Enterprise Nation

Alex Trapnell is a Virtual Assistant and business owner. Here she offers her top four tips for anyone following the same route; starting up as a VA in business. Across the tips, she covers everything from tax to networking and design.

VA-ry helpful tips

So here goes…

1. Do get yourself booked in to attend your local Tax Office ‘Becoming Self Employed’ and ‘Self Assessment for the Self Employed’ courses – usually 4 hrs each, free of charge.  Quite apart from gaining an understanding of your TAX, NI and allowable/non-allowable Business expenses, you won’t have to pay someone else to do your Return for you – an immediate cost saving.
2. Do get out there and network as and when you can – get yourself noticed – a bright outfit, smile, interest in the other person & willingness to listen will all help get you noticed and in turn, you’ll pick up on how you’ll be best placed to assist them as a potential client.  Do follow up with all contacts you meet after the event, either via telephone or email – offer to add them to your Newsletter mailing list if you have one.
3. Don’t assume a website designer will have expertise in all the areas it takes to produce the website that suits your particular business needs.  Decide and verbalise right away whether you require an online brochure style of site (to simply refer clients and contacts to), or a site that will drive new business.  If you’re not ‘up’ on successful forms of website content writing yourself, get an expert to help write the copy, ensuring that headers and text contain all necessary keywords/key phrases.
4. Don’t miss an opportunity and do talk to your competitors – you’ll often find that between you, you offer complimentary services and can actually form some level of ‘partnership’, whereby you can pass relevant work/leads to each other, rather than reverting to viewing each other as ‘the spawn of Satan’.

The above is in no way meant to be an exhaustive list of Tops Tips when setting up as a VA, but I hope you’ll find them helpful, as I did.  Note that I’m always happy to hear from budding VA’s and very pleased to share hints and tips that might prove useful.

• Alex Trapnell