Outsourcing Archives - Get Ahead VA

The Operational Edge, Post 3 of 4

Most businesses treat the end of a project the same way. Relief that it is over. A brief internal conversation about what went well. A vague intention to do things differently next time.

Then next time arrives and nothing is different.

The post-event debrief is the stage of event management that most organisations compress or skip entirely, usually while still running on adrenaline and the relief of having got through it. It is also the stage that compounds the value of everything that came before it.

Two kinds of review

There is a version of the debrief that most people recognise and most people avoid. It is the one that feels like a post-mortem: what went wrong, whose fault was it, how do we make sure it doesn’t happen again. Even when framed constructively, it is uncomfortable.

The debrief I run is different in purpose, though not in structure. The question is not what went wrong. It is what did we learn. Those two questions produce completely different conversations.

The first looks for problems to fix. The second looks for patterns to carry forward, improvements to embed, and things that went well that need to be protected rather than allowed to drift.

What the debrief actually looks like

Within two to three weeks of any event, I sit down with my client to review four things: the numbers (delegate attendance against target, revenue against budget), the logistics (what worked, what created friction, what we would handle differently), the feedback gathered from delegates, and ideas for next year.

That last category is the one most people underestimate. Capturing ideas for the following year while they are still fresh is not about planning too far ahead. It is about not losing the thinking that happens in the room but never makes it into the formal record.

I keep a running note system throughout every event, logging observations in real time as they arise. Not problems necessarily, just things worth revisiting. By the time I sit down for the debrief, I have a physical record of things I noticed on the day that would otherwise have faded. Small details, things a delegate mentioned in passing, moments where something worked better than expected. All of it goes into the conversation.

The small things that last longest

A few years ago, a delegate mentioned to me in passing that the event lanyards only had names printed on one side. When they turned around, as they always do, the name became invisible. Scanning badges, making introductions: small frictions, repeated throughout the day, across every delegate.

I fixed it. Every event I have run since has had names printed on both sides.

Recently, a director at one of my events specifically thanked me for it. He had noticed. He had no idea it had come from a delegate comment several years earlier. He just knew it was a detail that had been thought about.

That is what the debrief builds over time: a layer of small, considered improvements that accumulate into an event that feels genuinely well run, rather than just well intentioned.

Listening over assuming

There is a version of the debrief that confirms what you already believed. And there is a version that challenges it.

A client had been talking for some time about growing their annual event. Bigger venue, more delegates, exhibitor space. The assumption was that bigger meant better, and that attendees would welcome the change.

Throughout the event I had been talking to delegates, gathering feedback in conversation rather than through formal surveys. The picture that emerged was the opposite of the assumption. People came back year after year specifically because of the size. The conversations were good. They met people they actually wanted to meet. They could not have done that at a larger event.

That feedback shaped the following year’s planning in a way that no survey would have captured, because it came from the right conversations at the right moment, listened to and recorded rather than assumed away.

What this means for your business

The debrief habit is not just for events. Any significant project, campaign, or period of change in a business deserves the same treatment: a structured review, conducted while the detail is still accessible, with the explicit goal of carrying forward what was learned.

What makes it hard to build as a habit is the same thing that makes it valuable: it requires you to stop, at the exact moment when the instinct is to start the next thing.

The investment is a few hours. The return is a compounding improvement in how you work, built gradually, across every project that follows.

The final post in this series draws the thread together: what event management taught me about growing a business, and why the operational thinking I built over years of running conferences is the thing I bring most directly to the clients I support through Get Ahead.

If you would like a practical starting point for planning and reviewing your own events, I have put together a simple framework covering all six phases from commissioning through to debrief. You can download it below.

Our Event Planning Framework

The Operational Edge: Event Planning and Debrief Framework

About the Author

The Operational Edge, Post 2 of 4

Events have a way of expanding to fill all available time. That is not a criticism of events. It is a structural problem with how most businesses approach them.

The issue is rarely that running an event is too difficult. It is that the wrong people end up running it. And when the wrong people are managing the logistics, the right people stop doing what they are actually there to do.

The question that has to come first

Before any venue is booked or speaker is confirmed, there is one question that determines whether an event will be worth the investment: why are you running it, and how will you know if it worked?

I have seen events drift badly because nobody agreed this upfront. Marketing runs with enthusiasm. The original commercial objective gets diluted. Nobody is quite sure, afterwards, whether the event was a success or not, because nobody agreed what success looked like at the start.

This is the first conversation I have with any client. Not what do you want, but why do you want it. Delegate numbers. Leads generated. Relationships deepened. Profile raised with a specific audience. Agreeing this at the commissioning stage is what makes every subsequent decision easier, and what gives you something meaningful to review in the debrief.

The mistake that costs the most

A client I work with is now in its fifth year of running an annual conference. I did not run the first year. They did, using their own marketing and business development team.

They swore never to do that again.

Not because the event failed. It did not. But their business development team, the people whose job is to build relationships and convert conversations into business, spent the event day running logistics. Checking people in. Managing the catering. Pointing delegates to the right room. None of that is what a business development team is for.

