I know some of you are not going to believe this, but for the first seven years I was in business, I got up every morning and put on business attire whether I had a meeting outside the office, or not. This may seem silly, but I believe it allowed me to walk the walk. If I [...]

This is a biggie! The definition of entrepreneur is: “One who organizes and assumes the risk of a business or enterprise.” – and the buck stops there. You are totally responsible for every facet of your business. It’s all on your shoulders. Any mistakes that are made – your mistakes. Any successes or achievement, yours. But having a true entrepreneur’s mindset is [...]

Many small businesses start by offering to be the ‘lowest priced’ service provider. What could possibly be wrong with this thinking? Won’t you get all the clients you ever want or need? Won’t they be loyal to you as long as you keep your prices low? This methodology can be extremely damaging to the long-term health and wealth [...]

We’ve already discussed the risks of starting your own business, but another thing that many times may hold you back from true success are your beliefs. If you believe that you can only make a meager living in this business, then you most likely will. When I first started my business it was meant to be [...]

The most successful entrepreneurs know that their success is in no small way a result of being able to solve the problems of their clientele. I remember a sales manager a long ago telling me that every discontented client created two opportunities for me. It created an opportunity for me to solve a problem that could benefit [...]

Starting your own business is taking a big risk. The easiest way to manage your risk is by seeking information and looking at the business by analyzing the pros and cons. Keep your expectations high while putting systems in place to guard against the cons.  If you come up with more cons than pros and can’t [...]

Starting and growing a successful business isn’t easy. You need to surround yourself with like-minded people. And that means people who encourage and support you in starting and maintaining a business. As hard as this is to say, you may have to minimize connections with family and friends who are not supportive of you in a positive [...]

As a Virtual Assistance Coach I’ve learned there are some people who are not coachable. They simply don’t understand the concept, or don’t have enough business acumen to understand how they might benefit from such a relationship. Two clients recently signed up for my 12-week one-on-one program; we’ll call them Debbie and Claire. Each had been in [...]

Many of the virtual assistants I coach tell me they either don’t do any marketing, or do ‘some’, but nothing consistently. This is especially surprising to me for VAs who promote themselves as Internet Marketing Virtual Assistants.  There are some great resources available to you from well respected and established virtual assistants in our industry, some [...]

We all have the same amount of time to expend each and every day, so why does it seem like some people have mastered their time better than others? As Virtual Assistants I think we struggle with this quite a bit.   I don’t think it’s about the time at all, I think it’s about how [...]