Tag: emergency

Create a Procedures Manual

Posted on by Sue L Canfield

create a procedures manual for your virtual assistant businessOne of the best goals you can have for your virtual assistant business this year is to create a procedures manual. The procedures manual will come in handy if you need to take some time off and hand your tasks off to someone else for a bit.

Have you ever needed to take a day off to tend for a sick child? Did you wish you could call in sick and have someone cover for you? If you’ve created a procedures manual and have a good collaborative relationship with another virtual assistant, you might just be able to do this.

What if an emergency comes up and you need to take a week off? But client work still needs to get done. The tasks are repetitive and could be easily handled by another virtual assistant if only you had some written procedures for them to follow.

I write procedures for many of the easier, repetitive tasks I handle for clients. I have a team member who can handle these tasks by following the procedures. I strongly encourage you to do the same.

Create your procedures manual and then ask another virtual assistant to review them. If they can easily follow the procedures, you’re all set. If they have any questions or suggestions, this will allow you to fine tune the procedures before handing them off to someone else.

Do you have a procedures manual yet? If not, set that as a goal for your business this year.

 

Are You Prepared?

Posted on by Sue L Canfield

We work hard to prepare to work with with our clients. Yet it’s difficult to prepare for every contingency. A recent experience of a fellow virtual assistant brought this to my attention. It helped me realize one more thing we might want to prepare when working with our clients.

This virtual assistant had a client and a large portion of her income was received on a monthly basis from this client. Then unexpectedly the client passed away. Fortunately she is in a position where the loss of income is not a severe blow to her business. However work is left hanging and the virtual assistant is not sure what to do with the website she was in the middle of working on for the client.

So here’s a suggestion for anyone in business. Make sure you have an ’emergency’ contact, someone you can contact if for some reason you are unable to contact your client or something happens to your client. On the flip side, you should provide your client with an emergency contact so that if something happens to you, they have someone to contact to get their project work done.