increase productivity

Social Media: A nifty way for your business

Social media is a significant facet of this digital era. Its influence is reflected by the striking metrics like over a billion audiences in popular social media sites, the annual user increment of around 11%, the remarkable engagement rate and the like. With its evolution over the last decade, social media has eventually become a reliable medium of commercial information. 65% of social media users consider information which is shared on social media while making their purchase decision. No wonder, social media has come to be an effective weapon for business professionals, especially savvy marketers. Some specifics about social media which will encourage you to use social media for your business are sorted out as follows:   Social media offers you low – cost platform for advertising: Developing a social media strategy is the best way to decrease the marketing expenses in a business. While a 30 seconds TV ad pricing $350000 reaches a national audience a Facebook ad at a lesser cost reaches the global audience. So, social media gives you a better harvest for your marketing investments. Social media offers you a wide audience reach: If your aim is a wide reach then social media is your best bet. Facebook has over 1 billion active users across different demographics, geography and cultural parameters. Twitter which is logged in by over 100 million users daily is mostly used by the age ran. The twitter users aging above 60 are also increasing. Social media enables your faster reach to audience: There is hardly anyone who does not have a social media account. More than 60% of the social media account holders use their social media accounts daily. This justifies the fact and assures you that social media has a faster and ascertained reach to your target audience. Social media offers you an intense user engagement: User generated content in social media earns sincere attention of users. Apart from this, most of the content comes off in appealing forms like engaging games, queries, video ads and the like. Social media hikes brand loyalty of your fans: Most of the content in social media is user generated and it flows in from reliable sources. Moreover social media exposes your brand to a wide audience and it enables you to interact with the audience. It’s a three tier effect: it introduces your brand to your young prospective fans, invokes curiosity about your brand and emboldens the faith of your already existing fans. All these help you to earn brand loyalty from your fans. Social media offers you the scope of better customer service: Social media helps you in understanding the sentiment of your audience for your brand. By following the social buzz and analysing social sentiment of your target audience you understand the exact needs of your customers and follow them up with the required service. While the above stated advantages of social media gives you good returns, using social media for your brand is not free from risks. One of the risks arises from the fast reach of social media. So, if it’s a positive buzz your brand may become the king of the market while if it’s a negative buzz, you brand may get affected. So, using social media requires your vigilance all the time. You have to keep an eye on the reactions of your audiences to your marketing activities and keep the buzz about your brand under control. Giving prompt responses to your audience queries, regulating negative posts with an appeasing reply and pivoting audience attention to positive posts help you to regulate the reactions of your audience. If you are infusing social media in your business strategies you must not miss out on these tips:   Learn about the behaviour of your audience: Learning audience behaviour is a mixture of quantitative and qualitative process. It requires your intent observation, social sentiment analysis, search analysis etc. Learning about audience behaviour will help you to tune in your brand with your target audience. Do not beat the drum about your brand: Over promoting your brand will hamper your brand reputation. So, social media strategies must be objectified to win the heart of your audience rather than promoting your business. It should be customer oriented. Respond to messages and queries on time: Apt response to messages and queries from your audience helps you to earn new fans and maintain the relationship with already existing fans. Do not abuse the use of hash tags: The hash tags you use must be relevant to your business and must be popular at the time you make your post. Post at optimal frequencies: Posting at optimal frequencies increases the visibility of your brand in a social site. So, learn about the optimal frequency of posting in a particular site with real time posting as well as secondary research and post accordingly. Use the right parameters to measure the success of your brand: The ROI parameters tell you how effective have been your social media strategies and how you should proceed in the future. Choose the right parameters to evaluate your social media activities and earn rich returns. GetFriday (earlier YMII or YourManInIndia) is a service that was featured and used in the NYTimes best-selling productivity and lifestyle design book ‘The 4-Hour-Workweek’ by Timothy Ferris. Sign up now!

