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.
Where we will be visiting in the USA
