Resource type: Case study

Fiona Ibbetson, Leeds

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 more about how she spends a typical working day, and how she balances her work life with family commitments.

My morning routine

I like to get up early because I have a great morning routine that helps to get me in the right mindset for the day. I do half an hour of exercise, followed by ten minutes of daily gratitude. Then it’s time to get my daughter up for school, make her breakfast and get ready myself.

I usually eat breakfast at around 8am and check my emails to get an idea of the jobs I’ll need to tackle first. Then I wake my son up, make him breakfast and a packed lunch, and take him to school.

At my desk

The first thing I do when I sit down to start work is check over the tasks I’ve planned for myself the day before. These typically include responding to emails, posting and engaging on social media (I set aside dedicated time for this each day to make sure it gets done), connecting with people I met at networking events, and making any introductions that people have requested.

After that, I call the Get Ahead VA team to get a client update – it’s always reassuring to know that I have that support there when I need it – and I follow up with clients to ensure they’re getting everything they need. A big part of my job is pairing clients with virtual assistants, and I have a growing team of really great VAs on hand, who cover a wide range of services. This is also a good time to make contact with prospective clients: following up with anyone who’s expressed an interest in our services, and emailing out contracts and terms of agreement.

Out and about

The beauty of being a Regional Director is that you aren’t bound to your desk all day, every day. A big part of the job is networking, and I tend to do most of my networking at lunchtimes in order to fit my work within school hours. So, at around 11am I get in the car to go to a networking meeting. Sometimes I make use of that driving time to have a quick one-to-one call with a prospective client, or to listen to an audiobook. Currently I’m working my way through The 5 Second Rule by Mel Robbins. Lunchtime networking sessions tend to last two hours, and I eat while I’m there. If I’m not networking, I’ll use this time to review my business and marketing plan, think about what is working well for me, and hone my pitch for future networking events. I’ll take about half an hour for lunch and eat it at the table (not at my desk!).

Afternoon commitments

When my daughter gets home from school, I take a break to catch up with her and find out what homework she has to do. Then I walk to my son’s school to pick him up, and when we come home I give both kids a snack. This isn’t the end of the working day for me, but it’s great that I can be around when my kids finish school, to ask them how their day was.

My afternoon jobs include checking my emails and social media again, and responding to anything pressing, like sending a client proposal. As the working day comes to an end, I review what I’ve done and plan my tasks and set goals for the next day. I might also draft some emails, ready to send out the next morning. Then at around 5pm it’s time to stop work and take the kids to Tae Kwon Do!

A varied routine

All in all, I’m usually in the office around 4 hours a day, and out of the office for 4 hours. I always make time during my office hours for phone calls, emails, marketing and reaching out to any prospects and networking connections. Every week I follow up with my clients and the Get Ahead VA team, update my accounts, check my progress against the plan for the week and make a plan for the following week, so I’m always thinking ahead. Each month I send out invoices and schedule content to post to social media.

The beauty of being a Regional Director is the freedom it affords. For me, I like to spend time on selfdevelopment, whether that’s listening to an audiobook, reading an article, watching a webinar or working on my Beyond 2030 by Toni Eastwood ‘6 Secrets to Success’ model, which I highly recommend.

With Get Ahead VA you are not just buying into a proven business model, but you also have access to franchise advice and support services. You really feel part of the team. Once a month, there’s a regular Zoom call with all the Regional Directors, and this is a great forum for us to share what’s going well, where we need support, and just to bounce ideas around. Also, I know that Rebecca (the founder of Get Ahead VA) is always at the end of the phone if I need any help; she’s super supportive, and she even came up to Leeds when I was delivering a presentation at one of my networking meetings!

Being a Regional Director for Get Ahead VA is a hugely rewarding job, and I love the flexibility of the working hours and the variety of every day. I also love the ability to really scale the business by adding new regional team members as I need them. I would recommend it to anyone who’s thinking of taking the plunge.

