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By Charlette Woodcock

Carma’s Comments:
This month, Women’s Business Gallery will be covering Virtual Assistants, also known as VAs. These intrepid individuals help a bevy of entrepreneurs and small business owners grow their businesses while never stepping foot in the main office. As soon as you can, you really need to start building your virtual support team. The articles I’ll be posting this month will help you learn more about VAs and how to find them. Today’s article, by Charlette Woodcock, discusses the basics of why you would want to hire a VA.

Small businesses make up 98% of the nation’s business industry. Outsourcing to virtual assistants, known as VAs, is gaining ground every day and becoming even more lucrative for small business owners. In order to understand why this is happening, let’s first look at what a Virtual Assistant is and what services they may offer a small business owner.

Virtual assistants provide various services to small business owners to help with the tasks that are needed. Each Virtual assistant should be able to provide some basic services for their clients. These basic services would include tasks like: email management, customer service duties, organizing files and typing documents, data entry, making appointments, and customer follow-ups. Some well-trained and more experienced VA’s may offer specialized skills like: Website Designing/Updating, Accounting/Bookkeeping, Desktop Publishing, Power Point Presentations, or Writing & Editing. The list of services an experienced VA may offer is not limited to the above examples.
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The Women’s Business Gallery “What’s Missing?” Survey and Contest ended on Friday and now I have the results. I’ve already notified all the winners, so if you name appears below and you didn’t get my email, please check your spam folder or contact me at info@womens-business-gallery.com to collect your prize.

Before I announce the winners, I thought I’d share some of the results. They were quite interesting. For one, it seems that a lot of you have a lot in common with me. I guess like attracts like, huh? What do I mean?

Well, for one 77% of respondents have been in workforce for 10 or more years. For another, 69% of respondents are kinesthetic learners — you learn best when you experience or interact with the material. This latter point is particularly interesting because only 5% of the general population are kinesthetic learners!
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As I mentioned in the May 5th post, one way you can effectively manage your office is through prioritizing and time blocking. In this post, I’ll delve into that topic a bit more.

Task Lists
One commonly proffered piece of advice is to create a task list. I like to do this in a spreadsheet like Excel so I can have columns that categorize and prioritize each task. I even include columns for start and end dates. Then, when I change categories or priorities, I just click on “sort” and the list re-sorts itself.

This also helps in the initial brain-storming phase. I can just type in all my tasks as I think of them and organize them later.
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NOTE: I’m sorry I didn’t post this on Monday as usual. I forgot that Monday was Monday (long story) and Tuesday whizzed by before I knew it. But, here is this week’s post. Better late than never, eh?

One way to manage your office is to hire an assistant — in other words outsource or delegate the tasks to someone else. This is very wise because it frees your time to do the things you are good and and releases you from the things you that are not necessarily that good at.

There are several ways you can approach this:
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Boy! I’m getting a late start today. I’ve been on teleseminars all morning and the day is just whizzing by!

Anyway, last week I highlighted three areas that you can look at to improve office management. The first one was software, which is what I’ll cover today.

Before going into the benefits of using office management software, I think I should touch upon what it is. There are a number of different formats, but all office management software programs have the same goal — to ease the process of running an office-related business.
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