7 Essential Tips for the Successful Entrepreneur

July 26, 2009

As someone who runs an online business and does a great deal of travelling, I can attest to the immeasurable value that a virtual assistant can provide. In addition to having a virtual assistant to help during busy times, there are other resources that travelling entrepreneurs should tap into before leaving the office.

The beauty of an online business is that you can access it from wherever you may be. That flexibility provides a number of benefits to entrepreneurs. One valuable bonus is the ability to hire a virtual assistant to cover for you. Equally beneficial is the capability to conduct business while travelling with a virtual office at your fingertips. In order to do so, here are 7 things that every travelling entrepreneur should consider:

1. A Virtual Phone Number.

A virtual number is typically a toll-free number that you can redirect to your land line or mobile phone. This allows your online business to maintain consistency no matter where you are. When travelling, a virtual phone number enables you to be accessible to your customers at all times.

2. Call Answering.

When you consider that 70% of callers will not leave a message if you don’t answer the phone, a virtual assistant is invaluable phone coverage when you are not available. You can seamlessly route your virtual phone number to whichever number you choose. This is an ideal option when you are restricted from using your mobile phone while travelling, taking a vacation, or in another time zone. A virtual assistant can provide coverage for your online business when you can’t.

3. Virtual Address.

An online business has many advantages, among them not having to rent office space. With a virtual address, you can still have a postal mailing address by using a registered office service that will handle your mail and have it forwarded to you. You can streamline the process even further by having your virtual assistant sift through the junk mail and either scan/email or fax the essential pieces to your current location.

4. Virtual Post.

Whenever you are unable to get to a post office during hours of operation, there are several services where you can email documents and information to them and they’ll print and send it for you. The service will actually format your document and ensure that it is mailed promptly.

5. Email Handling.

An online business can attract a great deal of emails, some worthwhile, others unsolicited. When you’re travelling, you want to be able to access the important emails quickly and easily. One way to cut down on non-essential emails is to set up a virtual email box for your newsletter subscriptions and other resources you might use. This will limit the number of emails you receive to your direct online business account. The other email accounts can be perused at your leisure, or a virtual assistant can sort through the information and email you articles that are valuable to you.

6. Collaboration.

Find a virtual assistant who uses online collaboration software or a client project space. Keep everything perfectly organized in just one place and subscribe for updates using RSS feeds. This provides one simple stream of workflow that will keep you constantly updated, even with your mobile devices.

7. Mobile Device.

Make sure you have a hand held computer to avoid carrying around a laptop or briefcase. Always carry your virtual office in your pocket.

Posted by Virtual Miss Friday | Filed Under **Blogs**, **Business**, **Internet**, **Marketing**, **Media**, **Motivate**, **VMF**, **eBusiness**, Advertising, Development, Promotion | Comments

How to Maximise Your Profit with a Business Strategy

July 23, 2009

All businesses should have a business plan. It can be a rather intimidating task to sit down with a pen and paper and start creating one for your business. It’s something that is very important for you to do though, and as a Virtual Assistant you will probably find that you don’t need to do too much, as it’s unlikely that you’ll need much funding for your initial start up. I would encourage every start up business, Virtual Assistant or not, to sit down and go through the process of writing a business plan. The very act of putting your ideas onto paper helps you to focus and clarify your ideas. There are plenty of templates out there to help you, and I suggest your first port of call would be to look through the ones on the Microsoft website.

Initially, you should start with a very simple document that covers the following items:

1. Your Elevator Pitch – A thirty second description of your organisation and the services you handle which you can bring up when networking to introduce yourself in less than 30 seconds.

2. Market Analysis/Market Research – Is the research that you have pursued to locate your market, the target market for your products and services, your competitors and your services. You’ll need to provide a description of the different groups of targeted customers included in your market analysis, and explain why you are selecting these as targets. You may also want to describe the Virtual Assistant market by summarising the market growth over recent years and some trend analysis of where the market is likely to be headed.

3. Marketing and Sales – You should have developed plans to market your products and services, and to close sales. Your marketing strategy needs to include how you intend to concentrate on your target market, what sort of media you intend to utilise to establish awareness of your business and how you intend to position your business online; this will require developing your unique selling position. Your sales strategy on the flip side will address how you intend to finalise agreements and lock-in clients; this will encompass pricing, delivery, terms and conditions.

4. Operations – You need to describe how your business is going to be set up, including premises and equipment, you may also want to include how you see this changing as your online business grows.

5. Management and People – This area should encompass a rundown of how the company is set up, what support staff you use currently, or may want to utilise in the near future.

6. Finance – This is the part that generally scares people to death, but there is really no need to panic. You need to do this to make sure that your business is viable, and so that you have a set of goals and targets to work toward. You can download spreadsheet templates from the internet if you use Microsoft Office. I personally suggest that you acquire them from their website as they have a huge variety of completely free templates. This will comprise of :

* A personalised spending plan so you are aware of what expenditure you will need to cover from your income.

