I’d just like to ask you a quick question… what happens to your business when you get sick? Do you have a team of rockstars that look after everything for you or are you still doing everything yourself? If you have a team, can you rely on them to get their work done and keep your business running?

At the end of August I was knocked down with a cold but with a home-based business, a family and a sick little girl I persevered and kept going. Surprisingly the next week I was better and back to full steam. The following week the cold came back for a week but left the week after. This coming and going of a seemingly mild cold happened for 4 weeks and finished up being a rockin’ chest infection that kept me down for 3.5 weeks. I woke to drink some water, visit the bathroom, take my medication and then go back to sleep. I was useless to my family and to my business. My poor long suffering husband had to pick up the slack and take time off work just to look after me. It was a horrid time for us as a family but as a business owner I coped. Why? Because I have rockstars on my team.

Now I’m not saying everything was perfect and that everyone (clients and team members) were completely happy, but the business kept going and it still brought in money. I’ve spent the time on my systems and I have great team members who know exactly what they need to do for me. This is what made it easier for me to recover from a chest infection that ordinarily would have sent me to the hospital.

Getting sick should be part of your contingency plan and if you work by yourself consider what being really sick would do to your business. How would this down time effect client satisfaction? Who would look after your role for you while you take that much needed time off? How would using a Virtual Assistant on your team help alleviate your stress while you’re off sick and how can they help you generally within your business any other time?

Start thinking about your contingency plan and assess the risk of your business failing simply due to you being sick. Take the time now to figure out how everything will work without you BEFORE you get sick or need the time off. I promise, you’ll thank me for it!

The phone’s ringing, emails are flooding in, repair-man at the front door, full workload for today and the kids are going stir crazy. Sounds like just another day in the Short household but what makes today different is that we are on the second last day of a two week vacation break for Easter and we have survived… just!

In Australia we have four school terms of 11 weeks each which gives the kids a total of 12 weeks’ of holiday/vacation breaks. There are two in between each term and six over Christmas. I have three kids aged 11, 8 and nearly 5 so keeping them entertained these days is a lot different to when they were smaller.

In the past I was able to split my day into ‘during nap time’ and ‘awake time’. I would work really hard during the nap time (and at night) and be with the kids while they were awake. Now that they are older this strategy no longer works much to my dismay. Since going to school my kids have lost the ability to keep themselves entertained and the school holidays require more planning on my part to ensure we all survive it. So here are some tips I’ve found have helped me:

• Organise working play-dates with other mums who work from home. It’s my theory that the more kids you have in the house the easier it is for them to keep themselves entertained for more than 5 seconds. Yes there will be fights but if you give them some basic rules, you should find that they will sort themselves out. While they’re playing, you and your friend can get some work done.
• Email your clients to let them know the dates of the school/vacation holidays. Not all clients will remember that its school holidays and they’re usually very understanding once you explain what is going on, you just need to give them advance notice.
• Bribe your kids. Who would have thought bribery would work!! “Kids, I have a really important call to make, if you’re really quiet you can have 30 minutes on the Xbox” – works every time.
• Find a subcontractor to help. Having a backup person means you can take some of the pressure off yourself and still meet client deadlines.
• Enrol your kid’s in a free vacation care program. Look around in your area for some free kids programs. Some will give you the option of part time attendance while others will require your child to attend the full program.
• Work out a schedule with your kids and then stick to it. I usually try to only work during the morning (8am to 12pm) stop for lunch before deciding on an activity to take the kids along to during the afternoon. Some things we’ve done together include; going to the movies, going to the park, going for a bike ride or a walk, visiting friends/relatives or doing an activity together at home. I let the kids know what kind of behaviour is required of them while I work and what their reward/bribe will be for the day. Works beautifully!

The key here is to employ some planning before the vacation break hits you hard. Both your clients and your kids will thank you for it.

Originally published in the April 2011 IVAACast – The newsletter of the International Virtual Assistant Association. To subscribe click here

Tonight I have my ranty pants on. I don’t lose my temper often but when it comes to money, don’t mess with me!