Social Media: A nifty way for your business Read More »

Social media is a significant facet of this digital era. Its influence is reflected by the striking metrics like over a billion audiences in popular social media sites, the annual user increment of around 11%, the remarkable engagement rate and the like. With its evolution over the last decade, social media has eventually become a reliable medium of commercial information. 65% of social media users consider information which is shared on social media while making their purchase decision. No wonder, social media has come to be an effective weapon for business professionals, especially savvy marketers. Some specifics about social media which will encourage you to use social media for your business are sorted out as follows:   Social media offers you low – cost platform for advertising: Developing a social media strategy is the best way to decrease the marketing expenses in a business. While a 30 seconds TV ad pricing $350000 reaches a national audience a Facebook ad at a lesser cost reaches the global audience. So, social media gives you a better harvest for your marketing investments. Social media offers you a wide audience reach: If your aim is a wide reach then social media is your best bet. Facebook has over 1 billion active users across different demographics, geography and cultural parameters. Twitter which is logged in by over 100 million users daily is mostly used by the age ran. The twitter users aging above 60 are also increasing. Social media enables your faster reach to audience: There is hardly anyone who does not have a social media account. More than 60% of the social media account holders use their social media accounts daily. This justifies the fact and assures you that social media has a faster and ascertained reach to your target audience. Social media offers you an intense user engagement: User generated content in social media earns sincere attention of users. Apart from this, most of the content comes off in appealing forms like engaging games, queries, video ads and the like. Social media hikes brand loyalty of your fans: Most of the content in social media is user generated and it flows in from reliable sources. Moreover social media exposes your brand to a wide audience and it enables you to interact with the audience. It’s a three tier effect: it introduces your brand to your young prospective fans, invokes curiosity about your brand and emboldens the faith of your already existing fans. All these help you to earn brand loyalty from your fans. Social media offers you the scope of better customer service: Social media helps you in understanding the sentiment of your audience for your brand. By following the social buzz and analysing social sentiment of your target audience you understand the exact needs of your customers and follow them up with the required service. While the above stated advantages of social media gives you good returns, using social media for your brand is not free from risks. One of the risks arises from the fast reach of social media. So, if it’s a positive buzz your brand may become the king of the market while if it’s a negative buzz, you brand may get affected. So, using social media requires your vigilance all the time. You have to keep an eye on the reactions of your audiences to your marketing activities and keep the buzz about your brand under control. Giving prompt responses to your audience queries, regulating negative posts with an appeasing reply and pivoting audience attention to positive posts help you to regulate the reactions of your audience. If you are infusing social media in your business strategies you must not miss out on these tips:   Learn about the behaviour of your audience: Learning audience behaviour is a mixture of quantitative and qualitative process. It requires your intent observation, social sentiment analysis, search analysis etc. Learning about audience behaviour will help you to tune in your brand with your target audience. Do not beat the drum about your brand: Over promoting your brand will hamper your brand reputation. So, social media strategies must be objectified to win the heart of your audience rather than promoting your business. It should be customer oriented. Respond to messages and queries on time: Apt response to messages and queries from your audience helps you to earn new fans and maintain the relationship with already existing fans. Do not abuse the use of hash tags: The hash tags you use must be relevant to your business and must be popular at the time you make your post. Post at optimal frequencies: Posting at optimal frequencies increases the visibility of your brand in a social site. So, learn about the optimal frequency of posting in a particular site with real time posting as well as secondary research and post accordingly. Use the right parameters to measure the success of your brand: The ROI parameters tell you how effective have been your social media strategies and how you should proceed in the future. Choose the right parameters to evaluate your social media activities and earn rich returns. GetFriday (earlier YMII or YourManInIndia) is a service that was featured and used in the NYTimes best-selling productivity and lifestyle design book ‘The 4-Hour-Workweek’ by Timothy Ferris. Sign up now!

