Everyone talks about how when you are running your own business, how you need to know your ‘why’ – why you set up on your own in the first place. This might be that you were sick of the daily grind and daily commute, perhaps you hated your employers, maybe you had an illness and needed a change of lifestyle and less stress, or maybe you just fancied a change. As the years go by, it’s important to remember your ‘why’ but also recognise if it has changed.
This also applies to the services that you offer. Just because you set out offering one thing doesn’t mean you have to keep offering it.
How often do you review your website? I was having a look back at my services pages which list the types of services we can offer along with examples of the tasks we can do, and it got me thinking about a service I’d been offering that I didn’t originally set out to provide – social media support.
Over the years more and more clients have been asking for help with this. To properly execute a social media plan – researching what is working and what isn’t, creating a strategy and creating and planning content takes quite a lot of time and skill – and results take time to come – social media is not a quick win when it comes to bringing in new leads, which has been frustrating for some clients, especially where they have a modest budget to invest and want to see results for their investments.
It was becoming more and more difficult to be meet client’s expectations around the return on social media and they were not willing or able to invest what it rreally needed, so we were just scratching the surface and despite a small investment, were still asking:
- Why was no-one commenting on their posts?
- Why was their reach and engagement so low?
- Why were they not flooded with leads?
I began to ask myself why, as social media was not a service that I set out to provide, was I providing the support, so later that week on a call with my business coach I … pressed … DELETE and deleted the social media services page on my website. The relief was immediate. Strangely I then had two leads that week for potential clients who wanted this service, who I happily referred on.
Many of our clients use us as a one-stop shop for all their admin support, but that one-stop shop has to stop somewhere! No-one can do everything, and neither should they! It’s more important that you do what you do well and don’t try to be all things to all men (and women).
The Society of Virtual Assistants v10 of their annual survey, showed that the most popular services that VAs were providing were general admin, personal/lifestyle support and social media, and that many VAs were no longer offering social media support for the exact same reason that I decided not to.
“Overwhelmingly, general admin remains the most lucrative service for VAs to offer. Social media has seen a small decrease,
possibly due to clients becoming more aware of the need to measure ROI on social media”
Maybe I was having a rebellious week as I also decided to close my business Facebook page!
What services do you offer?
Are they all services that you love?
When did you last review?
I’d love to know.
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