I have a (now ex) client who owes me money in the thousands. This ex-client used to be a friend so I gave her the benefit of the doubt and every opportunity to pay what she owed me before decided to send it to the debt collector. In cleaning out the office we found a pile of receipts belonging to the ex-client so we posted it to her. The ex-client did a ‘return to sender’ without even looking inside the envelope. This screams to me of irresponsible behaviour and it makes me so glad that she isn’t a client or a friend anymore. I don’t condone her methods of business management or how she would run up huge bills around Melbourne then stick her head in the sand to ignore paying them. She ignores all calls, all emails and now it looks like the post too, just to get out of admitting she made a mistake and owes someone (ME!) money.

What I have learnt from all this is to not mix clients and friends and to send debts to the debt collector sooner. It’s hard chasing your own money but it has to be done. I didn’t start my business to fund someone else’s laptop!!

And to all my lovely clients who pay their invoices on time – we truly love you and without fabulous clients such as yourself, Tilda Virtual wouldn’t be where it is today!!

Being in business for yourself can seem like a roller-coaster ride at times. There are the incredible highs and then there are the incredible lows. Despite this we continue to work in/on our business which can seem to be a bit crazy at times to those not in business themselves. I know that my family and friends have all thought I was a bit looney for being a small business owner but what can I say except that I love what I do.

The key for me has always been flexibility and the willingness to find new solutions. When working from home stopped ‘working’ for me, I moved into an office space. When I had more work than I could handle I found subcontractors and employees. When my IT became painful I researched and found new solutions.

Here at Tilda Virtual Services we’re all about change and we constantly ask ourselves, ‘is this the most efficient way to do this?’ ‘how can I improve this process?’. We look for ways in which to make ourselves more efficient, we keep up to date on the latest toy on the market and we’re not afraid to sit down as a team and say ‘hey, this isn’t working for me/you/the client’ and to me this gives us an advantage over other businesses in the same industry.

So let me leave you with a question. What are you doing that needs changing and adapting? Are you honest with yourself about being flexible? Could your business do with a bit more flexibility?

Systems and procedures aren’t something we as business owners think about, particularly in the beginning when it’s just us working in the business. We’re busy getting our logo’s done, domains registered, websites created and finding clients to even think about procedures.

But as a business grows, as the number of clients increase and as we take on team members it soon becomes very clear to the business owner that systemising your business is the key to future growth.

Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time there was a VA who started her business with one client. She would write down her projects and tasks in a notebook and everything was fantastic in VA-Land. The client was happy and the VA was happy. Soon enough the VA became busier and busier. She now had multiple notebooks for all her clients but being such a visual person, found it difficult to remember where she was up to and what she needed to do each day.

The VA started using a whiteboard the size of her office wall to track everything and that worked for a period of time until she signed up her first Associate/subcontractor and became a Multi-VA. Why was the whiteboard no longer working? Her trusty sidekick lived in Kentucky USA while she lived in country NSW.

The VA then hired an employee and more subcontractors. The business grew too quickly and there came a point where the employee quit and the VA was overwhelmed. She didn’t have time to find another employee or subcontractor and felt she had to do the work of two people just to keep the business moving and her clients happy. Needless to say that if the VA had created her procedures and systemised her business, she would have been able to find a new team member quicker than you can say ‘I need help’.

Learn from my mistakes. Take the time TODAY to systemise your business. From recording how to reply to potential client emails to how to answer the phone. Procedures on when to follow up overdue invoices through to how to show your clients you care, systemise everything. Not only will it free up your time it provides a framework in which all your team members or staff know exactly what is expected of them and why. It will reinforce your brand, your professionalism and it will allow you to grow your business consistently knowing that you have the ability to cope.

So to end my story, I recently took two weeks off from my business and left it in the capable hands of my project manager Melinda and the rest of my team. The business continued to work efficiently and my team dealt with everything in my absence including dealing with new clients.

Start writing down the things you do everyday and how you do it. Systemise as you go through your day and before you know it, you’ll have a procedure manual that just needs to be made pretty.

In case you haven’t heard by now, Tilda Virtual Services has just opened its “actual” doors at Suite 1.13, 202 Jells Road in Wheelers Hill. These are real actual doors to our office which is open to the public where we provide binding, copying and faxing services in addition to our regular bookkeeping and virtual assistance services. And what would be the sense of a bunch of virtual assistants working out of an office suite if we didn’t offer virtual office space to home-based business owners?

Not many VAs actually take the leap and secure an office space outside the home. Truth be told, there’s not really much need of doing so. However, I felt strongly that I could further serve local home-based business owners by offering reception services and mail redirection; services much easier to provide from an “actual” office. Lincoln (code monkey) also wouldn’t have liked me renting meeting rooms before I secured the new office space outside of our home. “I don’t care if there’s a game on, Mr. Smith needs the family room. He booked it last week!”

