I know I promised that my next post would describe the WordPress plug-ins I learned about at WordCamp Toronto, but a couple of other things have come up and I’m too excited to save the news until next week!

Several months ago, I answered a few questions for someone who was writing an e-book about becoming a virtual assistant, and with so much else going on, it had slipped my mind. It therefore came as a wonderful surprise this week to learn that several of my comments were used in the brand new FabJob Guide to Become a Virtual Assistant!

I was also happy to receive a copy of the guide as a token of appreciation for my contributions. At 268 pages, it is packed with information and I know I’ll benefit from it, even though my VA business has been established for several years. It covers a wide range of essential topics, including:

• Communicating effectively with your clients
• Skills required, and different ways to acquire them
• Legal and taxation issues
• Marketing and networking
• Setting fees and collecting payment
• Working with strategic partners
• Time management and productivity
• Choosing your business name, niche market, and much more

I would definitely recommend the FabJob Guide to Become a Virtual Assistant to anyone considering this profession, even if my name wasn’t in it!

If you’re more likely to need a VA than to become one, be sure to swing by Deb Lee’s blog and read my guest post on The Benefits of Working with a Virtual Assistant.

Please visit From the Desk of Janet Barclay to read and comment on Interested in Becoming a Virtual Assistant – or Hiring One?.

Before establishing my own business, I’d received some basic training in website design and had used my skills to create a site I called “Jan’s Helpful Home Page” where I posted household management tips and invited people to send me their challenges, as well as a website for my sister, author Kathy Stinson. I was therefore prepared to design my own business website, but did no research whatsoever into the ins and outs of a website design business, since that wasn’t my focus at the time.

Since then, my business has evolved to the point where a good deal of my work consists of website design, mainly in the area of WordPress theme customization. I therefore thought it might be beneficial for me to read How to Open & Operate a Financially Successful Web Site Design Business by Bruce C. Brown and Charlotte Evans. What I discovered was a comprehensive manual outlining the technical and creative skills which a website designer needs to have before they even consider starting their own business.

Of course, even a highly experienced designer may not possess, or even be aware of, the other skills necessary to start and run a business, and the authors fill in that gap by addressing topics relevant to any business, such as competitor research, pricing, bookkeeping, marketing strategies, communicating with clients, and much more.

Also included are suggestions for complementary services which may be offered to website clients to generate additional income. I was pleased to discover that we are already offering many of these, and at the same time gained some new ideas for the future.

The helpful content is accompanied by an abundance of useful worksheets and checklists which appear throughout the book and on the companion CD-ROM, making this a valuable reference book for new and experienced website designers alike.

Please visit From the Desk of Janet Barclay to read and comment on Book Review: How to Open & Operate a Financially Successful Web Site Design Business.

It’s been many weeks since FoVA, and I just realized I haven’t told you about the last workshop I attended! I know quite a bit about WordPress, but I want to learn as much as I can, so I was pretty thrilled to learn that Frances Palaschuk was going to be doing a workshop on WordPress.

I knew from following her on Twitter that Frances would have lots of resources to share, and I was not disappointed. Here are a few of her recommendations:

• Studiopress for professional WordPress themes
• Jing for creating screencasts which can be used to demonstrate tasks to clients who are visual learners
• 123RF for royalty-free stock photos
• Oddiophile’s Technorati Tags Bookmarklet
• Google Webmaster tools, which I knew a little about, but learned even more

I also learned that when creating websites (as opposed to blogs) using WordPress, it’s better to use a premium theme (as I did for the Golden Horseshoe Virtual Assistants Group and Maestro Quality sites), because most free themes are more suited to blogs. Furthermore, when using free themes that are not listed on WordPress.org, it’s important to watch for hidden ads which may lead to “bad neighbourhoods.”

Perhaps most valuable of all were copies of Frances’ Ultimate Blog Planning Workbook and WordPress Site Design checklist, which have already been very useful.

All in all, FoVA was a wonderful experience and I am so glad I went. If you avoid industry conferences because you don’t understand the benefit of networking with and learning from your peers, I urge you to reconsider – you just don’t know what you’re missing! For more on that subject, read The ROI of Attending a Conference.

Please visit From the Desk of Janet Barclay to read and comment on The Wonderful World of WordPress.

According to Wikipedia, a standard operating procedure is “a set of instructions having the force of a directive, covering those features of operations that lend themselves to a definite or standardized procedure without loss of effectiveness.” Exciting stuff, eh? Maybe not, but it’s something we need to know about.

It’s been two years since I took a teleclass with Yvonne Weld, author of The Ultimate Guide to Creating a Thriving Business, and learned that standard operating procedures, or SOP, are just as important for one-person, home-based businesses as they are for large organizations. Even if you are the only person carrying out the work, if you don’t document it, how do you know you’ll do it the same way each and every time, ensuring consistency of service? And how will you remember how to do it if several months go by before you do that particular task again? Most importantly, how will someone else know what has to happen in the event that you’re unable to work?

