“When I finally walked away from nearly 9 years of secondary English teaching in January 2018, I was, I have to confess, uncertain of my future”
“When I finally walked away from nearly 9 years of secondary English teaching in January 2018, I was, I have to confess, uncertain of my future. I had already been supporting my partner with his motorcycle business for the previous year, learning a plethora of new skills along the way. However, the business was still growing & I couldn’t work for him full time.
Following a plaintive Facebook plea about any part time work vacancies in the local area, Helena Parrott contacted me in mid February 2018. Her business ‘Virtually Smart Ltd’ had taken off & she needed some help with her social media representation, website content & invoicing. The agreement was very much to see how things go, but six months on, we are still working together & driving Virtually Smart Ltd forward.
Helena Parrot & I have spent some considerable time over the previous six months collaborating & helping Helena to identify her ideal client avatar. Helena, a keep Gamer, is very interested in gaming, programming & new technologies which are forging business & enhancing life alike. Helena also has a very keen interest in engineering advances & luckily, so do I.
When I first took over the social media representation for Virtually Smart Ltd, I was very focused on advertising what Helena was able to help business owners with. The advertising I was formulating & the blogs I was writing were very geared towards the VA options Helena could offer & how they could help enhance a business. However, it was in the first few months of working for Helena, that we had our first collaborative meeting to consider which direction Helena wanted to take Virtually Smart Ltd. With an extensive connection to Ricardo, Shoreham, Helena is very used to working alongside Engineers, Programmers & Data analysts. This we knew would give Helena an advantage in this sector, as she had a considerable understanding of the ways those in this sector worked & what kind of business support models would suit their working needs.
With this new vision in hand & with the mantra ‘make your reader feel happier or smarter or both’ I completely reformatted the Virtually Smart Ltd blogging & social media content. I started to investigate how technologies were being seamlessly incorporated in to business. How artificial intelligence, virtual reality & seismic shifts in IT technologies; were re-shaping the face of business, from start-ups, right through to the corporate giants. With this new knowledge, the website blogging, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter & Instagram representation, radically changed.
Having spent considerable time using the data from the Virtually Smart Ltd social media scheduler, I was able to see what content was performing better & on which platform. With this information, the social media platform content not only changed, but the timings of the day, which are oh so crucial for certain platform users, were amended. Facebook & LinkedIn posts were changed to be linked directly to the weekly blog. Instagram, became a series of quotes postcards, linked to the theme of the weekly blog & the Twitter posts became inspirational business quotes. As a further dimension, Virtually Smart ltd now has a Youtube channel, which enables me to link video’s directly to the Virtually Smart Ltd website.
Further to the reinvention of the Virtually Smart Ltd social media/website content, the new skills set’s I have learnt through my collaboration with Helena, have been invaluable. I have been able to access IT applications which I would never had known about if it wasn’t for Helena’s expertise. Video making with Lumen5 & Biteable. Github, Trello, Fusionsoft, Canva, Toggl, to name but a few. These IT applications have transformed the way I can create content for Virtually Smart Ltd & these are only a snapshot of the capabilities Virtually Smart Ltd is now harnessing as a business.
In addition, with the Facebook VirtuallySmart South Coast Virtual Assistant Network being launched, I have been able to add another layer to the Virtually Smart Ltd content. Creating a community of local VA’s & offering ‘Mindfulness Monday’s’ ‘Technology Tuesday’s & ‘Freedom Friday’s’ & ultimately, as the group grows, regular meeting opportunities. The idea of the network was spurned after Helena & I attended the West Sussex Business Expo & one of the many great speakers told of the benefits of a sense of community around your business.
Therefore, I began this article with the statement ‘Reflections of the accidental VA’ & I am well aware that to some seasoned VA’s this may raise an eyebrow! However, I use the term ‘accidental’ as a way of bringing to the attention of those who are considering a career change, but are where I was way back in January this year. I had no idea where I was going when I left teaching. I knew I wanted to work more for my partner, but I also needed another form of income & a diversity to my working week.
The opportunities Helena has given me thus far, are astounding. Every week I am able to read more & more about the technologies surrounding business, the engineering advances in automation, medicine, mechanical engineering, British & global businesses & I am loving every moment. The blogs I am able to write for the website, reflect the Virtually Smart Ltd ethos of embracing technological change. I am learning week by week more information about the developing world around me & hopefully creating informative content to make the Virtually Smart Ltd reader feel ‘happier or smarter or both’. If Helena hadn’t seen my Facebook plea, hadn’t taken a chance, who knows where I would of ended up. But by sheer coincidence, Helena needed someone to help her develop Virtually Smart Ltd, just when I needed someone to take a chance. Therefore, my name is Katy Jane: Accidental VA & Social Media/Marketing Manager.”
