Virtual Assistants

MYOB 2009-01-19
Show #98
Release date: 19 Jan 2009

Notes

Mind Your Own Business Facebook Group member Lynnelle Wilson asked for a show on Virtual Assistants ... so here it is.

Lynelle wanted to know whether or not they’re a good idea and when is the right time to hire one.

Guy Kingston is joined by best-selling business author John Richards and the two first set out what they feel is a working definition of Virtual Assistant. They then offer insights based on their own experiences along with some useful tips to help answer Lynnelle’s questions.

Also, listener Kevin Hardingham follows up on our Podcast #96 – Sales Staff, with a useful tip about turning staff meetings into sales meetings.

Listener’s Link

Scott Griffiths, MD of Lucas Lynch, wants the world to know:

Lucas Lynch are a web development studio offering cutting-edge web based solutions and related web services. We are focused 100% on the web and our expertise lies in eCommerce, eBusiness, extranet & intranet applications. Our solutions are tailored specifically to client requirements, this means we only offer bespoke solutions.

We Apologise That The Revolution Has Been Delayed...

Is there a more futile occupation than “futurologist”?

Predicting the future is notoriously difficult. The only certainty is “expect the unexpected”.

However, those of us engaged in business have to make an educated guess if we are going to stand a chance of predicting coming trends and developing strategies to benefit from them. Also, it must be said, it can be good fun making those guesses.

Nowhere is this more apparent than on the subject of how information technology will change our lives in general and our businesses in particular.

It was in the 1970s and 1980s that the full potential of the silicon chip began to become apparent.

Then the talk was of a “revolution” in every aspect of our business lives. Industry would be run by robots. We would all work from home, possibly as freelancers. Virtual offices would replace huge buildings. Small, flat organisations would replace mighty hierarchies. One of our greatest problems would be how to use our increased leisure time.

As with all predictions, some have been proved accurate, some inaccurate, and most partly accurate. Errors are usually more in predicting the speed of change than the general direction.

There is a general trend: predictions tended to under-estimate the speed of technological change itself but over-estimate its impact on the way business is done.

Even experts have been astonished by the progress made since the 1980s in both the speed and the storage capacity of computers. This had led in turn to dramatic increase in the range of possible functions. True multi-media capacity is now an option for most consumers: the real design challenge is no longer how to make it more complex, but how to make it simpler and easier to use.

At the same time, miniaturisation has made all this technical power mobile.

Thin mobile telephones now have more computing power and functions than the giant computers of thirty years ago. Laptop computers in 2008 are ten or twenty times more powerful than desktops sold a decade earlier.

It seems that a computer generation is now about three years.

So where are all the people working from home, the virtual offices, the flat organisations, and the “portfolio lives”?

Most people are still working long hours for big organisations in big offices.

The technology has long been there to change all that, but business has been slow to adapt.

Yet there are signs of change. The growth of “virtual assistants” is one aspect of that change. They are now recognised more and more as a profession in their own right, and some are organising themselves as such: there is now a UK Association of Virtual Assistants.

The recession is likely to increase the supply of, and then the demand for, virtual assistants. Many of the jobs that will be lost will not come back. Employers will seek more flexibility in future.

Perhaps the recession will force business to come to terms with other aspects of technological change. The organisations that survive will not be those that tie up capital in large permanent staffs and huge office buildings. The long-predicted age of freelancing and flexi-time may be forced on us at last.

The recession may also encourage many former workers to reassess their priorities. They may decide that there is more to life than spending long hours commuting in order to spend even longer hours at someone else’s office.

Lenin, who knew a thing or two about revolutions, said that it took crisis to bring one about.

Perhaps one of the side-effects of the present crisis will be the revolution in our working habits that has long been the logical consequence of our technological revolution.