Virtual Assistants, who are we?

Owning and managing your own business has a number of advantages – such as independence and flexibility to work around your own hours.  However, much of your time gets eaten up by administrative tasks, taking you away from income-producing operations. 

So here we are, the virtual assistants (VA), one of the newest and fastest-growing office-support professionals.  Shane Bowlin, a certified VA, defines our position as that of a professional assistant working in partnership with an individual to provide support without being physically present.  We are more than just remote secretaries.  We learn our clients’ businesses and work closely in helping them take their businesses to the next level, becoming more productive and effective.

Desktop Publishing Services

• Designing and printing of
  • Business cards
  • Flyers
  • Brochures
  • Post cards
  • Invitations
  • Product labels
  • Business Logo /Seal
• Scanning of photos and graphics for your documents
• Cropping or editing of graphics

For quotes on the pricing, please leave a comment with your valid e-mail address and I will be in touch, pronto!

Virtual Assistance Services

As a virtual assistant, I work from my home office providing administrative support services.   These include:

• Transcription – general and legal, interviews, presentations, seminars, webcasts, manuscripts, pdf files, etc.
• Word Processing / Typing
• Internet Research
• E-mail Management
• Data Entry / Database Management 

If you are not seeing the service that you need, just ask!

For quotes on the pricing, please leave a comment with your valid e-mail address and I will be in touch, pronto!

I’m renovating…

This site is currently undergoing some changes.  Please bear with me while I go about the developments.

Meanwhile, let me introduce you to a new site, my HELP Blog.  It’s all about Health, Education, Livelihood and People.

These two sites will be connected.  But the Biz Blog will primarily focus on product showcases and home businesses.

I’m still trying to be a superwoman - attending to my family, the housechores, my home office and civic work.  Progress on my sites will be slow, but have a heart, I really want to do this, and however slow, I’ll make this happen.

Thank you for your patience.

Make a plan to become a WAHM

Once I’ve decided that I wanted to work at home and be with my kids, I then sat down to work on the financials.  How much do I need to earn to be able to sustain our family?  Giving up my monthly salary would create a big dent on our budget.  That’s where the cost of work has been most helpful.  See, in the beginning, I thought I had to earn the same amount I was earning from my employment.  But after realizing that there were a lot of expenses that I would be taking out of the family budget, it was easier to come up with a realistic target. 

Armed with a target amount, I then made a list of things I could do from home.  I bought reference books and read them from cover to cover.  Honest!  I still have a copy of 101 Best Home-Based Businesses for Women by Priscilla Huff that I refer to ’til now, and I spent hours searching the internet for business ideas and work-at-home opportunities.  And for each idea that I came across, I made an assessment of my skills and capabilities.  Can I do this?  And the better question is, can I do this for a long time?  Because of course, you would want to start on something that you can sustain.  Something that you can stick with for the long haul.  And then assess if you can afford the start-up.  With me, I was hellbent on finding something that I can do online.  And when I found one, I really spent time and money to get some training.  I enrolled in a training program, invested on a high-end desktop PC, scanner, printer, pedal, headset, and just about any software that the training center advised me to have.  And because I’ve already made financial investments, the more that I was motivated to make it work.

Now, investing on hardware and software for a work-at-home venture is different from having to pay money to get a job.  This is another important lesson that I learned from the professional WAHMs that I “met” online.  While looking for work-at-home opportunities, you will surely come across sites that promise you earnings in thousands of dollars, just by simply signing up with them and buying a kit to get started.  Uh-uh.  That’s almost sure to be a scam.  Always remember that you don’t need to pay money to get a job.  The only exception to this rule is if you are getting into a direct selling opportunity where you need to buy a kit to get started.   And even in this venture, you are not paying to get a job, instead you are paying for an inventory of items that will get you started in the direct selling business.   

In planning to become a WAHM, bear in mind that your chances of becoming successful with a tiny amount of work are slim to none.  Starting a home office or business entail hard work, constant re-education, creativity, and more hard work.  So if you have decided to be a work-at-home mom, be ready to roll up your sleeves and dig in.

How I got started

Going back to work after my third delivery was the hardest for me.  It was a premature one at 7 months, and it was touch and go for a while.  We had to leave the baby at the hospital, and even after we’ve taken him home, we had to bring him back to ICU on his second month.  A lot of complications, and I’ve been advised to personally take care of the baby for the first 2 years, at least.

