’d like to make Prime Admin Solutions one of the key ingredients for your business succes, contact me today.
5 Ways a Virtual Assistant Can Help Consultants
Whether you are a marketing consultant, a manager consultant, business consultant or market research consultant, a virtual assistant should be an integral part of your business. My accountant has a saying, “stick to the knitting”; in other words, do the parts of the job that you make the most money at and delegate the other stuff.
Here are some ways that a virtual assistant can help you:
1. Document formatting
If you work on a hourly billable basis, drafting a document and having your virtual assistant format it for you allows you to move on to other financially lucrative work.
2. Contact Management
Give your business cards to your Virtual Assistant to enter into your contact management database. Consider using an online service such as Zoho CRM, Sugar CRM or SalesForce.
3. Meeting Prep
Your Virtual Assistant can help with reservations, room bookings, catering orders as well as meeting materials. Your VA can coordinate back pre-work (if necessary), preparing name tags, agendas, tent cards, evaluation forms and other documentation.
4. Après Meeting
Your VA can take the flip charts from your meeting and transcribe them into a Word, Excel or Mind Manager document. Do you have meeting participants fill out evaluation sheets? Give them to your Virtual Assistant to compile and prepare a quantitative and qualitative report. Was the meeting recorded on tape or digitally? Again, your Virtual Assistant can transcribe this for you into a form you and your clients can work with. Take a FedEx, UPS or Purolator waybill addressed to your VA along with packaging material to your meeting. After the meeting package everything up and drop the package off at a courier drop off location (for example, Staples) on your way home and have it shipped to your virtual assistant.
5. Invoicing
Your VA can prepare your invoices and send them to your clients on your behalf as well as following up on unpaid invoices.
A tool every entrepreneur needs
Neat Receipts is a great little tool that no business should be without. What is it? It’s a business card scanner, a receipt scanner and a portable scanner. How can Neat Receipts help you?
- Receipts:
- It’s not just a scanner. Neat Receipts can take your scanned receipt and break it down into a spreadsheet by place of purchase, type of product, cost, taxes. It also keeps a scan of the receipt for your records.
- Business Cards:
- Scan your business cards using Neat Receipts into a format that you can use to upload to your contract management system (such as Outlook, SalesForce, Zoho, etc.). Saves typing. Yes, you’ll have to review to ensure the right items are put in the correct fields, but it saves on errors.
- Portable Scanner:
- Are you frequently on the road and need a quick scan of a document to email to someone? Neat Receipts can scan quickly to a PDF and it fits in your suit case.
This is a product I highly recommend. Of course, if you are extremely busy and don’t have the time to do this yourself and you have a pile of business cards and/or receipts you would like scanned, Prime Admin Solutions can help you with that.
For more information on this really cool product, check out: The Neat Company’s website.
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