Business process setup

A business process documents all the activities you perform to achieve various goals in your business. Without a process, you will beat around the bush a lot. This makes it important for you to have one as a virtual assistant. Because if you are not organized behind the scenes, it would be difficult for you to serve your clients seamlessly.

When preparing your business process, bear in mind that what you want to see are the exact steps you take to achieve each and every of your goals. E.g. Let’s assume one of your goal is to add a new service to your list of offers.

First of all, you do not want to just wake up one day and inform your clients that you now have a new offer and they should start subscribing. You should instead, create steps (tasks) that you will take to actualize your goal.

1. Get clear about your goal

Your goal here is to add a new offer to your services.

2. Create a list of actions

This is where you state the strategies you need to take to achieve your goal of adding a new service to your list of offers. Activities at this stage may include:

1. Determining the price of the new service
2. Coming up with content for putting out word about the service
3. Coming up with the right strategies for introducing the service to your existing clients
4. Getting your business ready in terms of tools needed to properly offer the service to the public in exchange for money.
5. E.t.c. (your business might need more activities to be included in your plan depending on the service you are adding).

3. Involve yourself and stakeholders

After sorting out the process in the steps listed above, you should create action plans to accomplish each step. You necessarily do not need to assign anything to stakeholders especially if you are the only one running the business. However, there are tasks that you might not have the strengths to accomplish in which case you will have to outsource them to freelancers or other businesses. Such task might be creating branded material for your new service. If you do not run a branding company, you will find it easier to outsource this task to the experts. This could even be an opportunity to patronize your clients if they offer branding services.

Stakeholder also include any other person who has a role to play in the accomplishment of your goal.

4. Test your idea

The process you are setting up should be designed in such way that you can use it to add another service to your list of offers in the future. So you want to do a test run of all the above activities and launch the offer to see if the business process is effective or not. At this stage, you should consider launching the service to a new set of prospect at a great discount or even free so that there is space for enough slacks in case your process does not work as it should.

During the test, be deliberate about catching flaws and areas where improvements need to made, then make adjustments.

5. Launch

After stage 3 (testing of the process) and making corrections of the flaws you noticed, it is time to launch your new service to existing and new clients who are to pay in full for the service.

6. Get feedback

Remember that the feedback you received in step 4 above was your own observations and that of prospects who enjoined discount offers, so it might be a little bit biased. The feedback you are getting at this stage are from clients who made full payment, so it is important to pay strict attention and make further adjustments as necessary.

Repeat

Repeat all steps when next you need to add new services to your list of offers. If properly planned and implemented, you will not need to create new plans when launching a new service. You might only need to make little adjustments. This is the trait of efficiency you want to also exhibit when completing your clients’ projects.

This brings us to the end of Module 9.

Do not forget to share this course with your friends and family, they’d really appreciate it.

CONTINUE TO MODULE 10

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