I am so pleased and proud to be able to now offer my services as a Virtual Assistant.

I have been working as a full time personal assistant for around 5 years now and I absolutely love it! I have always been committed, organised and loyal (to a fault) so this is a perfect job for me.  As you know from my other blogs I have had a long and winding road figuring out my own personal career but for a long time I have known that this is where I wanted to end up, working for myself and helping as many people as possible.

Helping others is a key part of my personality, it is what makes me happy.  Seeing people succeed and knowing that I had a helping hand in their success is a wonderful feeling.  I feel so proud of my executives as they make advances and manage to complete projects, and knowing that I helped in even a small way is elevating.  My confidence, commitment and loyalty to my executives fuels my desire to be the best assistant that I can for them.  Making their day to day lives a little simpler. Hence the name of my VA business!!

Some people may question why I want to be the assistant rather than the executive, and to them I say, you clearly do not know what an assistant does! Assistants, whether they are personal, executive, virtual or go by any other name, are the puppeteers, we are the person behind the curtain.  Assistants are the gatekeepers of their executives time, inbox, office, meetings, events, diary and in some cases even their personal arrangements.  Many big mergers, projects, product launches and multi corporation events would never have gone ahead if it weren’t for the assistant working hard and running fast behind the scenes.  Ensuring everyone’s diaries and priorities lines up for crucial meetings, taking the minutes and circulating to ensure everyone leaves those meetings on the same page.  Taking on the small but important details for events such as catering for dietary requirements or disabled access.  These are all things that need to be done but the executives do not have time to do. 

Let’s look at an example, planning a pre event meeting. 

You need 6 directors, the head of sales, the head of marketing, the 3 speakers and the venue host to all be available for a 3 hour planning meeting in the next 2 weeks.  This meeting needs to be available hybrid so some can attend from out of area, there needs to be a room and refreshments for those attending in person.  Minutes must be taken and circulated after and there need to be an agenda made up beforehand. 

Now you need to coordinate this, contact everyone to find a matching date and time, find an available room, set up the teams/zoom meeting, organised refreshments, write an agenda and make sure everyone’s talking points are included, arrive early to set up the room and check the tech in working, take the minutes as well as try and contribute to or even lead the meeting and then tidy up the room afterwards and circulate the minutes.

As an executive you could do all this or you give your assistant the brief above and then spend your time prepping for the meeting and the event or doing other strategic work.  The assistant gets all of this done quickly and efficiently, as this is where our organisational skills shine, and we know that not only did we pull off this difficult task, we also enable the executive to get back that time to do their own work, and often get to be the one taking the minutes therefore learning   more about the event and the strategic direction of the company, helping us to assist the executive more effectively going forward.

Thanks for following!

Kay x