Microbusiness Profile: The Relief

Dawn Rivers Baker, MicroEnterprise Journal

There is a revolution going on in the American economy right now, one that a lot of people haven't noticed yet. What's even more interesting is that some of the leaders of that revolution don't even realize they're doing it.

Danielle Keister runs The Relief, a Virtual Assistance professional service company, from her home office in Tacoma, WA. She started out in the non-virtual world doing freelance clerical work on the side while she worked a "regular job" in administration in corporate America.

After she had been handling these freelance jobs for awhile, Danielle began to see that she had the foundations for a real business of her own — in addition to being fed up with the whole corporate grind.

"This can't be all there is. I don't want to be a hamster on a treadmill, and go to my grave feeling like I hadn't exacted all the joy I could out of living," she told me during a telephone interview.

In 1998, she got a secretarial service up and running and then, a few years later, she encountered the concept of the Virtual Assistant. Secretarial services, which have been around for decades, are task or project focused, operating in much the same way as a print or copy shop.

Virtual Assistants, on the other hand, are true professional administrative service providers. "It's more about really connecting with that business, and being a partner with that business in an ongoing collaborative relationship," Danielle explains. "We generally work with clients on retainer, and it's a lot more like your relationship with your attorney or your accountant."

That difference is very, very important—but I'll get to that shortly.

Possibly because she makes that distinction and holds herself to very high professional standards, Danielle is among the more successful Virtual Assistants. Hers is another non-employer business, but she subcontracts the bookkeeping work that comes her way.

She also has hired another microbusiness owner to handle the administrative work involved in running her business, which frees more of her time to handle administrative work for her clients.

Because the Virtual Assistant industry is a relatively new one, Danielle finds that it is important to help potential clients understand exactly what she does and what they can expect from working with her. At the same time, because her work varies depending on the needs of individual clients, it is easier for her to tell me what she doesn't do than it is for her to describe what she does.

And quite a lot of her description of her services centers on the kind of relationship she develops with her clients, which (interestingly enough) recalls last week's profilee, Melanie Strick. On the subject of the difficulties some microbusiness owners experience in managing the independent contractor relationship, Danielle says, "A good Virtual Assistant is going to let the client know, right from the get-go, what they can expect."

"I think they hold the bigger end of the responsibility in communicating what their standards are, what their policies and processes are, and just really clearly laying it out for the client ... and it really takes the burden off the client then," she added.

All this client-contractor relationship nurturing provides a glimpse into the revolution in company structure that is taking place right now, largely under everybody's radar, within the microbusiness economy. And at the heart of that structural change is the Virtual Assistant industry.

Those of us with experience in office-based work are familiar with the administrative assistant as employee. Virtual Assistants are changing the way in which businesses are acquiring administrative services. In the overall scheme of things, that's a pretty huge shift.

For generations, administrative employees have been the glue that has held companies together, the backbone of their human resources infrastructure. From a hierarchical point of view, they were always undervalued and underpaid, too. Largely because administrative assistants perform tasks that do not generate revenue, they have always been considered unimportant and expendable in the company scheme of things.

Of course, that has never been the case. What the emergence of a Virtual Assistant industry has done is to remove the services performed by these professionals out of the corporate hierarchical structure and re-assessed them for what they really are: a way for company leaders to get some of their precious time back.

Danielle puts it this way: "If I'm allowing you to carve out focus that you're paying one monthly lump-sum for, and that in turn allows you to just wildly expand your business—creates X-number of extra hours a month and X-number of increased income—you tell me what the value of that is."

When you look at it that way, administrative assistance becomes a critical and tremendously valuable service. That's why so many microbusinesses and non-employer businesses willingly pay what Virtual Assistants ask, and why the better ones can earn so much more of both money and status than any secretary or office manager ever dreamed of.

The emergence of the Virtual Assistant industry has meant that folks who provide professional administrative services have placed a much more realistic value on what those services are truly worth. That's a fairly gigantic shift, too, and has created the need for a whole new set of management skills for both the Virtual Assistants and their clients.

The industry is going through some growing pains, and that's what Danielle tells me is her biggest business headache right now. She finds she needs to get very clear with prospective clients about what services she offers, and about the fact that she is not an employee and will not be treated like one.

At the same time, others in the field remain embedded in that employee mindset and end up training their clients to treat them like employees. That, in its turn, impacts the marketplace, leaving those Virtual Assistants at the other end of the spectrum battling to be treated with the proper level of professional respect. "It's an ongoing dilemma," says Danielle.

She feels strongly enough about developing standards and ethics in the Virtual Assistant industry that she started an organization, called the Virtual Assistance Chamber of Commerce, dedicated to the advancement of the profession.

There is a certain amount of friction involved here and it will be interesting to see what kind of a coherent industry structure will emerge from the growing pains. As they iron out the kinks in their profession, Virtual Assistants are also instigating a tectonic shift in the way businesses acquire basic bedrock administrative services. That makes their struggle much, much larger than just the fate of their industry.

If the growth of microbusiness ownership is a quiet revolution in the American economy, the Virtual Assistant industry is, in many ways, quietly leading the charge. Their successes represent giant victories for all that microbusiness ownership stands for: people with the courage to take back their economic freedom and to demand compensation that is commensurate for the work performed.