Be Careful What You Wish For in Business Growth

I’d often heard that old admonition “Be careful what you wish for,” but I’d never paid much attention to it – until recently.

 When I first started Office Support 911, my virtual assistant service, back in 2006, I was pretty green about running my own business in general. I figured that I would simply hang my shingle and the customers would just start pouring in.

 That didn’t happen. The cobwebs were starting to grow around my desk (and my phone) so I did all the usual marketing things like joining my local board of trade, advertising in local newspapers, printing up business cards and social networking like crazy.

 I also used to wish that someone would just notice me and let me prove to them that I was really good at what I did. I was waiting for that big break – that one golden opportunity to break into the virtual assistant business in a big way.

 Little could I foresee that that day would eventually come.

 I had also read that most small businesses fail in the first five years due to lack of capital, lack of good management, lack of foresight and perhaps just a lack of tenacity. But I wasn’t worried about that stuff. I figured that I would just cross each bridge as I came to it.

 A very wise loved one—also a business owner—kept telling me, “Karen, if you don’t plan for expansion, your business is going to grow and you won’t be prepared to deal with it. Be careful what you wish for in terms of business success because if you don’t have the structure in place before that success hits you, you’ll be scrambling to catch up. You’ll burn out trying to do it all by yourself as one individual.”

 Luckily, I listened to him and started thinking ahead. While I had originally wished for a certain degree of success, I really hadn’t given much thought as to how I would actually execute and handle the amount of business that started coming my way.

 Some of the lessons I learned were:

• One person can only do so much in one day. Working 24/7 is a prime opportunity for you to experience burnout.
• You need to have a good work/life balance. Your ‘real’ life is just as important as your business success. We are not robots.
• Well before you hit that ‘burnout’ point, you need to start thinking about what tasks you can delegate, which means letting go of the reins a little bit.
• You also need to invest some time in training your protégés. It’s time well spent if you find the right ones.
• For a business to grow successfully, one needs to plan for the expansion that they originally wished for.

 I would love to hear more lessons learned from other small business owners. How did you deal with that business growth you had wished for?

Please feel free to share your wisdom and tips here with others!

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Starting a Web-Based Business

I don’t normally promote products and/or services on my blog, but this is a new book that I am very excited about. It’s called The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Starting a Web-Based Business by Steve Slaunwhite.

Many new entrepreneurs don’t know where to begin in terms of best practices in getting their business off the ground when starting an ‘online’ business versus a brick-and-mortar business.

Barnes and Noble describes this new book as follows:

“The web-based basics!

“Aspiring web entrepreneurs will find here everything they need to know about starting and running their own small-scale online business. Whether they intend to sell goods, services, subscriptions, or advertising, this book provides them with the specific nuts and bolts of planning, designing, build­ing, hosting, marketing, and operating their online businesses.”

The price is right for this new must-have book. Most major stores such as Amazon and Barnes and Noble are selling it online for under $20. The actual bookstore price will vary, depending on where you buy it. 

Check it out at Amazon at http://tinyurl.com/nl7s8o

What I also liked about this book is that Steve Slaunwhite really drilled down to the basics here. He did not talk to people as if they already had extensive internet savvy. He talked to them as if they were starting from scratch, which is what I really liked. The book is easy to understand and follow, and contains a slew of invaluable information for newbies who are just starting their internet businesses.

The Expanding World of Virtual Assistance

As the internet continues to expand, so do the opportunities for freelancers and independent contractors to savour a piece of the pie while they service the needs of businesses who conduct most of their transactions via the internet.

For example, when I first established my online virtual assistant business as Office Support 911 back in 2006, I had no idea that three years later, my online business would explode with opportunities.

 When I first started out, I was a complete unknown on the internet. I created my virtual assistance business from the ground up. At that time, I hadn’t yet realized the opportunities that lay ahead in the virtual world.

 Word-of-mouth and social networking have been my primary sources of marketing. Referrals continue to flow in as my main source of new business. “They tell two friends and they tell two friends.”

Virtual assistant services may include:

• Calendar management
• Customer relationship management (CRM)
• Transcription
• Proofreading
• Web design
• Graphic design
• Social marketing management
• Ghostwriting
• Marketing (cold calls)
• Website hosting
• And the list goes on…

 It truly is a freelancers’ market these days, more so than it was in the old days when companies had no other choice but to hire someone full-time or part-time to perform most of their tasks in their brick-and-mortar office. The employers would then need to pay someone for eight hours regardless of what that person did for them during those eight hours.

 Nowadays, even brick-and-mortar establishments are starting to come online and search on the internet for possible solutions for their need for assistance. They are also finding that they are being wowed by the quality of assistance they are receiving from these virtual assistants.

 Yes, the world of virtual assistance is being expanded day by day.

Hiring a New Transcriptionist 101

Before you hire a transcriptionist or transcription company, what type of transcription service do you need?

 There are basically three types of transcriptionists:

1. Medical
2. Legal
3. General

In terms of medical and legal transcription, these providers are held to high and stringent standards in terms of understanding medical and legal terms. The majority of these professionals have been accredited with degrees in their respective fields of transcription. Normally, their transcripts are absolutely verbatim for obvious reasons. These professionals also deserve the highest fees due to their specialization and training.

With general transcription, the ballpark is wide open. Making ‘product-ready’ transcripts is totally different from the straight verbatim required by medical and legal transcriptionists.

 If you are looking for a general transcriptionist, it’s not so black-and-white.  Think about: 

• What language format would you like your transcript to be in? (i.e. British or American English)
• How much do you want your final product to be edited in terms of grammar and punctuation?
• How important is it that your transcriptionist understand common internet terms?
•  How much internet research do you expect your transcriptionist to do in order to accurately transcribe your audio files?
• How much time are you willing to invest to bring your transcriptionist up to speed in terms of your goals?

‘General transcription’ is a fuzzy term that envelops pretty much everything not contained in medical or legal transcription. Often, general transcriptionists are requested to do everything from verbatim to highly-edited and proofread transcripts. Of course, the price charged will be based on how much editing and research you require from them.

If you are just looking for general transcription and visit Elance or Guru, you may be presented with prices around the $25 per audio hour mark. This is fine if you are looking for purely verbatim transcripts. At $25 per audio hour, considering it takes an average of three to four hours for even the best transcriptionist to transcribe  one hour of audio, this means the transcriber is actually receiving between $8.30 and $6.25 per hour of his/her time.  If that is okay with you, then I guess that is okay with them. But I know firsthand that  it’s not okay with most  general transcriptionists.

If your budget includes $25 per audio hour for transcription services, then you’ll pretty much get what you pay for. Expect to receive a verbatim, pretty raw transcript that may likely include every ‘um’, ‘ah’ and ‘you know’ spoken. You may also see some fairly apparent grammatical errors. If you can see them, so can your potential clients.

It may be a good idea to think about the time and cost required (if you want this to be a polished, final product) on behalf of yourself or the rest of your team in terms of refurbishing the product that you bought at such a bargain price, but then had to spend hours and hours cleaning up.

More about this topic in later posts…