This past week of work, the first week of February, was an interesting one for me in terms of my career and my business.
Last week was a transition period and if felt like it all week. January was a very busy month for my business with the first two weeks filled with many meetings about new projects while at the same time working on many of my current design projects already underway. At times it felt as if everything was up in the air and I had no control over anything. I guess this feeling of “losing control” is not uncommon. I read recently that the sense of control one feels as a business owner, or just a plain human being, is really nothing more than an illusion anyway. Who really has control over everything at every moment? I mean isn’t reality nothing more than your perception of the present? OK, I digress…
Anyhow, the beginning of last week had me scrambling to finish tasks on projects that I had worked on over the weekend, catch up on other projects that had been put on the back burner because of meetings in the first couple of weeks in January, and start to develop proposals for the new work that I had the meetings about the weeks before. Whew!
I did manage to make it through the week because I was looking forward to Friday. Friday, February 2nd, was my first official meeting with my new VA (Virtual Assistant). Now I can tell that I was very excited for this phone call because it was an actual “line-in-the-sand” if you will with regard to a transition for me and my business. I was now going to have someone other than me involved in the “day-to-day” activities of the business. Furthermore this person is invested to help my business succeed. As one of my business mantras in “your success in our success” so it is with my VA. This is cool for a number of reasons.
First, what I already said above. Second, once we iron out workflows, etc. this relationship will help me be more productive by allowing me to focus on what I do best, help my clients. Third, I should get to have a bit more sanity in my life by not having to do absolutely everything for my business. Fourth, I can’t think of a fourth at the moment but I know it exists along with a fifth, sixth, seventh, etc.
The most intriguing part of starting this phase of the business comes down to one thing for me, delegation. I must admit that during our one-hour phone call I felt completely disorganized (although I asked and was told that I was actually pretty well organized). Before we had our meeting I filled out and sent a few pages of questions relating to what things I need help with in terms of tasks. However, when I was on the call my brain was like a giant void.
The question was asked, “What can I help you with right now?”
A long pause–my brain scrambling for a task. I honestly could not put my finger on a task. How stupid I felt. Lucky for me we had already stumbled across a significant task, helping with data entry to get my companies new project tracking system online (btw, if you have not seen or heard of activeCollab, I highly recommend it!)
So, for now I will close this entry here. I could probably ramble on for longer but this is enough for now. I’m sure to have more to say soon.
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