But I digress. Was it easy for me to take such a big step into the unknown that is 202 Jells Road? No. Was it scary? Yes. Then again, it wasn’t easy for me to start this business when I was preparing to give birth to my third baby! You see, I don’t want to live my life in fear. I don’t believe it does one bit of good. I prefer to live my life in opportunity.

Fear crushes dreams. It stunts business growth and prevents us from reaching our full potential. It’s a nasty beast, isn’t it?

Being an entrepreneur, the very nature of it, means you’re always faced with another risk or a scary decision to make. But the way I see it, if you never feel that fear and go ahead and do it anyway, you’re never going to grow. You won’t really get anywhere if you just keep going with what feels comfortable.

I’d like to challenge you this month to do something that you fear. Go ahead and experience the fear but do it anyway and see how empowering it is. You will hopefully get used to it. After all, at the end of your days would you rather tell your grandchildren you lived your life in opportunity or in fear?

Melinda, the girls and I are madly getting ready for the Australian VA Conference. As a major sponsor via Tilda Hosting, we are able to do inserts in the goody bags and have an expo table too. We’ve got the DL flyers ready, business cards ready and we haven’t forgotten the chocolate frogs either!!

The conference is only next week but it isn’t too late to register. Please go to the website and register. You won’t regret it!

It’s the sort of thing that usually creeps up on me with no warning, the dreaded school holidays. We finally get into our groove and we are getting through the week really well only to have things change on me again. This year however is different. Not only are we in a different city and state, but I’m not sick (I’m getting over a virus instead)! In previous years I’d work so hard that come school holidays I’d get struck down with some virus and wouldn’t be able to enjoy the extra time with my kids. This year is different.

Now that we are relatively settled into our new home/school/job/home office I’ve decided to be a bit proactive in trying to survive the school holidays. Here are my strategies:

• Keep bedtime routines the same – bit of a no brainer but you’ll thank me later.
• Set up working playdates – this is where you set a day to visit with friends who also work from home for a playdate with a difference. Instead of sitting around drinking coffee and eating Tim Tams (which is still ok to do if you want to), bring your laptop and get some additional work done instead. For some reason, the more kids there are in a house the easier it is to look after them and I think it’s because they’re playing with other peeps different to their siblings. A change of scenery doesn’t hurt the creative juices either.
• Take the time to retrain your kids at the beginning of the school holidays – this means explaining that when you are on the phone or working not to interrupt unless there is blood. My kids are 9, nearly 6 and 3 and out of the three the youngest can remember the rules the best. Particularly the whole no talking to mum while mum’s on the phone or skype phone rule.
• Give them something to look forward to – This weekend we are going to see the Star Wars exhibit at Scienceworks and the kids (including the big hairy one) can’t wait. It gives me bribing power and something to dangle in front of them when they are being a bit naughty.

I’m sure there are loads more you can do to survive the school holidays so lets hear them. These are the strategies I’m using to survive these school holidays and so far so good. Tomorrow we’re off to visit Lucie and her kids and my kids were looking forward to it so much they went to bed without a peep. Got to love bribery!

Over the past three years I’ve used a number of different organisational tools both online and printed to best organise my time to my client’s advantage. Basecamp, Google Docs, Client Spot, Central Desktop and more. While each of these software packages made communicating with my team easier, it still made seeing the bigger picture difficult for me and that’s when I realised I needed to once again, change my systems. I’m a very visual person and what I was using just wasn’t cutting it or the Aussie dollar made it too expensive for my budget.

Three years ago I started with my humble notebook but then again, I only had 1 – 2 clients at the time. Task management and tracking was easy and there was no chance of anything falling through ‘the cracks’.

These days I have anywhere from 9 to 15  clients who all regularly use our services and I am yet to find a software package that fits all my needs. There have been a few that were very close but in the end they all lacked that certain something that made it perfect.

Currently I’m using a spreadsheet with a sheet for each client. My current system is far from perfect but I’m interested in hearing how others manage their client tasks and projects? Do you give your clients access and if so do they use it? Do you just use Outlook to manage everything?

