Home-based virtual staffs

Ann Harrell has run the offices for a couple of day care centers, business owners and a medical consultant. The companies are located from Annapolis to Michigan, but Mrs. Harrell is firmly planted in her home office in Bowie.

Mrs. Harrell is a certified virtual assistant. After a corporate downsizing a few years ago, she took her 15 years of experience and started her own business.

She has contracts with two clients to do services such as bookkeeping, newsletter writing, marketing and database management. She works around the schedule of her four sons, whom she home-schools.

“I wanted to do the thing I loved the most while being with the people I loved the most,” Mrs. Harrell says.

As more small companies are being run from a laptop and a mobile office, it is a natural progression for a support staff to be home-based as well. Advances in technology have made it possible, for instance, for a consultant in Colorado to have a support staff in Silver Spring.

Virtual assistants provide a range of services, from basic clerical work to correspondence to organizing and implementing systems. Most come to the industry from corporate America, where they have learned the necessary computer programs and gained skills that naturally transfer to being a virtual assistant, says Susan Kramer, an Illinois-based virtual assistant and marketing director for the International Virtual Assistants Association (IVAA).

The IVAA, which began in 2001, offers several certifications for virtual assistants. Through home study and tests, virtual assistants can earn a certified virtual assistant designation as well as designations in ethics or the real estate business.

Mrs. Harrell is certified in all three areas and says it gives her an extra professional edge when contracting for jobs.

“One of my first clients said he hired me because of the certifications,” Mrs. Harrell says. “He was concerned about having a home-based administrator.”

Many people earn their extra edge in the business by taking a virtual assistant course before starting their business. Stacy Brice, a former virtual assistant from Cockeysville, Md., started AssistU (www.assistU.com) 10 years ago.

AssistU offers 20-week courses via teleconference. About 1,000 virtual assistants have graduated from the program, Ms. Brice says.

AssistU graduates also can earn two levels of certification from the organization after they have work experience.

“There are some people who build their own practices and then do training,” Ms. Brice says. “We are the only ones who offer comprehensive programs.”

Ms. Brice says many people are drawn to becoming virtual assistants because they have gotten tired of the lack of security or lack of flexibility in the corporate realm.

They like the idea of owning their own business. Virtual assistants typically charge between $15 and $75 an hour, depending on the project or their skills, Ms. Brice says.

Meanwhile, most businesses that hire virtual assistants are small practitioners such as Realtors, entrepreneurs, authors and business coaches, Ms. Brice says. With a virtual assistant, they are freed from doing administrative tasks but do not have to pay a full-time employee or provide office space or equipment.

The AssistU courses, which cost upward of $2,500, are not so much about how to use Office Excel. Rather, they concentrate on what you need to know about running your own business. Topics covered include invoicing, making a business plan, setting fees and setting boundaries.

“We teach what it means to have a business,” says Ms. Brice, who has hired her own virtual assistant, an AssistU grad who works out of the upper peninsula of Michigan. “One of the hardest leaps to make is from the employee mind-set to the owner mind-set.”

AssistU also provides newly minted virtual assistants with a network of others. Often, the graduates look to others in the network if they have a particularly difficult problem to solve.

“There was one virtual assistant whose client wanted them to broker a yacht from Hong Kong to New York,” Ms. Brice says. “The VA went into the virtual community and asked if anyone had worked with a yacht broker.”

It turned out that someone had, and the assistant was able to make contact and set up a smooth move for the yacht.

Nothing that challenging has happened to Lee Marshall of Germantown, who became a virtual assistant after taking the AssistU course in 2004.

Mrs. Marshall had worked in the insurance industry before staying home after her twin boys were born. Eventually, she wanted to return to work but could not see returning to the long hours and business travel she used to do.

Mrs. Marshall says taking the course “was absolutely a good route” for going into business. Her company, Greased Wheel Virtual Assistance, works with three clients: a Gaithersburg small business owner, a McLean management consultant and an executive recruiter in Connecticut. She says she does different support tasks for each client, ranging from information technology support to business analysis to graphic design for newsletters.

Mrs. Marshall advises anyone going into business, in addition to taking the AssistU course, to get the right office equipment.

“You need the biggest, baddest computer you can get,” she says. “You might need to be able to connect through a private network, and you need to be able to back work up. You need a good-quality phone and headset. I also have a laptop that is configured so I could work other places.”