Marketing Services

Who are Crest Coaching?

Crest Coaching & HR are an independent Surrey business. They provide expert HR services, personalised executive coaching and career coaching services for SME’s. They are passionate about helping companies create engaged and successful teams. In addition, they offer group leadership coaching for managers as well as group change management sessions. 

Challenges 

Crest Coaching’s lead coach, Desiree, had outsourced to us before, and we had created some branded e-books for her on the topics of burnout and resilience. However, lockdown heightened these issues, so additional marketing was needed to bring her expertise to new audiences. She was also launching a new programme called Winning Teams so it seemed a good time to re-evaluate some of her marketing materials and content.

With these goals in mind, Desiree wanted to expand upon the e-books but also ensure her followers used the existing content. She also wanted to improve her general visibility on her marketing channels and re-assess her content strategy, to reach more people who might connect with her work. 

Solutions 

We worked with Desiree to provide guidance on a social media strategy, and a content plan for her to deliver herself over the summer months. We gathered information through a client questionnaire and online consultation.

Our marketing experts evaluated both the content and resources already available and made a clear, section-by-section strategy. This meant that Desiree always knows what to post, the ways she can post it and how she can boost this with an interaction plan too.

The new content plan brought about some other changes for Crest Coaching and HR. Once she started to use the new plan, Desiree was able to see further content marketing opportunities. She decided to invest in some designed templates on Canva which she could edit with fresh content whilst still maintaining her brand.  She created a new e-book for a specific event and outsourced the design element to Get Ahead. Desiree also wanted to develop her email marketing, including automating newsletter sign-up and creating a template for future newsletter content. The assistant working on this set up a linktr.ee account to make it easier to direct people to all the valuable content Crest HR has to offer. 

The process – working together to achieve Crest HR’s goals

When Desiree originally approached Get Ahead, she was looking for some help with visibility on social media. However, Joanne, the Regional Director for Surrey, felt Desiree’s business deserved a more strategic approach, and guided her to services that were going to be of most value to her ongoing. This included solving some niggling automation set-up issues and introducing some new tools that will make her marketing processes flow more easily now and in the future. 

The Regional Director put together the portfolio of services required, which included design, strategy and planning, marketing automation and technical VA services, delivered by three separate VAs. 

On this project the Regional Director took the client’s requests and produced a comprehensive brief for the team.  That meant we could offer a co-ordinated response, while the client received all the benefits of a single point of contact. Each VA slotted into their role in the project quickly and efficiently, ultimately saving the client time and money.

Outcomes 

We love it when a client comes back to utilise our services again and even better when we can quickly spot several things we can implement quickly and efficiently into their business.  After working with virtual experts from Get Ahead, Desiree can now organise her ongoing email marketing without having to worry about automation.  She has a stock of beautifully designed templates and resources which can be utilised in many different ways. Desiree also has a robust social media content plan and strategy that will be useful way beyond the initial few months it covered.  

 Our work for Crest Coaching and HR is a great example of how Get Ahead can combine services all under one roof to make it easier for the client and give them great value of money. The whole project came to less than £550 but it will benefit Desiree and her business far into the future.

If you’re considering outsourcing your marketing support, read our marketing page here, or get in touch on 01483 332 220 to find out more.

 

Virtual Event hosting support for UK VA Conference #VACon21 Online

Introduction

Get Ahead successfully provided tech support for the UK VA Conference, #VACon21 On-line.

Virtual Assistants, outsourcing experts for office administration and more (!), regularly attend the event for professional development, sharing best practice, ideas and increasing their business networks. The UK VA Conference also hosts the annual UK VA Awards, recognising the outstanding professionals in the Virtual Assistants business support industry.

This event, established in 2007, has in recent years been held at London’s largest exhibition centre, ExCeL. Respecting the restrictions of the pandemic, for 2021, the event had to be staged on-line.

