Number Nine on my list is I am not an employee, I am an independent business owner.

This was a tricky one to grasp when I first started Net Secretary almost five years ago. I had just come from being an employee in the corporate sector and still had that "employee mentality" – if the boss said jump, my response was ‘how high?’  I made quite a few mistakes in those early days, bowing to pressure from clients on when and how they wanted things done, not trusting my own professional judgement or having the confidence to say "no".

It is extremely liberating once this concept has been grasped and I am now comfortable with the fact I am a business owner, just as my clients are, and I deserve to be treated with the same level of professional respect as I treat them.

I have realistic boundaries – for example, no weekend work or evening work unless we are appropriately compensated and it is mutually agreed, not expected. For the most part I choose my clients and who I want to work with, not the other way around.

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I’ve going to share with you my Top 10 Valuable lessons I’ve learned since opening Net Secretary and becoming a Virtual Assistant. I continue to learn new things every day in my business but these are the 10 most valuable lessons that help define my business. Today I start at Number 10.

Number 10 – You can’t be all things to all people

Net Secretary provides a core range of virtual assistance services to a regular group of clients in select industries. We do what we are experts at and what provides the best service to our clients. We do not provide bookkeeping services nor legal or medical transcription or related legal/medical services. We do not do telemarketing or cold calling. We are not experts in these fields and nor do we want to be. There are plenty of other niche service providers out there that offer these services. Our niche is transcription, copywriting, web design/updates and all general admin and virtual assistant services. We strive to be the best at what we are good at. We do not aspire to be ‘jack of all trades’ and master of none.

Stay tuned for Number 9…

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Net Secretary received exciting news today that we are to receive a credit in our client’s upcoming new film for a large transcription project we completed for them. The client was thrilled with Net Secretary’s fast and accurate work on the project and their comments are below:

“Thanks very much for your great service – we have all been very impressed with your turn around speed and I have already been passing your details on to other productions looking for transcribers.”

We are very excited about this new development at Net Secretary and look forward to some great referral work coming out of this job.

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Virtual Assistants Battle the Economic Blues | Geekpreneur

This article was brought to my attention by Kathie Thomas, founder of the virtual assistant industry in Australia and mentioned in this post. It is a great article and I found a lot of truth in it – certainly Net Secretary has never been busier and we seem to have so far remained unaffected by the economic climate around us.

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Reprinted with permission – Lyn Prowse-Bishop of www.execstress.com

One of the most frequent enquiries I receive in my practice is for transcription services – digital, microtape, standard tape – not just from potential clients but from new VAs wanting to ‘get in on’ what seems to be a burgeoning niche in the Virtual Assistant industry. So, here are a few tips and facts to help clients understand the costs of providing transcription services, and ‘newbies’ who want to add this service to their practice.

A: Not all transcriptionists are alike

There are varying typing speeds, varying levels of expertise – both with WP software and with PC-based player software – and as a result, varying charge out rates. If you are a client looking for transcription services who cares about the resulting product without having to do too much post-transcription checking, you need to find a professional service. The skills of a transcriptionist vary from a typist. According to the Industry Production Standards (IPS) Guide:

“Tape transcription is a specialised service, very different from general text keyboarding [which] relies on visual processing and can be measured as words or characters per minute; then corrected for accuracy. Transcriptionists however, must rely on aural processing, and the rhythm of the work depends on the person doing the original recording. The keyboarding portion of the tape transcription process includes a certain amount of editing ‘on the fly’ by the transcriptionist – ie paragraphing, insertion of punctuation, capitalisation, correction of grammar (in non-verbatim transcripts) and sometimes aural identification of speakers”.

So what should you look for when assessing candidates?

1. Someone with at least 2-3 years of business, office or secretarial experience;
2. Keyboarding speed of around 70 words per minute (wpm);
3. Good language/grammar skills;
4. The software skills to handle the project;

PLUS:

5. Someone with a minimum of 2-3 years basic transcription experience;
6. Mastery of advanced language skills, including grammar, punctuation, spelling and sentence structure;
7. Exceptional level of accuracy;
8. Excellent independent judgment and decision making skills;
9. Superior on-screen proofreading and editing abilities;
10. Ability to recognise errors and inconsistencies in dictated material while transcribing;
11. Proficiency in clarification of dictation without altering meaning or style;
12. Hearing acuity and language discrimination skills, including familiarity with and understanding of accents and dialects, and recognition of voice inflections within a document.

What?! I hear you say. Indeed, these are the identified requirements of a professional transcriptionist. If you do not partner with an operator with this skill set then you can be assured that not only will transcription time be longer, but your post-transcription proofing and editing of the document will defeat the purpose of outsourcing the job in the first place.

