Becoming a Regional Director for Get Ahead VA means having the freedom to run your own business with support from an established brand – so you’re going into business for yourself, not by yourself. But what is it actually like to be a Regional Director, day to day?
We spoke to Fiona, the head of our Leeds branch, to find out how she spends a typical working day.
(more…)Social media is a vital tool for modern businesses, but with so many platforms to choose from, how do you know which one is right for you? We’re here to help – each month we’ll focus on one social media platform and examine how it can help your business grow and connect with an online audience. This month, we’re starting with Facebook.
(more…)Plastic is a hot topic – the buzz around it began in earnest thanks to the BBC series Blue Planet II, which raised awareness about the damage plastic is doing to our oceans and sea life. Earlier this month, people and organisations around the world celebrated World Oceans Day (8th June), an annual event which encourages people to protect our oceans against threats like plastic.
So how can you, as a business owner, get involved with this movement? We’ve gathered together a few ideas – big and small – to help you reduce plastic in your workplace.
(more…)Happy Bring Your Dog to Work Day! If you don’t already know about this fantastic event, on the 21st June each year, people up and down the country take their dogs to work in order to raise money for dog-related charities. (Of course, it’s also a great excuse to cuddle other people’s pooches and introduce your own to some new friends.)
Any business can become an official sponsor of the event, and individuals can make donations to the leading charities online. Today, we thought we’d celebrate by introducing you to some of the dogs in the Get Ahead VA team. Bring on the pups!
(more…)The Company Page is a powerful tool on LinkedIn – it gives a business a dedicated space to promote its products/services, post content and connect with its audience. It’s especially useful for B2B interactions and, naturally, the most effective Company Pages are the ones with the widest reach.
So how do you go about growing your Company Page on LinkedIn? Here are 6 quick tips for increasing your following and finding an engaged audience.
(more…)Get Ahead VA offers a wide range of business and marketing services. In our Service Spotlight, we take a closer look at one of these and show you how our virtual assistants can help you and your business. This month, we’re looking at graphic design.
What is graphic design?
Graphic design is the art of creating visual content for a wide range of purposes, such as marketing, communication and branding. Graphic designers apply their skills to all sorts of different media – from websites to magazines, leaflets to logos – in order to catch an audience’s attention and convey a message. In this way, graphic design is hugely important for business owners – no brand, marketing campaign or company website is complete without graphic design.
(more…)These days, there’s no getting away from social media. In the UK, 67% of the population uses social media – that’s around 45 million individual users* – which makes it an invaluable tool for business. This is especially the case for small business owners, who can access an enormous audience for a relatively low cost.
However, it’s important to be smart about your business’ social media marketing. Rather than opening accounts on every platform and spreading your efforts too thinly, it’s better to concentrate on just one or two that you can dedicate serious time to in order to make them work for you.
But which platforms should you use? Today we’re taking a look at three of the biggest social media sites – Facebook, Twitter and Instagram – to help you decide which could be right for your business.
(more…)This week is Learning at Work Week (13–19 May), and to celebrate, we’re talking about CPD – continuing professional development.
CPD is the process of tracking your knowledge and skills, and investing time in your own training and development at work. It is reflective – it requires you to think about the things you have learned, to reflect on what you would do differently next time, and to set goals and targets for yourself for the future. Most importantly, it involves writing these things down, so that you have a permanent record of your own development.
We’ve talked before about how to do CPD as a business owner, but today we’re focusing on why it’s important, and why you should make time for it.
(more…)Get Ahead VA offers a wide range of business and marketing services. In our Service Spotlight, we take a closer look at one of these and show you how our virtual assistants can help you and your business. This month, we’re looking at business development.
(more…)Get Ahead VA is very proud to have branches across the country, and the Regional Directors that run them are brimming with good advice about being your own boss. Today Salvatore, who runs the Bristol branch, is here to share his advice about the all-important elevator pitch.
As a Get Ahead VA Regional Director, I do a lot of networking, and one vital tool for this is the elevator pitch. The elevator pitch is a quick and punchy sales pitch, designed to explain who you are, what you do, and what you can offer to potential clients. This can be delivered formally (many networking meetings give everyone a chance to pitch to the room), or informally, during one-on-one mingling sessions, which is where the real connections are made.
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