Virtual Assistance and You

As a website builder, I had to smile with a wince when I read this question in a forum recently:

“…what does one do when their designer doesn’t seem to be listening to them? One of my sites is being rebranded and we’ve hit a snag 3 weeks in – every time I say I want a certain colour, I get something different … I’m at a loss as to how to proceed – don’t want to end the contract but when I say turqouise 3 times & I get green instead (after saying I don’t like green) I’m not sure how to communicate! Really could do with some ideas / insights here thank you so much!”

Communication. Nothing works without it.

The challenge is magnified enormously when you’re working location-independently. While this style of business is increasingly attractive, the temperament and protocols to operate properly are by no means set.

If you’re standing at the counter of your local printing company, you can point to their color chart and say, “This one.” When communicating virtually, you need the hexadecimal or RGB number or whatever. Unfortunately, we don’t all share the same level of technical know-how. Not so many have ever heard of hexadecimals.

Using digital means to communicate requires at least one of two things: a parity in knowledge about any fields discussed and technology used; or extreme skill in listening, articulating, educating, and empathizing on the part of the virtual worker.

Virtual assistance is all about the latter, of course. It’s incumbent on us, the individuals who call ourselves virtual assistants, to acquire (yea, master) the skill of virtual communications.

And it’s no slide, believe me.

In the above example, the customer was incensed that the word, “turquoise” didn’t seem to be communicating. The designer was likely thinking, “I keep giving her turquoise and she’s still not happy.”

How can this discrepancy be resolved?

The seller has to take total responsibility, of course. It’s a very cool opportunity to develop your service to your customers and fellow human beings. You must listen and provide with true generosity. And in the process, you will likely profit.

You have to recognize where the barriers lie (confusion about colors, for example)   between you and perfect understanding on your clients’ part and work your way through them. Provide charts, samples, other resources and guides. Over-communicate. Know that “turquoise” is not a sufficient identifier for a color.

You have to help your clients become your ideal customers.

And just so you know: I am preaching to myself. Doing business increasingly becomes a matter of communicating better with my clients. I’m thinking about checklists, guidelines, questionnaires, introductions of many sorts: ways to make the process of building a website or producing copy or establishing a social media presence much simpler for the site owner. The more streamlined for them, the more pleasant for me!

As a caveat, I know the marketing world doesn’t recognize perfection in any lasting sense, and every design is a new challenge. So it remains that each job is unique. But the more we can eliminate unnecessary misunderstandings, the better.

Finally, I want to note that the ultimate value of virtual assistants may well be our expertise in virtual communications, since we fundamentally depend on it. We can serve as guides for our clients in the intricacies of being digitally understood.

Categorizing and marketing

When it comes to your relationships, your clients, your colleagues, contacts, and suppliers, it’s tempting to categorize them and set up automated systems based on assumptions or aggregate descriptives about them.

The possibility of categorizing – i.e., labeling groups of people with certain shared characteristics – has triggered the past century or so in advertising. Some Henry Ford idea of standardization has blinded us to anything else but a mechanized version of human life.

But people are not essentially mechanistic. Our differences are both subtle and enormous.

Do you judge rather than serve?

Are you positively paralyzed by the fracas over the “Ground Zero” Muslim community center? Could we possibly be more splintered, more divided than we are over this issue? (The whole thing makes me sad.)

I realize I have a palpable fear of certain political viewpoints. I am actually afraid of those who espouse certain affiliations. I feel threatened by them.

These realizations cause me to re-assess. To have such extreme responses bodes no good. I am believing in my categories instead of perceiving the individuality of every moment, person, and situation.

Do you agree that there is a difference here?

You can hold to the hard line, insisting that everything can be categorized; or you can open to the reality that there is no categorization, that every instance is unique.

The tools for service

It is, of course, a lot easier to sort things into boxes and deal with them in bulk. But real life, nature, and the environment around us all suggest that it’s a lot more complicated than that. Especially when it comes to other people, shortcuts created by generalizing are costly if not completely destructive.

