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.
I have recently been reviewing my website content to make sure I’m talking to the type of client I want to be working with and part of this review is the services pages. In my services pages I listed the types of services we can offer along with examples of the tasks we can do.
Recently I have struggling with one particular service, and it’s a service I never 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 has been becoming more difficult to be able to deliver client’s expectations on their budgets and get the results they want.
- Why is no-one commenting on their posts when they ask a question?
- Why is their reach and engagement so low?
- Why are they not flooded with leads?
I regularly have calls with my business coach, who often asks what is going well and what isn’t and more and more I recognised that the thing causing me the most stress, and the task I was least enjoying was social media, so last week whilst on one of my coaching calls 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 my clients use us as we can be a one-stop shop for all their admin support, but that one-stop shop has to stop somewhere! No-one can do everything and continue to do it well.
I have just taken part in an online challenge for VAs, where one of the tasks was to review my services and split them into columns showing
1, What I like doing
2, What services are most in demand
3, What services are most profitable
Social media is no longer on that list but I was happy with everything else that was.
This week the Society of Virtual Assistants issued v10 of their annual survey, which showed that the most popular services that VAs were providing were general admin, personal/lifestyle support and social media but that social media had slipped from the 2nd the 3rd spot in the last year.
“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.
Joanne Manville
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