The event happened. The return on the event did not.

The real cost of running an event yourself is rarely whether it goes smoothly. It is your best people doing the wrong job at exactly the moment when doing the right job matters most.

The decisions only you should make

There are things in any event that should not be delegated. Agreeing the budget and who has final sign-off. Deciding why the event is being run and what a successful outcome looks like. Choosing the format and the audience. These are strategic decisions that belong with whoever owns the commercial objective.

Everything else is operational. Venue liaison, delegate communications, logistics, supplier management, on-site coordination: all of it is delegatable. More than that, it needs to be delegated if the people who should be working the room are going to be free to do so.

What trust looks like when it builds

One of the most meaningful moments in a long client relationship came at the end of an event I had been running annually for several years. The director who had commissioned the work thanked his team, then mentioned, in passing, that he had had nothing to do with the event that year. He had simply arrived as a delegate.

He said it as a compliment.

In the early years of our working relationship, he had been closely involved in every decision. He wanted to understand the process, check the detail, stay across the logistics. That is entirely reasonable when you are entrusting something important to someone new.

By year three, we had developed a shorthand. If I swapped two speaker slots the day before, I sent him a brief note. No explanation required. He had enough experience of how I worked to know that if I had made a change, there was a reason for it.

That level of trust does not come from a contract. It comes from consistently doing what you say you will do, communicating only what the other person actually needs to know, and not creating work for them when the situation does not require it.

What this means for your business

Owner-led businesses often underestimate how much they are carrying themselves. Not because they have not thought about delegation, but because explaining something and managing someone else doing it can feel like more effort than doing it themselves.

Sometimes that calculation is right. For routine, low-stakes tasks, perhaps.

For an event, it is almost never right. The preparation required to brief someone properly is an investment that pays back on the day, when your commercial team are free to do what they are actually there for.

The next post in this series takes a slightly different angle: not what happens during an event, but what happens after. Specifically, the debrief most businesses skip, and why skipping it costs more than it saves.

The first post in this series, which discusses the planning required for a successful event, is here.

About the Author

WHAT RETAIL TAUGHT ME ABOUT BUSINESS – POST 3 OF 4

Before I became a Regional Director for Get Ahead, I spent years as a Buying Director for major UK retailers including Ryman and Signet. This series isn’t a career retrospective. It’s about the skills, instincts, and lessons from that world that still shape how I work today, and why they matter for the business owners I support.

One of the things buyers get asked most often, in my experience, is why they said no.

Not to a bad product. Not to something obviously wrong for the range. But to something that, on the surface, looked perfectly reasonable. Good quality. Competitive price. A supplier with a solid track record. And still, the answer was no.

The reason is almost always the same: it was right, but it wasn’t right for us. For now. For this customer. For this part of the range. The product itself wasn’t the problem. The fit was.

Learning to make that distinction clearly, and to trust it even when the pressure was on to say yes, is one of the most valuable things a buying career teaches you.

Good product, wrong fit – the most expensive mistake in buying

In buying, a trusted supplier relationship changes the texture of everything. When a product isn’t performing, a trusted supplier tells you eIn retail buying, ‘good product, wrong fit’ is one of the most common and most costly errors a team can make. It happens when the selection process focuses on the product in isolation rather than in context. Is it well made? Yes. Is it priced correctly? Yes. Will our customers want it, in this store, at this moment? That’s the question that gets skipped.

The consequences show up a few months later. Slow sales. High stock levels. Markdown pressure. The product takes up space that a better-fitting product could have occupied, and the margin takes a hit that could have been avoided. Not because the product was poor, but because it was chosen for the wrong context.

The discipline of evaluating fit over features, of asking ‘is this right for us?’ rather than just ‘is this good?’, is something that has to be actively maintained. There is always pressure to fill a gap, to take the available option, to move the process forward. Standing still long enough to properly assess fit requires confidence in the judgment and a willingness to be patient when patience feels uncomfortable.

When I walk away from something I like

Some of the decisions I’m most comfortable with in my buying career are the ones where I said no to something I genuinely liked.

Not products that were obviously wrong. But products that were interesting, well-presented, commercially attractive, and still not the right fit for what we needed. Walking away from those required a kind of discipline that got easier with practice but never became entirely comfortable. There’s always a part of you that wonders whether you made the right call.

In retail, I walked away from products I liked all the time. Not because they were wrong, but because they were wrong for us, for now. That judgment is one of the most valuable things buying taught me.

What made it easier was having a clear picture of what ‘right fit’ actually looked like. Not a vague sense that something wasn’t quite right, but a specific understanding of the customer, the range gap, the context into which a product needed to fit. The clearer that picture was, the more confident the no became

Fit over features in business support

The same principle applies, with striking consistency, to the work I do now.

When a business owner is looking for a Virtual Expert, the temptation is to focus on the capability list. Can they do social media? Bookkeeping? Executive assistant work? Those are the features. They matter, but they don’t determine fit.

