Today we met a fabulous group of ladies from the VADFW Dallas Fort Worth VA Network Group comprising of Lissa Duty; Julia Lilly; Kay Wright; Charity Van Fleet; Cindy Flood; Sharon Tousley; Tracy Smith and my partner Jamie Macleod (who thoroughly enjoyed the event). What a great lunchtime meet up we all had, a lovely meal thanks to the Glory House restaurant and we all did a lot of laughing which is always a good sign. Plenty of photographs taken afterwards – some funny ones too!
Tracy Smith invited me along to do a short talk/presentation about my Churchill Fellowship and what information research I would be doing during my trip to the USA. There was a good selection of start up VA’s along with those who had been going a good while, so plenty of questions and answers from all of us to share.
It was a really good opportunity to find out how big the VA industry was in Dallas and Fort Worth and to learn that this particular group had a membership of a 42 VA members, which Lissa and Julia organised regularly on a monthly lunchtime basis.
We each took a turn in introducing ourselves explaining what our main VA services were which highlighted a highly professional set of VA’s with some really strong and much needed skills to offer to businesses.
They all agreed that the term VA was still new to a lot of businesses and still under-recognised. We discussed the most preferred and best ways of marketing our skills with networking being the most productive form of meeting new people and building on making good contacts.
It was interesting to discover the background of each VA and how they evolved into taking the VA route. We all agreed working from home was wonderful and how important it was to create a good balance of attending network events to break up the monotony of working from home which can be lonely and the necessary need to meet and make friends with other fellow VA’s.
I thoroughly enjoyed answering questions on how I grew my own VA business, how I found other VA colleagues to sub-contract work to, which enabled me to visit the USA for 5 weeks on this fellowship leaving my clients in the capable hands of my colleagues Denise Shaw and Pippa Mell.
I learned a great deal of information from these ladies, especially how important the use of Social Networking was to a lot of their clients. Plus we talked about the different ways in which they charged for their services, either by the hour or on retainer basis.
We discussed the issue of some larger VA companies that had chosen to do down the route of franchising their VA business. There was a strong agreement that giving a person a territory to concentrate on getting business from seemed to go against the whole ethos of working as a Virtual Assistant which allows you to work for any company anywhere. But as the same time understood the option of buying into a franchise could be seen as a less scary/risky option as opposed to doing it alone.
My immediate impression of this group was an overwhelming wish to keep in touch with each of the ladies. They made both myself and Jamie very, very welcome, incredibly easy going and approachable, open to share, ask questions and so hospitable. Charity Van Fleet very kindly arranged an introduction to visit the Irving Chamber of Commerce, getting in touch with the organisation immediately after the lunch meeting to visit. Charity was a member of the Chamber and spoke very highly of how they helped small businesses.
We drove to the Irving Chamber of Commerce following Charity in the car and received a warm welcome and a great tour of the building which originally was a bank. The new technology used in the building was great to see. The lady who showed us round the building was very much aware of the term Virtual Assistance which was good to see and appeared to have good relationship with Charity. She gave us a fabulous run down of the demographic, economic, history of Irving and its central location relationship to other States in the US, with its continuous growing, innovative and exciting plans for the future. A thoroughly enjoyable visit.
Thursday, 23 September 2010
Monday, 20 September 2010
Meet up with Vesna Rafaty from Rafety Law Group
Friday 17 September
This particular meeting was arranged for my partner Jamie regarding his music as Vesna Rafaty is a music lawyer and also concentrates on Intellectual Property law.
Vesna was a delight to meet with, such a breath of fresh air to sit and chat with. Incredibly open and very frank with her thoughts and opinions, her approach was very positive with a constant appetite for new ideas and opportunities.
Once I explained what Virtual Assistance was and how the industry worked along with our reason for visiting the USA on our research study, she instantly told us about her new project and readily adopted the concept of VA finding it very appealing.
