The Sounding Board

We all make them, we all break them – every year. Yup! It’s that time of year again. Time for your New Year’s Resolution! What will yours be this year? Will you stick to it?

This year, I have two New Year’s Resolutions. One is business, one is personal. Personally? I’m going back to the gym. I’m getting back into my size 5’s if it kills me. However, I refuse to disclose how far I’ll have to go to get down to a 5. J That’s my personal New Year’s Resolution.

Now, for my business New Year’s Resolution, I’ve decided to move towards something more beneficial to my business (and subsequently my personal life.) I have raised my rates – something I’ve only done once since I opened my virtual doors four years ago this January. I have scaled down my practice in order to specialize in several key areas with only my favorite clients. That gives me more time to focus on the things in my life that I truly enjoy, both personally and professionally. I’ve also done something rather drastic compared to most professional Virtual Assistants – I’ve done away with billable hours! Tracking hours is one of the things about my business that I truly despise. I hate it, to be perfectly honest. It feels like I’m nickel & diming my clients to death tracking every minute. Not to mention, the time I spend tracking hours could be much better used for other pursuits.

So, I’ve moved to a flat rate system for Virtually Yours. Rather than trading time for money, I have instead focused on the end results. What do my clients want to accomplish? What role do they need me to fill in their business? THIS is what my fee should be based on, not the tedious time-consuming focus on billable hours. Rather than have clients hand over tasks and bill according to the time it takes to complete each task, I instead focus on the end result. For example, if a client retains my services to manage their enewsletter and calendar, they aren’t as much concerned with the number of hours it takes to do that each month. (Well, okay, maybe they are…but that shouldn’t be where they focus.) Instead, the focus should be providing readers with usable content on a consistent basis via their newsletter, and keeping their calendar of appointments & commitments organized. The end results shouldn’t suffer in quality simply because the client can only afford to pay for 5 or 10 hours worth of work each month & the tasks take 12 hours to complete. What corners are you going to cut in order to stay in budget? And if you have to cut corners & suffer less quality to stay within budget, then what’s the point of hiring someone else to do it for you? Doesn’t it seem so much more simple to say I’ll take over your enewsletter and your calendar, doing whatever tasks are required to accomplish those goals, and charge you X amount for taking care of that for you? In my opinion, that makes more sense. Not to mention, simplifies things for my clients AND me.

I like things simple. I like things that are easy to understand. My clients like it too. I think it will be a win-win for all. J

Happy New Year!

This entry was posted on Friday, December 28th, 2007 at 5:32 am and is filed under General Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.