The Solution

We worked closely with the client to make sure that the event technology options matched their exact requirements. We concluded and agreed that ZOOM would fully meet the client’s needs.

Each day and session hosted different speakers, so we had to test connectivity and functionality for each session. For example, some sessions were dependent on the chat function, while others required screensharing or breakout rooms. We worked with each speaker, listening to their plan and finding the tech solution to make their session as productive and interactive as possible.

Get Ahead provided tech checks for every speaker, and we met with them before the start of their session to make sure everyone was fully briefed. This additional, behind-the-scenes preparatory work was essential for the smooth running of the event, and keeping things running to time.

For the delegates, we released the links to each session and all attendees were given our contact details so they could liaise directly with us if they were struggling to access a session or had any other tech issues restricting access. This enabled our client to concentrate on their own role and responsibilities for the conference, safe in the knowledge that we had control of the tech platform.

The Challenges

The UK VA Conference organiser, Storm Media and Publishing, had the need to deliver a flawless series of virtual events for long-standing, established, virtual professionals – an audience that would pick up on any mistake and mishap! Regularly the format had been a ‘one day’ event, however, demands of the lockdown restricted the availability of the potential audience (dealing with home-schooling demands etc.) The most popular solution was to deliver events over 4 consecutive days. The client required reliable, consistently solid hosting and technical background support for the essential success of the online sessions, so they approached Get Ahead to ask for our help.

Why Get Ahead?

The event has been very well received, indeed reviewed as a great success, and the Get Ahead team were very proud to be supporting the profession. Our client, Storm Media’s CEO, John Palmer, said:

“Rebecca and her team supported the delivery of the UK VA Conference 2021 #VACon21 Online with our innovative 4 x 4 format over 4 days. The Get Ahead team facilitated the registrations, waiting rooms, live sessions, managed the Q & A and chat functions, reliably supporting the efforts to keep our ‘show on the road’! Get Ahead have impressed with their focus towards the detail, tech agility and the team’s confident ability to manage both speakers and delegates, whilst being mindful of keeping things running to time and budget. Delighted that Rebecca has added top class online event management to Get Ahead’s growing portfolio of services.”

Many thanks to John for his kind words!

Here at Get Ahead VA, we are privileged to work with a wide variety of clients who recognise the value of outsourcing the tasks that either they lack skills for or that take up their valuable time. Here’s 60 seconds with one of our clients, Enterprise Lab, a global platform that is committed to developing enterprise eco-systems for prosperity – this means better people, better businesses, better economies.

What situation was your business in when you first came to Get Ahead VA?

Earlier in the year during lockdown, we launched our Resource Centre – an online platform of curated content from our network of business experts, to provide support and guidance to businesses in all sectors and of all sizes, during a time that would impact and challenge businesses forcing them to pivot. We needed support with digital marketing to promote the platform & content to our target audience.

What difference did this make to your business?

Having a clear strategy in place for our digital marketing has meant that we can focus on our business objectives and be really clear about who we are trying to target and how we want to engage them.

With the success of the Resource Centre and the insights we gained from the digital marketing activities, we have evolved our approach to supporting small businesses in 2020 with our Start Up>Scale Up Summit virtual event in November.

The Get Ahead team have been flexible in their approach which has allowed us to evolve our plans but maintain a clear focus.

How did we help solve the problem for you?

Kristy from Get Ahead took my brief, and built a skilled team of experts led by Marie who worked on a digital marketing strategy and a plan for the Resource Centre which supported our vision of how it would help to meet our business objectives for 2020 and beyond.

They kicked off with a virtual workshop to shape the strategy collaboratively with us; this helped us to be clear on our objectives and positioning and gather some insights on what our competitors were doing and how we were differentiating ourselves.

From there they carried out an audit of our digital platforms – the website and social media pages – and a SWOT analysis, before putting together detailed plans which delivered on our strategic goals.

