We’re ready to help YOU make 2012 your best year yet. In order to do this, we wanted to make an offer to you at the beginning of the year to help you really make an impact on how much you accomplish in the next 12 months (as you might have noticed, twelve months is not a long period of time and it’s even shorter if you are unorganized!)

Our team has helped our clients:

• Host a virtual book launch and make it into the Amazon best sellers list
• Organize a series of paid and free teleclasses
• Launch a new WordPress site, integrated with social media
• Finalize an e-book and create a virtual storefront
• and more…

Our regular, not-discounted hourly rate is $50/hour. For this week only (until Friday, January 6th), you can purchase as many hours as you like for just $40/hour. That is a savings of $10 per HOUR which is huge! We haven’t had a sale like this in… well, I don’t know that we’ve ever had a sale like this!

Just to remind you of the guidelines around our pre-paid hours:

• Hours roll over month to month and you have them until you use them
• We bill to the minute and deduct time used from these hours on the 15th and last day of each month
• You can request a detailed time report at any time
• All of our services (except transcription) can be used under these pre-paid hours

When you’re ready, simply click the link below and on the screen that follows, enter the total that you’d like to spend.  For example, if you want 10 hours, you’ll enter $400 on the next screen.  If you’d like 20 hours, you’ll enter $800.

Please note: when you are checking out, you’ll see that it says “Enter donation.” This is the only option PayPal has that allows us to let you enter whichever amount you would like. We just didn’t want anyone getting confused with the wording on those pages as we can not change it.

Not Quite Ready to Commit?

I totally understand! Hiring a virtual assistant is not something you generally just “do” (unless you are already super clear on the projects you need to get done) so, let me make it even easier for you! If you aren’t entirely sure that a virtual assistant is right for you and your business, schedule a call with me to discuss it! It’s free and there is zero obligation and I have a no-hard-sell-policy which I enforce. I’ll tell you about our business, you can tell me about yours and we’ll see if there is a good fit.

To schedule that call, click here:
http://www.tungle.me/ErinBlaskie

I have tons of open spots available this week and you can talk to me before making a decision AND still get the discount before Friday!

Do You Really Need to Spend Money to Make It?

A lot of times you will hear people say, “You need to spend money to make money” or you’ll hear people talking about how the universe opens up and expands to return to you what you spend. I beg to differ. I don’t believe that, in every scenario, you need to spend money to make money nor do I think that you should frivously spend your capital and just trust that it’ll come back to you. My own business, for example, was built with zero debt and zero funding. I bootstrapped it and you can too.

Businesses that feel like they have to spend an inordinate amount of money to make money often fail. Now, I am not talking about spending money to get your brick and mortar location set up or the capital that goes out to hiring people when they are needed. However, most of the people that are in my world are online entrepreneurs who are setting up web spaces and hiring virtual teams. For these particular people, not having a tight rein on your spending will inevitably lead to the death of your business.

Spend What You Make, As You Make It

You should spend what you make, as you make it. I know for the eager beaver entrepreneurs and the perfectionists, this idea sounds ludacris. You instead might think that you have to put things on a credit card now to ensure that everything is perfect before you launch things to the world and start making money. I see the reverse as being true. Get your wares out there in a professional yet quick and dirty way, see if it’s viable and see if it will turn a profit and when it does, reinvest a portion of that revenue back into business improvements. The other portion? That’s your income!

When I started my business, I started it with an Internet connection and my computer. The only money I put out was for an Elance.com account (where I landed my first client) and for website hosting that included a domain name. It wasn’t until my business turned profits that I upgraded my website, invested in a fancy schmancy telephone service, upgraded to a fancy shopping cart and all of that fun stuff. When you are in start-up mode, you have to nickel and dime in every area of your business so that your business doesn’t start creeping into your personal life.

If Your Spending is Out of Control, Reel It In

I can’t tell you the number of entrepreneurs that I’ve personally worked with who started their businesses, put things on credit cards, maxed out all of their available credit, dipped into their children’s education funds, used their life savings, dipped into retirement funds or sold their posessions just to keep their perfect business image. If this is you, stop spending, look for ways to bring in revenue and get your business out of debt.

What tips do you have for entrepreneurs who might be struggling with business debt? Leave them in the comments below.

This is the third post in a series.  The series will explore some of the common hesitations when it comes to outsourcing and delegating work to a virtual assistant.  Our hope is to shed some light on working with a virtual assistant and clear away some of the doubts so that more people can benefit from having support for their business.

Major Outsourcing Pain Point – No Experience or Not the Right Kind of Experience

Another area that entrepreneurs struggle with, when thinking about hiring a virtual assistant, is in the area of experience.  Entrepreneurs fear that the person that they hire will not have the right kind of experience required or the virtual assistant may say that they have expertise in an area but maybe they don’t really.

Hiring virtually can be a really scary thing.  You are putting a lot of trust and faith into someone you’ve never met and when you send work out to your virtual assistant, it sort of disappears into this black hole only to come out at a later time finished.  It takes a bit of time to get used to the idea of working virtually.  This post is going to explore ways that you can make sure that you eliminate the fear around lack of experience.

Is the Virtual Assistant Walking the Talk?

One of the main ways to see if a virtual assistant has the experience you are after is to see if they are walking their talk.  If the virtual assistant claims to be a really fantastic WordPress designer, yet their own website is amateurish, you may want to look for someone who has illustrated their skill set.  Now, it does happen where the old adage is true: “The cobbler’s children never have any shoes” so sometimes you need to dig a little deeper than the virtual assistant’s presence.  We’ll explore those options in a moment.

In the most ideal of worlds, you would ideally find a virtual assistant who is doing things that you would like to do in your own business.  If they are already executing on those things for themselves, you are going to get someone who has experience from the trenches.  This experience and expertise can be invaluable when implementing on your task list because many of the inefficiencies of certain projects will have been worked out.

Ask for Samples of Work

Samples of work, aka a portfolio, is another fabulous way to see a virtual assistant’s experience and expertise.  Ask them for samples of their best work in the area that you are looking to hire in.  For example: if you are looking to hire someone to help you create a logo, ask them for samples of their logo design work.  If they don’t have any or can’t produce those examples, it will be a really clear indicator as to the true level of experience that they have in a particular project.

Trust Your Gut

Sometimes, you might find someone that you just really, really click with.  Perhaps this virtual assistant doesn’t have the right experience or expertise that you are after.  Sometimes, it pays to go with your gut.  If you find someone that you can train, you might end up with someone that you can mould and shape into the type of virtual assistant you most need and they may cost less.  Keep in mind though that the learning curve for someone like this is much steeper so it might take you longer to get things done.

Set an Intention

Everyone starts somewhere in their business so you will see newbie virtual assistants and you will see seasoned pros.  Your job is to figure out what you want out of a service provider and what you are willing to spend on that.  The more you search, the pickier you are and of course, the more you are willing to stretch your budget a little bit, the better quality service provider you will be able to hire into your business.

Stay tuned for the next blog post in the series!