Her new venture, a little different to her day to day business dealings was an exciting new piece of virtual technology using cloud computing. This enables businesses to benefit from an alternative marketing tool for collecting feedback, responses, any kind of information relevant to your business.
This fantastic opportunity meeting Vesna who is based in Dallas will definitely be a valuable contact whom I hope to work with - this new piece of software could easily be offered under the growing list of VA Services we currently offer to our existing and potential new clients.
This particular meeting was arranged for my partner Jamie regarding his music as Vesna Rafaty is a music lawyer and also concentrates on Intellectual Property law.
Vesna was a delight to meet with, such a breath of fresh air to sit and chat with. Incredibly open and very frank with her thoughts and opinions, her approach was very positive with a constant appetite for new ideas and opportunities.
Once I explained what Virtual Assistance was and how the industry worked along with our reason for visiting the USA on our research study, she instantly told us about her new project and readily adopted the concept of VA finding it very appealing.
Her new venture, a little different to her day to day business dealings was an exciting new piece of virtual technology using cloud computing. This enables businesses to benefit from an alternative marketing tool for collecting feedback, responses, any kind of information relevant to your business.
This fantastic opportunity meeting Vesna who is based in Dallas will definitely be a valuable contact whom I hope to work with - this new piece of software could easily be offered under the growing list of VA Services we currently offer to our existing and potential new clients.
Wednesday, 15 September 2010
Wednesday 15 September – visit with Greater Richmond Partnership and Capital One
Met with the Greater Richmond Partnership and enjoyed our visit with Rowena Fratarcangelo, Gregory Wingfield and Sara Dunnigan. Rowena kindly took us to the Capital One head quarters the following morning based in west Richmond.
Rowena gave us a newspaper article from the Richmond Times business newspaper about ‘Working Moms Best Companies’. This talked about the top best companies to work for – specifically aimed at women.
Definitely an idea to do research in the UK to find out the top best companies for women/mums to work for, who offer the best benefits for flexible working.
The Capital One headquarters was a fantastic place of work to look around – a huge campus covering an area of about 100 acres employing around 7,000 people. The area comprised of about 8 buildings and a lot of parking space areas which were all packed to capacity with cars – a very busy place. Definitely needed a car to get around the place.
This actually provided us with a significant change in culture and a major different focus on looking after and retaining employees. The state of the art facilities and technology and innovative training and development tools gave a huge impression of how much this particular company invests in their employees.
What made a massive impact was how the layout of the offices/work space was provided for people. Basically an employee finds a preferred place (hot desk) to work from, logs on computer, uses instant messenger (similar to what we use on Skype) to show they’re logged on and ready to start work. The emphasis on the production of quality work, providing the right environment which gives the employee much more incentive, trust and flexibility was great to see actually working in a successful setting.
This particular visit provoked so many new ideas around the concept of virtual working.
They mentioned that generally on Friday’s the building can seem very empty due to a lot of employees working from home accessing their work remotely, logging in at home to do the work, again another flexible option for employees.
This gave rise to the concept of teleworking being virtual with the option of working from home with a mix of working on site at a purpose built office environment so employees get chance to interact with each other, attend meetings and training sessions, striking a good productive balance of work.
I did ask about the use of video conferencing due to the number of office bases in different states and countries – they explained that video conferencing was used regularly but still felt that technology was still not stable to the quality they really required e.g. someone would not be able to get sound or talk as part of the group call etc.
The actual buildings inside were extremely well thought out, lots of internal café areas for employees, places for relaxation with large tv screens, a fantastic indoor gym and lots of outside sporting areas as part of the campus for playing team games – very big on team building and getting people to integrate together.
It will be very interesting to look at the Capital One offices in Nottingham in England when we return from the US to find out if they too have adopted this way of flexible working and change in working culture.
Rowena gave us a newspaper article from the Richmond Times business newspaper about ‘Working Moms Best Companies’. This talked about the top best companies to work for – specifically aimed at women.
