Heather Villa » Professionalism

A Checklist for Staffing Up

Heather Villa, CMA, MBA, MSM — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 15:14:24 +0000

When you are considering the possibility of hiring staff – whether that staff includes a virtual assistant, an onsite assistant, freelance consultant, or an entire office of staff – you want to make the right decision as quickly as possible and get the role filled. After all, every passing day without a person in the empty role will cost you money and time! Print and use this article as a checklist to review resumes and to make sure that you cover these points during your interview.

Experience
This should be one of the main considerations when looking at a potential candidate. You need to determine how much experience he or she has working at the tasks you want them to do. It doesn’t mean that they must have performed the exact role, but they should at least have experience in the tasks you need done. For example, a branch manager who is applying for the job of marketing manager might still be well qualified, just because they did marketing while a branch manager. Insist on and check references. Be sure that the experience listed matches what you are seeking.

Integrity
This trait is particularly important if your employee will be dealing with confidential information. Again, reference checks are invaluable and a background check should be considered when client confidentiality is important. Integrity can be a difficult quality to measure so you might have to rely on instinct a little.

Professionalism
This is always important in the business world. If your employee will be dealing with clients via the phone or email, it is imperative that they are able to conduct themselves in a professional manner. How do they conduct themselves on the phone? Do they have a pleasant speaking voice and use proper grammar? A thorough interview as well as a writing assessment can help you make this determination. And seriously consider doing this same assessment for all employees, not just front-office employees, because these people might answer phones in a pinch or they may end up becoming managers when your business grows further.

Initiative
This is huge, but it’s often missed. In my opinion, it’s the second-most-important quality after integrity. A person with initiative may not always do a perfect job, but they’re also not going to sit around and wait. They will be assertive, proactive, and a self-starter. Watch for candidates who seem to think “outside the box” and resist hiring employees who seem to be timid and who need a lot of guidance. You don’t want to spend your time micro-managing people or cleaning up after their messes! You will want to ask how they handle obstacles or difficulties in completing a task and how they manage their time when working from home.

These qualities are imperative in every staff member you hire, whether virtual assistant, freelancer, or employee. Use this article as a “checklist” to ensure that they possess these qualities before you hire them.

About the author: Heather Villa, MBA CMA MSM, is a Business Coach and Entrepreneur. She helps business owners achieve success in operations, productivity, project management, and social media. Read her other articles at http://hireheathervilla.com/resources/articles/ and visit http://heathervilla.com for more information.

Enhancing productivity and profitability by outsourcing

Heather Villa, CMA, MBA, MSM — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 00:42:29 +0000

As a small business owner, getting all of your scheduled work completed in a day can be a daunting task: There is so much to do and so little time to do it. And to make matters worse, new technology and marketing channels and ideas keep popping up, adding an additional challenge of trying to keep up: You’re left not only struggling with an overwhelming number of current tasks but also with an onslaught of potential new tasks!

Outsourcing can be a good option for you. By delegating some of your work to someone else, you can recapture time. Hiring someone to work onsite can be costly and fraught with legal complications and overhead expenses. Hiring a virtual office assistant keeps costs down and productivity higher. Here are five tips to help you as you drive up productivity with a virtual office assistant:

Tip 1: Experience of a Virtual Office Assistant
This should be one of the main considerations when looking at a potential candidate. You need to determine how much experience he or she has working virtually. Unless you hire from a virtual assistant firm, you’ll want to check references. Be sure that the experience listed matches what you are seeking. And don’t forget to consider your business’ future needs. You should never staff only for today but you should staff for tomorrow as well.

Tip 2: Integrity of a Virtual Office Assistant
You’ll be entrusting your VA with proprietary information, so be sure to hire only VA’s whose firms create and adhere to a non-disclosure agreement. You’ll also want to make sure that there are escalation opportunities and quality guarantees in case you receive work that doesn’t meet the standard you were hoping for. But remember: it works both ways, too: You’re asking someone to support your business so it’s important that you deliver timely, quality support and instructions.

Tip 3: Professionalism of a Virtual Office Assistant
Sometimes, your VA can be tasked with customer service or sales activities so it’s important that they display the high level of professionalism you demand in your business. This is one reason I recommend going through a VA firm rather than finding a sole proprietor. Firms should train their VA’s and hold them accountable.

Tip 4: Technical Skills of a Virtual Office Assistant
A Virtual Assistant needs to have all of the software, hardware and technical abilities that are required for the task at hand. In addition, though, you’ll want to make sure that your VA is open to learning new skills and applications that you might use in your business. Trusting your VA’s to competently handle the workload will help you to move tasks off of your schedule onto theirs.

