A recent post on the official blog at VAnetworking.com, Partner With a Virtual Assistant, is entitled “You Have to Spend Money to Make Money”. The article is aimed at potential clients and lists conditions where money should be spent as an investment in business.
- Marketing,
- Education,
- Outsourcing (hint, hint, hint — partner with a VA)
The statistics of employee costs as compared to virtual professional costs for the same task are familiar. But, the referenced post points out the net profit from outsourcing with a strong, critical thinking virtual professional who will accomplish a task and free you up to perform billable tasks for your clients. There are some impressive numbers there because the sort of virtual professional that fits this description isn’t a volunteer by a long shot.
That virtual professional has no doubt taken the point about BUSINESS and business investment to heart. You will be working with:
- Someone who has marketed to get your attention.
- Someone who has invested in education to be more efficient at your task.
- Someone who has a network and can either outsource your task again at a secondary level to an equally qualified virtual professional or can refer to you to a better qualified member of that network.
This condition wasn’t reached without considerable investment of time and money on the part of the virtual professional.
Additionally, the VA will have invested in equipment and software to bring quality performance to your task.
These investment requirements are a painful lesson for many entry level virtual assistants because they are coming into the field needing “today money” yesterday. There are some ways to tweak the investment quotient in terms of cash, but they will be expensive in terms of ‘time’ taken to utilize free seminars, inadequate equipment, invisibility in the virtual market, tentative connections with others who could help or caught in the birds of a feather flock together, so the network is largely VAs of the same proficiency. All of that really costs in the amount of time it takes to build a business. Low investment can leave the virtual professional at the back of the working pack. And working is where it is…unless you are a hobby business.
At Particularly Virtual and on @ Bar JD Virtual Professionals, I invest time, no doubt about it and look for options that have low or now cash investment. Some discipline I’ve set in includes only investing in one money thing at a time, especially education. No matter how sweet the deal, I finish the class I’m working on now before impulsively grabbing another. I do learn from the free tele-seminars and webinars. Many times, I learn that this person has little to offer me before I give them my money. I’m not going to be snooty about networking, but I will concentrate on the relationship with people who can work with me if needed. Again, at low cost networking sources, I have learned enough about some folks to know whom to concentrate upon.
But, for the PROFESSIONAL virtual assistant, monetary investment in your business is the way that you will come to have ‘today’ money from your efforts.
