Aspire 2016 Featuring a Roundtable with Rosie Remotely's Founder

If you're an EA or PA looking to further your education and career, Conferenz is hosting 'Aspire 2016', offering strategies, skills development and inspiration for junior to mid-level administrative professionals who want to increase value and advance their careers.

Our founder, Rhonnie will be hosting a special roundtable discussion at the event on Project Management. 

Here is the blurb from the Aspire 2016 brochure: 

Roundtable 2 - "Project management essentials and other tools for managing business events like a pro "

• The four basic elements of a project
• Managing resources effectively - Useful project management tools
• Dealing with changes to the project/event by having clarity over the scope
• Preparing (and sticking to) the budget and schedule
• Thinking about all events strategically
• Tips for good event execution on the day and dealing with the unexpected

Speaker: Rhonnie Snelgar, Founder, JAGGAR International; Director, Rosie Remotely Virtual Assistants and Harlow Garland Weddings & Events.

To view the brochure and book your spot at this conference, click here.

'Unlabel: Selling You Without Selling Out' Review

Before reading this book, I’d never really heard of Marc Ecko – I’d seen the Rhino symbol around but not being in the ‘street’ scene, I’d never known what it symbolised nor who the person was behind the tusk.

While reading the book though, I began to see Marc’s influence everywhere – not just in the Rhino emblazoned tee shirts but in music, fashion, art, popular culture – all these things I’d seen and heard but never knew they came from one person.

In this book, Marc tells his tale very bluntly and honestly, not glossing over his set-backs or pretending he was always at the helm of a successful business. He tells us honestly about his issues with trademarks after a similarly named brand filed a lawsuit, he tells us about every single roadblock and success he encountered, financial wins and dramatic losses, his story is the epitome of authenticity, which is exactly what this book is about.

From airbrushing t-shirts in his parent’s garage as a kid to his rampant successes with Ecko Unltd and Complex Media, Marc empowers the reader to defy convention and create an authentic brand. It’s an easy read, written more as a memoir than a traditional business book with visual blueprints depicting his teachings in infographic form to keep you focused and engaged.

He teaches the importance of delivering what you say you will, how to understand your product or service’s effect on people and why failure is actually a great thing.

Marc says it best in the blurb of the book:

Image via: 

*“Unlabel explores the anatomy of a brand. And it uses the Authenticity Formula to explain the cross sections of that anatomy.

My brand started in my parents’ garage in Lakewood, New Jersey, where I spray-painted T shirts and sold them for $10 a pop. By understanding how to harness my fear and separating perception from reality, I grew that brand to the tune of a billion-dollar retail business.

I’ve built skate brands, hip-hop brands, magazine and video game brands. I’ve built brands that people literally tattoo on their bodies, which is “branding” in the truest sense. But the most important brand that I built was me, the personal brand that’s from my guts to the skin.

My philosophy is simple: unlabel. Not “un” as in the nihilist or negative sense of the prefix, but in the “refuse” sense of the meaning.

Refuse to be labeled. Fight their labels. Ignore their labels. Peel off their labels. Unlabel—and create your brand.”*

It’s a very easy read, written for the average Joe start-up with big ideas but it’s also written for business owners who are looking to refine their brand, to expand and empower their business, authentically.

Marc’s words and enthusiasm are palpable and really grab and hold your attention from start to finish. The book itself is beautifully presented in hardcover form with its thick pages, vibrant content and illustrations and quality business branding acumen on each page. We definitely recommend it, whether you're a seasoned entrepreneur looking to expand or rebrand or a new start-up looking to build an authentic brand right from the start. We'd also recommend it to people wanting to build a personal brand ie personalities, bloggers and speakers.

How to Regain Your Most Valuable Asset - Time

Whether you're an entrepreneur just wetting your feet or you're a seasoned executive, time is your most valuable asset and it's also the most wasted, especially in a startup where you're just not ready to delegate tasks because your business is your entire identity at the start and you need to ensure that your company starts off the way it means to go on. 

The downside to trying to do everything yourself though is that often, you let your company down by not producing work to the standard you would if you had more time or delivering late because you didn't have the resource and struggled to do it all alone. 

A Virtual Assistant is your secret weapon - they work remotely and they're contractors so you don't have to commit to an FTE resource and you have none of the headache of working out PAYE, KiwiSaver, FBT or ACC levies which is invaluable at the beginning when you find it hard to let go and you don't have the time or the funds to commit to a dedicated resource. 

Virtual Assistants work on either an hourly rate, a project rate or a monthly package deal and allow you to truly customise your level of assistance to what best suits your business. Working out what tasks to delegate is the hard part but you'll often find that they can do it all and just having a consultation with a Virtual Assistant can help you work out where your biggest roadblocks are and where they can best assist you.  Most will focus on administrative tasks - the likes of which you'd ordinarily delegate to a Personal Assistant while others (like Rosie Remotely), offer a far wider range of services extending to graphic design or website design and population. 

Here are a few tasks that can be delegated to a Virtual Assistant :

Inbox Management and Calendar Scheduling - A Virtual Assistant can manage your calendar, scheduling meetings and appointments or planning events and conferences. They can also filter your most important emails and respond to others on your behalf, freeing up your time and allowing you to focus solely on the messages that are directly relevant to your role and voice.