Fit is about something more specific: whether this person, with this particular style of working, will actually mesh well with this business owner, at this stage of their business. Whether their pace matches the pace of the business. Whether their communication style will work in a remote relationship with limited briefing time. Whether they’ll ask the right questions or wait to be told what to do.

WHY THIS MATTERS NOW

It’s worth naming this directly, because there are now platforms that use AI to match businesses with freelance support based on skills, availability, and budget. They’re efficient. They remove friction from the process. And they are, almost entirely, feature-matching rather than fit-matching.

They can tell you who can do the work. They can’t tell you who will work well with you. That judgment – the quieter, more contextual, more human assessment of fit – is something that still requires a conversation. And it’s one of the reasons the matching conversation matters as much as it does.

A Virtual Expert who is talented, experienced, and highly capable can still be the wrong fit for a particular business. And a wrong fit, even with the best intentions on both sides, tends to produce frustration rather than results. The hours get spent. The tasks get done. But the relationship never quite settles, and the business owner ends the arrangement without being entirely sure what went wrong.

What went wrong, almost always, is that the fit wasn’t properly assessed at the start.

Why the right fit protects everyone

Getting fit right at the outset isn’t just good for the client. It’s good for the Virtual Expert, and it’s good for the working relationship between them.

A well-matched arrangement allows a Virtual Expert to do their best work. They understand the business, they understand the owner’s priorities, and they can contribute with genuine confidence rather than constantly second-guessing whether they’re approaching things the right way. That confidence is good for the work and good for the relationship.

A poorly matched arrangement does the opposite. It creates friction that nobody wanted and that drains energy from both sides. No amount of goodwill on either side fully compensates for a fundamental mismatch in working style or expectation.

This is why the conversation I have with business owners before any matching happens matters so much. Not because I’m trying to complicate a simple process, but because taking the time to understand the context, the business, and what ‘right fit’ actually looks like in this specific situation is what makes everything that follows more likely to work.

A Final Thought

Buying taught me to trust the no as much as the yes.

Not every good thing is the right thing. Not every capable person is the right person for every role. Fit matters more than features, and knowing when something doesn’t fit, even when it looks good on paper, is a skill worth developing.

For business owners making decisions about support, the question worth asking isn’t just ‘can they do the work?’ It’s ‘will this actually work, for us, right now?’ Those are different questions. And the second one is the one that matters most.

If you’d like to think through what the right fit for your business might actually look like, that’s exactly the kind of conversation I enjoy. I’m always happy to explore it with you

I’m Vicky McKenna, Regional Director for Get Ahead in Oxfordshire.

Next in the series: The Weight of the Decision.

What Retail Taught Me About Business

What a career in retail buying taught Vicky McKenna about business, and why those lessons matter more than ever.

WHAT RETAIL TAUGHT ME ABOUT BUSINESS – POST 4 OF 4

There’s a particular feeling I remember from the end of a range sign-off meeting.

The decisions have been made. The spreadsheets are updated. The suppliers have been briefed. And then, in the quiet after the meeting, comes the weight of it. The awareness that those decisions will show up on shop floors across the country in a few months’ time. That customers will engage with them, or they won’t. That the business will make money from them, or it won’t. That your judgment was sound, or it wasn’t.

No one talks about that feeling very much in a corporate buying environment. The culture tends to reward confidence and forward momentum. But the weight is always there, underneath. And over time, I came to think of it not as a burden but as information. A signal that the decisions mattered. That the accountability was real.

What high-stakes decision-making actually feels like

InSenior buying roles involve a particular kind of pressure that’s hard to describe to someone who hasn’t experienced it. You’re making decisions that will affect stock levels across hundreds of stores, supplier relationships, hundreds of thousands of pounds of investment, and ultimately the trading performance of categories that the business depends on. You’re doing this with incomplete information, under time pressure, often in the face of conflicting signals from the market.

The decisions themselves are rarely straightforward. The data gives you part of the picture. Your instinct gives you another part. The brief you’ve established, the relationships you’ve built, the context you’ve accumulated over years in a sector, all of that feeds into a judgment call that is, ultimately, yours to make.

You get better at it. But you never stop feeling the weight of it. And I think that’s right. The moment a decision stops feeling weighty is probably the moment you’ve stopped taking it seriously enough.

Why that experience changes how I listen

When a business owner sits down with me and starts to describe what’s going on in their business, I notice things that I’m not sure I would have noticed without those years in buying roles.

I notice when someone is carrying more than they’re saying. The slight tension in how they describe a situation that they’re framing as manageable. The decisions they mention in passing that are clearly not small at all. The gap between how things look from the outside and how they’re actually feeling from the inside.

Running a growing business involves a version of the same pressure I experienced in senior buying roles: high-stakes decisions, incomplete information, real accountability, and often very few people around you who truly understand the weight of what you’re carrying. The specifics are different. The texture of it is remarkably similar.

When you’ve sat in rooms making decisions that affect entire product ranges and entire teams, you understand what business owners are carrying. That’s not something you read about. It’s something you feel.