Creating standard operating procedures for my business has been on my “someday list” ever since I took that teleclass, and now that there are two of us, it has become increasingly important to have a procedures manual. For that reason, when I saw that one of the workshops at the recent Forum on Virtual Assistance (FoVA) was Standard Operating Procedures – the Who, What, Where & Why you should have one for your Virtual Business, I was eager to attend.

The workshop was facilitated by Kristi Pavlik, who is known in VA circles as the Systems Chick. (Kristi appears in the above photo with her very own Systems Chick which was presented to her at FoVA.) She explained that an SOP has two main components: a system, which is the overall picture, and the process documents, which provide the specific instructions for each task.

To illustrate a system, Kristi supplied us with a copy of the mind map she uses for her business. The business name goes in the middle, and each broad area of the business goes in a bubble around it. Next to each bubble is a list of specific activities related to that business area. Each bubble then gets its own mind map. As I began to fill mine out, I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it actually was. Furthermore, I realized that creating a procedures manual for my business is not all that different than the procedures manuals I created in my past jobs.

I’ve always had a problem wrapping my head around mind maps, so for my systems, I decided to make a list using outline mode in Outlook instead. I then used that outline as the starting point for my process documents by making a copy of the file, switching to normal view, and copying and pasting all the procedures that we have already documented. The rest will get filled in over time until it’s complete. I’m actually not sure if it will ever be complete, because we’re always making changes and introducing new procedures, but this is certainly going to make it a lot easier for us to keep track of everything.

Because this is so important, I decided to invest in Kristi’s e-book, Systems of a Successful VA, and was pleased to find it full of visuals, step by step directions, templates and added resources which should be very helpful as I move through the process.

I think getting started just may be the biggest step. Although there’s still a lot of work to be done, it feels really good to see how much has already been documented, and especially to see it assembled in one place. It’s also much easier to see now what sections still need to be completed.

If you don’t yet have an SOP for your business, I strongly encourage you to get started as soon as possible.

Please visit From the Desk of Janet Barclay to read and comment on Developing Standard Operating Procedures.

Janet:  Thanks for stopping by, Vanessa. It’s great to meet you.

Vanessa:  Thank you, Janet! I’ve been a fan of yours for a long time. I’m honored to be here.

J:  Thank you. That’s nice to hear. Why don’t you give my readers an overview of your e-book series?

V:  I’d love to! The Adventures of Vanessa Andruz, Virtual Assistant series is a collaborative effort between me and my writing partner, Melodee Patterson of Short-term Solutions. I knew nothing about the Virtual Assistance industry when I left the SafeRight Insurance Company after being the President’s Executive Assistant for a number of years. But after doing some Internet research on the subject – which I discuss in the first e-book – I decided becoming a Virtual Assistant was the perfect solution for me.

I did tons of research on all aspects of becoming a VA – such as what kind of business structure was best for me, how to set up my home office, how to determine my rates, the best ways to market my business, getting over my fear of networking, and how to blog. It was hard work and took a lot of time!

J:  So you decided to share your findings with other prospective Virtual Assistants?

V:  Yes, exactly! Melodee and I wanted to save other VAs the time and frustration of plowing through all that information themselves. We used my research notes and the forms I created for my own business as a blueprint for the series.

J:  I understand you had some interesting adventures while starting your company. What happened?

V:  Oh, Lordy. For one thing, my mother – she reads auras for a living – was bound and determined to “help” me. You wouldn’t believe the things she mailed me from Sedona, Arizona! And then there’s my ex-husband who had the nerve to tell me I couldn’t possibly start my own business without his help! Luckily, my friend Marci was very supportive and helped me through the rough patches. Anyway, it’s all in the e-books. I wanted prospective Virtual Assistants to know that life may throw some roadblocks their way, but becoming a VA is worth the effort.

J:  How many e-books are available?

V:  At the moment, there are three e-books. The first e-book, Vanessa Has a Dream is free to download. It describes how I left my job and decided to become a Virtual Assistant. It’s an unbelievable story, but I swear my adventures are as real as I am!

In the second e-book, Vanessa Becomes a Virtual Assistant, I discovered my company name – with a little help from the Universe, created a business plan template, and decided on a business structure. And the business plan template is downloadable!

J:  That’s great. What about the third e-book?

V:  Vanessa Sets Up Her Home Office is full of practical advice on choosing the right office equipment and supplies for your own VA business. There are research notes about computers, fax machines, scanners, ways to access the internet, and lots of other good stuff. I even describe my visit to my hometown’s office supply store. Don’t you just love wandering around in the pen and pencil section?

J:  Ummm, yes, I do. Where can my readers download your e-books?