Are You An Entrepreneur? Build Your Virtual Team and Watch Your Business Grow

If you are an entrepreneur, you love to pave your own path and make a huge fortune out of it. You often play the game of risk because you can turn risks into opportunities. All these risks and struggles in the journey of entrepreneurship – have to be ousted to become the cynosure of the market. The, path to the ultimate glory and success has its own challenges. You have big dreams but a thin pocket. Your business needs diverse skills and rich inputs. And, managing administrative work around the business adds to the ever growing challenges. Even when you manage the work and budget, you are not able to find that right pool of talent for your business in your geographic market. So, what should you do? How to overcome these challenges thrown in your path by the market? The best way to deal with these problems for long term is to categorize interrelated challenges and then find solutions which can be effectively applied to mitigate each challenge. For every budding entrepreneur and small business owner, almost all the challenges can be categorized into 3 categories – budget constraints, quality issues of your products and services, and fierce competition in the market. Once you sort out the primary challenges, you must realize that there are smart ways to break free from these confinements of entrepreneurship. Many smart solutions have evolved with the help of IT such that growing businesses can work within a little office space with minimum resources. Teams work in decentralised structures from geographically detached places. This is where the most frequented term ‘Virtual Teams’ comes into play. Virtual Teams are composed of talent from different parts of the world and works by co-ordinating through IT resources. Virtual teams have the advantage of using minimum resources to bring in the required flexibility to the organization in terms of budget and resource utilization. Some of the best benefits of building Virtual teams are: You make a lean organisation: Your virtual team is made up of most productive resources. You are not spending to buy office space, you are not breaking your head to recruit and pay salaries to your full time employees, yet you are availing the most professional inputs to your business. You are not incurring maintenance cost of extra resources without compromising on productivity of your limited resources. You enrich your organisation culture: You are not narrowed by your geographic and demographic cultural commonalities. Your virtually assorted team will give you wide-ranging inputs and ideas which might not have stroked you without your virtual team. Moreover with Virtual Teams you are making a flexible organisation culture, in which your team members can give you ideas freely without being suppressed by your authority. You are not confined by talent limitations of geography and demography: You can pick resources from any part of the world. So you can pick the best choice for your business if you can do a proper research to pick your resources before building a virtual team. So if you don’t find talent in your geographic area to fit into your business, it’s not a matter of worry at all! Building Virtual Teams has manifold benefits for your business but it again brings along its own challenges. There are challenges in managing the virtual teams i.e. team communication, project management, meeting scheduling, and blending of the virtual teams with the organisation culture. The following tips will help you to manage your Virtual Team gracefully. Use tools for seamless team communication: You can manage your projects and have transparent updates on them by integrating tools like Trello. A combination of different tools will give you better results. Schedule your meetings mutually: You virtual team members are geographically scattered and hence don’t share the same time zone. Find a mutually agreeable time before scheduling the meetings. Once you are conscientious enough to follow the above tips, all you need is to watch your virtual team driving your business to success!

Are You An Entrepreneur? Build Your Virtual Team and Watch Your Business Grow Read More »

