‘I would gladly have accepted a heaping spoonful of nepotism when I got out of college and was looking for a job’ – Sloane Crosley
Nepotism can be such an ugly word. In an ideal world we would all work hard for everything and everything would be awarded on merit and be fair and above board. The truth is we all need a helping hand every now and again. When my dad didn’t want me to buy remodelled tyres because he didn’t think they were safe enough he paid for brand new ones, and way back in my career I was given the heads up by a friend that my job was being made redundant and she put me in touch with a contact of hers who helped me move on from that situation and get a better job. That’s life, and sometimes you have to put yourself first and grab some opportunities that might give you a bit of a leg up.
When my bestie of all besties left her job last year, she didn’t mope around about how unfair it all was (like I did) or just accept the same unhappy career path she was on and take the next job that was offered to her (like I did). She decided to do what she’d always wanted to do and start up her own Virtual Assistant business. And (no bias whatsoever) she’s bloody excellent at it.
I know this (with no bias whatsoever) because one of the benefits of having a friend who owns their own business is that you can utilize them for your own personal gain. So I made Angela work for me. And believe me I would say if I thought she was crap. Ok I may not write a blog post about it, that would be pretty cruel, but I would tell her. So, not that I was surprised in the slightest, I’ve always known she’s brilliant, but the things she did for me totally exceeded my expectations and I’ll be honest, totally changed the way I thought about virtual assistants.
I was always under the impression that a VA was just there to book your gel manicure, arrange a few meetings and book your travel, and yes she has done things like that as well, but some of the stuff she picked up and helped me out with really, really impressed me.
So I’d asked Ang to help out with a few blog things, all the stuff I always plan to do on a rainy Sunday afternoon but always get side-tracked with crime documentaries on Netflix. I gave her admin access to both my blog and my Facebook page and within 48 hours she’d checked and fixed all the broken links on my site, and put together a stats pack for me (which I had asked for) but she added extra stats around average monthly stats that I hadn’t even thought of and produced the following:
Followers
Blog site: 220
Twitter: 823
Facebook: 189
Average monthly views for 2017 across social media platforms: 3,862
Average visitors for 2017 to blog across your social media: 2,694
Average daily view for 2017: 128
This is now going to be so easy to keep updated and fire off to anyone who ask, and makes me look way more professional and put together than I actually am (to be fair Ang has been doing that for me since we were 16!)
She then went on to produce some branding images (which I didn’t even have to ask for) but turned out brilliantly and will be extremely useful for invoicing and pitching to brands:
She even photoshopped away my double chin for a picture I was using for a post, which I shouldn’t really admit but hey, girlfriend got mad photo editing skills!
Lastly and probably most importantly, she put together a comprehensive list of pubs which fall along the metro line which I will now be able to use when continuing out Wine & Beer Metro tour, as it saves me having to just get off the train and google where the best place to go is, which is how we were doing it previously. Having a plan of action and a direction to head in has been invaluable and saved me loads of time where I was previously walking aimlessly around places I’m unfamiliar with in search of a cold glass of Sav Blanc.
This is obviously just the things she’s done for me, there are seemingly no end to her talents and I honestly didn’t realise how useful it is to have help with my blog until I got it and now I don’t know what I’d do without her!
If you fancy giving her a try, send her a quick email (angela@nevirtualassistant.com) to see how it fits in with your requirements and lifestyle and her skills includes (but are certainly not limited to:
- Data entry
- Data/word processing
- Creating and maintaining spreadsheets
- Credit control
- Travel arranging and booking
- Diary set up and management
- Email checking, responding and cleanup
- Research
- Social media management
- Photo editing
For further information visit www.nevirtualassistant.com and tell her I sent ya!
Great article!