Tip 5: Initiative of a Virtual Office Assistant
It is not likely that you want an order taker. That’s more often the role of a part time minimum wage employee! A virtual assistant is mean to ASSIST, so you want someone who can take your requests and run with them, but you’ll enjoy greater business success if you work with someone who is proactive and who takes initiative. You’ll need to empower your VA and give them the parameters and permission to take initiative on your behalf.

These tips will help you to find the perfect virtual assistant for your business. And when you find that VA, you’ll be able to pass off numerous activities (from administrative to marketing to customer service and support, to sales, and so much more) and you’ll be able to focus your efforts on critical business activities that can build a stronger and more successful organization.

About the author: Heather Villa, MBA CMA MSM, is a Business Coach and Entrepreneur. She helps business owners achieve success in operations, productivity, project management, and social media. Read her other articles at http://hireheathervilla.com/resources/articles/ and visit http://heathervilla.com for more information.

Be Nice!

Heather Villa, CMA, MBA, MSM — Sun, 17 May 2009 01:56:50 +0000

At IAC Professionals, we have a 90 day training period, where our Virtual Assistants are put through a boot camp, for lack of a better term. During those 90 days, they don’t work with clients, rather they work on small tasks that are assigned to them, and part of a larger project, while supervised by a project manager. This time period gives us a chance to see (and possibly work on) their professionalism, response time and abilities. Our project managers are patient individuals, and spend time making sure that the client is happy with the end result. This 90 days allows us to assure that if they were to work directly with a client, they would give the professionalism, efficient response and work quality that our clients demand.

In order to be able to have this period, we need a steady flow of project related work, so when the volume is low or when we have an exceptionally large amount of candidates in the training period, we hop on over to Elance and see if there are any projects that would be ideal for us.

A few weeks ago we bid on one, and the person posting the project (let’s call him John) came back and said he wanted to set up a time to talk to us. John and one of my staff scheduled an appointment and when we called John he did not answer, so we left him a message. Then we went back and forth on the project message board scheduling another time, and again John did not show up. We let him know that when he was ready to proceed he could reach us anytime at our phone number/ email address.

We did not hear from John until 3 days ago, when he posted a message that said something similar to this (some data changed to not leave any identifying material):

I need X. All Content and Design will be provided.

I also need A, B, C and D. All Content and Design will be provided.

I need this project completed quickly…and WILL NOT tolerate bait an switch tactics…low ball bid then run the project up later.

So, here is the problem… the original project was for X. Our bid outlined X. So, now he is asking for A, B, C and D, which is fine – but it is obviously going to be a different price from X. However, what bothered us was the:

I need this project completed quickly…and WILL NOT tolerate bait an switch tactics…low ball bid then run the project up later.

I don’t care how many bad experiences you have had, you never go into a relationship accusing or assuming that a new provider is going to do something unethical or wrong. We specifically outlined that we would give X, we specifically said that it would take 3 days from receiving full content, design and server information. We attempted to meet with him twice. So, why he would write on the message board asking for X (with A, B, C and D) ‘quickly’ and then tell us not to do any bait and switch tactics… who did the bait and switch? Our bid was for X, he took our bid and threw A, B, C and D in there as well.

In the end, we denied the job offer and we politely told him that we were unable to help him at this time, with the change of scope his project contained.

The point of this blog post is to show that being rude does not get you anywhere. It is unacceptable in the business place. I prefer not to do business with individuals or organizations that are rude, and if I am rude to someone (and I am not innocent, I have been!) then I would expect them to not want to do business with me. Everyone makes mistakes and some people just have a bad day. Maybe John was having a bad day, maybe I should have given him another chance, but my guard would have already been up and we would have already been on the defensive side of the wall, which would not have helped cultivate the client – provider relationship.

What ever happened to the ‘Treat others the way you want to be treated’ concept? Is it old fashion? Has it gone out the window? I ask because this is just one example of the rudeness I am seeing in client/provider relationships as of lately. A colleague of mine, a pretty successful business coach (she gave me permission to do this blog as long as I did not mention any names) had another instance of rudeness ruining a possible relationship, here is her story:

