If you are a small to medium sized business owner you will understand that downtime is important but very hard to have when you own your own business. You typically cannot shutter your doors and windows when you go on vacation or want to take a weekend off. You can control that you don’t work 24/7, but most business owners will continue to have some degree of contact with the office even when on vacation.
For me, I am getting ready to do some European travel this summer. I will be out 10 days in Paris, France and out two weeks in Russia later in the summer. In both cases I am not expecting to have email or phone contact. So short of closing your business and angering customers what do you do? For me, I am taking my Christmas holiday to train a new personal assistant. Although in one week I cannot do a brain clone, I can set the groundwork with a new assistant to give them the background needed to be able to monitor and answer as many questions as possible in my absence and then continue additional long distance training. I will be training my assistant to do minor AdWords account management tasks and to monitor customer service e-mail and voice traffic.
I am fortunate in that I am already working with the person whom I have chosen to be my personal assistant, but if you do not have the same situation, you may want to consider contacting Kathy Goughenour of Virtual Assistant Training. Kathy has been a personal assistant and now trains others on how to be virtual assistants. She knows her students and can recommend one to you to contact to become your personal assistant on a full-time or part-time basis.
There is no reason in today’s web connected world why a personal assistant cannot monitor phone, email, and business traffic for you from just about any location. If you are feeling too tethered to your own growing business, now’s the time to start planning for your free time by considering training a personal assistant.