Hop ahead to:
A focus on care
Potentially scary parts
Creating value through care
Virtual Assistance, Reimagined
I will be forever grateful for the phenomenal level of patience, flexibility, and support you gave me this year. It helped me to be more courageous, find stamina when I didn’t have any, and finally start to take of myself, too.
- Ashley Sinclair of SelfActivator
A focus on care
Creative, bold, visionary women know the value of self-care, and their businesses thrive when they regularly invest in their most valuable business asset: themselves.
What’s self-care?
Self-care is time spent away from your revenue-earning activities to rest, recharge, revitalize, and otherwise sustain you and your creativity. Only you know what specific activities encompass your own self-care. Self-care is especially important for women running businesses, because it clarifies and strengthens the line between where your business ends and YOU begin.
OK, so what’s biz-care?
Biz-care is time spent away from direct revenue-earning activities to recharge, revitalize and otherwise sustain your business’s growth and vision. Sound familiar? Biz-care is self-care, reimagined for the wellbeing of your living, growing business.
| Examples of self-care | Examples of biz-care |
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Women who run their own businesses usually have every intention of investing in self-care. Many of us became entrepreneurs because we wanted to honor our strengths, gifts, and needs in authentic ways that nourish us.
But finding time and energy to do it can be tough. Your business is your baby, and it’s your responsibility to take care of the urgent emails, the calls, the meetings, the planning, the writing, the website, the blog, the shipments, the social networking, on and on. And then there’s the rest of your life demanding your time and attention. Eventually, self-care takes a back seat, even though you know it’s important.
There’s a better way.
The bottom-line: I strengthen women-owned businesses and ventures by creating mutually-empowered partnerships that free women up to take time for self-care and biz-care. Because I invest care-fully in your business, you can better care for own wellbeing and for your business’s.
Potentially scary parts
A word about delegation.
Oh heavens yes, delegating can be hard.
Let me be really, super honest here. I don’t know your business. No one can care for your business the way you do; no one carries the elephant of responsibility like you do; no one stayed up late nights dreaming and planning and working like you did. Your business is your baby, and no one else will take care of it like you can.
This is exactly why you need to care for yourself first.
I work hard to earn trusted partnerships with my clients so they feel comfortable delegating tasks that allow them to focus on what they love and what they do best.
If we work together, my first step will be investing my time in learning everything I can about your business to make sure I fully understand your values, processes, and needs. Every moment I spend serving your business is rooted in care, commitment, knowledge, and respect for you. That’s how I earn your trust. That’s what I mean when I say that I build mutually empowered partnerships.
Creating value through care
When you hire someone to take care of some things so you can invest in self-care and biz-care, there absolutely is increased potential value for your bottom line. Read: your revenue-earning potential grows.
However, the prospect of spending money to make money, honestly, sucks. It never stops feeling like a gamble, or a leap of faith at best. Running a small business means you don’t have the luxury of regular, predictable paychecks, and every deposit feels hard-won and tenuous. Seriously, I hear you, and I will never propose that you spend money on my services solely to make more money. Ew.
Luckily, there are three kinds of value connected with self-care and biz-care, and two of them are guaranteed to pay dividends 100% of the time.
(1) Time: Guaranteed.
When you invest in your own self-care needs, the first thing you get back is time. With the benefit of added time every week, you can choose to focus on the real change- and money-making parts of your business or invest it back into your own personal wellbeing. The ball is back in your court.
According to the 80/20 rule, 20% of your actions will create 80% of your results. What would happen if you redirected more time and energy to the parts of your work that made the most difference for you and your clients?
(2) Quality of life: Guaranteed.
I’m guessing quality of life had something to do with your decision to venture out on your own, right? (I certainly hope so!) When you invest in self-care and biz-care, you enjoy your time with your business more. You stave off burnout. Your vacations actually restore you. You do more of the stuff that makes you glow, the kinds of things that you dreamed about doing when you started your business. When you do the parts of your work that make you come alive and delegate the rest to a trusted partner, you are honoring yourself and your needs.
(3) Money: Possibly.
When you and your business are fresh, energized, and ripe, you have so much more to offer your clients: you have a richer imagination, more energy, greater focus. Could that help you increase your bottom line? Perhaps.
It may instead be enough for you to create time and cultivate more joy in life. For me and my business, self-care is both the means and the end. Only you know what’s best for you and your baby.
Virtual Assistance, Reimagined
When I say that I “reimagine” Virtual Assistance, I mean that I consciously, creatively provide a different experience for my clients than they’d get anywhere else.
I like to think that VA also stands for Virtual Ally. That’s so much nicer, don’t you think? When we agree to work together, I become part of your team.
This is fundamentally different from hiring someone only to take care of a few to dos here and there. (While it’s a valid approach to delegating, it’s just not how I work best.) It’s the difference between bringing in someone to hammer nails and someone who will help you build the house – in part by hammering nails when need be. You follow?
Even if the day-to-day tasks are the same, what’s most important is the relationship we build together.
Things that I intentionally do differently:
- I replicate a creative feel, rather than a corporate one, as an assurance of quality.
- I do not outsource my labor to “cheaper” overseas countries and “pass the savings on to you.”
- You do not pay expensive referral fees for VA databases and registries to work with me.
- You and I will together decide if we’d be a good fit for each other, rather than being offered as “best matches” from long lists of people.
I shape and position my biz in a way that values creativity, mutual empowerment and the road less traveled. I wouldn’t want to leave my baby in the hands of someone who doesn’t understand, let alone share, my values.
So I work hard to create a business to which I would entrust my own biz-baby.
“Be the change.”
No one ever said you have to go it alone. I’d really like to know your business. I’d like to make an investment in it and learn what makes it tick; learn what’s important to you and your clients. I am so excited to see how you and your baby will grow when you have the time and the energy to invest in the care you both need. I hope we can be partners in that, together.