So thank goodness for social media, giving us the means by which to address our ‘public’ one by one. The technology has an uncanny way of expressing solutions to needs we hardly knew we had! But our need to serve rather than judge surely preceded the internet’s explosion.

That thing you do …

The old ‘billboard’ outbound marketing had to die. People do not want to be categorized, so any system that perpetrates categorization is doomed from the start. People want to be seen in their individuality, and it is the extent to which you can convince them you see them accordingly that you win their trust, and patronage.

Applying this maxim to the continual search for my ideal client, it becomes clear that there’s no final definition of that elusive personality. The person who resonates best with me may actually fit a multitude of ‘profile’ types. I can no more hope to predict the type than I can resolve the “Ground Zero Mosque” question.

Ultimately, que sera, sera, right? If I be what I be, you be what you be, and we meet through the internet or anywhere, then you are my ideal client. At least until proven otherwise.

People are at their best when using their native gifts. The fat person who dances beautifully; the gentleman who becomes a farmer; the introvert who inspires millions: these are examples of the deliciously contradictory nature of personality. One’s native gifts are not defined by others because they can often contradict outward appearances. We each must find our own core skills.

Always, my thinking stems from the assumption that every sentient being has something to offer by way of helping others. To be alive and whole is to share and empathize.

But identifying your core skills is not easy. A great many of us forever remain blind to the best uses of our energies.

Those who do identify their native gifts and use them for the benefit of others have the opportunity to live harmoniously and with relative ease. Examples might be a someone who loves cooking and writes cookbooks; or someone who is a natural public speaker and delivers speeches for a living. Or perhaps someone who is an expert housekeeper and works cleaning houses.

A large portion of the workforce have no idea what their core skills are, or never consider the question. They’re just glad to have a job. Generally, no one questions it: individuals fit into job descriptions; job descriptions do not change to fit individuals.

Increasingly, however, alongside disillusionment with corporate careers, many are copping a new paradigm. They are responding to a new imperative, one that echoes from inside their deepest dreams as well as down the canyons of social need today. It’s a sort of desperation, maybe: finally we turn to our inner selves for answers, all else having failed.

Creating a job means you have done all the homework of self -and-other research, consciously building a livelihood from your core abilities.  It means you have approached the challenge of making a living from the perspective of compassion, as opposed to the perspective of self-protection. You  have figured out how to translate your talents into gifts.

But what are your talents, and how can they be configured as gifts? It worries me that discovering your answers may take most, if not all of your working life. But perhaps, if you start searching right now, you’ll find the answer just around the corner.

I would be honored if you’d share your story about defining right livelihood in your life. Please comment!

This blog has a modest readership, and I gather that most of you are fellow virtual assistants.  If you’re not a VA, you probably work with VAs or you’re looking into working with one. Whichever of these categories defines you, it’s likely that you’re a solopreneur, or at least an entrepreneur, working your buns off to realize a dream.

Most of my clients are people involved in work that is close to their heart. They may have had previous employment in corporate circles or other organizations, but now they are committed to realizing the best expression of themselves, the best gifts they can make to life.

Usually people don’t work up the gumption to go into business for themselves until later in life, if at all. But since our economy is so fragile, more peeps nowadays are leaving the corporations to venture out on the high wire of their native proclivities, presuming to make a living through in-depth experience of whatever thing(s) they are passionate about. The risk involves blood, sweat, and tears; and then the simple heaven of knowing you gave it your best shot. You might succeed and you might not, but you will not wonder what if.

Most VAs will know what I mean, because we are business owners who usually start out as solo efforts, whether we stay there or not. We know what it is to depend on your own belief in yourself.

There are so many others, as well, who will relate to the compelling drive to find their best expression, who do not want to settle for what others want them to be. It takes a lot of courage to stop working a safe job in favor of doing something that comes more naturally to you. A barrage of ancient rules and taboos gets in the way, not to mention the paralyzing fear of loss.

