I’ve been a busy VA!
November 7, 2008 by Kylie Short · Leave a Comment
I have to confess I’ve been really busy with both client work and some exciting new projects for Tilda Virtual Services. I’m in the midst of creating my first info product as a joint venture with Angela den Hollander at communic8 design and I have been working hard at rebranding my e-newsletter.
The newsletter is now called Techno Update - and it will be a monthly cheat sheet on the latest technology for online businesses trying to market their services or products. Topics will include VoIP, Content Management Systems, Customer Relationship Management Software, Setting up and promoting Teleseminars and much more.
Techno Update will give you all the information you’ll need to decide if using particular software or technology is going to help you to achieve your goals.
I kind of can’t help myself and read a LOT of ’stuff’ on the Internet and I thought what better way to market my business and my services than to share this knowledge with the rest of the world.
To subscribe you can click on the home page and subscribe in the form there on the right or you can send a blank email to kylie-349256@autocontactor.com
Why not drop me a line and tell me what it is you are looking for, but don’t know what you need?
Do you have a contingency plan?
August 5, 2008 by Kylie Short · 1 Comment
The Virtual Assistant (otherwise known as Kylie) woke from her slumber and rose to eat breakfast with her young family. Afterwards code monkey assisted her in preparing each of the trainee code monkeys/Virtual Assistants for child care and school. She just knew that today would be a fantastic day. The sun was shining brightly, she loved her family and she loved her work.
As she travelled to her brand new office outside of her home, she quickly summarised what had to be done that day in her head. She’d need to check in with each of her Associates as well as complete client projects due that day.
After 5 minutes she arrived, collected her belongings from the boot and walked the last few metres to her door. “Hmm, that’s strange” she thought to herself. “Beckie is normally here by now, I bet she’s left me a text message on my phone.” And so she had. Beckie was unwell today and so the Virtual Assistant rearranged the schedule slightly and reallocated some of the client tasks scheduled for that day.
The Virtual Assistant unpacked her fourth baby (her MacBook Pro), turned it on and went to make herself a coffee with her cappachino machine. When she returned she saw that it appeared to be having trouble starting up. She did a forced quit and restarted. Still, the same thing happened again.
Nearly in tears, the Virtual Assistant called her code monkey to tell him of her troubles. “oh oh, I think we need to reinstall it” he said.
—–
Normally this is the part of the story where you read about the person being unable to meet deadlines, unable to communicate and unable to work AT ALL because they didn’t have a contingency plan for when things like this happen. Luckily I do. I simply jumped onto a PC, logged onto the network and other than the different operating system, it was like I was on my Mac. I had NO DOWNTIME!
Have you planned for contingencies?
When Word goes ‘bad’
May 16, 2008 by Kylie Short · 1 Comment
It’s been a marathon but we solved it. What did we solve? A good friend of mine and Associate VA went to open a Word document I sent to her for a client task. Only problem was that when she went to open it, she got an error message and Word refused to respond.
My Associate had looming deadlines including coursework for her PhD, my client task and her own client tasks. Word not working = very upset and stressed out VA.
She persevered for hours before grabbing me on Skype where we Googled, troubleshooting to no avail. Three hours after we started working on solving it together, my codemonkey husband came home. Another three and a half hours later (now 4am for my stressed out VA) Codemonkey solved the problem. He used an article from Geekswithblogs and thank goodness the article was there.
Troubleshooting more often than not is simply a case of trying multiple solutions until you find the right one. In this case there was a huge number of solutions we attempted until we found the right one. Why did this happen? Who knows.. what I do know is that my lovely VA can now go to sleep, has recovered her documents and all is well with her laptop.
More evidence that I’m a nerd..
January 27, 2008 by Kylie Short · 1 Comment
I had the pleasure of talking with Katie from Mint Coaching this week and she mentioned to me that she was surfing later on during the day. I of course responded “oh yeah, I’ve been catching up on my blog reading….” and there was this silence on the other end of the phone.
Katie said “um, I’m going surfing” to which I asked her “what, with water and … stuff?”
Silence…
“OH I get it now, you’re going surfing”
BAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Poor woman, I doubt she’s ever spoken to a real live nerd before.
Trojan targets Mac Users
November 6, 2007 by Kylie Short · Leave a Comment
Well it was bound to happen one day. Don’t people have better things to do??????
Read about it here.