potential clients

My husband says, I have been “running the roads” a lot lately. That’s a southern thing if you don’t understand that phrase. But he is correct. I have been going a lot of places in the last couple of weeks and according to my calendar, I’m not going to slow down until around Christmas.

Now for a virtual professional, that’s a bit of a culture shock to actually go outside of your virtual world. But I love getting out of here. I love to visit and talk with people and network everywhere I go.

I shared a booth with one of my clients at the National Philanthropy Day luncheon in Knoxville last week and enjoyed catching up with old friends and making new ones. And of course, sharing my business and the services I provide for administrative support and online marketing. I walked away with a great list of people to follow-up with this week.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the East Tennessee Veteran’s Memorial was being dedicated this past weekend and I was honored to be invited to a reception and the dedication ceremony. The Mayor’s were there, as well as other politicians, high-ranking military personel and many familiar faces from my time with the organization. The ceremony was incredibly moving and I was proud to be an American and to have been involved in the early stages of the memorial’s planning. And it proved to be a great place to network. I was invited to be on a local radio show and several people are interested in learning more about my business.

I’m looking forward to the next couple of weeks and the many networking opportunties to share what I do and how I can help other business owners with their administrative and marketing needs.

So Honey, I have a few more “roads to run.”

A Virtual Shut Down

Oh, that makes my skin crawl just typing it! But it happened to me last Friday. I had a computer tech out to my virtual office for some repairs and I noticed he kept rubbing his head and was on the phone quite a bit and finally I ventured in to ask how it was going and he said, “I have some news and some not so good news.” Those are just not comments you want to hear when someone is working on your computer, your livelihood!

So basically he was trying to do something that required my product key from my computer and it wasn’t accepting it, which made the computer unavailable for use. That’s my best description. I’m a virtual assistant, give me a database or some websites to design or social media sites to update and I’m your gal! But this hardware stuff is way over my head. I just know I turn it on in the morning and it usually does what I need it to do.

As I watched him drive away Friday afternoon with my computer on a gurney, my thoughts were, “will I ever see it again and will I ever work again?” Now I did have the good sense to recently buy an external hard drive and all of my client files reside there, and I have another laptop that came over on the Mayflower that I was able to check some emails and not feel so isolated from the world. So I knew I wasn’t completely dead in the water, but just the thought of reloading my programs and re-setting all of my passwords on my main computer just made me sick.

Well, there is a happy ending to this story. Late Sunday evening I got the call that my computer had survived the surgery and was doing well. I am happy to say I am writing this blog on it even now and I believe it is going to make a full recovery.

In my virtual world, having a virtual shut down is a potential death sentence to my business, but because of a few systems I had put in place I was able to have a little peace knowing that I could still function until all was well again.