Being who you most profoundly are, submitting to the vision quest in search of how your core self can be most useful to both your self and your fellow human beings, requires huge strength and ongoing faith. It’s certainly not the easy way out.

The current limelight on branding as a concern of every individual shows that the trend towards increased self-employment is not just a blip on the radar. Personal branding is about taking responsibility for the chain of events that is your career, both where you plan to end up, and every step on the way. It’s your life, not your boss’ or your father’s or some other leader’s. You are the center of your universe. Because of this, strengthening your core skills is always in your best interest.

Many don’t recognize a core skill apart from their daily work as it is. But for those who feel a disconnect between their occupation and their compassionate pre-occupation, proceeding to your own business or practice is inevitable.

And if you’re on that road, it’s my advice to do all you can to find company. Seek out places where you can find others similarly realizing their dreams, who can support and sustain you. It could make all the difference.

I’ve been working administratively since 1973. Through nearly all of that time, the ideal of the multi-tasker was held up as the highest achievement. If administration is carrying out the dictates of the planners, multi-tasking is the best way to serve their lofty ideals, because it makes several employees out of one, and gets the job done no matter what.

And anyway, it’s a high. When you’re responding to demands from many quarters at once, you’re dancing. Flit here, pause there, do a pirouette and end up on top.

Multi-tasking is endlessly entertaining, while you accomplish the oft-labeled-impossible task of serving many masters all at the same time.

But it never lasts. Have you noticed? The one constant in multi-tasking is burn-out. The nerves fray, the attention eventually wanders.

So how can we benefit from multi-tasking without fizzling like firecrackers?

By applying it consciously, rather than compulsively.

The business person who is always tracking several threads at once and therefore never available for focused,  eyeball-to-eyeball experiences is useless 99% of the time.  You know who you are.

This is not to dispense with multi-tasking altogether. Using it to take care of mundane responsibilities can be tremendously helpful. But continuing to multi-task when your activities lead you into realms of personal contact, decision-making, or any higher-level thought can be detrimental to growth.

Note that multi-tasking can be addictive. It’s also admired, in a general sense, so the addict is encouraged in  his/ her affliction every day, in a vicious cycle that few people understand or even realize. I’m thinking of one friend who is actually successful in business.  But she won’t become any more successful than she is; she will stay at her current level, because she’s addicted to multi-tasking.

To multi-task in a conscious way means that you can turn it on and off at will. It means whenever you are with another person, you turn it off, because when you multi-task while communicating in person, you give the other less than their due respect. We owe one another more than that, no matter who the other is. In person (or in direct one-on-one conversation of any kind), focus is key and without it you risk being offensive.

As in my friend’s case, multi-tasking leads to negligence in other areas of life, often the personal needs that are ignored while you Accomplish with phenomenal speed and acumen.  It’s these suppressed urges that eventually demand your surrender. Just because you can juggle like a wiz doesn’t mean you’re entitled to sainthood.

Though you may think it hard to believe, life is even more multi than multi-tasking.

I wonder how many web content producers are old enough to remember personally the experience that was the Grateful Dead. Now that David Meerman Scott and Brian Halligan (I’m not sure they can count themselves amongst the elders – ?) have exhumed the Dead’s philosophy in their soon to be published Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead, perhaps we can all begin to appreciate the legacy of the 60s/70s as productive in many ways.

After all, half a century later, we are realizing the marketing brilliance of those musical prophets. We have even developed technology to facilitate their ideas. Though we may have thought that the internet itself forces change, perhaps it’s more true that soul and society have changed, and the internet was created in response to those transformations.

It’s evidence of his superior intelligence that 26-year-old Dan Schawbel celebrates the coming launch of the Scott-Halligan book on his Personal Branding Blog, providing an excerpt for his audience.

The given chapter celebrates the Dead’s love for their work.

“We are taught as children that work and play are opposing forces in nature. This teaching is incorrect—it is possible that your work can be like play! In fact, if you do what you love the way the Grateful did, you’ll never ‘work’ a day in your life.”