Definitely an idea to do research in the UK to find out the top best companies for women/mums to work for, who offer the best benefits for flexible working.
The Capital One headquarters was a fantastic place of work to look around – a huge campus covering an area of about 100 acres employing around 7,000 people. The area comprised of about 8 buildings and a lot of parking space areas which were all packed to capacity with cars – a very busy place. Definitely needed a car to get around the place.
This actually provided us with a significant change in culture and a major different focus on looking after and retaining employees. The state of the art facilities and technology and innovative training and development tools gave a huge impression of how much this particular company invests in their employees.
What made a massive impact was how the layout of the offices/work space was provided for people. Basically an employee finds a preferred place (hot desk) to work from, logs on computer, uses instant messenger (similar to what we use on Skype) to show they’re logged on and ready to start work. The emphasis on the production of quality work, providing the right environment which gives the employee much more incentive, trust and flexibility was great to see actually working in a successful setting.
This particular visit provoked so many new ideas around the concept of virtual working.
They mentioned that generally on Friday’s the building can seem very empty due to a lot of employees working from home accessing their work remotely, logging in at home to do the work, again another flexible option for employees.
This gave rise to the concept of teleworking being virtual with the option of working from home with a mix of working on site at a purpose built office environment so employees get chance to interact with each other, attend meetings and training sessions, striking a good productive balance of work.
I did ask about the use of video conferencing due to the number of office bases in different states and countries – they explained that video conferencing was used regularly but still felt that technology was still not stable to the quality they really required e.g. someone would not be able to get sound or talk as part of the group call etc.
The actual buildings inside were extremely well thought out, lots of internal café areas for employees, places for relaxation with large tv screens, a fantastic indoor gym and lots of outside sporting areas as part of the campus for playing team games – very big on team building and getting people to integrate together.
It will be very interesting to look at the Capital One offices in Nottingham in England when we return from the US to find out if they too have adopted this way of flexible working and change in working culture.
Tuesday, 14 September 2010
Monday 13 September - meeting with Virginia Commonwealth University
Met with Mike West and Katherine Inge from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia yesterday.
They have been working with organisations on telework projects which started about 6 to 7 years ago.
They ran these as pilot projects looking at what made a good home working teleworker, looking at the characteristics of a teleworker.
They did a survey on businesses in their local area to find out what policies and procedures they currently have in place around flexible working allowing employees to work from home. They ran a placement project with about 100 placements, a large percentage of these being veterans.
They raised the awareness of teleworking – pointing out that even now employers see teleworking as a reward to employees rather than being a necessity.
They carried out telework assessments, a process of vetting people to see how their typing skills and communications skills qualified, testing them on their telephone skills, customer service skills etc.
Katherine had more involvement on the self employment side and mentioned the ‘Self Employment Grant’ which was made available through the Office Disability and Policy Dept which was trialled throughout New York, Alaska and Florida.
The availability of Developed Start-up Projects – whereby interested people looking at going self employed can still receive Social Security Work Incentive payments and put money aside separately to save towards starting a new business while staying on benefits.
Katherine suggested that we pull together case studies showing the different processes/services/projects we work on for clients, what the procedure is, how long each piece of work takes, showing specifically what can be achieved. This in turn could be used as a PR marketing piece to raise awareness of home working virtual assistance and teleworking.
Mike and Katherine provided us with a fantastic pack to take away including:
• Video on ‘Self Employment – Start-up in the USA’
• Start-up resource documents on self employment
• A mentor guide to Increase Customized Employment Outcomes through T-TAP
• Business, Disability and Employment – corporate Models of Success
• VCU – Rehabilitation Research and Training Centre on Workplace Supports and Job Retention
Both Mike and Katherine provided us with some great contacts: The Midwest Institute of Telecommuting - http://www.mite.org/ and Expiditor Corporation - http://www.expeditercorp.com/.
Definitely wish to keep in touch with Mike and Katherine as a great source of continuous development in this area.