That recognition matters, I think, in the conversations I have with clients. Not because I want to project my own experience onto theirs, every business is different, and every business owner’s situation is specific to them. But because having genuinely experienced that kind of pressure means I don’t underestimate it. I don’t treat the mental load of running a business as a side issue or a lifestyle complaint. It’s a real thing, with real consequences, that deserves a real response.

The difference between support that completes tasks and support that eases the load

There’s a version of business support that is essentially transactional. Tasks come in, tasks go out. The diary gets managed, the inbox gets sorted, the social media gets scheduled. Everything on the list gets done. And the business owner is still, somehow, exhausted at the end of the week.

That’s not because the support wasn’t competent. It’s because the support was addressing the visible surface of the problem rather than the underlying one. The tasks were getting done, but the mental load wasn’t shifting. The decisions were still all sitting with one person. The weight hadn’t moved.

Good support does something different. It doesn’t just take tasks off a list. It takes decisions off a desk. A Virtual Expert who truly understands a business can start to carry some of the cognitive weight of running it: anticipating what’s needed before being asked, flagging things that need attention, making judgment calls within their area of responsibility so the business owner doesn’t have to make every one themselves.

That shift, from task completion to genuine decision support, is where business support becomes genuinely valuable. It requires a level of trust that takes time to build. But when it’s there, the difference is significant, not just in what gets done, but in how the business owner feels at the end of the week.

On asking for help

One of the things I noticed in corporate buying environments is how rarely people asked for help openly. The culture rewarded self-sufficiency, confidence, the appearance of having everything under control. Asking for support felt like admitting a gap, which felt like weakness, which felt like professional risk.

It took me a while to understand that the opposite is true. The most commercially effective people I’ve worked with have been the ones who are clearest about what they know and what they don’t, about where they need input and where they can run independently. That clarity isn’t weakness. It’s good judgment about how to deploy limited resources, including your own energy and attention, for maximum effect.

For business owners, I think the same reframe is worth making. Bringing in support isn’t a sign that the business is struggling. It’s a sign that the business is being run well. It’s the decision to direct your energy toward the things only you can do, and to trust capable people with the things they can do better or faster than you.

That’s not giving something up. It’s making a smart call about where the real value of your time lies.

WHY THIS MATTERS NOW

A word on AI, since it’s increasingly part of the conversation about how businesses reduce the pressure of decision-making. Used well, it genuinely helps: better information, faster analysis, more options surfaced more quickly. I use it myself and I think the businesses that learn to work with it thoughtfully will have a real advantage.

But it doesn’t carry the weight. It doesn’t feel the accountability. And it can’t make the judgment calls that depend on context, relationship, and the kind of accumulated experience that comes from years of getting decisions right and wrong.

The decisions that matter most in a growing business, the ones about people, direction, investment, trust, still need a human in the room. Someone who understands what’s at stake, who will sit with the discomfort of uncertainty, and who will own the outcome. AI can support that person. It can’t replace them.

Which is, in its own way, an argument for exactly the kind of support this series has been exploring: the right people, chosen carefully, trusted over time.

A Final Thought

Retail taught me that the weight of a decision is proportional to what’s at stake. And what’s at stake, when you’re running a business you’ve built, is considerable.

The business owners I work with are carrying real responsibility. Real pressure. Real accountability. Not to a line manager or a trading director, but to themselves, to the people who work with them, and to the clients who depend on them.

That deserves to be taken seriously. And the right support, brought in at the right time, is one of the most practical and most honest responses to it.

Not because you can’t manage alone. But because you don’t have to.

If you’re carrying more than you should be, and you’d like to explore what the right support could look like for your business, I’d love to have that conversation.

I’m Vicky McKenna, Regional Director for Get Ahead in Oxfordshire.

Next in the series: Knowing When Something Doesn’t Fit.

What Retail Taught Me About Business

What a career in retail buying taught Vicky McKenna about business, and why those lessons matter more than ever.

WHAT RETAIL TAUGHT ME ABOUT BUSINESS – POST 2 OF 4

In retail, margin is everything. It’s the number every buyer is accountable for, the measure by which every decision is ultimately judged. You’re always looking for ways to improve it: better pricing, smarter sourcing, tighter ranging, fewer markdowns.

But after years in buying roles at Ryman and Signet, I came to believe something that sounds almost counterintuitive in such a commercially driven environment: the most reliable way to protect and grow your margin isn’t the deal you negotiate. It’s the relationship you build.

The suppliers who delivered the most value, consistently, over time, were rarely the ones who came in with the lowest price. They were the ones I trusted. And trust, it turns out, is worth a great deal more than a percentage point on a cost price.

What trust actually delivers in a commercial relationship

In buying, a trusted supplier relationship changes the texture of everything. When a product isn’t performing, a trusted supplier tells you early and helps you find a solution, rather than waiting for the markdown conversation you’ll inevitably have anyway. When something goes wrong in the supply chain, they call you before you have to chase. When an opportunity arises, a new product, an exclusive, a promotional window, they think of you first.

