Question of the Week – Various Client Professions

Q.  With your clients, what professions are you helping out?

A. Sydni Craig-Hart: I have a client who a college consultant.  Another one is an executive coach for media professionals.  I have a client who is a consultant for getting your kids into private school.  There is also a woman who works with other corporate employees seeking a career change.  One client is a marketing consultant for interior designers.  Another provides diversity training to corporations.  The last person is a holistic nutritional health counselor.

You can see from this list that there is tremendous diversity.  That’s by choice.  ’ve chosen to be a generalist and not niche myself by working just for lawyers, authors or fitness people.  Because I worked in finance for so long, I was ready to do something else.  I like having my hands in all of these different pots.

However, many Virtual Assistants choose to niche themselves into one area or one particular profession.  Or they only offer one particular set of services.  This is perfectly acceptable.

Laura Allen – Admissions Director, AssistU:    My first client, as I was going through the Virtual Training Program, was an independent local bookstore.  Books are a passion of mine.  This store was the last holdout of an independent bookstore in our town.  Everything else was chain operated.  It was nice to have a local client.  She unfortunately has gone out of business since then.  She was the only local client I experienced.

There are some pros and cons to having a local client, depending on if you like having the opportunity to meet face-to-face with your client to do some personal stuff in the store.  I love that. T hat was really fun for me.  I miss that.

A couple of my first clients were Virtual Assistants themselves through AssistU.  They were senior Virtual Assistants that I learned a wealth of information from in the first year I worked with them.  As I left services with them, clients they had outgrown came to my practice.  It was a win-win for everyone all around.

I also have a client who is a life coach.  I can’t recommend working with a life coach highly enough as you build your business.  I had never experienced life coaches until I had been through AssistU.

A lot of AssistU’s program is built on the foundations of CoachU and Stacy Brice’s background with coaching.  AssistU is one of my clients.  Everything we do at AssistU is virtual.  We teach our clients and virtual assistants virtually.   We are a virtual company.

I have a client who is a consultant for the public library system in Maryland and a nonprofit organization in the state of Delaware.

Those are my four current clients. They are varied.  I never would have believed those would be the types of clients I would be working with when I set out at the beginning of the training.