V:  They can go to the E-books page of my current website here.

J:  Are there other ways they can contact you?

V:  Sure! They can email me, and I’m also on Facebook.

J:  It was a pleasure having you here today, Vanessa. I’ve enjoyed the first three e-books in the series and I can’t wait to read the rest!

V:  Thanks again for letting me stop by, Janet. I’ll be sure to let you and your readers know when the next e-book is available.

J:  Before you leave Vanessa, I have to ask…you do realize that you’re not a real person, right?

V:  [Sigh] Yes, I know. I’m just a figment of Melodee’s imagination. But that doesn’t mean my e-books aren’t informative and entertaining.

J:  I certainly agree with that. Thanks again for coming, Vanessa.

V:  You’re very welcome, Janet. I enjoyed talking with you.

Please visit From the Desk of Janet Barclay to read and comment on An Interview with Vanessa Andruz, Virtual Assistant.

On June 29^th, I’ll be hosting Vanessa Andruz as she travels through cyberspace on her Virtual E-book Tour.

Vanessa Andruz is a Virtual Assistant and owner of Andruz Business Solutions LLC. She was an Executive Assistant for many years, but after turning 50, she became tired of corporate politics and decided it was time for a change. After researching different career moves, she became a Virtual Assistant. She had some challenges while setting up her business – her mother insisted on “helping” and her ex-husband gave her grief about quitting her job – but she persevered and now has a successful Virtual Assistance business.

With the help of Melodee Patterson of Short-term Solutions, she has created a series of e-books (The Adventures of Vanessa Andruz, Virtual Assistant) which chronicle her VA journey – ex-husband and all. The series provides timely information on discovering your company name, setting up your home office, determining your services and rates, becoming a marketing maven, and much, much more.  If you’re thinking of joining the fast-growing Virtual Assistance industry or any home-based business, you won’t want to miss my interview with Vanessa.

Please visit From the Desk of Janet Barclay to read and comment on Introducing Vanessa Andruz.

The second workshop I attended at the Forum on Virtual Assistance (FoVA) was Creating a Marketing Budget & Plan to Help Your Business Grow. The session was presented by Jeannine Clontz, the recipient of this year’s Thomas Leonard International Virtual Assistant of Distinction Award.

A week or so prior to the conference, I received a marketing budget worksheet which I was to fill out before attending, so I suspected this wasn’t going to be one of those sessions where you just sit and listen to the speaker – and I was right. In fact, the budget was only one of seven sections of the worksheet which we completed with Jeannine’s guidance. The others were:

• Developing your Ideal Client Profile
• Locating your Target Market
• Listing what problems our prospects have and how we can solve them
• Listing the different marketing media we will use
• Creating a detailed plan for each medium
• Drafting response e-mails for different scenarios

The whole exercise was quite eye-opening, and I was able to come up with some great new ideas as well as expanding on those I already had.

Since having a documented plan makes it a lot easier to make decisions when various marketing opportunities arise and to respond to inquiries on a timely basis, it tied in very nicely with the workshop on Standard Operating Procedures which I attended next, and which I’ll blog about in an upcoming post.

In addition to the exercises, some of the interesting things Jeannine covered in the workshop were:

• You should plan to spend 5 to 10% of your sales goal on marketing.
• The best testimonials describe measurable results.
• Most clients prefer to pay for individual services or packages rather than an hourly rate, so they’ll know exactly what they’re getting and how much it will cost.

To learn how to create your own marketing plan and lots more about starting and growing a home-based business, check out Jeannine’s book, Enterpreneurial Freedom.

Please visit From the Desk of Janet Barclay to read and comment on Creating a Marketing Plan.

As I mentioned previously, I had the opportunity to give a Lunch & Learn session on Personality Type and Organizing Style to my peers at FoVA 2009, and one of the people who attended was Tawnya Sutherland, Founder of VAnetworking.com. I didn’t know it at the time, but Tawnya was making plans for another great learning opportunity for virtual assistants this summer, and I’ve been invited to do a repeat performance as part of that program, which has just been announced.

Called VA Virtuosos, it’s going to be an exciting summer workshop series of 28 educational eSeminars to benefit all virtual assistants worldwide. What is most amazing is the price – it’s only $27.00 for the whole series – that’s less than it costs for most individual classes!

Furthermore, it’s a fantastic opportunity to learn from such experts as Kathie Thomas, Cristina Favreau, Tina Forsyth, and far too many others to mention here. There are only 100 spots, so be sure to sign up today!

My seminar, The Power of Personality Type is scheduled for Tuesday, July 14, at 1:00 pm Eastern time. It’s the first time I’ve spoken about personality type by teleclass or webinar, so if you’ve been unable to attend any of my live presentations, you won’t want to miss it!

