Warning: long post.
I’ve worked from home running my own one-horse operation and loved it despite the hours. 80 hours a week minimum, about 40-45 of which were billable. The rest was admin, marketing, networking. The business is sold now, I’m retired. It filled in the gap between taking early retirement from the railway industry and state retirement age + 2 years – 14 years.
I’m a trained typographer and typesetter, a print designer (master’s degree and lots of professional practice). After leaving the railway industry (yes, we used to do this kind of stuff many moons ago), as well as being able to find a niche in academic book publishing, typesetting in German, Italian and French as well as English, I had a profitable sideline as a virtual assistant, I probably wouldn’t have survived if I’d relied solely on typography work.
Being a VA is like being an office temp except that you work from home and you can be more picky about the work you do and the clients you take. There was crossover between the two roles; big stuff like engineering specifications, invitations to tender; engineering, oil industry and big pharma training manuals came to me as typing work and I used my design and publishing experience to give back a really good product, matching the corporate house style, easy to read and impressive to look at, that could translate into instructional DVDs so the product became a computer/simulator and online one, as well as the printed one. Being able to produce DVDs even when other people give you the source material isn’t a usual part of virtual assistant stuff, but if you have the skill and the software it’s very well paid.
I did a lot of typing of dictation, everything from letters to big legal Instructions to Counsel – formal briefs from solicitors to barristers to represent a client in court; huge engineering documents like invitations to tender, specifications, project briefs – these were usually a mix of a hand amended text in the post and dictated changes; expert reports for claims cases, a mixture of interesting and varied work. I was lucky if the client took notice of my saying that please, pretty please, would they send me an electronic copy of the original file they’d amended? Usually they sent me something that someone had altered without using ‘Save as’ first, with the result that I had to retype the whole thing. Great typing practice, I could compose a shopping list while copy typing; somehow when doing this the words go from eyes to fingers without going through brain, unless a query stops me and makes me think.
If you go in for stuff involving lots of typing, invest in a mechanical keyboard; I’ve never had a strain injury through typing most of the day. I have a Filco Majestouch Ninja 10keyless keyboard with Cherry blue key switches. Those are the clicky switches beloved of really fast typists. :-)
Clients dictate their work in their offices or at home and email the the speech file to the VA; the VA types it up in the format required and sends back the typed copy for printing. There needs to be careful co-ordination between the VA and the client on this because MS Office, and other similar word processors, are utterly dreadful at losing your careful formatting and make your work useless. This isn’t well understood by so many users, even now. There are two ways around this: either you and the client both use the same templates (Word .dotx files) which creates problems of their own which can involve loss of files and their automatic backups without notice, or send the work back as PDF files which can’t be altered.
Skills needed: Excellent organisation, discipline, timekeeping, spelling and grammar; some knowledge of basic typography (comfortable line lengths, use of leading and white space, to justify the text or not, use of larger font sizes for headings and other emphasis, not underlining) to make your work stand out visually from the run of the mill stuff produced in the average office. It does get noticed. Advanced skills with MS Office and, preferably, similar software: templates, fields, OLE, styles, forms, everything to do with automation. Ability to produce work in PDF needed for stuff that’s going to be printed professionally.
This is just one office skill, the one I know best. Other office and commercial skills like book keeping for small businesses are often asked for.
Think about what background you have. If you’ve been a legal secretary you have one target market right there, for both branches of the legal profession. You need to have a good idea of the pay rates in your target industry, how much you can charge and therefore how many billable hours you need to work each and every week, to earn enough for you and your family to live on, cover your business overheads and invest in your pension.
Doing your own accounts can save you money, but HMRC will hit you hard if you make mistakes, for some reason they seem to have it in for small businesses, they seem to think we’re soft targets. I’ve not have it happen to me, but I’ve seen the effect on others like me who made a couple of innocent, quite small, mistakes.
If you’re thinking seriously about this, see what government help is available in terms of money and any business management training available.
Budgeting is crucial, it sounds obvious but the depth you need to get into when you’re considering this for providing your living makes it hard work, even to knowing (e.g.) how many pairs of socks you bought in the last six months. Do you have receipts for all your shopping for the last six months? If you’re thinking about running your own business, start collecting them right now. Count everything that goes out of your home, decide what’s necessary and what isn’t. It will probably scare you if you do this thoroughly. Always remember to claim whatever government allowances are available for businesses.
Invest in a lawyer to draft a proper business contract, there’s no economising on this and it’s so worth having the security. There was a site on the Web a long time ago that published a draft business contract and on reading it, it surprised me how much I didn’t think of when considering what I wanted in mine. I took my own advice and got a lawyer to draft mine, and was very glad I did, it got me paid when a formerly good client disputed the bill for a big job. The client filed for bankruptcy soon afterwards.
Would I do it again, age allowing? Absolutely. The satisfaction outweighs the exhaustion every time. I was lucky enough to have some career contacts to pass my name around which helped me get started.
Caveat: My kids were grown up when I started this. Would I have done it with kids under, say, 18? Not unless I had regular support and could work uninterrupted when I needed to, which was about 95% of the time, to meet the deadlines.
Just one perspective, HTH.