A prospective client contacted me about retaining my coaching services, and everything was going great, the initial consultation went wonderful… I was really looking forward to helping him. He decided to retain me for two sessions a month, so I sent over my agreement to him. My agreement is a simple one page thing, it is not like many complicated contracts out there. It outlines what I give, what the client will give and where the limitations are. There is a section in my agreement that states my business hours and that any appointments must be made inside of these hours, otherwise there is an additional fee. The client, when he returned the agreement made a note on it that simply said ‘Provider will not provide sessions or work outside of business hours without prior approval from client’ and he initialed it. I thought to myself, how strange! Obviously if we pre-schedule our appointments, he would be well aware if any sessions are outside of my normal business hours. However, I too initialed that handwritten line and we began with our coaching relationship. About three weeks into the relationship, the client had an emergency, and called my office line at 9pm in the evening to speak about it (outside of my business hours). I normally would not have gotten the call, because it is outside of business hours, however my husband and I happened to be in the office fixing a leak in the window, so I took the call. When my invoice was issued at the end of the month, there was an issue. My client was irate that I charged him the additional fee for the late night call. I was kind of dumbfounded, because he called me at 9pm, he obviously knew that I was providing a session outside of my normal business hours. I was in quite a predicament, because I really wanted to help the client, but he obviously did not value my time. I ended up not charging him for that session at all and cancelling our agreement, as I need to work with people who value me as an individual.

Unbelievable! Everyone is human, everyone has the right to have a personal life outside of work and the right to provide the services they provide in a manner that is comfortable to them. I don’t understand why this gentleman above, would think, that he could contact his coach at 9pm in the evening and the agreement would not be adhered to? I bet you money, that his clients don’t contact him at 9pm at night without him billing them (if he even takes the call!).

I say agreements or no agreements, if everyone treated others the way they wanted to be treated that client/service provider relationships would be more productive and fruitful to both parties! What do you think?

How to Develop Organizational Culture in an E-Business

Clients don’t want to hear it…

Heather Villa, CMA, MBA, MSM — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 08:07:30 +0000

As most of you know, I run a virtual assistance enterprise. I currently have a staff of 45 and a client list of over 600 with at least 20% clients active at any given time. Our clients range from one person freelancers working out of their homes (like UberGeekGirl) to multi million dollar organizations (like Clean Energy Fuels). The key to our success is professionalism, structure, continuitity, quality and maintaining a customer satisfaction centric organization focusing on superior service.

We all have problems, get sick, go on vacation, have spats etc., however, clients don’t want to hear it. Even when they ask ‘So How are you doing?’, they want to hear as it relates to their work or ‘fine’, they don’t want you to start telling them about how your husband never helps out or your wife never cooks or you can’t pay your bills. Rule of thumb is – if your life is disorganized or chaotic, your work may be.

So, when I am doing a twitter search and seeing people in the service industry pitching themselves or selling themselves on twitter, with the same twitter account that they tell the world about all their personal inappropriate problems, I am appalled.

Yes, Twitter is about sharing, feel free to say about your email box being full, or not being able to sleep, or what a stressful day work was… but don’t talk about your spat with a loved one, your financial state, your inability to perform… not only could it jeopardize your sales pitch, but also your current client base.

Remember there are plenty of examples of things being said on Twitter that come around to bite you in the rear:

Ketchum Exec insults Fed Ex Client

Cisco Job Interview

NBA Player tweeting at half time

Twitter causes Mistrial?

MSNBC Writer insults Technorati

Of course there are even more. While your tweets may not make the news, they could make or break your career.

Sincerely,

Heather Villa

You Have Nothing Until You Have Your First Sale

Heather Villa, CMA, MBA, MSM — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 21:12:36 +0000

In my work as a consultant who helps turn ideas into products and business services, I am often approached by a potential client who tells me: “I have a great business idea”…and then they proceed to tell me what it is.

Although I maintain an air of professionalism and would never word it quite this way, the truth is, they don’t usually have a good business idea. They might have a good idea. And it might be sellable. But they don’t really have anything until they’ve made their very first sale.

If you are a small business owner (or someone who aspires to be a small business owner) then listen up: You have nothing until you have your first sale.

Now, I realize that budding entrepreneurs get excited because they’ve designed the next great mousetrap and they’re expecting the world to beat a path to their door. But what happens next? They conduct a market study. They design a website. They start picking out carpet samples for their office. They buy a computer. They hire an administrative assistant.

And they haven’t earned a single penny in revenue.

Forget the market study. Forget the website. Forget the carpet. Forget the computer. Forget the administrative assistant:

SELL YOUR FIRST PRODUCT.

Down the road, you will need the other stuff. And I would advise that you do a market study and website early. But in most cases, probably not first. (Although if you’re selling website design, you might be an exception to my “no website” rule).

Why sell your product first? That first sale will tell you more than a market study ever will. (Note, that first sale will not excuse you from a market study). Your customer’s feedback will be invaluable as you evolve your product or service. The sales process will help you understand what you should do. Who your customer is will help you understand your demographic.

Also, the first sale is the hardest and will tell you whether or not you’re cut out for this kind of thing. (Maybe you discover that you hate sales, but sales are the fuel of every business).

So, create your prototype (or sample or whatever you need to close the first deal) and start knocking on doors or calling up prospects. Transact that first sale. And THEN you’ll be in business!