B: Transcription Time Determinants

Understand that transcription time is determined by the quality of the audio – any noise, accents, multiple speakers, poor tape quality, or poorly positioned recording device, will increase transcription time. If you have an hour of audio it is NOT going to take an hour to transcribe – even for someone with a typing speed of 120wpm. Conversational English is in the vicinity of 200 to 250wpm – add to that relistening to identify speakers in multiple-speaker audios or any undue background noise and things start to slow down.

The IPS place transcription time for a straightforward, single person, clear audio file (think, dictating a letter) (Class 1) at 1:3-5 – ie for very minute of recorded audio it will take approximately 3-5 minutes to transcribe. This means an hour of audio will take approximately 3-5 hours to transcribe. The range covers things like complexity of the recording, whether it contains jargon or technical language, if the speaker has an accent, and whether there is any looking up of addresses, internet searching and so on. This range goes up to 4.8 to 8 hours for a Class 5 file.

Clients can decrease the amount of the final invoice by ensuring that their audio files are recorded in the best possible circumstances: better quality = less time to transcribe.

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Net Secretary is almost ready to offer web hosting and domain name registration at competitive prices. We are currently in the process of changing over our server and this should take another week or two before everything is live and operational. I’ll be sending out an email broadcast when its all finalised.

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Setting Goals the SMART way!

 If you’ve been to business school or read books on goal setting you might be familiar with the acronym SMART, which stands for Specific, Measurable, Actionable or Attributable, Realistic, and Timed. Let me explain briefly what each letter of the SMART Goal formula entails

S = Specific Your goals mustn’t be vague they must be as specific as they can be. For example, a goal to "Be more successful in 2009" is too vague as it doesn’t define what success is. For one person success might be to pass their exams, for another it might be to retire from their job, and yet for another person it might be to earn over $75,000.

M = Measurable As well as being specific your goals should be measurable. If your goal is related to money you might set a goal to "Earn over $100,000" or maybe to "Increase your monthly income by 25%". If your goal was sports related you might say "To knock three seconds off my personal best time" or "To win three major tournaments".

A = Actionable or Attributable There’s no point in setting goals that are not actionable or attributable, i.e. you have no direct control over the outcome. For example it would be silly to set a goal for your favorite sporting team to win the league if you cannot directly influence that outcome. If you are the team coach, the owner of the team or even one of the players this could be a goal that is actionable, but if you are just a fan there is nothing you can do that will have any impact on the outcome and so it is not actionable or attributable. Likewise, you couldn’t set a goal to "Win the lottery" as it is not a goal that you can directly influence. Yes, you can buy a ticket, or even several tickets, but you cannot influence the numbers that will be drawn out and so it is not actionable.

R = Realistic When setting goals you need to be realistic. Setting a goal such as "To be the world’s best-selling singer" is not a realistic goal if you’ve never made a record, don’t have a recording contract and sound like a cat being strangled. Even if that was your ultimate goal it’s best to break it down and take several smaller steps. For example, you might start off with a goal of taking singing lessons, forming a band, writing a song, recording a song, or maybe getting a recording deal, but having a goal to be bigger than Madonna is not a great first step.

T = Timed A well thought out goal must include a timescale and must not be open ended. For example "To get promotion" is too vague. It would be far better to have a goal that said "To get promoted by 1st July 2009".

Using this clever acronym means you can easily remember all of the attributes necessary to set SMART goals for yourself or other people. As soon as you start to use this method of goal setting you will see an amazing transformation. Gone will be the vague goals that you set and then forgot about. In their place will be highly targeted goals that give you razor-sharp focus that will let you hit your goals like a heat seeking missile.

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Wishing all my lovely clients a wonderful Christmas and a relaxed, enjoyable break and I look forward to working with you again in 2009.

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Microsoft patches IE, but Firefox is still safer

There has been a lot of buzz in the media these past couple of days about a serious security flaw in Microsoft IE. I don’t use IE anyway and haven’t done for two or three years (wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole!).

This is not the first time this has happened with IE. Back in 2005 there was another security flaw in Microsoft’s browser version IE6 – I wonder how many times it has to happen before people get the message that hackers will always try to infiltrate widely used programs, like IE. This problem is not applicable to the beautiful and very fast Firefox (the Bomb of all Browsers – read the above article on how to customise it to act like IE with certain websites including Active X controls) or Chrome, Opera, Safari etc.

I would suggest get out there and download one of the alternative browsers, give it a good go for a week and I’m confident you will never want to go back to the ‘dark side’ of MS IE. I’m quite sure you can import your bookmarks from IE too. No excuses folks – protect your personal information and say ‘no’ to IE!

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Angels of the office

I found this interesting article in my daily Google Alerts as it mentions virtual assistants and echoes my previous blog post about the importance of Virtual Assistants during an economic downturn.

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