Self employed / small business opinions wanted

Hello, my wife has just posted this on net mums and was hoping to get some ideas and feedback from a wider demographic. Any experiences or thoughts? If self employed, what would you want from this kind of service?

I was just wondering if anyone could give me some feedback on an idea I have had that I could do from home to fit around school, pre-school hours, dog etc? It is to be a PA for small businesses that do not have the resources, or need, for a full time administrator. So I’m thinking it would appeal to self employed trade people. I could do all of their office work i.e. Invoicing, diary management, emails, answering phone calls (if they divert calls to me or give me a mobile), basic book-keeping, proof-reading, stock management etc…..

What do people think of this as an idea? Do you think there is a need? At the moment I could do this for maybe just 1 company but then look to expand as my children get older and start full-time school. Can anyone think of reasons why this wouldn’t work?

Thank you for any feedback…..

Can anyone think of reasons why this wouldn’t work?

There are lots of other similar services out there.

However, if you could get it working, you might do well at it. You’ll have to think of how to add value as well as just being a service. And don’t underestimate how much time it takes just to do one tradesperson’s diary, invoicing, estimates, etc. It probably adds a day’s worth of work every week for me – and I’m just me. So what could you charge and how many persons’ admin could you handle efficiently? Self-employed tradespeople are notorious micro-managers and find it hard to let go of this stuff.

Having said that, go for it, you’ll never know not trying will you?

As above,lots of us small SME,dont have the casjh or time to pay for this sort of service, we would also have to answer all your calls for problems ,stuff you cant find dont know etc.

Then how are you going to charge per hour, per day, who is going to decide if its worthwhile, yep us the customer.

and for that reason IM OUT,

The problem with being a SME is that it can be more work to brief another staff member than to actually do the admin oneself.

If you were talking about a person who was off-site, that would be even worse. The business owner would have to factor in time for briefing, organising all the paper-work and then having to check it.

So I wish you luck, but I can’t invest…

Virtual PAs have been around for a few years now. I know one that was doing really well. She kicked it off by marketing to people via MeetUp, Ecademy, local CoC etc. She’d get them in a room and ask what their hourly rate was … most would say something like £20-£50. She’d then ask them to work out how many hours they spent on admin/book-keeping etc. This would normally amount to quite a lot. So she’d then say “In which case I can take on your workload and save you a LOT of time and money.”

She was bl00dy good though. And a good laugh.

I would say bookkeeping, invoicing etc could work well, but not the phone-answering / PA side of it, simply because there would be periods during the day when you couldn’t be immediately available due to the school run and other childcare issues. I deal with a bookkeeper/accountant who is a mum and she is very professional, keeps appointments etc but if you call her up there are times when she can’t answer the phone: this is fine for a bookkeeper but would be no good as an answering / diary management service.

Bookkeeping is not that hard to learn and get qualified on, the software is pretty cheap and rates are not too bad (£20/hr is about the going rate): you can pick up a client’s bank statements, invoices etc once a week/month and then put them onto Sage or whatever system you have learnt, do a bit of filing, produce management accounts, do VAT returns and basic payroll, and fit the work around being a mum.