So when I reported back to the office, and received a notice that I was getting a promotion to head office, it was like a physical blow.  There we were, financially drained from the complicated pregnancy and subsequent delivery, and I was being moved from my comfort zone.  I was really not being given much of a choice.  My provincial assignment was being made redundant, and they were giving me a new position with wider scope, bigger responsibility and greater challenges.  Another time, I would have grabbed the opportunity with both hands and jumped in with both feet.  But with the new baby, there was no way I could even consider it.

So I asked to be given redundancy pay instead.  I was thinking, “We’ll survive with the money while I look for work nearer our place.”  That’s when I started pouring myself into internet searches.  I wanted to look for something that I can do from home.  I found that medical transcription was hot.  So I went around the city looking for schools or training centers that offer flexible hours.  I found one that I could attend on weekends.  And for a few months, I trained to become a medical transcriptionist.

The internet is a rich source of ideas and opportunities.  I spent hours upon hours searching for work-at-home transcription jobs.  Fortunately, it didn’t take me long.  I landed a sub-contract with a US based production company, and another with a small business in Canada.  So when I left my job in May 15, 2006, I was ready.  I started my first project on May 29.

For those of you who are thinking of working from home, it’s important that you prepare yourself.  With me, I did a lot of research, and I took every information I gathered seriously.  It surprised me to learn how much it cost me to work.  I’ve never given that a thought, ’til then.  While I was earning a 5-figure income monthly, a big chunk of that actually goes back to expenses that allows me to work.  For me to be able to go to work, I had to pay a live-in househelp (I actually had two), which means I pay them monthly salaries, plus 13th month pay and annual bonus, and I pay extra for water, electricity and food.  Also, I had to maintain a wardrobe for the office, plus shoes, bags, and lunches out.  It was a good thing that I had a service vehicle provided by the company, but for those who have none, transportation expense would take a big chunk of takehome pay.  Not to mention the guilt treats.  You know, those toys that you buy to make up for the time that you missed your child’s first tummy turn, or first step, or whatever.  And since you are busy with office work, and more often than not too tired to pay attention to the prices of things that you buy, you tend to spend more on your haste.  And the small repairs around the house that you could actually do yourself, but because you are working, you pay someone else to do it. 

And so I did my own computation.  From my net takehome pay (after taxes), I deducted all the expenses that I could make do without once I started working from home.  And the amount I came up with became my target income for my work-at-home job. 

And I’m proud to say that I still have not touched my redundancy pay to this day.

Is working home for you?

This is the question that I ask my former officemates who have been inquiring about my WAHM status lately.  See, the company I used to work for has been streamlining on its manpower - heavily, I might add - and people are being displaced.  Word is that, from 1,800 current employees, headcount will be down to 500 by early 2009.  These are people I’ve worked with for 8 or so years, and now they are losing their jobs.  The only good thing about it is that they’ve been offered redundancy pay.  That is way a lot better than early retirement pay. 

The sad part is that some of them are husband and wife teams.  Like my former staff, who married a technical guy, and now both of them are in danger of losing their jobs.  They have not received any notice yet, but from what I’ve witnessed, there was hardly any notice given to those who have left so far.  Oh, and by the way, my husband is also with that company, and he has been summoned to a meeting, informing him that his section is being collapsed.  But his is another story altogether.  See, he is just so good at what he does that the higher-ups have been trying valiantly to save him.  So I’ll write about that in another day.

So some of the girls (women) I’ve worked with have expressed interest in what I’m doing.  And they want to know if they can do it, too.  So I ask them, “Do you think it is for you?”  Because not everybody can be happy working from home.  I’ve writtten about the life of a WAHM some time ago, and what I’ve pictured there does not even come close to the real scenario that WAHMs face everyday.

My advice, before you even think of becoming a WAHM, is to assess yourself if you can be happy doing it.  Unlike being in a regular office environment, there is definitely no glamour working from home.  And there will always be distractions.  However good you are at organizing your schedule, you always have to make allowances for the kids.  Good if you don’t have kids to mind like I do.  I have three. 

Being happy at what you do is very important.  As they say, choose a job you love, and you won’t work a day in your life.  So if you think that you can be happy being at home, running an office and doing housechores and taking care of the kids,  then by all means, plan on becoming a WAHM.