#REMOTE EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT SERVICE HOW TO#
#REMOTE EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT SERVICE INSTALL#

I even tried calling the person who had been her reference, but he doesn’t seem to be answering his phone either. When I tried calling her, I discovered her phone had been disconnected. In retrospect, I may have been better off doing a screencast showing her exactly what I wanted done.Īt the end of the second week, I asked her to send me everything she had been working on, even if it was only partially complete because I wanted to evaluate things before moving forward.

For whatever reason, it had confused her. Personally I thought my instructions were very detailed and very clear–especially with all the screen shots showing exactly what I needed.

#REMOTE EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT SERVICE HOW TO#

I emphasized the need for accurate record keeping and explained that the time tracking was a very important part of what I needed to be able to tell if the arrangement was worth while or not.Īs we launched into the second week, I discovered that she was having significant difficulties understanding how to obtain the metrics for various websites. When I asked about the two missing hours, the reply I got was “well, it was about 20 hours.” I saw a draft of the authoritative articles she was supposed to locate and summarize were ok, but looked like they were chosen based on their ordering in Google rather than actual content. I sent an email with screen shots showing how to get these numbers from each site.Īt the end of the first week, she had only logged 18 hours and she hadn’t accomplished much. The metrics were to come from places like Alexa, Technorati, Feedburner, etc. Another was to find websites in a particular niche and put together a spreadsheet showing 3 or 4 metrics, the URL and contact information. One was to find 20 authoritative articles on a particular subject and write up 100 to 200 word summaries. And I gave her several tasks to complete. We agreed to start off with 20 hours per week for $250. Regardless of the cause, a good time tracking system lets you keep track of exactly how long things take to get done and can give you a good idea of what type of tasks will best use your assistant’s skills. The issue might be an unclear definition of the task or it might have to do with not providing proper training ahead of time. If I give someone a task that I think will take 2 hours and it takes them 16 hours there is probably something wrong. When you are working with someone remotely it is easy to have very different ideas on how long something will take. Particularly I wanted to make sure I had a way for her to track her time on each task.

#REMOTE EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT SERVICE INSTALL#

I used Basecamp because it was easy to setup and get running and the hosted feature meant I didn’t have to try to install something myself.

The first thing I did was to setup a project management system. In retrospect the noisy kids should have been a warning sign. With the kids at home she wouldn’t be able to make phone calls, but most of what I needed done was going to be over email anyway. I could hear her kids very loud in the background and every once in awhile our conversation would be interrupted while she told them to stop climbing the walls. She said she was wanting to work from home to be able to spend more time with her kids. When I spoke with I called one of her references and they were very pleased with her work, so I decided to try it as an experiment. I also wanted to keep the work in the USA if I could instead of sending it out of the country. My thinking was that someone who grew up in the US would be easier to communicate with than someone from a foreign country. I found a paralegal from Texas who was looking for work as a virtual assistant.

I looked at a lot of the companies that provide remote executive assistants, but decided I’d rather work with someone directly. I get all the important stuff done, but there are many smaller things that I’d like to accomplish that I simply don’t have enough time. With innovative and state-of-the-art technologies and processes, our data driven solution has helped our clients to outperform its competitor by improving business and operational performance.I find that I have a lot more ideas of things I’d like to do than I have time to do them. Market Quotient is a next generation outsourcing firm providing impeccable research and data driven solutions to global companies.

Remote executive assistant service