It's Time to Set Boundaries

As Virtual Assistants, it’s important to set up guidelines with our clients from the start. In most cases, they will follow your lead – so you need to lead! In this episode of The RocketGirl Show, I'll share how I set some boundaries with my clients as soon as they begin work with me.

TRANSCRIPT 

Hey, everybody. I'm Belinda Wasser, also known as RocketGirl. Today we're going to talk about setting boundaries on The RocketGirl Show.

When you are a virtual assistant, boundaries are a very important thing, and the thing that I love most about boundaries is that we get to set them ourselves. Boundaries don't have to be something harsh or even rigid, but a set of guidelines that we want to run or use running our business. So today I'm going to talk about a couple of things about boundaries.

If you set your hours ahead of time, and you let your clients know, then they will know when to expect that you're working and you're not working. So here's how I do that. As part of my new client onboarding process, I send an email, and I let them know typically I'm at my desk and available from nine until five, Monday through Friday, and so that way that they know that I don't typically work on the weekends.

Now, it's important to make sure that you don't train them that this is not true, so if a client emails you on Saturday, you don't answer them on Saturday, unless it's an exception. We do have things that come up, and we want to be responsive, but really if it's something that can wait until Monday and you decide to wait until Monday. Here's my point, don't email your client on a weekend and then think that they're not going to email you and expect work on the weekend, because you're sort of training them that you're working. Do you understand what I'm saying? So make sure that you're clear about that.

The other thing is you want to decide on your email response policy. Here's what I mean by that. In my email that I send to my clients, I say, "I'm watching email all day long, and I'm keeping my eye out for emergencies or quick urgent requests, however you'll hear back from me within 24 hours." So that way they know that I haven't ignored them. I do have some clients that are a little bit more anxious than others, so how I handle that is, when they email me, I email them right back and I say, "Got it. Thanks. I'll look in a bit, tomorrow." whatever the answer is, so that way they know that I'm here, I saw it, but then I'm not going to jump on it right away. So think through what your email policy is going to be.

This is the biggest one. Remember that you don't have to work when your clients are working. So for example, one of my clients works on the weekends all the time, and she might send me a million emails. That's totally fine because I don't typically work on the weekends, and so just because she's asking doesn't mean I have to respond.

Now here's a pro tip. I love doing this. I use a paid Gmail, so it could be that I want to work on the weekend, and I could answer 20, 30 emails, but I schedule them with the delayed send feature so that they go out on Monday. So that way I can clean out my inbox, enjoy that nice clean inbox, and my clients won't email me back, and they don't know that I'm working on the weekend, so I'm not training them to think that I'm available. So that's my big tip on that.

I want to see if we have any comments and questions, you guys. If you have questions, just drop them in the chat, and I will take a peak. I want to let you know about my free online classroom. It's called The Virtual Assistant Connection, and it's a Facebook group, and you can find it by typing "The Virtual Assistant Connection" in the search bar at the top of Facebook, or you can follow this bit.ly link, and what you'll find is all kinds of videos like this. There's all kinds of articles. Whether you're just thinking about being a VA or have been one for a long time, nine years full time, like me, so definitely check that out.

We'd love to have you. We're almost at 2,000 members. We've been growing quite a bit, and it's very exciting. Here's someone saying, a newbie, "Hello, newbie trying to learn." Well, that's the best place to do it is to come over to that group, and all the information is organized and categorized, and I think it's quite easy to navigate, so please come on over. The other thing I wanted to tell you all about is you can follow this bit.ly link as well, bitly.vaconnection.com and that will bring you right over to the group.

Until next time, I'm Belinda Wasser, RocketGirl, signing off.