None of that is contractual. None of it can be negotiated into an agreement. It emerges, slowly, from a consistent pattern of honesty, reliability, and mutual respect. You show up as a fair and straightforward partner. They do the same. And over time, that relationship becomes genuinely more valuable than any individual transaction within it.

My best supplier relationships weren’t always with the cheapest option. They were with the people I trusted. That’s still true today, just in a different context.

The flip side was equally instructive. The purely transactional relationships, the ones built entirely on price and pressure, were the most fragile. They worked, up to a point, in stable conditions. But under pressure, supply disruption, a difficult trading period, a product that needed support, they had nothing to draw on. There was no goodwill in the account. No genuine partnership. Just a series of transactions that neither side felt particularly good about.

Spotting the difference between partnership and performance

One of the most useful things buying teaches you is how to distinguish between a supplier who is genuinely invested in your success and one who is simply managing your account. The signals are often subtle. It’s in how they respond when things go wrong. Whether they’re honest about problems before they become your problems. Whether their questions are about your business or just about their order book.

That instinct for genuine partnership versus transactional performance has stayed with me, and I use it constantly in my role at Get Ahead.

When I’m working with a business owner to understand what kind of Virtual Expert support would make the most difference for them, I’m listening for the same signals I used to listen for across a supplier meeting table. Is this person genuinely interested in understanding the business, or are they focused on filling their diary? Do they ask questions that go beyond the brief, or do they take the brief at face value and run with it? Would they tell a client if they thought the approach wasn’t working, or would they quietly keep delivering the wrong thing?

Those aren’t just questions of competence. They’re questions of character. And character, in a working relationship, is what determines whether it stays good under pressure.

Why relationship intelligence is a commercial skill

There’s a tendency to treat relationship-building as the soft counterpart to the hard commercial skills: negotiation, analysis, margin management. Something the more people-oriented members of a buying team do while the serious work happens elsewhere.

In my experience, that’s precisely backwards. The ability to build, maintain, and read relationships under commercial pressure is one of the most difficult and most valuable skills a buyer can develop. It requires emotional intelligence, yes. But it also requires strategic thinking, patience, and a willingness to invest time in something whose return isn’t immediately measurable.

For business owners, the same is true. The relationships that drive growth, the clients who come back, who refer others, who give you honest feedback rather than quietly moving on, are built over time through consistent, genuine engagement. Not through a slick pitch or a well-timed discount. Through the accumulated weight of interactions that left the other person feeling heard, valued, and well-served.

That’s not soft. It’s the most durable commercial asset a business can build.

WHY THIS MATTERS NOW

This is worth holding onto at a moment when AI is making it increasingly easy to simulate relationship-building without doing it. Automated follow-ups that sound personal. Generated messages that use your name and reference your last conversation. Agents that engage on your behalf while you’re elsewhere.

None of that is relationship-building. It’s the appearance of it. And the businesses that have tried to grow on the back of simulated connection tend to find, sooner or later, that there’s nothing underneath it. The real margin, in retail and in business support, still comes from the relationships that are genuinely built.

What this means for how I work with businesses in Oxfordshire

When business owners ask me how Get Ahead works, I find myself talking about relationships more than processes. The way we match clients with Virtual Experts isn’t just about skills and availability. It’s about finding people who will genuinely invest in understanding your business, who will be honest when something isn’t working, and who will show up consistently over time rather than just at the beginning.

That matters because the value of good support compounds in the same way a good supplier relationship does. The longer a well-matched Virtual Expert works with a business, the more context they carry, the better their judgment becomes, and the more they can contribute beyond the immediate task in front of them.

It starts with the right match. But it grows through the relationship. And the relationship is, ultimately, where the real value lives.

A Final Thought

Retail taught me that the best commercial relationships aren’t the ones you extract the most from. They’re the ones that give most back.

That requires a different kind of investment than price negotiation. It requires showing up well, consistently, over time. Being honest when it’s uncomfortable. Caring about the other person’s success, not just your own outcome.

It’s slower than a transaction. And it’s worth considerably more.

If you’re thinking about what good business support could look like for your business, and you’d like to explore that with someone who takes the relationship seriously, I’d love to hear from you.

I’m Vicky McKenna, Regional Director for Get Ahead in Oxfordshire.

Next in the series: Knowing When Something Doesn’t Fit.

What Retail Taught Me About Business

What a career in retail buying taught Vicky McKenna about business, and why those lessons matter more than ever.

WHAT RETAIL TAUGHT ME ABOUT BUSINESS – POST 1 OF 4

In retail buying, the brief is everything.

Before a single product is selected, before a supplier meeting is booked, before a range is built, there is a brief. What does the customer actually want? What problem are they trying to solve? What does success look like for this category, this season, this store format? Get the brief right and the rest of the process has a chance. Get it wrong, and you can spend months pursuing something that was never going to work, however good it looked on paper.

I learned this early in my buying career, and I learned it the hard way. A range that made perfect sense in a meeting room could fall completely flat on the shop floor, not because the products were poor, but because they answered the wrong question. The brief had been assumed rather than established. And assumptions, in buying, are expensive.