If you are an entrepreneur, you love to pave your own path and make a huge fortune out of it. You often play the game of risk because you can turn risks into opportunities. All these risks and struggles in the journey of entrepreneurship – have to be ousted to become the cynosure of the market. The, path to the ultimate glory and success has its own challenges. You have big dreams but a thin pocket. Your business needs diverse skills and rich inputs. And, managing administrative work around the business adds to the ever growing challenges. Even when you manage the work and budget, you are not able to find that right pool of talent for your business in your geographic market. So, what should you do? How to overcome these challenges thrown in your path by the market? The best way to deal with these problems for long term is to categorize interrelated challenges and then find solutions which can be effectively applied to mitigate each challenge. For every budding entrepreneur and small business owner, almost all the challenges can be categorized into 3 categories – budget constraints, quality issues of your products and services, and fierce competition in the market. Once you sort out the primary challenges, you must realize that there are smart ways to break free from these confinements of entrepreneurship. Many smart solutions have evolved with the help of IT such that growing businesses can work within a little office space with minimum resources. Teams work in decentralised structures from geographically detached places. This is where the most frequented term ‘Virtual Teams’ comes into play. Virtual Teams are composed of talent from different parts of the world and works by co-ordinating through IT resources. Virtual teams have the advantage of using minimum resources to bring in the required flexibility to the organization in terms of budget and resource utilization. Some of the best benefits of building Virtual teams are: You make a lean organisation: Your virtual team is made up of most productive resources. You are not spending to buy office space, you are not breaking your head to recruit and pay salaries to your full time employees, yet you are availing the most professional inputs to your business. You are not incurring maintenance cost of extra resources without compromising on productivity of your limited resources. You enrich your organisation culture: You are not narrowed by your geographic and demographic cultural commonalities. Your virtually assorted team will give you wide-ranging inputs and ideas which might not have stroked you without your virtual team. Moreover with Virtual Teams you are making a flexible organisation culture, in which your team members can give you ideas freely without being suppressed by your authority. You are not confined by talent limitations of geography and demography: You can pick resources from any part of the world. So you can pick the best choice for your business if you can do a proper research to pick your resources before building a virtual team. So if you don’t find talent in your geographic area to fit into your business, it’s not a matter of worry at all! Building Virtual Teams has manifold benefits for your business but it again brings along its own challenges. There are challenges in managing the virtual teams i.e. team communication, project management, meeting scheduling, and blending of the virtual teams with the organisation culture. The following tips will help you to manage your Virtual Team gracefully. Use tools for seamless team communication: You can manage your projects and have transparent updates on them by integrating tools like Trello. A combination of different tools will give you better results. Schedule your meetings mutually: You virtual team members are geographically scattered and hence don’t share the same time zone. Find a mutually agreeable time before scheduling the meetings. Once you are conscientious enough to follow the above tips, all you need is to watch your virtual team driving your business to success!

AJ Jacobs Talks About His Experiences With Life Outsourcing Company, GetFriday

GetFriday’s Virtual Assistance Services has won the hearts of many around the globe, due to their timely, professional personal and business support services. A fitting example of a happy client is the editor of Esquire Magazine, AJ Jacobs. AJ Jacobs is a New York Times bestselling author and journalist who has been on a long and fruitful journey with GetFriday for the past ten years. In the quest to improve his life, AJ Jacobs experimented with outsourcing and chose to work with GetFriday. In his testimonial video, AJ Jacobs recounts his experiences and throws light on how quickly and efficiently GetFriday’s Virtual Assistants responded to his needs and enquiries. In a light-hearted moment in the video, AJ Jacobs mentions that if he had outsourced the making of the video testimonial to Team GetFriday, they would have done a ‘quicker and a much more efficient’ job. He also talks about a gamut of services offered by GetFriday. From carrying out online purchases on his behalf to managing his e-mails, AJ Jacobs had a helping hand at every step of the way, with GetFriday’s Virtual Assistants.See how GetFriday’s Virtual Assistant can help you. It is a matter of great pride and honor for GetFriday, to have worked with AJ Jacobs. Just like AJ Jacobs, GetFriday has successfully served clients from different parts of the world across multiple domains and industries. GetFriday’s Virtual Assistants have proved that they are capable of multi-tasking and handling work, no matter how simple or complex. On a closing note, GetFriday eagerly looks forward to serving hundreds others and making a small difference to their lives in every possible way. Because, Life gets better with GetFriday! New to outsourcing? – Six Things You MUST outsource to a Virtual Assistant

AJ Jacobs Talks About His Experiences With Life Outsourcing Company, GetFriday Read More »

