Category: Get Ahead team

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!

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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 Fiona, who runs the Leeds branch, is here to share her top tips for managing your time as a business owner.

Time management is an important skill for any business owner, and I have to use it a lot as a Get Ahead VA Regional Director. That means I’ve learned a few things about organising my time effectively, so here’s some of my best advice if you’re thinking of starting up a business too.

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Mother’s Day is just around the corner (Sunday 31st March), and to celebrate we thought we’d ask some of our VAs what it’s like to be a mum and run a business.

At Get Ahead VA, we offer our virtual assistants a flexible approach to working, so that they are able to provide a professional service to our clients, whilst also fitting their work around other commitments, such as family. As a result, many of our VAs are also parents, and they’re brimming with good advice about managing life and business side by side!

If you’re a parent who’s interested in starting a business, here’s are some tips from our VAs to get you started.

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Happy Valentine’s Day! Love is in the air, and we hope that you’re taking the time today to appreciate the things that are most special to you. It could be anything – a loved one, your family, your friends… or even your job!

That’s right – here at Get Ahead VA we’re celebrating this season of love by thinking about why we love our jobs. So, we asked everyone in the Get Ahead VA team to tell us what they love about being a virtual assistant, and this is what they had to say:

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One of our virtual experts, Melanie McDowell, talks about how some words of wisdom from her dad shaped her approach to complex challenges.

Some of us have significant people in our lives whose words have helped us immeasurably in difficult situations.  And mostly, those people have no idea how much their pearls of wisdom have stuck with us: for me, that person is my dad.  He’s not that old, my dad.  Whilst he doesn’t have much hair left, and he’s old enough to qualify for a free bus pass, he’s certainly no wizened old sage who sits cross-legged atop a mountain.  He just has a way with words, and as I’ve grown older, I’ve realised that half the things he says aren’t even his own words, so perhaps his real skill is knowing the right thing to say at the right time.

Why on earth was he asking me about elephants?

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We’re back with another Top 8 list to celebrate Get Ahead VA’s 8th birthday, and this time we’re talking productivity! If you’ve ever wondered how you can get more done in the day without feeling overwhelmed, here are 8 useful tips from Senior Virtual Assistant Melanie McDowell.

  1. Schedule your days

Forget about writing to-do lists – they’re always too long and you never get to the bottom of them. Instead, I prefer to schedule every day, or even better, write out my next day’s schedule the night before I go to bed. Attaching a specific time to each task helps you keep on track and avoid distraction. Don’t forget to schedule in down-time, and time for travel between locations. When you first start scheduling, you might find that you put far too much into one day, so scale it back to what you can realistically achieve. I used to beat myself up for not ticking lots of things off my list, but it’s tremendously rewarding to see what you can actually get through in a day.

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Here at Get Ahead VA, we’re happy to let you in on some of our business secrets – the things that help our virtual assistants to be as organised and efficient as they can be. Previously we’ve told you about Get Ahead VA’s favourite apps, and today we’re back with another helping.

So without further ado, here are 5 more brilliant apps that can help you to manage your business and keep yourself informed!

Bitly

Bitly is a URL-shortening app that you can install on your phone or add as an extension to your web browser. If you need to share a link with your social media followers or members of your team, just pop it into Bitly and get a shorter, more shareable version to use in its place. With this app you can also customise URLs to fit with your branding, and track the analytics for each link.

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As we are celebrate our 8th year in business, we would like to share our 8 best business reads with you – kindly compiled by one of our team – Senior Virtual Assistant, Melanie McDowell.

1.  Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker.  This will shock you into getting an early night!  Full of evidence for why we should prioritise sleep, including research about the implications of sleep deprivation on our health and well-being.  Compelling and utterly terrifying reading.

2.  View From The Summit by Sir Edmund Hillary.  I find autobiographies by people I admire to be incredibly insightful and inspiring.  This is one of my favourites, being both a New Zealander and a rock climber myself.  Find someone you admire and read their story.

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We are delighted to announce that Get Ahead VA has been shortlisted for not one, but two awards in the upcoming Women in Business Awards 2018!

The Women in Business Awards “celebrate, encourage and inspire successful and aspiring business women in the South.” This will be the event’s fifth year, and awards will be given to business women from the Thames Valley, Solent and South Coast regions across eight different categories. These awards will honour women who have made a significant difference inside or outside their organisations, at all levels of business, from start-ups to senior executives.

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Here at Get Ahead VA, our team of virtual assistants includes experts in a wide variety of fields. From accounting to admin, Hootsuite to holiday cover, email marketing to Excel, our VAs can add value to many aspects of your business.

With that in mind, our VAs are always on the lookout for the apps, tools and tricks of the trade that will help them to work more efficiently. We asked them to name their favourites, so you can discover the programs behind the people, and get some inspiration for your own business.

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