Our digital marketing plan consisted of SEO, PPC, social media management, video content, and paid social ads on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. We received a consolidated regular report and a weekly team call to review performance and agree next steps which ensures we’re always working towards our goals.

Collaboration with the Get Ahead team has been the key to success and rather than simply pushing work through to your traditional agency, the team seamlessly slot in as if they’re part of our own business.

Supporting a local business for their next expo

Background

Arcivate offers Automated Invoice Processing Software to help their customers automate supplier invoicing. They received a government grant to attend a business expo, so they were keen to use it well. To get the best value, they wanted to be thorough in their approach to the expo, maybe even finding solutions that could be re-used in future years. They spoke to Jo McGowan of Get Ahead Guildford to organise the design and production of their stand and artwork.

Challenges

The business knew it needed artwork for the stand at their next expo. Without an informative, eye-catching stand, the business risked missing opportunities and not making the most of the exhibitions. But as with many Get Ahead projects, a detailed conversation with one of our regional directors highlighted additional needs the business had around content and marketing messaging.

The business wanted to ensure that the messaging on their exhibition stand, and on their website and social media communications, was communicating the same benefits and problems solved. They wanted to ensure that people meeting them at the expo would receive the same message on all other channels and anyone looking them up after the expo would experience a consistency of values across the board.

Solutions

Designing the stand was relatively straightforward. The business already had a logo and style guide; it was easy for our graphic designers to combine it with information given in person by the business owner to create an eye-catching stand.

Jo McGowan has her own directory of contractors who can help deliver Get Ahead’s work. On this occasion, she was able to recommend a printer who would transform the designs from digital files into upright banners. Reassuringly, the printer she suggested was the same one the client was already considering – Jo naming him too was all the encouragement the client needed.

The Get Ahead marketing experts also worked hard to develop some great content for the business. By building up a strong foundation of blogs and case studies, the business clarified its messages and learned to describe their offering in a way that was clear and meaningful to clients and prospects.

All these solutions were easy to implement. Jo and her team were delighted by how open the client was to suggestions – it made the process easier by turning outsourced support into a genuine partnership.

Outcomes

The business is looking forward to the upcoming exhibition, and the team feel confident that they’ll be able to show potential leads a clear direction. They’ve also built up a strong bank of online content – very useful for the upcoming expo, but also for future social media posts, presentations, newsletters and other marketing opportunities.

“You are always cautious when entering into a new arrangement as to what will be provided, but we have been very pleasantly surprised at just how easy it has been to liaise with Joanne and her team and the great early results they have provided”

Andrew Coyle, Arcivate

Here at Get Ahead VA, we are privileged to work with a wide variety of clients who recognise the value of outsourcing the tasks that either they lack skills for or that take up their valuable time. Here’s 60 seconds with one of our clients, Moira Fuller, Productivity & Strategy Coach for small businesses and founder of the craft subscription box Craftiosity.

What did you need help with when you came to Get Ahead VA?

I was juggling two businesses and wanted to focus more time on supporting small business entrepreneurs by outsourcing much of the admin of my subscription box business. A friend recommended Fiona from Get Ahead VA to me, and after a quick chat, we decided to trial working together. We haven’t looked back since!

How did Get Ahead VA help solve the problem for you?

I was matched up with Hazel, who’s been an excellent support and has taken on more as the months have gone by. She manages our customer service emails and the orders database (no small feat!) and liaises with our fulfilment centre. I really appreciate that Get Ahead are also able to provide cover when Hazel’s on holiday, so the support is year round.

What has this meant for you and your business?

I’m a big fan of working in your ‘genius zone’ – the area where your passions and skills align – and outsourcing as much of the rest as possible, and from the location you choose! I was intentional about building a business that would give me location freedom, that didn’t require premises with in-office staff.

Working consistently with an excellent VA has meant I can trust that this part of the business is in safe hands, and this allows me to focus on my business growth. The investment in support has easily paid off, both financially and in making my work more enjoyable, allowing me to focus on the strategy and business support I excel at.