The question beneath the question

What buying teaches you, over time, is to listen for what someone actually needs rather than what they say they want. Those two things are often related. They’re rarely identical.

A supplier might tell you they have a product that will transform your stationery range. What they mean is: they have a product. Whether it transforms anything depends entirely on what your customers are actually looking for, and that’s a question only you can answer, if you’ve done the work to understand it properly.

The discipline this requires isn’t complicated. But it does require slowing down at the point where most people are tempted to speed up. When there’s pressure to fill a gap, to make a decision, to move forward, the instinct is to reach for the nearest available solution. The brief disciplines you to pause and ask: is this actually the right solution, for these customers, at this moment?

That pause is where the real value is created. Not in the selection itself, but in the clarity that precedes it.

What this looks like when a business owner comes to me

The conversations I have as a Regional Director for Get Ahead often begin in a very similar place to those supplier meetings. A business owner knows they need help. They can feel the weight of what they’re carrying: the tasks that aren’t getting done, the skills that are missing, the hours that are disappearing into things that aren’t really their job. What they’re less clear on, often, is exactly what kind of help would make the most difference.

That’s not a criticism. It’s completely understandable. When you’re inside a business, running it day to day, it’s genuinely hard to step back and identify the precise point where external support would have the greatest impact. The pressure creates noise. And noise makes it hard to brief clearly.

In retail buying, the brief was everything. Get it wrong and the whole range suffered. I’ve taken that same discipline into every conversation I have with business owners today.

So the first thing I try to do, before any conversation about Virtual Experts or matching or how Get Ahead works, is ask the questions that help establish the real brief. Not ‘what tasks do you need doing?’ but ‘what would a good outcome actually look like for your business in six months?’ Not ‘what skills are you missing?’ but ‘where is the gap that’s costing you the most, in time, in energy, in lost opportunity?’

Those questions slow things down, briefly. But they save an enormous amount of time and frustration further down the line.

Why getting the brief right changes everything downstream

In buying, a poorly established brief has consequences that ripple through the entire process. The wrong product gets selected. It takes up space on the shelf that a better product could have occupied. It delivers disappointing sales. It damages the relationship with the supplier who was briefed incorrectly in the first place. The cost of the initial misalignment compounds at every stage.

The same is true in business support. A Virtual Expert matched to the wrong brief, even a talented, experienced one, will struggle to deliver what the business actually needs, because what the business actually needs was never clearly established. The hours get spent. The invoices get paid. But the outcome falls short, and nobody is quite sure why.

Getting the brief right upfront protects everyone: the business owner, the Virtual Expert, and the working relationship between them. It creates the conditions for genuine success rather than a technically-fulfilled arrangement that doesn’t quite hit the mark.

This is one of the things I value most about how Get Ahead approaches matching. It’s not a transactional process – here’s a list of available VAs, take your pick. It’s a conversation. A careful one. One that starts with the brief, and takes the time to establish it properly before anything else happens.

What I’d ask any business owner to consider

If you’re thinking about bringing in support, whether that’s a Virtual Expert, a specialist freelancer, or any form of external help, the most useful thing you can do before that conversation is spend some time getting clear on the brief yourself.

Not a job description. Not a list of tasks. A genuine answer to the question: what would need to be true in three or six months for this to have been the right decision?

That answer is your brief. Everything else follows from it.

And if you find the answer hard to articulate, if the pressure and the noise make it difficult to see clearly what the real gap is, that’s a conversation worth having too. Sometimes the most valuable thing a buying conversation does is help you understand what you actually need. The same is true here.

WHY THIS MATTERS NOW

This applies, perhaps more than anywhere right now, to how businesses are approaching AI. The temptation is to adopt a tool because it’s available, because everyone else seems to be using it, because not using it feels like falling behind. But a poorly briefed AI implementation is the same as a poorly briefed buying range: it answers the wrong question efficiently.

The discipline of the brief – what problem are we actually solving, for whom, and what does success look like – is exactly what most AI conversations are missing. The businesses getting the most from these tools aren’t the ones who adopted them fastest. They’re the ones who were clearest about what they needed before they started.

A Final Thought

Retail buying taught me that the brief isn’t a formality. It’s the foundation.

Get it right and everything that follows has a chance to work. Get it wrong and even the best people, the best products, and the best intentions won’t save you.

That’s as true for a stationery range in a Ryman store as it is for the decision to bring in support for your growing business.

The question is always the same: what do you actually need? Not what’s available. Not what’s easiest. What would genuinely make the difference.

If you’re wondering what kind of support might make the most difference for your business right now, and you’d find it useful to think that through with someone, I’m always happy to have that conversation.

I’m Vicky McKenna, Regional Director for Get Ahead in Oxfordshire.

Next in the series: Relationships Are the Real Margin.

What Retail Taught Me About Business

What a career in retail buying taught Vicky McKenna about business, and why those lessons matter more than ever.

Finding a partner that aligns with your needs

It can feel daunting to realise you need support and don’t know where to begin. It may feel as though your organisation is not running at full potential and you need assistance with certain functions. But trust is important. Trusting an organisation and its people to have access to data and to communicate with your audience. So, where to start?

