They said you should start a VA business. It’s easy and cheap, and you can get it up and running in a few days. This type of talk is bad for business.

Every six months, I review my Instagram followers for The VA Project. It always saddens me to remove followers who have not been active on their accounts for six months or more. I love to support and connect with those who follow me, and I can’t do that if there is no one home. There can be a hundred reasons why people start social media profiles and then, for whatever reason, stop.

Two reasons particularly come to mind:

  1. On the positive, the VA is so busy that she doesn’t have time for social media. It is not needed to build their business.
  2. Then there is the more likely reason, and that is they are no longer a VA because they listened to all the hype and sales talk to get them to part with their money and it just didn’t work out for them because there was no foundation to build on.

The problem

Starting a business is the easy part. The hard part is creating the foundation and building the steps to support all the other stuff you’re going to put on top of it to build growth. So how do you do that? From experience, there are five things you need to strategise, plan for, and implement.

We all know what happens if we don’t have a solid foundation underfoot when we walk, we find it awkward to navigate the terrain, and sometimes we stumble so bad we don’t get up again. We hurt ourselves enough to put us off wanting to do whatever we were doing.

After 35 years working as a business admin SME and over 14 years in business as a virtual assistant, I’ve worked out the foundation needed to help you build the business you need. I’ve done all the stumbling for you.

They are the most impactful in their simplicity, and if you don’t sort these out, you will always struggle.

7 Tips to build business growth

  1. Knowing why you want to be in business is absolutely key. If you want to be a VA get a designer handbag. It won’t work. It’s simply not good enough!
  2. Your level of experience, clients really don’t like it when you say you can when you can’t.
  3. How much time do you have to run a part-time VA business? Absolutely you can be a part-time VA but how much time is available in your day to realistically do this?
  4. What will stop you from succeeding? Aside from any one of these seven points, there could be many other things that will stop you from being successful in your business.
  5. Shake off your employee mindset because your clients are not your employers and being reactionary in your business constantly is a quick way to burnout.
  6. Managing family and friends. You have to love good intentions but they don’t pay the bills. Constant interruptions will sabotage your business if you don’t set boundaries from the beginning.
  7. Reducing the silo impact.

I wrote a great manual on how to set up the foundations you need to succeed and grow your Virtual Assistant business. You can get a copy here, it’s FREE!

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