In case you haven’t noticed, we’re undergoing an enormous re-calibration of work, all over the world. All facets of employment and career are being renovated, morphing because of pressures from the economy, society, and acts of God and mammon. Mine is the first generation in a very long time to believe that life should be personally fulfilling, and work should be more than drudgery.

The Dead shocked us with their simple being-ness, no excuses, no pretending. They gathered their following through happy sharing. A micro-economy still revolves around their heirs, descendant bands, and ever-living fans.

The most famous Dead takeaway for marketing:  let your customers sell for you.

The Dead invited fans to record their concerts, rather than fight costly battles over copyright. This meant that their fans were the record producers, and thus they were the marketing department as well.

I don’t know if this was sheer prescience on someone’s part; maybe Gerry Garcia thought it up. But it’s certainly likely that the Dead’s tactics were a result of their conviction that going with the flow is the right way to live. When you run into brick walls, go around them. The Dead, in an ironic sense, gave us a new way to live. Heroism transformed, through their culture, from monster bashing machismo to loving peacemaker.

So now we’re experimenting with inbound marketing, because

• the establishment of relationships is clearly so much more profitable than yelling at crowds;
• erring on the side of generosity brings our customers closer to us and gives them the tools to become our advocates;
• giving equal value to work and play in our lives allows us to become the best we can be, instead of trying to fit in molds.

I thank Scott and Halligan for paying this tribute to the Dead; and also for reminding us that the internet did not spring full grown from the head of Google or anyone on our current cutting edge. Rather, it’s been a long strange trip, and its origins go back 50 years, at least.

Working in inbound marketing can be frustrating because its precepts – which work so well, when applied conscientiously – are foreign to traditional business practices. They’re the opposite of marketing tactics we grew up with. They sound suspiciously soft-hearted, on first encounter. Therefore, very few people know and hold to them.

It’s frustrating when, as  an inbound marketer, you consider warm responsiveness to be basic to good business, for example, but you realize that very few of your vendors and colleagues hold that value.  Unless you serve an immediate need of theirs, you won’t get a response from them at all.

Or when you work hard on good listening skills, and then realize the other person’s awareness doesn’t extend any further than the end of their nose.

Or when you generously give, and then suddenly see that your gifts are taken for granted or even resented.

Or how about this one: you realize the person you’re talking to is completely possessed by fear of identity theft, not to mention AIDS, drugs, crime, terrorists, and Bigfoot, and can’t hear a word you’re saying about sharing and openness on the internet.

If you’ve read any of my previous posts, you know I’m involved in an ongoing campaign to spread the good word about inbound marketing in my local area. But sometimes the gap in understanding leaves me gasping.

• Be open about who you are personally?
• Give things away?
• Forget privacy paranoia?
• Mix business and social life?
• Publish my journal in a blog?

These things are anathema in the American South. Still.

So I get disheartened, sometimes, like the Congresswoman yesterday who remarked that philosophical differences between the sides were so great in the immigration discussions that no meeting of the minds seems possible.

On the other hand, I know inbound marketing is here to stay. How do I know that? Because it works, and the old invasive techniques increasingly do not work.

There’s one fellow I know from local networking, whom I have seen at meetings for a couple years now, though we haven’t spoken personally much. I regarded him as a master with the elevator speech, and an accomplished socializer, definitely part of the glue keeping the groups together. Not until today did I learn that he considers himself a student in, as he puts it, “learning how to talk to people.” He’s probably 55 or 60 years old; was a firefighter all his career; only recently turned to selling. There was a look in his eye as he spoke, and the spellbinding clarity of his intention. He is curious about “how to talk to people,” and that means he listens, and gives, and serves, and keeps an open mind. Awe-inspiring.

So there, I’ve now convinced myself that all is not lost, and I can go on preaching the inbound marketing gospel to the insurance agents and realtors in my local groups. If my fireman gets it, maybe many more can and will.

What do you think?

