The cross blog conversation between Tricia of Time Saver VA and myself continues. If this is your first time here please go to our first conversation and follow along. Tricia and I have been doing this CBC for awhile now. She’s asked me some great questions and I enjoy hearing ‘newbie’ questions. Once again she’s asked me a great question.

Tricia asks:

Tishia, do you make your clients sign agreement forms?

Yes and no Tricia. This is actually something that I have to start getting better at doing. I need to make every client sign one especially my retainer clients. For awhile I was doing good about making new clients sign them. If a client doesn’t ask I tend to not push the issue.

For more than one reason that isn’t the smartest business move. A signed contract not only protects my client as well as myself but it also states all my policies, rates, late fee, etc plain as day. If an issue were to ever arise, I’d have a contract to fall back on.

Now I’ve made a post-it note to myself that I need to update my contract and start making it mandatory that all clients sign one. Thanks for asking that question & reminding me how important contracts really are!

A Question for Tricia:

Do you make your clients sign contracts? 

Ok so I know it wasn’t very original turning around and asking you the same question Tricia but now I’m curious as to what your policy is.

The cross blog conversation between Tricia of Time Saver VA and myself continues. If this is your first time here please go to our first conversation and follow along.

First I have to apologize that it has taken me over a week to answer Tricia’s question. As we all know sometimes life happens and things need to be taken care of while we let something else sit on the back burner. Let’s just say life happened and I had to take care of some things and get myself sorted out. Thankfully I am blessed to work at home and can take some time off when needed.

But now it’s time to get back to the cross blog conversation and onto answering Tricia’s question.

Tricia Asks:

When you struggle to find content for your website blog what do you do?

One of my weak areas is adding content to my site on a regular basis. Before anyone attacks me with the “content is king” lecture let me defend myself and say that I have somethings up my sleeve to implement that will take care of this issue

Until I have my ducks in a row and start doing what I have planned I have been writing about products that I’m using, membership sites, etc. I’ve thrown in a blog post with a new customer testimonial…anything that comes to mind I blog about.

I’ve just recently set up Google Alerts for some different business related terms that I hope will also help inspire some content creation. And I’ll also be checking into some PLR items because I absolutely love rewriting PLR (guess you can imagine that’s one of my services I offer…LOL) and I also have thought about using a Ghost Writer as well.

I hope that gives you some ideas Tricia and answered your question.

A Question for Tricia:

We all learn from our mistakes. Think back to when you first started your business until now. What is the one mistake that made you cringe when it happened but you learned a valuable lesson from it?

If this is your first time here please read the first conversation that Tricia and I had together. This week I’ve been asked a great question, one that didn’t take long to come up with my answer.

Tricia asks:  

Tishia is there a service out there that you don’t know how to do but wish you could learn so that you can offer it to your clients?

Yes Tricia there is definitely something I wish I could offer my clients that I don’t. I do basic WordPress customization but I want to be able to do more in depth customization! I’ve been intrigued with WordPress ever since I started working with it. I love it but sometimes hate it too ;-)  Eventually I would like to learn more coding, etc so that I can offer more customizations. Until then, I’m enjoying the basic customization I do offer.

A Question for Tricia:

Now that your kids are out of school for the summer, how is this going to affect your schedule? Will you make changes to accommodate your kids being home or will you still work the same hours you have been?

I’m back with another question from my CBC with Tricia of Time Saver VA. If this is your first time visiting, please check out our first conversation here. You can read her answer to my last question here.
Tricia’s Question for Me:

How often do you check your email?  And does checking your email really seem to eat up your time?

I suppose I have to answer this question honestly don’t I? This is one of my downfalls, but I’m working on it every day. I’m obsessive about checking my email. It used to be I was ok with only checking in the morning and then in the afternoon.

Once my business began to grow and I had more emails coming in it was a bit overwhelming opening my email first thing in the morning and seeing all that I needed to deal with. So I picked up a bad habit…leaving my email program open all the while I was online. It’s very distracting and a habit I certainly don’t recommend! Having it open at all times makes reading and responding to emails even more time consuming, in my opinion than if you just schedule say an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon.

I’m back to only checking it in the morning and afternoon. Ok well I’m working really hard on only checking it twice a day! I schedule 1 hour every day for checking my email first thing in the morning. I schedule 30 minutes every day for checking my email in the afternoon (I have more in the mornings than in the afternoon).

When I know that I have a certain amount of time scheduled to deal with email, it keeps me more focused and on target. When I was in the habit of leaving it open all day, it was too time consuming because I would stop what I was doing when I saw that an email had come in.

I think I got a bit wordy on answering that question. I didn’t mean to ramble so much and I hope it made some sort of sense to you Tricia. Now I have another question for you.

A question for Tricia:

Now that you’ve been working as a VA for awhile, what’s the one piece of advice you would give another newbie coming into this market? 

It’s time for another question in my CBC (cross blog conversation) with Tricia of Time Saver VA. Last time Tricia answered my question of what her ‘perfect’ internship would be so it’s only fitting that her question for me this week has to do with interns. If you are just joining us, please check out our first conversation so you can follow along.

Tricia’s Question for Me:

If you had to hire an intern what qualities would you look for in an intern?

There are several different qualities I would look for in an intern. The main characteristics I would look for in a person applying for an internship with me (if I were to offer one) are:

• self-starter
• eager to learn
• certain amount of time (ex: 10 hours) to devote each week to the internship
• ethical
• good communicator
• follows instructions
• a new VA just starting out or someone interested in starting a VA business

The last thing I would look for in a possible intern would be someone that I could potentially use as my backup VA and partner with them on future projects such as information products, audio recordings, teleseminars, etc. In other words, someone that I could work side by side with that would be an asset to me and my business.

Another great question from Tricia and I look forward to the next one she sends my way.

A question for Tricia:

What marketing tool(s) have you found to be the most beneficial to you in getting your name out there and obtaining new clients?