First, work out exactly what you need. Define your core requirements and create a scope of work so that both sides are clear on expectations. Include budgets and timelines so that you have a framework to work with. When you begin your search, you will see if outsourcing companies meet your goals.

At Get Ahead, we make sure that our case studies are available and relevant for potential clients to understand how we work, the skills that we cover and how we can help.

Working to a common goal

An effective outsourcing company will take interest in your overall goals. They’ll want to understand your business and your strategy, not just the parts that need help. To make your business as efficient as possible, a proficient partner will spend time listening and understanding and selecting the right person to work with you to achieve your short- and long-term goals.

As an experienced outsourcing provider, Get Ahead succeeds in improving your ability to return to your core activities and improve customer satisfaction and output.

Carrying out due diligence with a new partner

A reliable and trustworthy outsourcing partner will explain and show proof of how they secure your data and precautions taken to ensure that you are matched with the right person for your organisational needs.

Vicky McKenna, Regional Director for Oxford and Bucks, says:

‘Security is a top priority at Get Ahead. Each of our virtual experts are insured with the ICO to protect your data and adhere to strict guidelines. We use your data responsibly and also have policies around AI.

In terms of ensuring you are working with the person best suited to your organisation, ask plenty of questions. How many specialists are on your team? Do you have the skills that I require? Have you worked with similar organisations to ours? How will I know that they care about our business and our output?’

If a partner doesn’t welcome questions and a dialogue, that tells you want you need to know! If you still feel unsure and need some answers – read this piece about barriers to delegation.

Expert support, delivered with confidence

To discover how we can support your team with outstanding virtual experts – get in contact with us to speak with someone who listens to make the best of your business

This is the final post in the series A Smoother Life Is a Decision. Earlier posts explored time and attention, trust and control, and what smooth running actually looks like. This one asks the bigger question underneath all of them.

There is a myth that most high-achieving people have internalised so thoroughly that they rarely notice it is there. The myth that it is possible, with sufficient capability and organisation, to have it all: the demanding career, the well-run home, the family life you want, the social life, the presence. All of it, sustainably, without anything giving.

I believed this for a long time. I imagine a lot of people reading this have believed it too, or still do.

What I have found, in my own experience and in my coaching work, is that eventually the cracks appear. Not dramatically, usually. Not in a way that anyone on the outside would necessarily see. But in the small subtractions: the conversation you were not quite present for, the evening you spent on the phone sorting something that should not have needed sorting, the weekend that went on logistics rather than living.

The Myth of Having It All

The narrative around needing to be capable of managing everything is shifting, slowly. There is more honest conversation now about what that level of operation actually costs, and more willingness to admit that behind many apparently seamless lives, a great deal of support is quietly in place.

Admitting that you could genuinely do with an extra pair of hands is, I think, one of the harder things for people who are used to being the capable one. It can feel like a concession. Like something has slipped.

It has not. What it actually reflects is clarity: a clear-eyed assessment of where your time and energy are most valuable, and the decision to stop spending both on things that someone else could handle just as well, or better.

What High Achievers Know About Time

In my coaching work, two patterns come up with remarkable consistency.

The first is that people are significantly kinder to others than to themselves when it comes to workload expectations. They would never expect a colleague to absorb the volume they quietly expect of themselves. They give others permission to have limits that they do not extend to themselves.

The second is that the things taking up the most time are rarely the things they value most or do best. The pressures on their hours, at home and at work, are disproportionately concentrated on tasks that are necessary but not important in any deeper sense. Necessary in the way that administration is necessary. But not the things they will look back on.

Outsourcing is not, in my experience, primarily about creating free time. It is about reclaiming the right time: the time you want to spend doing things you want to do, and the things you will be glad you did.

You have worked hard for the life you have. The question worth asking is whether you are living it, or spending your best hours running it.

What Presence Actually Looks Like

I do not use the word presence lightly. It is one of those words that gets deployed a lot without much examination. What I mean by it is simple: being somewhere fully, with your attention available for what is in front of you, rather than running a background process on everything else that needs doing.

For busy people managing complex households, presence is often the thing that quietly erodes first. You are at the dinner table. You are also aware that you need to book the boiler service, reply to a personal email, check something you meant to check yesterday. You are there, but not entirely.

That erosion is gradual. It is also reversible. And it tends to reverse not when things get less busy (they rarely do) but when the background load is being held by someone else.

A Final Thought

This is the last post in the series A Smoother Life Is a Decision. Earlier posts explored protecting your best hours, the freedom of letting go, and what smooth running actually looks like. This one asks the bigger question underneath all of them.

What is the life you have worked hard for? And are you spending enough of your time actually living it?

If that question lands somewhere, I would love to have a conversation. Not about what we offer, but about what you want. What changes. What matters.

Book a private call here, or email me directly at natasha.doran@getaheadva.com. I am always happy to talk.

Click to find out more about our Lifestyle Manager service.