They have been working with organisations on telework projects which started about 6 to 7 years ago.
They ran these as pilot projects looking at what made a good home working teleworker, looking at the characteristics of a teleworker.
They did a survey on businesses in their local area to find out what policies and procedures they currently have in place around flexible working allowing employees to work from home. They ran a placement project with about 100 placements, a large percentage of these being veterans.
They raised the awareness of teleworking – pointing out that even now employers see teleworking as a reward to employees rather than being a necessity.
They carried out telework assessments, a process of vetting people to see how their typing skills and communications skills qualified, testing them on their telephone skills, customer service skills etc.
Katherine had more involvement on the self employment side and mentioned the ‘Self Employment Grant’ which was made available through the Office Disability and Policy Dept which was trialled throughout New York, Alaska and Florida.
The availability of Developed Start-up Projects – whereby interested people looking at going self employed can still receive Social Security Work Incentive payments and put money aside separately to save towards starting a new business while staying on benefits.
Katherine suggested that we pull together case studies showing the different processes/services/projects we work on for clients, what the procedure is, how long each piece of work takes, showing specifically what can be achieved. This in turn could be used as a PR marketing piece to raise awareness of home working virtual assistance and teleworking.
Mike and Katherine provided us with a fantastic pack to take away including:
• Video on ‘Self Employment – Start-up in the USA’
• Start-up resource documents on self employment
• A mentor guide to Increase Customized Employment Outcomes through T-TAP
• Business, Disability and Employment – corporate Models of Success
• VCU – Rehabilitation Research and Training Centre on Workplace Supports and Job Retention
Both Mike and Katherine provided us with some great contacts: The Midwest Institute of Telecommuting - http://www.mite.org/ and Expiditor Corporation - http://www.expeditercorp.com/.
Definitely wish to keep in touch with Mike and Katherine as a great source of continuous development in this area.
Sunday, 12 September 2010
Meet up with Nancy Seeger at Arts Assistance in Washington DC
Had a great meeting with Nancy Seeger from Arts Assistance at a local Starbucks Cafe near our hotel.
A fantastic opportunity to ask lots of questions about being a Virtual Assistant based in Washington DC and how her business has grown specialising in offering web design and graphic design to performing arts businesses.
Nancy's involvement with the IVAA International Virtual Assistance Association was a good insight especially her background in creating the web pages for the forth coming IVAA Summit in October.
Nancy passed on some great contacts within the VA Industry based in different States who I shall be making contact with.
Our last day in Washington DC to travel down to Richmond Virginia on Saturday 11 September.
Both me and Jamie really loved Washington a fantastic place to visit with so much to see. The people are incredibly cheerful and friendly and having such wonderful weather really made our visit memorable. Can't wait to visit again towards the end of our visit in October.
A fantastic opportunity to ask lots of questions about being a Virtual Assistant based in Washington DC and how her business has grown specialising in offering web design and graphic design to performing arts businesses.
Nancy's involvement with the IVAA International Virtual Assistance Association was a good insight especially her background in creating the web pages for the forth coming IVAA Summit in October.
Nancy passed on some great contacts within the VA Industry based in different States who I shall be making contact with.
Our last day in Washington DC to travel down to Richmond Virginia on Saturday 11 September.
Both me and Jamie really loved Washington a fantastic place to visit with so much to see. The people are incredibly cheerful and friendly and having such wonderful weather really made our visit memorable. Can't wait to visit again towards the end of our visit in October.
Thursday, 9 September 2010
Arrived in Washington DC
Arrived safely in Washington DC (first time flying too), what a fantastic city. Spent the first few days visiting the White House, Lincoln Monument and many of the other wonderful memorials and monuments. Very hot temperatures of 95 degrees looking to get cooler. We have a conference call early Friday morning and our first meeting with Nancy Seegar from Arts Assistance. Nancy will be taking us to her new offices based in Fairfax - looking forward to our first meet up.
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Where we will be visiting in the USA
