Virtual Assistants give entrepreneurs real help

David Goldsmith spends his days on the phone and on the road. As president of Customer Edge, he works out of his home in New Mexico and travels the country, leading seminars and acting as a consultant for companies that want to improve customer service.

Like many busy business owners, Goldsmith has an assistant to set appointments, order conference supplies, make his travel arrangements, send out brochures, handle the books and put together his daily newsletter.

Actually, he has three -- one to handle day-to-day matters, one to focus on conferences and one who works on the newsletter. Goldsmith doesn't have the space -- or desire -- to have employees working in his home. His "staff members" work from their own homes in three different states. They are part of a fledgling industry: virtual assistants.

It's a business filled with cutting-edge terms. Virtual assistants design their services for business owners called neo-SOHO's and "netpreneurs," Internet-savvy entrepreneurs working from small office/home office settings. Virtual assistants have adapted traditional skills to a virtual marketplace.

Never meeting the boss

They recruit their clients and bid on jobs via e-mail, phone, fax and overnight shipping. They may never meet many of their clients. They have their own associations, certification programs and even a virtual university, AssistU. Run by former virtual assistant Stacy Brice, AssistU is a 19-week boot camp that only accepts about half of its applicants. Only those who make the grade graduate and earn recommendations from the online school.

"By the time they finish, they have more than 300 hours of class time, client-simulated experiences and study," Brice says. "I'm the pretend client, and I'm a tough cookie."

Chris Durst, a pioneer in a business that didn't get going until 1995, is a partner in StaffCentrix, a virtual assistant referral business. She helped set up the International Virtual Assistants Association, which has a certification program.

"As a small business owner, one of the reasons many of us go off on our own is that we work best on our own," she says. "If you hire an employee, they bring a whole host of issues -- taxes, insurance, sexual harassment -- and you have to make a commitment to a certain number of hours or days a week. A temp still needs to come to your location and share your space. With a virtual assistant, you don't have to get extra equipment and you don't have to train them. When you say to a VA, 'Watch the bottom line,' who better to understand that than another business owner? Vas aim to please because their business depends on it."

Skills from outside the area

For Bob Farrar, an attorney in Rome, Ga., virtual assistants offered an opportunity to obtain high-quality skills that were not readily available outside an urban center. Farrar has a part-time, in-office secretary who greets clients and does most of his dictation and correspondence work. But he uses a virtual assistant in Atlanta to handle office and case management and a virtual assistant in Orlando, Fla., to keep his books. A virtual paralegal works part-time -- but solely for Farrar -- from her home in South Carolina.

Article by Pat Curry - BankRate.com