Coach Virtual Assistant Blog: View from The Edge

Picture this…

It’s Tuesday morning and you’re sitting on your back patio sipping tea, listening to the birds and watching the sun rise. You get up, and head indoors ready to start the day responding to the 30 emails in your inbox, prep for that important new-client conference call in an hour, and complete the many items on your agenda for the day when, WHAM! Your husband rushes in yelling, “We need to go to the hospital, NOW!” What do you do first?

Yes, I know you should grab your bag and head for the door, but what about your business? Who will take care of that while you’re gone? Do you have an emergency phone-tree for support set up?

This was my Tuesday morning, complete with hysterical husband. Here’s how it went for me…
Run upstairs to get dressed, type hurried email to clients to let them know that I’ll be out for a while, sit and manually add client email addresses to the BCC field one-by-one. Send an email off to my most trusted team member, Yoana Pedroso of Advantage Office Support asking her to hold down the fort. Throw the laptop, pen and paper in a bag and head for the car 20 minutes later.

Clearly, this is not good.  What if there was a fire/flood/hurricane?  What would we do?  Who would we call? Will there be Wi-Fi where we’re going?

Lucky for us we live near an excellent hospital we rushed into the emergency room to find ourselves the only people there.  Not one other emergency case at 9am on a Tuesday!  Fancy that!  We were taken right in, immediately seen by a nurse, then a doctor, a CT scan, handed the prescriptions for Peter and we were out the door in just over an hour.  While there, I discovered Wi-Fi and so was able to continue checking email — or rather watching the number of emails awaiting response go up and up and up…

The rest of my day was a downhill race to midnight when, after two embarassing mistakes, I decided to call it a day and hit the sack.

Friday afternoons are reserved for my business administration.  Guess what I’ll be tackling this week?  Emergency planning.  I want it all down on paper so that if anything happens to me my husband knows who to alert.  If anything happens to our home office, we have off-site backups of everything.  Most importantly, I want to have a contact person who is equipped to jump in if I make the emergency call/email for help.

What are you doing about emergency planning in your business?

What a great tool! Twitter search is like Google of the Twitterverse. Punch in a search word and it pulls up all the tweets from the last… well I went back as far as 20 days, but it looks to me like it goes on just about forever!

Twitter Search.

Great!  One of my incredible clients, Charlie Cook of MarketingforSuccess.com was quoted in an article in the York Sunday Record in York, PA.

Great article!  Read it here >>

Network to build business visibility - York, Pennsylvania.

Keeping with the Twitter theme, (you know how we love a good theme around here), I wanted to include a link to this article by Brandice. Very smart way to deal with the weird Twitter spammer people.

Twitterquette and the “Follow Spammer”. Read More >>
(Sounds like a new age fairytale, huh?)

Speaking of Twitter, I have a couple of resources to share this weekend. Chris Brogan posted this great post, “50 Ideas on sing Twitter for Business”. A great read, I picked up some tips and learned about some other sites that are handy to use in conjunction with Twitter. Great!

50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business >>

This week, Facebook aficionado Mari Smith tweeted about this article and I kept it, thinking it would make a fun Friday post.

I just love that even a 102 year old is active on Facebook! This post is timely as I intend to spend the weekend cleaning up my FB profile and getting it “marketing ready” so that I can use it for my business and not just for personal connections. Besides, let’s face it. I never use it for personal stuff either!

Enjoy the article and have a great weekend!

The Oldest Person on Facebook >>

I am excited about the upcoming Guest Expert Call hosted by Life Coach Mary, featuring Aurora Winter, author of From Heartbreak to Happiness and founder of the Grief Coach Academy.

As a coach, when someone blurts out a devastating fact, such as, “My son was just killed in a car crash” — how you respond in the next few seconds will mean the difference between making a friend for life — or being relegated to the outer circle forever. In such moments, there is no time to prepare.

The time to prepare is now.

In this no cost phone seminar, Aurora Winter give you practical tools to deal with anyone who is devastated by death, divorce, disease, or another heartbreaking loss.

Use this link to register >> Life Coach Mary | Aurora Winter

P.S. I am extra proud to share this event with you as BOTH of these incredible coaches are favorite clients of mine.

Charlie Cook of Marketing for Success released a new, updated version of his well-known marketing guide,
7 Steps to Get More Clients and Grow Your Business. The book is available for download from his website.

Use this link to get your copy >>

Stumbled into a great article this week.  Erica Douglass  raises some interesting points about placing a “real” value on your time.

Douglass says,  “… I spent 3 hours over the course of one week focusing on getting my company to the first result in Google for certain web hosting-related search terms. Those 3 hours paid off, netting my business over $250,000 in annual revenue.  …What is my hourly wage as an entrepreneur, then? Somewhere between $10 and $83,333 ($250,000/3).”

As an entrepreneur, how DO you put a value on your time?  What tasks can you outsource, to give you more time to focus on these valuable business tasks?

Follow this link to read the article “You Are Worth More than You Think” >>

My colleague, Erin Blaskie, is hosting the first annual Summer Speaker Series featuring an amazing line-up of speakers including James Roche, Christina Merkley, Sheri McConnell, Alexis Neely, Allana Pratt, Lou Bortone, Viki Viertel, Lynn Scheurell, Kathie Thomas, Debbie LaChusa, Wendy Weiss, Terri Z, Donna Gunter, Diana Ennen and so, so, so many more.

Here’s the deal… She’s featuring TWO speakers PER DAY for the entire month of August (not including weekends because really, who likes working weekends?)

The best part is that this amazing series of speakers is priced VERY affordably.  It’s going to be one of the hottest events of the summer and you’ve got an invitation from me!

Simply click through this link and register today.  You won’t be disappointed!

You can purchase a seat in one track, two tracks or get audio downloads included too (along with your live seat) so what are you waiting for!  I’ve heard there is a cap of 200 people due to the bridge line and with the speakers involved, that won’t last long!

Visit and register now… ‘see’ you on the calls!