And speaking of personality type, you can read the first review of my new e-book, Organizing Your Life, Your Way! at Melodee’s Virtual Assistant Blog.

Please visit From the Desk of Janet Barclay to read and comment on Learn About Personality Type and much much more.

As promised last week, today I begin sharing some of the valuable information I learned at the recent Forum on Virtual Assistance. My first workshop was with Mary-Lou Ashton, a VA coach and trainer who has been part of the industry in Canada since 1997. Her session, Your Professional & Personal Foundation: Tolerations, Needs and Values, was about identifying the little things we put up with in our lives that may not seem like a big deal, but can drain us of our energy and hinder our productivity.

The workshop consisted of a series of exercises designed to help us explore those issues, which I’ll describe below. I hope you won’t mind that I’m not sharing my answers, but I’m sure you can appreciate that a lot of it is very personal in nature and not something I’d care to publish online.

In the first exercise, we each made a list of things we are tolerating. It’s quite surprising how many things you can identify when you start to think about them in this way, and in many cases, they are things that can be easily rectified. For example, I often get frustrated with my computer not running as fast as I’d like. I realized not long after buying it that I should have requested more RAM, but nearly two years later I still haven’t got around to doing anything about it. That’s an easy fix!

From our list, we had to identify the toleration that would have the biggest payout if we found a way to deal with it, instead of continuing to tolerate it. Lastly, we developed a plan to address the toleration, including a completion date.

This exercise was very eye-opening, but it was just the beginning!

The second exercise focused on identifying ten things that we need in order for us to be our best. We were provided with a substantial list to work from. Mary-Lou cautioned us to pay particular attention to words that we might tend to skip over, because they might be needs that we have not admitted to ourselves for some reason. Of course, if we haven’t admitted them, we probably haven’t done anything about getting them fulfilled! After narrowing the list down to the four most important ones, we had to choose which one we wanted to work on first.

Mary-Lou explained that there are two sides to ensuring that our needs are met:

1)    establishing boundaries that don’t allow others to hurt us, distract us, use us, or command our attention

2)    raising the standards we hold ourselves to

That was a lot of soul-searching for one morning, but there was one more exercise to go!

The Values Exercise began by writing down our defining moments. Several years ago I bought a copy of Dr. Phil’s book, Self Matters, but I set it aside when I got to an exercise like this one, because I just couldn’t wrap my head around it, or maybe I just didn’t want to look that deeply into myself. This time I was more successful, so maybe that means I’m more self-aware now… either that or I just needed to be held captive in a seminar room to make sure I finished the exercise!

We then looked at our defining moments and what they say about us, and from that identified our four most important values.

Eliminating what’s negative from our lives will free us to be whole and present and attract more of what’s positive. After all, the Law of Attraction isn’t just about visualizing what we want and waiting for it to appear – it’s about gaining clarity that allows us to take the necessary actions to bring it about.

It was a lot more work than I expected to do when I went to the conference, but it was a very rewarding series of exercises, and definitely something I will revisit from time to time.

Please visit From the Desk of Janet Barclay to read and comment on Exploring Tolerations, Needs and Values.

Last Friday I had the pleasure of attending the Forum on Virtual Assistance (FoVA). Being my first live face-to-face conference since I went to the POC Conference in 2006, I’d forgotten what a thrill it is to be surrounded by others with similar interests! An even bigger thrill was finally meeting some of the VAs I’ve come to know online, including Kathy Colaiacovo from Nova Scotia and Tracey d’Aviero from Ottawa, shown with me in the photo.

Barb Lang did an awesome job of organizing the event, which was held at the Marriott Fallsview in Niagara Falls. The food was delicious and the dining room and meeting rooms all overlooked the Falls. Although I’ve been visiting the Falls since I was too young to remember, I’ve never seen them from that particular vantage point, and it was just wonderful.

All of that was great, but what was even better was the quality of the workshops. Every single one offered not just interesting information, but valuable worksheets that I can use to enhance my business, now that I’m back in my office.

Much of what I learned will also be of benefit to you, regardless of the nature of your business, so I plan to share some of it with you in future posts. Here is a list of the sessions I attended, so you’ll know what you have to look forward to:

• Your Professional & Personal Foundation: Tolerations, Needs and Values, with Mary Lou Ashton
• Helping Your Business Grow by Creating a Marketing Plan, with Jeannine Clontz (winner of this year’s Thomas Leonard Virtual Assistant of Distinction Award)
• Standard Operating Procedures – the Who, What, Where & Why, with Kristi Pavlik
• Creating Websites Using WordPress, with Frances Palaschuk

There was also a Lunch & Learn session on Personality Type and Organizing Style, which I heard was pretty good.

If you haven’t already, be sure to add this blog to your reader, or subscribe by email, so you don’t miss out!

Please visit From the Desk of Janet Barclay to read and comment on FoVA 2009 in Review.