Proofreading / Editing - Spelling mistakes leap off the page at us and both spelling and grammatical errors are our biggest pet peeves. Offering a full proofing and editing service, A Virtual Assistant will take an in-depth look at your documents, marketing materials or authorial manuscripts and correct any spelling or grammatical errors, taking the initiative to enhance content fluidity where required. This is especially popular with authors.

Documents & Presentations - Do you need assistance to make that PowerPoint presentation exciting? As advanced users of a number of software packages, your Virtual Assistant can utilise all of the effects and settings available to really make those presentations engaging.

Database Entry / Maintenance - You've recently picked up a slew of new potential clients from a tradeshow, you have a wealth of product information to enter or you just need to organise a bulk amount of information into one easy to navigate database. Trust your Virtual Assistant's  error-free fingers to do the entry and maintenance for you. 

Digitising Printed Material - Whether it's decades old company records you only have in hardcopy, a manual from before the digital age or even family records you need organised and digitised for future use, it can be digitised because a Virtual Assistant has the time and the attention to details to carry it through.

Dictation and Transcription - One of the fundamental tasks for a Virtual Assistant - simply send an audio file and choose clean or full verbatim and you'll swiftly have your rambling notes or corporate document transcribed without the headache of sitting down to create it yourself. 

New Business Setup & Companies Office Administration - Seasoned Virtual Assistants will be used to dealing with the Companies Office, filing annual returns, updating shareholder information or nominee shareholder records and can make the entire process seamless. This comes in extra handy when you're first starting out and don't know how to register your business.

Marketing Collateral - Virtual Assistants are able to create engaging straight to print brochures, newsletters and other marketing materials that are ready to send to the printers with no additional rework required, even facilitating the publishing aspect for you.

Research - One of the easiest tasks to assign to a virtual assistant is online research. Whether you need to find information on corporate websites, do market comparisons on products or services, source new blog topics, find your desired slice of real estate for sale,or you need to get into nitty gritty statistical research, a Virtual Assistant can take on the task to give you the results without the time waste.

Website Creation, Content Population & Site Maintenance - Premier Virtual Assistants like those of Rosie Remotely are well versed in CSS, HTML and web design. They can also take on the maintenance of your existing sites and domain management and renewals to ensure your site's uninterrupted continuity or create ongoing content to populate your site to keep it fresh.

Travel Research & Bookings - Virtual Assistants are able to find hotels, book airfares and research sample itineraries to map out your perfect trip whether that be for business or pleasure and they most always have vast experience both in direct bookings and working with corporate agencies.

Event Management - Workshops, training seminars, conferences, staff events and client functions are hard work if you haven't done them before but a Virtual Assistant can take the stress out of the event and run them for you. 

Personal Errands - Often (whether you're a seasoned executive or a newbie entrepreneur), your personal life falls by the wayside as your focus is laser-sharp solely on the business. A Virtual Assistant can pick up the slack and help you both professionally and personally. They can't go and get that haircut you've had to cancel seven times now but they can arrange your drycleaning, your groceries, travel and mail pickups - anything you can think of, they can do. 

Rosie Remotely is New Zealand's premier virtual assistance service offering clients exceptional, professional assistance - worldwide and on any timetable, allowing your business to reclaim lost time without the HR headache or FTE expense.

www.rosieremotely.com

'The Roadside MBA' Review

Business books are either an utter waste of the paper they're printed on or insightful. No business book is going to lay out your path for you, that's something you need to do for yourself. What worked for one company won't necessarily work for yours but what is important in a book on business is that it excites you, it causes you to spark ideas and insight applicable to your own business, and as you read, you become increasingly excited about how your business can evolve and grow, you discover the new tactics you can apply to your strategy and the application of the knowledge gained of how other small businesses function either similarly or conversely to your own. This is one such example. They're rare examples nowadays, lost in a sea of the aforementioned wasted trees but this book is insightful, funny and written in a casual manner that makes the reader the Sal Paradise to the trio's theories and research on the road.

Good work fellas.

Buy this book through our store!

Welcome

Welcome to the newly revamped Rosie Remotely website! 

We wanted to offer our clients more -existing or potential and so when we finished the rebranding, we decided to add a blog, a resources page and a store to do just that. 

Our Blog will aim to keep you motivated, to offer tips around time management, information, interviews and articles on how Virtual Assistants can help your business, whether you're a one-man-band or a thousands-strong empire! 

Through our Resources section, we will offer everyone - client or potential client, tips and tricks for commonly used software, hardware and just general IT Tips for those without an inhouse IT expert - or even those who want to limit the queries on their IT department. We'll be adding things as fast as we can to make this a complete library of tips for you to access at your leisure.

Our Store will offer books and resources that we found invaluable for entrepreneurs just wetting their feet all the way through to seasoned executives who need to regain some time and streamline some of their processes. These books have been read by our founder and we promote them only if the content excites her, motivates her and pushes her to implement the things the book discusses. We aren't paid or even asked to promote these and we don't benefit from doing it other than the knowledge that these book recommendations may help someone like you to work smarter or achieve their successes. 

If you're not already familiar with Rosie Remotely, here's a quick elevator pitch: 

Rosie Remotely is a virtual assistance service offering clients exceptional, professional assistance - worldwide and on any timetable, allowing your business to reclaim lost time without the HR headache or FTE expense.

Get in touch now to book your assistant - whether it's a one-off project or an ongoing engagement, we can't wait to talk to you! 

- Rosie Remotely