Thursday 1st August is Yorkshire Day – a day dedicated to celebrating the beautiful, vibrant and innovative county of Yorkshire – and Get Ahead VA is very proud to be part of this wonderful region. To celebrate this special day, we wanted to let you know how we can help your Yorkshire-based business to grow.

What is Yorkshire Day?

Yorkshire Day is an annual celebration of the county of Yorkshire, promoting the county’s  towns, beauty spots and top attractions through special promotions, festivals, art, culture, food and drink. This year the main celebrations will be held in Whitby, where representatives from across the county will come together to show off the best that Yorkshire has to offer.

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Taking a summer holiday might seem like an indulgent luxury for a business owner, but it is actually an essential part of running a business and making it a success.

When your phone runs out of battery, you recharge it, and the same principle applies to you too. The summer is the perfect time to take yourself away from work for a week or two and top up your batteries with fun, sunshine and, most importantly, rest. Not only will this make you feel better, it’ll benefit your business too, when you return refreshed and brimming with new ideas.

Have we convinced you to take a break? Then here are three ways you can make the most of your summer holiday.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Are you a business owner on the lookout for new podcast recommendations? If so, have we got a list for you! We’ve talked before about how great podcasts can be, so today we’re here to share with you some of our favourite podcasts for business owners and women in business, as recommended by our team of virtual assistants.

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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 PR.

What is PR?

PR stands for ‘public relations’, and it covers all the activities your business does to spread information, build relationships and present a positive image of itself to the world. In practice, this means communicating with the media, building a reputation through social media or organic marketing campaigns, managing internal communications, and running damage control if something goes wrong.

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Did you know that the first Friday in April is National Walk to Work Day? This is a day which encourages anybody who can to leave their car at home, skip the bus and go to work on foot instead. The day is designed to raise awareness about the often sedentary nature of modern working life, and encourage everybody to adopt a healthy new habit.

Walking by itself is hugely beneficial, but there are also things you can do to be productive while you’re pounding the pavement. So if you’re thinking of trying it out, here are some of our tips for making the most of your walk to work.

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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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The end of the financial year is just around the corner, and with it come some changes that the government is making to VAT returns for businesses – an initiative called ‘Making Tax Digital’.

If you’re not sure whether or how the changes will affect your business, don’t worry. Here’s what you need to know to prepare for this new way of managing your business’ taxes.

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