Sounds like something from AA, but honestly, being a VA is like an addiction. One that I’m very passionate about.

My next greatest joy is software and learning new skills, this too is  like an addiction to me. I enjoy expanding my knowledge and accumulating new productivity tools.

I have been in Administration for more about 30 years and I love it. I can’t imagine doing anything else.

My main objective in this Blog is to try and pass along some information that I find helpful to my business and hopefully you will find useful in yours as well.

It is true what they say about being a business owner, you spend more time working “in” your business and not enough time working “on” your business.

So today, I took a couple of hours out to do just that, work on my business, and updated my web site. It feels wonderful getting the few tweaks done that I’ve been meaning to get to for ages.

I hope that you will stop by and take a look.

I’ve actually just found Windows Live Writer and I think that this new tool will make things so much easier for me to post. I love the fact that I can launch this from my desktop and there are so many cool additional plug-ins available as well. You might just want to check it out.

Where did I find out about Windows Live Writer? From Smashing Magazine – which I just love.

As a consequence, rising costs of hiring staff, including paying benefits, overtime, sick leave and holiday pay, not to mention the overhead of computer software and updated office equipment, more and more business owners are realizing that there are alternatives and so a lot of them are downsizing their offices and now outsourcing to Virtual Assistants.

The benefits of outsourcing to a Virtual Assistant are numerous. A VA as we are called can do all the things that their office staff would do and more. VA’s can answer client phones, answer e-mails, handle customers inquiries, keep databases for their clients, set up their websites and maintain them, make their travel arrangements, do their shopping, mail out special campaigns, design their flyer’s and other marketing material, type letters, pay bills, do bookkeeping and the list goes on and on.

A typical day for a Virtual Assistant is not so typical. For instance a client can be in a different Province or Country so a VAs typical day, due to time differences would dictate when they would be working. A lot of times this can work to the VAs advantage and to the advantage of the client. The client can give the VA some work to do at the end of their day and when they arrive at work the next morning the job is completed. They don’t have any down time and the VA just works as if it was an ordinary day.

There are times when a client needs something done urgently and so the VA will work sometimes into the early morning hours to get the work completed for them or even on the weekends, whatever it takes to get the job done. The benefit to the client is that they aren’t paying overtime to an employee to get this done, and they are getting professional services and professional work done on otherwise off time.

A lot of clients pay by the hour for work that they need done. Sometimes a Virtual Assistant will be hired for a small one time project. Other times they may work for a short time on an ongoing project. Some VA’s have clients that contract them on an ongoing basis. As you can see there are certainly lots of advantages outsourcing to a Virtual Assistant.