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What does it take to be an absolutely remarkable virtual assistant? There are a lot of things online or marketing speak about the 5 P’s. By doing a search on Google for the 5 Ps or the Ps of Marketing or similar, then you will uncover a list of different words whose initial letter is a P, which are indeed relevant to marketing, but not necessarily when it comes to Virtual Assistants. To avoid any confusion, I have come up with my own 5Ps for Virtual Assistants, which you should focus on if you want to really stand out with your Virtual Assistant organisation.

1) PASSION

This is the most important of all the peas — Passion. You need to have passion for what you do, for your business. You have to be passionate about your skill set and have a passion for learning everything that you need to know about the world of virtual assistants, especially as it is so dynamic. Unless you are passionate, it is unlikely you’ll be able to build a standout virtual assistant business. It’s not to say that you won’t be successful and you won’t have want you want from your business but if you want to really go for it and you want to be one of the best virtual assistants and one of the competitors in the virtual assistant industry you need to have that passion and that fire going for what you do.

2. PERSONABLE

The second one is you need to be Personable. Do you get on well with people? You really have to be able to communicate well. You need to be able to speak to people well. In addition, you have to be able to communicate what you are thinking to others in order to give instructions and to impart what you’re feeling and so on and it’s important that people really take to you, as well. You need a combination of social skills and personality. It’s an important part of being a virtual assistant because people actually can’t see you, usually, because you’re virtual. If you like, you have to have a very advanced digital kind of personality. It’s not easy but you need this characteristic in you.

3) PRODUCTIVITY

Let’s turn to Productivity. You have to be very very productive to be a good virtual assistant because the whole basis of your business will be how much work you can get done, how productive you can be with the tasks and various things which are going to be coming at you because you’re not just doing billable time. If this were the case, it wouldn’t be so difficult, but you also have issues related to running a business to worry about. So, if you chose that you only want to work 8 hours a day you have to probably expect that you will only be doing a few of those as billable time and the remainder of the time you will actually be developing and building your Virtual Assistant business. That’s why productivity is so vitally important if you’re going to get things done and have time available to work on developing your business, as well.

4) PATIENCE

The fourth one is Patience. This is where you have to have an extraordinary amount of patience, as some days you will come across clients and other people who will really push you to the extreme. It happens quite a lot with me. In these circumstances it is very important that you remain calm, as you will always have to be sympathetic to the other person’s position. Sometimes you come across people who try to get their work done and put you under additional pressure and you cannot upset people so all you can do is stand back and take a deep breath and tell yourself that you are going to do your absolute best under the circumstances. If you take the time to assess a situation and approach everything in this way, the chances are very good that everything will be okay in the end.

5) PERSEVERANCE

The last one is Perseverance because without perseverance you will not sustain your VA business because a VA business is not built overnight. It’s not a get-rich-quick scheme. You have to dedicate a lot of time. It takes hard work, a lot of effort but once you get there and once you make it and you persevere then it will be wonderful. I am extremely satisfied with my Virtual Assistant organization, I can assure you. I consider it to be one of the best things I’ve ever achieved. I hope if you’re thinking about becoming a virtual assistant that you don’t give up on the first hard time, you persevere and you get through the tough time, especially during recession and things like that. But in actual fact, the recession, after a couple of months I increased my workloads and my business a lot more. In many respects, you will find that Virtual Assistance is one of those recession proof businesses.

 Passion, Personable, Productivity, Patience, Perseverance: those are the 5 P’s of being a remarkable virtual assistant.