this week's featured member »
This section is dedicated to the members of VASG and gives them a chance to shine!
With the launch of our new site we would like to say a very big thank you to a special member who has dedicated an awful lot of her personal time to negotiating some truly great deals with suppliers, all with the sole aim of benefitting her fellow members and so I would like to hand over to Helen Stothard of HLS Business Solutions and TeamHLSBS….
“I am really honoured to have been selected to be one of the spotlight VAs on the VASG website.
I am a simple northern lass, who decided to set up a Virtual Assistant business in early 2009 without actually knowing what the term Virtual Assistant meant, or that there was an entire industry out there surrounding it. I just knew I wanted to work from home, for a variety of clients, doing a range of tasks.
Now just over a year later I run my own successful business and have already expanded, setting up TeamHLSBS, my fantastic team of associates. We work together to provide traditional VA services to my clients covering everything from Call Handling to CRM Management. I have clients across the UK and Europe, in a variety of industries. However, they seem to all require a similar service from me, someone to sort them out!
Using cloud based systems has never been so simple, and it makes us work more efficiently and effectively for clients. By using these systems, and encouraging our clients to use them to their full potential we save them so much time, which we then put to use in other areas, be it being the first responder to a website enquiry, setting up meetings or training events, following up on enquiries or handling travel or research requests. We also have a growing base of bookkeeping clients through our association with Xero, and I was delighted to achieve Xero Certified Advisor status at the beginning of June this year.
No two days are the same, I have some clients who only ever communicate via email or Skype and others who like to have regular Skype video chats. I have never met the majority of my clients and yet we have a fantastic relationship. This has been achieved through the use of Social Media, which has been responsible for the huge growth in the business and the majority of my clients. You may also have heard that I am a bit of a Twitter addict! In order to succeed as a VA I strongly believe that it is more about building relationships than just accomplishing the tasks, albeit doing that correctly does make a difference! I think all VAs are entrepreneurs at heart, otherwise we wouldn’t be running our own businesses.
To succeed as a VA you need to have a strong will, have confidence in your abilities and have a strong support network, and VASG has been a key support network for me. TeamHLSBS was also set up to give some of that support back to the community, be that training, resources or a helping pair of hands when needed.
By collaborating with other VAs HLS Business Solutions is able to offer a complete service to my clients, if I personally don’t have the skills or experience then one of my team does, if I am out of action for any reason then my clients are still being cared for.
I have gone from someone just looking to make a wage from working from home to actually having a full time business that I am hugely proud of, and a client base that I love working with. And I honestly don’t think I could ask for any more!”
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