Creating Standards for your Virtual Practice

Whenever I talk with new virtual assistants, the question comes up --- *how* do you get all those things when you have to do what the client wants. The answer is -- you first do what YOU want, and then attract to you the clients who think that's terrific. You run your business, it doesn't run you. The tail doesn't wag the dog. You put standards in place that dictate how you work and what clients can expect of you.

Think of the largest department store in your city. They have standards around what hours they'll work, the merchandise they sell, how they interact with customers, etc. And you are, or aren't, attracted to them based on those standards. If you are, great. And if you aren't, then you shop elsewhere. And you know what? That's just fine with them. Because they learned, long ago, what you need to learn as you start your own business:

You can't be all things to all people.

To try is to set yourself up for failure.

So, just how *do* you decide what standards to create for your new business?

First, you understand that standards for your business are the set of rules you choose to work by. You make them up based on the life you want to be living, and by honoring yourself, first, and then by deciding where your business fits into the bigger life picture. Once you know that, you can't really help but create something terrific, *and* you naturally attract people who are a fit for what you offer.

Having a hard time believing that you can have things your way? Why?

The most common reason I've seen is that a new business owner often struggles to really embrace the fact that she/he's a business owner. If you break free of the "employee" mindset, it's becomes far easier. Think to yourself: Does the department store struggle with that? Does the restaurant down the street struggle with that? Of course not! And neither will you, at some point :)

Consider these examples:

If your goal is to have a virtual practice so that you can, for example, spend more time with your kids, then you need to create some standards around work hours that allow you to do that. One of the AssistU trained VAs did just that.

At first, she was locked into the employee mindset that said she needed to work eight hours each day. So she'd spend the morning with her girls, take them to school, begin her day around 9am, leave her office at 3pm, collect them from school, spend the rest of the afternoon with them, do the dinner, bath, homework thing with them in the evening, and then, once they were in bed, she'd go back and do the other two to three hours of work she need to do to make her "work day" eight hours long. And, in just a few weeks, she was exhausted -- far more so than she had been in her corporate job!

We did some coaching, and it didn't take much for her to step out of that mindset and embrace the fact that she now owned a business and could create standards for it that built in the flexibility she needed. Today, she really ends her day at 3pm. Her work day is six hours long, and when she leaves her office, she's done. That honors her commitment to family *and* her commitment to taking great care of herself (a personal standard infinitely worth upholding by the creation of business standards). Does she have trouble finding clients who are more than "ok" with her hours? Not at all. The people who are attracted to her are people who *also* have similar values.

If your goal is to create more flexibility in your life --- the ability to do holiday shopping in the middle of the day rather than fighting the evening crowds; the ability to take long weekends whenever you want; the ability to have a long lunch with a friend without worrying about having to be back in 60 minutes, then you'll want to create a standards that would let you do just that.

When I, for example, had a lucrative VA practice, one of my standards was that I didn't work with clients who couldn't get along without me. Ancillary to that was my standard that I didn't work with clients who had emergencies (now, I realize that everyone has emergencies in life -- but you know the kind I mean; "Stacy -- oh my goodness! I realize it's 450p and your day ends at 5, but forgot that I need to get this out tonight -- you'll get it handled for me, won't you?" *Those* emergencies I didn't want any part of!) I didn't want to foster that kind of dependency because I knew, for me, it meant that at some point, I'd have to choose between doing what was right for me, and doing what the client needed in the moment. Better to create a standard that would allow me to naturally attract clients who were self-reliant and organized. And did I have any trouble at all filling my practice with those clients? Not at all!

When you think you need to do "whatever it takes" to make clients happy and to get them to work with you, you end up anything but satisfied, and you end up more of a slave than you ever were in the corporate world. It's only by the creation of terrific standards that you reclaim your ability to live your life on your own terms. Higher standards attract a higher quality client, and allow you to live a higher quality life. And isn't that one of the reasons you went into business for yourself to begin with?