* A worksheet showing how you’re going to fund any start up costs you might have.

* A Sales Budget – You will probably want to use value based pricing for this. You can reasonably estimate your sales by working out your billable hours per month at the rate you expect to charge.

* A Costs Budget – You will need to identify your fixed costs and your variable costs. There is no requirement to calculate the cost of sales because as a Virtual Assistant you are merely offering a service.

* An Operating Budget/Profit and Loss – This is a strategy for your business which details the sales and expenditure accounts in one form.

* Break Even Analysis – This will demonstrate the amount of hours you need to bill in order to cover your costs, and then anything in excess of that is profit. To complete this type of analysis you need to know your variable costs/unit, sales price/unit and fixed costs.

* Cashflow Forecast – This will be the most critical document to you. It’s the heart of your business. Poor financial management is one of the principle reasons for business collapse. This will help you monitor the cash coming in and going out of your business, and it will help you identity when you will have cash available to make capital expenditures, or when you might not have enough cash and need to make arrangements with your bank before the problem happens.

That’s everything you essentially require to make a start. This should even be all you really need to set up a business bank account. You can add things like an executive summary at the start of the document, which is a section designed to give a brief overview of your business together with highlights from sections 2 -6 above. If you wish, you could add appendices to include your CV and so on.

Don’t forget, your business plan should be dynamic and you should use it as a yardstick of how effectively you’ve met your targets. It needs to be reviewed at least every four weeks from when you start your business, but this can be extended as your business grows, although it’s always best to monitor the financial section at regular, short term intervals.

Michelle Dale is The Managing Director of Virtual Miss Friday, a highly qualified Executive Virtual Assistant Service which helps businesses and individuals accomplish every detail of their professional aspirations. Want to discover more about these insightful online business building success strategies? Support the Campaign for FREE Virtual Assistance now!

Posted by Virtual Miss Friday | Filed Under **Business**, **Internet**, **Marketing**, **Motivate**, **eBusiness**, Advertising, Development, Promotion | Comments

Key Steps for Setting Up a Dynamic Blog

July 10, 2009

Starting up a blog is probably one of the smartest ways a Virtual Assistant can invest their time and effort. It’s the first thing most people will see of your business, so there’s absolutely no margin for error. Attempting to make it complicated or overly complex is a waste of time. These days, you don’t need a computer expert to do the job for you, because everything necessary is readily available, most of it for free.

The one thing that I would suggest, if this is going to be your main web presence as a Virtual Assistant, then you should have your own Hosting Package and a domain name that mirrors your business name, or as near as you can get it. The process that you need to go through when starting your blog is:

First of all, before you begin, here is a big warning: Keep your site classy and uncluttered, simplicity is everything! Ensure that the site is easy for your users to get around, so that they can quickly find what they’re looking for. Whilst in technological terms it may be state of the art, your blog still needs to appear stylish.

1. The first thing to do is to pursue some keyword research around the topics you are going to talk about on your blog. From this you can identify the most optimised names for the blog. From this you can identify the most optimised names for the blog.

2. Your next step is to research the blog platform that you are going to use. There are a great number of choices available, offered by providers such as WordPress.org – the Moveable Type for the self hosted option, or the likes of WordPress.com, Typepad, Blogger, Blogspot or Blogsmith for hosted platforms. The things you really need to make sure that you do are:

* Use a platform that’s widely supported by an extremely active community.

* Use a portable option, and always maintain back ups in case anything goes wrong.Once you’ve selected a platform, sign up using one of the preferred names that you picked for the blog, or install the site onto your own domain.

4. Select the template that you want to utilise, and ensure that:

* It ’s appropriate to your topic.

* You fully customise it with headers, pictures, buttons and so on to make your blog stand out.

* The end result suits your style and brand.

5. Once you have completed this see what else you are able to add to your site, i.e. available widgets and plug-ins.

6. When you’re comfortable with the general style, you should add some posts to get a good idea of how the blog will appear once users start to interact with it. Once you’ve done this, make any tweaks necessary to improve the appearance and layout.

7. When you are happy with the overall look you can then publish your blog.

Maintaining your blog can be challenging as you really should post more than once a week, two or three unique posts at them minimum would be best. You should be displaying something that visitors will want to return for – and motivate these users to opt-in to your feed.

Remember that this is an online business blog and you’re displaying your corporate image, so keep the discussions agreeable, as you want to put forth your individuality while still remaining completely professional. Don’t intermingle business with pleasure on your site, and as you don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable, try to stay away from any sort of controversial subjects.

Michelle Dale is The Managing Director of Virtual Miss Friday, a state of the art Executive Virtual Assistant Service which assists businesses and individuals with every aspect of their enterprising requirements. Do you want to explore these inspiring online business building success strategies? Check out the Campaign for FREE Virtual Assistance right away!

Posted by Virtual Miss Friday | Filed Under **Blogs**, **Internet**, **Marketing**, **Media**, **eBusiness**, Advertising, Development, Promotion | Comments