Bizpro Ltd – Virtual Assistants

One of the biggest things that separate big companies from their small competitors is the level of support enjoyed. Large companies are typically better staffed, which means they have the personnel necessary to perform a number of services that simply make big corporations look more professional to clients. Small business owners typically have to do all the work themselves or most of it. This leaves them scrambling and often looking less professional than they could. When it’s time to gain a big business advantage, even a company staffed by one can enjoy an edge if a virtual assistant is relied upon for help.

Well, much of England is covered in snow and for many businesses this means a complete slowdown and sometimes a stop as far as productivity is concerned.

Why?

Because they are not geared up to cope without staff in their offices. When their staff aren’t able to make it in because of traffic chaos or rail disruptions their business could grind to a halt. It’s that serious, but it needn’t be a problem, and it needn’t be expensive to resolve. In fact, quite the opposite!

Treevestors.com defines Carbon Footprint as “A measure of the amount of carbon dioxide emitted through the combustion of fossil fuels. A carbon footprint is often expressed as tons of carbon dioxide or tons of carbon emitted, usually on an annual basis”

A recent BBC documentary, Britain from Above, quoted various statistics regarding Britain on the move. In any 24 hour period the documentary stated 36 million people are on the move, between 7.00am & 10.00am, almost 1 million of those are on the trains, and 15 million in private motor vehicles. The impact this has on Britain’s carbon footprint must be astounding. These figures do not include the daily flights going in and out of every airport, or the ferries travelling in and out of our ports. Public transport isn’t sufficient enough to keep our vehicles off the road, rising fuel costs and taxes isn’t really having a great effect either. So what is the answer?

Today I had the pleasure of talking to the communications officer of a well known London hospital. Interestingly enough, they felt the need to explain to me what communications is, and that a hospital porter may not communicate in quite the same way that a consultant surgeon would. They went on to give me a very ‘helpful’ analogy of borrowing money: ‘If I were to go to a relative stranger to borrow ten pounds, it would feel a lot less comfortable to me than asking a friend, and the words I would use would be different. Whilst I tried hard not to be offended by this ‘revelation’, the whole conversation got me thinking that even those that are paid to do communications for a role perhaps don’t always realise that communication is important on so many more levels than just talking!

It’s only been a week or so, but I’ve already caught the twitterbug that is on everyone’s lips at the moment.

For those that don’t know, Twitter is the new (ish) craze in online social networking – you type in updates about what you are doing at any given moment through out the day or night. Just recently its taken the 4Networking world by storm, and for me, the twitterbulb has also just illuminated.

Through Twitter, I’ve made contact and been contacted (followed) by people I wouldn’t normally ever be able to get in touch with. I’m keeping up to date with Sir Richard Branson, (not that I can really believe it’s him!), a writer for the Guardian, lots of 4Networkers, and a few other Virtual Assistants. You can update it via web or phone, and you can link it to your facebook site too! There are so many add on applications that you can do almost anything with it.