Very excited to announce that I have been shortlisted as Virtual Assistant of the Year Award Northern Ireland 2020.

Lots of hard work, self development, learning curves along the way since starting out but the journey has been amazing! I have never regretted becoming self employed and I wouldn’t swap it or the people I’ve met along the-way for all the gold at the end of the rainbow!

We are in unparalleled times with the corona virus pandemic and it has turned the world upside down and inside out. I’m reminded of a quote form Colum McCann’s novel’s Let the Great World Spin ‘The simple things come back to us. They rest for a moment by our rib cages then suddenly reach in and twist our hearts a notch backward’.

The world has changed inexorably in the last few months and we can’t control what is happening, but we can control our reaction to it. What type of business owner are you in a time of crisis? Are you one who:

Stumbles on?

Moves forward with purpose?

Stays still?

For a lot of business owners to survive and thrive this may be the ideal opportunity to pivot your business?

I’m going to give you 5 reasons today why should use a Virtual Assistant at this time to help you grow your business and make it thrive rather than stagnate.

Guest podcaster for Gayle Alexander’s VA Today series on the topic of being a Virtual Assistant!

Do you know what the term Virtual Assistant means? Being a ‘virtual’ assistant doesn’t mean a faceless voice like Siri or Alexa. I’ve made this video to explain #Fatherted style the difference between real and virtual!

Privileged to be invited to be a guest blogger for Louise Brogan’s Social Bee Academy on the topic of becoming Virtual!

Who is VirtuAli? The skills I have acquired over a long career have forged the services I offer and how I now help to take away the admin pain from a diverse number of businesses

When I studied French at Queens University Belfast, we read as many people did Albert Camus ‘l’étranger’. The definition of ‘étranger’ in Collins French Dictionary is : ‘foreign, alien, strange, irrelevant’. It has been a month now since Brexit decision and as someone who has freely lived and worked around Europe and now has been running a small business in NI for last year , this is my take on Brexit.

Despite virtual nature of my job, I am still of the generation that likes to send snail mail and was writing a card to my former boss in Luxemburg the other day who has just retired. As I was writing it, I was thinking if someone had said to me in May 2013 that I’d be leaving Luxembourg to go back to Northern Ireland by May 2014 and that by May 2015 I would have started my own business, I would have laughed. Yet here I am in Moira, Co.Armagh, May 2016 an entrepreneurial business woman and not totally broke!

When I was writing the card it made me think of the YB12 (Your Best Year Yet) workshop that I did with John Higgins last September and one of exercises was to write an email to your future self. I found mine the other day and am proud of what I achieved in the last 12 months, though of course there is still lots to do to build my virtual empire!

What does it take to make the leap to self-employment?

This is the question on the lips of anyone who’s ever thought about leaving the security of a full time job to go it alone. Making the decision is the first step, but how to turn that into a reality and stick at it is not always as clear cut.

Three years ago, I was working as a Personal Assistant (PA) to a senior Director in the headquarters of the European Investment Bank in Luxembourg where I’d gone to work 9yrs previously as a bi-lingual Project Administrator. I’d got to the stage in my career where I could go as far as I wanted in my grade and had already taken a sideways step to get more experience. I knew I wanted to use the skills I already had developed in 14yrs of varied administrative posts: customer –orientated , knowledge sharing, adapting to different personalities , evolving with new technologies and working with a high level of autonomy but I wasn’t quite sure which way to turn as I couldn’t find a role which was demanding and interesting enough.