Having started her activity in the banking and financing area, Rachel decided to become a work from home mother at least until the age of school.
The as the experience went on, Rachel understood that she could make a living by keeping working at home.
Rachel took Gina Horkey Handbook course and during that process, she realized that her skill set was somehow outdated, which led her to get some training on tools and processes.
She confesses still being flabbergasted year to date, just one year after having started and already with 7 clients as her steady client base.
There is a huge market demand for Virtual Assistants
Inbox Zero does not mean having “zero” e-mails in each inbox, but to have the e-mails supported by a proper filing system that prioritizes the e-mails according to corporate priorities.
Common pains
Everyone gets an almost constant stream of e-mails and just deleting them is not the solution.
Most people although highly qualified in their line of business, do not deal in a suitable manner with their email flow, not managing it an effective way that opposite to bearing a negative impact towards their core business, in fact, leverages it.
E-mail excessive flow overwhelms most people
The challenge escalates even further when speaking about clients whose business implies a flow of messages from their own clients.
Towards some clients and in specific cases, Rachel also takes care of answering all e-mail messages which do not require a specific answer that depends on the client specific knowhow while forwarding the ones that require via Trello.
Despite some clients who require her to login into their specific mail systems, most times Rachel, leads clients to use Gmail, since it is free, highly available and redundant, with assured backups, all at a very low cost.
Starting up
One of the first things Rachel does when start supporting a new client is to set up a dedicated Trello board.
Then, Rachel does a survey through the client email “architecture”, how many folders and subfolders, what is the logic behind and so on.
Afterwards it’s time to propose optimizations, by adapting both the structure and the processes.
The beginning is the most time-consuming phase when both parties need to adapt to an optimized workflow.
Communication
Some clients will require regular (even weekly) meetings over skype or other while other clients as long as things are working do not take action to communicate.
Rachel’s clients range from Physicians to Bloggers or Marketing Experts and each presents a very distinct challenge. The Blogger email box seems to be the Mississippi River while in the case of the physician the challenge is not volume but content.
And the workload represents an average flow of about 100 daily emails per client.
Service Scope
The service in some cases goes beyond merely the email component, tackling items like Content Writing or Social Media.
Content Management mainly towards proofreading and editing is also one main accessory task towards some clients since consistency and quality are vital for some profiles.
In some cases collecting feedback about some client activities or planning and scheduling travel initiatives is also a complimentary service.
Although Rachels’ Core Business pertains email management, it does not consume 100% of her work time, therefore some accessory services are also provided to clients that require them.
Humans like their comfort zone, but if in need, its ok to get help while focusing on the essentials