It was fun reading through this case study by Inc. magazine about virtual working. The participants, on the whole (if you believe the article’s author), preferred the routine of going in to the office every day, vs. working from their homes. In short, they were creeped out by the virtual work experience.

Employees missed the office, saying they felt their lives became less dynamic; rather than clear delineations of work and non-work environments, they felt as though they were at work all the time.

However, the author of the article does admit that, given the right circumstances, virtual work can be entirely satisfactory. Allow me to quote him:

“… most virtual companies build their cultures from scratch, hiring the sort of people who want to work remotely, who don’t want to be friends with their co-workers, and who like being a long distance away from their bosses. Virtual companies are also, crucially, run by CEOs who are able to derive a sense of personal fulfillment from this arrangement. Many entrepreneurs speak of the flush of pride they feel when they walk into their offices and see the people they have created jobs for and the culture they have fostered; Matt Mullenweg gets that same rush from looking at a map and seeing his employees scattered across the world.”

I’m tempted to suggest to you that those who prefer the commute and the water cooler are simply afraid of change. They’re just sad lemmings rushing toward their demise rather than choosing new alternatives. But that would be entirely unfair. The workers in this particular case were located in comfortable uptown digs, and they clearly benefited from the social and intellectual rewards of their daily interactions.

So we have to face the fact that some will be nurtured by an brick and mortar office environment and others will live more happily in their home workplaces. Who’s surprised? The world was ever thus divided in two.

The dichotomy points to the need, however, to apply caution when hiring employees or when contracting for virtual assistance. Does the person you are considering have a well-developed awareness of their best working habits? Are they happiest when working as an employee, or are they more suited to independent work? Which type is most appropriate for your needs?

It pays to be aware of this burgeoning dichotomy in the business world, because confusion can be costly. Your in-house employees should naturally thrive on their routines, and your virtual contract partners should perform best via their chosen MOs. But when you cast a contractor in an employee position, or an employee in a contract job, you’re asking for trouble.

In the field of virtual assistance, some service providers approach the work from an employee mentality, even to the point of offering to spend set hours ‘in the office’ each week. On the other hand, a great many VAs are remote operators, and your relationship with them is that of a vendor or B2B supplier. Know which type you need when seeking a VA and you’ll greatly speed your process.

An especially savory triumph of the internet is that it allows us to expand our existence into a larger definition of self; it is a more expansive set of accepted tools for work and self-expression.  Whether office workers or independent agents, we can each choose our preferred way of working.

The web makes it more obvious than ever that we are authors of our own destinies.

A few recent observations:

• I feel a strong urge to share with you this article by David Castro, an Ashoka Fellow, on the subject of social entrepreneurship, because it really took my breath away;
• I’ve been offended, lately, by the aggressive presence of political and religious representatives in business networking meetings, and feel like ranting on the trend;
• I remember that profound old maxim of creative production: weed out those parts you love the best, and then you begin to approach a worthy work of art.

These thought threads intertwine; and in describing how they do so, maybe some usefulness can be extracted.

•  Castro’s article is compelling and challenging. Social entrepreneurship is defined as establishing repeatable systems that create value, where value is defined as receiving more than you put in.

How is it possible to harvest more than you plant? The metaphor proves the point: what actual harvest is inferior to the lowly seeds that started the whole thing? The harvest is blessing beyond any discernable effort.

Even though expressly for-profit, as opposed to Castro’s focus on non-profit entrepreneurship, any business may benefit from understanding this natural law. What kinds of inputs will yield returns far richer than their sources? How can you organize in ways that realize surplus, and therefore ensure experimentation and growth?

•  My particular geographical region tends to be somewhat parochial, if not downright backwoods, when it comes to religion and politics. You have to expect a dominant contingent of redneck mentalities wherever groups are gathered here. I know this and generally manage it tolerably, but lately, it’s gotten out of hand. Preachers rail at us in their 30-second elevator speeches; Tea Party cavalry keep us hostage in their 10-minute presentations.