Ask around in your online or offline community and chances are you know someone who started their business to be at home with their kids. Some of them may have even started their business while on maternity leave only to be told that they were ‘stark raving mad’. We all know how hard it is to start a new business, to write that business plan, to pay for our licences and to find that first client. But how many of us truly understand how having children and working from home will affect our businesses to the extent that it does?

I started my business 34 weeks pregnant with my third child while building our new home and studying at university for a degree in education full time. My boys were 6 and 3 and I’d been having a difficult pregnancy.  And yes, I was told that I was stark raving mad to even think about a business. My husband was extremely supportive but most of my extended family was very negative and frowned upon working when raising a family. All I knew was that my studies were less and less fulfilling as time went by. All I knew was that to be a great mum, I needed something besides child rearing. All I knew was that I wanted something more.

I applied for a job 33 weeks pregnant, started the following week working from home as a subcontractor and that’s when my entrepreneurial spirit showed itself. I stumbled upon the term Virtual Assistant and my head just about exploded with the information that was so readily available. But nothing really prepared me for working from home with small children.

Yes there were the articles about how to manage one’s time, how to work alongside your child and how to set up a play office so they could play and be with you. But nothing prepared me for what ultimately happened. I gave birth to a beautiful girl who was very sick. Instead of taking a few days off (pfft, what do people know, I can ‘pop’ out this baby and be back at the computer in no time) we had a short stay in the NICU and didn’t leave hospital for two weeks. I had systems in place, my mum became my assistant and looked after my one and only client but even then, I wasn’t prepared.

No one tells you about breastfeeding while typing one handed and talking with a client on Skype. No one tells you about how segmented your day will become. No one tells you that you’re supposed to sleep at night. And there’s no one to keep a close eye on you for post-natal depression (post partum).

The first thing you’ll need to discover is what type of schedule works best for you and then to not feel guilty about it. If you’re a morning person that’s great and if you’re a night person, that’s great too. Figure out what part of the day you are the most productive, map it against your family’s needs and try to stick to it.

The next thing is to understand that it’s ok to have nanna naps, even if there are no kids at home. If you need 10 minutes or 30 minutes to recharge, do it! It’s part and parcel of taking care of yourself so you don’t fall apart. I personally am a night person but my husband is a morning person so he gets up to the kids in the morning, feeds them, dresses them all before leaving to go to work. But I’m the one who gets up to the kids in the middle of the night and puts miss M back to bed 4 times between 1am and 4am.

Set up a default schedule where you block in everyone’s commitments including your own. Colour-code the schedule for each person in the family. One thing I have noticed with two children in school now is how busy we are. They don’t do a lot of after school activities but remembering which child has library day and which child has ICT (information communication technology – fancy pants term for information technology) is a lot easier now with the family schedule on the wall.

Create a support circle of business mums. They don’t necessarily have to be in the same industry as you or even have children the same age as yours, you just need to surround yourself with people who understand what it is like to be a mum in business for herself. Family members won’t understand and your partner may not understand. You’ll receive all sorts of advice from all corners and I promise it will all conflict with what you are trying to do. Having your circle of cheerleaders’ means you have people to share your highs and lows with.

Try to understand that running a business with a newborn is vastly different to running a business with a 9 year old or even a 19 year old. Your child has needs, wants and desires that changes, as they get older. My billing record is at an all time high that dates back to when miss M was less than 6 months old. Why? She slept a lot so I was able to put in the extra time. I was also post-natal at the time. Recognise what your family needs from you and be prepared as best you can for when it changes.

Each child is different. What works for me won’t work for you. I don’t have a play area in my office because I can’t handle the mess. I need a clear and tidy workspace to be able to work and kids are made to be messy. So we have a separate playroom for them to be messy to their heart’s content. All three of my kids are pretty independent and so I can snatch 10 or 20 minutes to make a phone call. But there are days when I can’t do that, so I don’t. We go outside instead. Listen to your kids and you’ll soon figure out what you need to do.

Trust in yourself. We all do a great job with our kids AND our businesses. While owning a thriving business and raising children is no easy thing to do, I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world. Don’t think that one size fits all. Find the solutions that suit you and your family and you’ll notice the difference it makes to your business immediately. Your children are only young once so make the most of it.

About Kylie Short:
Kylie Short, owner of Tilda Virtual Services specialises in providing Internet Marketing Support, Administrative Support, Hosting and Website Design to coaches, consultants and small business owners working from home. Visit her website at http://www.tildavirtual.com.au