“I must get more organised next year.” Needing to get more organised is a common theme among many small business owners and never more so than when we’re heading into a new year. The good intentions and resolutions that we make in January are the perfect context to start putting those systems and processes in place to make our businesses run more smoothly and efficiently. And there’s no better place to begin than your inbox.

It’s the first thing we look at in the morning and most of us dip in and out of our inbox throughout the day. An overfull, disorganised inbox can create feelings of overwhelm more quickly than almost any other area of a small business and the time wasted trying to find past emails is immense – you can waste up to half an hour each day re-reading old emails while trying to find the one you’re looking for.
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Luckily there are some very simple, quick fixes that can help you to break your old email habits and create a beautiful, streamlined inbox (and get you back all that lost time).

You know you’re overwhelmed and struggling with the amount of admin on your plate. And you know you need to outsource some of it to a professional. But when you’re so busy it can be difficult to identify which admin tasks you should outsource. Plus, a lot of small business owners get used to doing everything themselves and get into the mindset of “I can do that, it only takes 5 minutes”.
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The thing is, all those “just 5 minutes” add up to a lot of time in the long run. Leaving you with even less time to decide what you are going to outsource. Luckily for you I’ve come up with a quick guide to 20 easily outsourceable admin tasks that you could hand over to a virtual assistant tomorrow.

Adoption UK is a national charity supporting around 20,000 adoptive families each year through membership, community activities and groups, and other events. Founded in 1970 the charity employees around 100 staff, plus a large number of volunteers.
 
Moving from face-to-face to online
Following the national lockdown in March 2020 Adoption UK were forced to cancel their in-person community support groups. In April 2020 they hired Helen Leach VA Services to assist with moving their community support group services online. Rob Langley-Swain, Director of Membership, tells the story.

​Many small business owners who struggle with their admin would love to get some outside help. Knowing where to start can be tricky though.

A question I’m often asked is: what kind of tasks can a VA help with?
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The remit of individual tasks a VA can assist with is very broad but the types of work we take on essentially boil down to 3 things:

Following last week’s revised government guidance regarding Covid-19 restrictions the meetings and business events industry has been thrown into confusion again. We had been told that as of 1st October business events could resume, providing they stuck to social distancing guidelines and venues were made Covid-safe. The PM’s statement last week clarified what is and isn’t allowed with regards to social gatherings but his throwaway comment that “the spread of the virus is now affecting our ability to reopen business conferences, exhibitions and large sporting events” left many in the business events industry confused. It looks like we’ll just have to wait for further guidance on this one.

The rules around day-to-day working are clearer. We’re being encouraged to work from home where possible. After 6 months of working from home most of us are now familiar with Zoom, Teams and Google Meet. “You’re on mute Mark!” (it’s always Mark) has become a staple of most online meetings, and we’re resigned to staying on these platforms for the foreseeable future. But for some of us, including coaches and trainers, face-to-face meetings simply have to resume in order for their businesses to survive.
So how do we approach face-to-face meetings in a Covid-safe way?

“Always freakishly organised…”

Is how my sister chose to describe me when I asked her to write the copy for my wedding planning website back in 2011.
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These days I support small business owners, coaches and not-for-profit organisations who are struggling with overwhelm and want someone to ease the workload. And I have to admit, I am rather organised. Which is a big key to why I do what I do.

Normally at this time of year I’d have written about how to manage the school holidays along with running a small business, but so many of us had to negotiate 4 months of home-schooling that the summer holidays didn’t seem to present the same challenge this year. In fact this looks like being the easiest 6-7 weeks of the parenting/work juggle that I’ve done in quite a while.
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Our experiences since March of this year have all been different. Some business owners embraced lockdown, using it as an opportunity to take a look at marketing strategies and revamp existing processes and practices. Others have reacted to the new situation by realigning their offering – moving from face-to-face services to online. Some have been even busier than usual. A lot of us will have been concentrating purely on what absolutely needed to be done, keeping our business afloat and letting a lot of the little day-to-day things slide. 

For small business owners the art of juggling is one we have to learn early on. We start off being CEO, Finance Director, Administrator, Customer Service, Marketing department – every time something new gets thrown at us we add it to the act, find the time, and keep on going. Since lockdown started many of us have had to deal with extra challenges, whether that has been in the shape of homeschooling, moving a face-to-face business online, or both.
 
But there comes a point for all of us when it gets too much and we can’t keep everything going. For me, it all fell apart last week – I was trying to keep too many balls in the air and ended up dropping all of them.
 
At first I felt awful – I’m a professional multi-tasker, how had I let this happen? Well, it’s simple really, I’d forgotten the golden rule - planning. I had become so tangled up in what I had to do that I hadn’t stopped to think about how to go about doing it.
 
So I dusted off my trusty VA rulebook and created a helpful infographic for all of us who are struggling with the juggling act right now.

In the last 10 weeks the world of work has changed beyond recognition for most of us. Remote working, up until now something that only a handful of us did regularly, has become the norm, with tools such as Zoom, Teams and Google Meet replacing face-to-face contact. It’s a reasonable assumption that we won’t ever return to the old normal and that in the future flexible working patterns will increase, with more people working from home on a regular basis and teams continuing to communicate via video conference.
This is all well and good and while I’m obviously a champion of remote working (what VA isn’t?) there is one area where it really can’t compete with face-to-face contact and that’s when it comes to team-building. Zoom, Teams and all those other online tools work to maintain the connections that have already been built in the office at people’s desks, bumping into each other while getting a cup of tea, those ‘water-cooler’ moments where chance snatches of conversation enable colleagues to get to know each other and build relationships. And if we’re going to see increased flexible working then the humble team-building day will be ever more important.

The events industry is in limbo. With current government restrictions having forced the closure of venues, both large and small, mass gatherings banned, and no guidance given as to when these constraints will be lifted, the events world as we know it has all but disappeared. Conferences, exhibitions, workshops, even the humble team-building day: the physical versions of these have all been cancelled or postponed for the foreseeable future.

The Business Visits and Events Partnership (BVEP) has briefed DCMS that business events should be classed differently from mass-gatherings (https://bit.ly/2Wpi1eh) to aid recovery of the industry when lockdown restrictions are eased; in the meantime many business events continue to be transferred to a virtual setting or have been postponed for the time being.

Against this backdrop it may seem counter-intuitive to be considering hiring an events manager to plan your next event – surely we should be waiting to see how things pan out? However now may be the perfect time to get all your ducks in a row and be ready to proceed when we come out of the other side.