Certainly I will defend to the death your right to whatever convictions you choose. But this is a country where we agree that separation of Church and State is ideal; and where respect for trade supposedly levels all playing fields.  I come to these meetings for commerce, not to be sermonized.

•  An insidious force working against your forward progress may be your own sentimentality. Consider this scenario: you make something, anything, a creation that involves (and is intended to communicate) your imagination, self-expression, and choice-making. Included is a part of it – perhaps the original whim that gave you inspiration, or some other small piece that fell miraculously into place just when you needed it – there’s a part of your creation that you love especially, more than the rest.

When you come the point that you know that that very piece is the one that must be deleted, when you see that without that one beloved bit your creation will finally communicate with the greatest clarity, then and only then do you approach true completion of your project.

So there’s the pattern:

1. Surplus for survival.
2. Separation of trade and opinion.
3. Exile sentimentality.

• I like Castro’s article because it suggests answers can be found in working smarter, more holistically and more realistically.
• I dislike proselytizing in business networking meetings because it suggests answers can be found in what someone else tells you to believe.
• I use the teaching about throwing out the part you love the best because it suggests answers can be found when I get out of my own way.

Yes, just a few musings on business life. A motley crew of perceptions. But the whole is far more glorious than the parts; the harvest is far richer than the tiny seed.

How about you? What has possessed/obsessed your thought recently?

• Brick and mortar service business.
• 20 year history.
• Owner loves it but works too much, would like to have some time off.
• Finds it hard to delegate. No one can do it as well as she.
• Just opened second location.
• Several thousand in debt.
• About 10 on staff.
• Can’t see the forest for the trees.

This is what I worked with today, and I confess, it left me gasping somewhat. What a mess challenge. And yet, I believe it’s a relatively common situation with American small businesses. It’s the logical result of the Puritan Work Ethic.

Here’s how wikipedia.com defines that legacy of all multi-generation Americans:

“The Protestant Work Ethic (or the Puritan Work Ethic) is a concept in sociology, economics and history, attributable to the work of Max Weber. It is based upon the notion (of) the Calvinist emphasis on the necessity for hard work as a component of a person’s calling and worldly success and as a sign of personal salvation. It is argued that Protestants beginning with Martin Luther had reconceptualised worldly work as a duty which benefits both the individual and society as a whole. Thus, the Catholic idea of good works was transformed into an obligation to work diligently as a sign of grace.”

Now, that might be hard to follow unless you’re a student of theology or history, but basically it means that many millions in our society live, and especially work, under the thumb of guilt. If we’re working hard and not getting anywhere, we assume that’s because we’re not working hard enough.

A subversive new idea is beginning to infiltrate, however. (It was introduced ages ago, but evolutionary change is slow.)

Note that the computer age not only backs this new idea but insists on it.

The new idea is to work smarter, not harder.

Are you like my friend? Do you feel as if the faster you go, the ‘behinder’ you get? Though you try to stay positive, is a quietly insistent thought intruding, suggesting there must be a better way?

My friend has a wonderfully optimistic outlook, despite her underlying awareness of the hamster wheel. I would like to help her see alternatives. Not a easy task when you’re working with someone who’s going at a gazillion RPMs all the time.

My friend let slip that she loves doing layout design and graphic arts. She also told me that a pressing task today was adapting a contract template to a specific case – something she does not love to do.

I tsk-tsked her and said she should be doing those things she loves, delegating those she does not. This is the only way to maximize resources.

Yet her Puritan Ethic won’t allow

• indulging her loves,
• giving any of her work to others to do,
• spending money or time on something that will make her own life easier.

Would removing her debt allow her to open up to alternatives? Probably. But times are cruel, right now. Rare is the small business that is not carrying at least some debt. We can’t let lack of funds defeat us.

Now, far be it from me to find fault with the aforementioned Ethic or any of its proponents. But I humbly suggest that the scenario as above described is to be found everywhere and it is a situation in which a virtual assistant can make all the difference.

Just sayin’.