Making your clients work

What? Your clients need to work? But aren’t you, their VA, doing it all for them?  Up to a point.

I often smile to myself when having phone meetings with clients. We have an action list of items for me to attend to, but at the end of the discussion, the client often has their own action list too.  Because, after all, if they want me to complete my duties, there are some things they need to do.

What kind of things do you ask?

Well, business cards.  How often have you come across clients with business cards in bundles with rubber bands around them, or stuffed into drawers, or envelopes, etc. They need to get the pile together and hand it over to you to do the data entry, update the database, or whatever is needed.

The contacts list in their email program – you’ll need to explain how they can export the file to send to you.

Preparing information for bios/profiles for LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter. Unless you’ve known them for years, you won’t know anything of their past history and will need that information to action the very things they’ve engaged you to do.

This is just a small sample.  So when the client sometimes say ‘I’ve got more homework than you have’ just smile (even if they can’t see the smile, they can hear it in your voice) and remind them that once you do have that information, you’ll be able to complete that particular action as soon as possible.