About the Author

The Gap Between Coping and Supporting

Coping is when things get done. The bills get paid, the contractors get booked, the school calendar gets tracked. Nothing falls catastrophically through the gap. You manage.

Supporting is something else. It is when the household is running in a way that actively gives you back time, attention, and presence. Where the things that matter to you are attended to before you have to think about them. Where you are not the bottleneck in your own domestic life.

The gap between the two is not always obvious from the outside. A coping household and a supporting household can look very similar. The difference is felt, not seen.

I hear it described in small ways, usually. It is ordering a food shop while feeding the children and trying to ask them about their day at the same time. It is catching up with personal emails in the evening instead of talking to your partner or just watching something you actually want to watch. It is the perpetual low-level awareness that there are things you should be doing that you have not quite got to.

That is coping. Functioning, but at a cost.

Proactive Versus Reactive

The clearest marker of a household that genuinely runs smoothly is that things are anticipated rather than just responded to. This sounds obvious, but in practice it requires someone whose job it is to think ahead, not just to action what arrives.

A straightforward example: insurance renewals. The default for most busy households is to roll them over, because reviewing them properly requires time and attention that never quite materialises. A proactive approach means sitting down with the paperwork in good time, reviewing what is actually out there, and making a considered decision. The outcome is usually better. The process is not one that needs to sit on your plate.

A less obvious one: a client of mine had a child with a World Book Day event coming up. We got ahead of it a week before, sourced a costume second-hand, had it customised, done. On the day, she was not that parent frantically trying to find something the evening before. She was just present.

It is a small thing in the context of everything a busy family manages. But those small things compound. And their absence, the constant background sense of things being slightly ahead of you, is what costs most.

A smooth-running home does not mean nothing ever goes wrong. It means that when something does, there is already someone who knows the house, knows your standards, and knows exactly what to do.

What Consistent Standards Actually Look Like

One of the things people worry about, when they think about handing over the management of their home, is whether their standards will be maintained. The way they like things. The suppliers they trust. The particular level of detail they care about.

This is a legitimate concern, and it is one I take seriously. The value of a single trusted point of contact is precisely that they hold your standards over time. The contractor who already knows your house does not need briefing from scratch every time. Your preferences are already on file. The things you care about are already known.

That consistency, built up gradually and maintained reliably, is the difference between a service that functions and one that genuinely supports.

Smooth Running as a Design Choice

What I want to leave you with is this: a life that runs smoothly does not happen by accident. It happens because someone has thought carefully about the details and taken responsibility for them. That might be you. Or it might be someone working alongside you, whose job it is to hold that complexity so you do not have to.

Either way, it is a decision. And like most decisions, the first step is simply getting clear on what you actually want.

A Final Thought

In the first two posts of this series, A Smoother Life Is a Decision, I wrote about protecting your best hours and the decision to let go. This post is about what you are letting go into: a household that does not just cope, but genuinely supports the life you have built.

If you would like to talk through what that might look like for your household specifically, I would love to have that conversation.

Book a private call here, or email me directly at natasha.doran@getaheadva.com.

Click to find out more about our Lifestyle Manager service.

Next in the series: The Life You’ve Worked Hard For

The Operational Edge, Post 3 of 4

Two kinds of review

What the debrief actually looks like

The small things that last longest

Listening over assuming

What this means for your business

Our Event Planning Framework

About the Author

The Operational Edge, Post 2 of 4

The question that has to come first

The mistake that costs the most

The decisions only you should make

What trust looks like when it builds

What this means for your business

About the Author

WHAT RETAIL TAUGHT ME ABOUT BUSINESS – POST 3 OF 4

Good product, wrong fit – the most expensive mistake in buying

When I walk away from something I like

Fit over features in business support

Why the right fit protects everyone

A Final Thought

What Retail Taught Me About Business

WHAT RETAIL TAUGHT ME ABOUT BUSINESS – POST 4 OF 4

What high-stakes decision-making actually feels like

Why that experience changes how I listen

The difference between support that completes tasks and support that eases the load

On asking for help

A Final Thought

What Retail Taught Me About Business

WHAT RETAIL TAUGHT ME ABOUT BUSINESS – POST 2 OF 4

What trust actually delivers in a commercial relationship

Spotting the difference between partnership and performance

Why relationship intelligence is a commercial skill

What this means for how I work with businesses in Oxfordshire

A Final Thought

What Retail Taught Me About Business

WHAT RETAIL TAUGHT ME ABOUT BUSINESS – POST 1 OF 4

The question beneath the question

What this looks like when a business owner comes to me

Why getting the brief right changes everything downstream

What I’d ask any business owner to consider

A Final Thought

What Retail Taught Me About Business

Finding a partner that aligns with your needs

Working to a common goal

Carrying out due diligence with a new partner

Expert support, delivered with confidence

The Myth of Having It All

What High Achievers Know About Time

What Presence Actually Looks Like

A Final Thought

About the Author

The Gap Between Coping and Supporting

Proactive Versus Reactive

What Consistent Standards Actually Look Like

Smooth Running as a Design Choice

A Final Thought

About the Author

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