Lately, I’ve been taking to other VAs who brought up the question of how to protect their clients best in case they weren’t available.
Here are two scenarios that I can think of:
- This one is an easy one: Your VA takes a vacation – I wrote a post about this subject a while back. Any business needs to have a “Plan B” that can be activated if something happens, or a team member is suddenly unavailable. It’s a simple planning exercise as the time frame is known beforehand and everything can be prepared up-front.
- Your VA falls ill and is very suddenly not available, possibly for a longer period of time. What if she’s in the middle of, say organizing one of your events? Or she has ongoing tasks but hasn’t written an SOP (Standard operating Procedure) about these? It’s important that such SOPs are prepared on any task so that (1) repeat instructions can be avoided; (b) if necessary, seamless transition to someone else is possible. Ideally, the documents should be stored in a file-sharing tool, such as Dropbox, Evernote, GoogleSuite or similar for easy access.
Does your VA prepare SOPs for your business? What other practices do you see necessary? I’d love to read your thoughts.