GetFriday’s Virtual Assistance Services has won the hearts of many around the globe, due to their timely, professional personal and business support services. A fitting example of a happy client is the editor of Esquire Magazine, AJ Jacobs. AJ Jacobs is a New York Times bestselling author and journalist who has been on a long and fruitful journey with GetFriday for the past ten years. In the quest to improve his life, AJ Jacobs experimented with outsourcing and chose to work with GetFriday. In his testimonial video, AJ Jacobs recounts his experiences and throws light on how quickly and efficiently GetFriday’s Virtual Assistants responded to his needs and enquiries. In a light-hearted moment in the video, AJ Jacobs mentions that if he had outsourced the making of the video testimonial to Team GetFriday, they would have done a ‘quicker and a much more efficient’ job. He also talks about a gamut of services offered by GetFriday. From carrying out online purchases on his behalf to managing his e-mails, AJ Jacobs had a helping hand at every step of the way, with GetFriday’s Virtual Assistants.See how GetFriday’s Virtual Assistant can help you. It is a matter of great pride and honor for GetFriday, to have worked with AJ Jacobs. Just like AJ Jacobs, GetFriday has successfully served clients from different parts of the world across multiple domains and industries. GetFriday’s Virtual Assistants have proved that they are capable of multi-tasking and handling work, no matter how simple or complex. On a closing note, GetFriday eagerly looks forward to serving hundreds others and making a small difference to their lives in every possible way. Because, Life gets better with GetFriday! New to outsourcing? – Six Things You MUST outsource to a Virtual Assistant

Four Fool-Proof Ways To Overcome Writer’s Block With a Virtual Assistant

Writer’s block is something every writer struggles with at some point in their lives. Since the lifeblood of every writer’s success lies in their ability to churn out quick quality content, a writer’s block could throw you off balance, especially if you have strict deadlines to meet. The feeling of not being ‘good enough’ to write is all too familiar. But most of the time, a writer’s block is not really a ‘block’ at all. It’s just endless self-criticism and a noiseless outburst of the ‘stress’ you experience when you have to produce work that will not be viewed by your readers as flaming pieces of garbage. If people pen their thoughts down without worrying too much about perfecting the sentences, the flow of writing improves and gives the writers a rough skeleton to work with for later. Contrary to popular belief, a writer’s block usually occurs during the initial phases of writing and is common among professional writers, novelists, academicians, researchers and the like. Many a time, people put their lives on hold until they can find the inspiration to write. Some of the activities that people indulge in for inspiration include going through ‘how-to’ blog posts on overcoming writer’s blocks (shooting myself in the foot?), taking long walks outside, completing household chores, reading poetic novels or hoping to find some inspiration by watching the plants in their backyards grow. Though these may provide stimulus for some, it does not necessarily work all the time. What You Should Ideally Be Doing? Writers have to invest countless hours of research and pore over a number of resources before they actually get down to writing the first few drafts. With hours of prep work, professional writers almost always struggle for time. All this creates an even bigger problem if the writer is prone to experiencing writer’s blocks every now and then. The trick to overcoming a writer’s block is to work around the problem smartly. Though a request for help with writing at this point may be perceived as a critical weakness, it is in fact one of the smartest things a writer can do for his/her writing, without taking away the glory they deserve. Hiring a Virtual Assistant can give you enough room to work around your creativity and will give you the space to write at leisure without letting the brass tacks or prep work get in the way. Though indirectly, this could help with overcoming writer’s block because you will have fewer things to worry about and will be able to concentrate better on the composition of your thoughts. Leave the research, keyword searches, vocabulary sheets and lots more to your VA. You’ll find that no matter what you compose, be it an online blog or a book, outsourcing a few aspects of preparatory writing work to a personal virtual assistant can definitely ease the pressures of a writer’s block. Get your VA to: Do The Research Work Whether you are working on a research paper or writing a blog series, you will be required to do some amount of research if you want your final, written piece to look credible. Engaging your audience is crucial and presenting data or checking out the facts behind people, locations, characters and subjects can help you do just that. For example, in the following two sentences, you’ll notice a difference in how the information is presented. The research and detail that goes into the second sentence will make you understand why the second sentence will be considered more reliable in the eyes of a reader. Example 1 “Mike stole an orange bag from the Selfridges store and ran out as quickly as he could.” Example 2 “Mike stole an expensive, orange, suede satchel from the Selfridges store and ran out as quickly as he could.” A reader would most definitely be drawn to the second line, because it is a lot more descriptive and also gives the illusion that the bag is stolen from the store actually exists at Selfridges. The devil is in the details and carrying out proper research before any kind of writing, will only make your writing piece honest. If you are starting out as a writer, you may not know where to look for information. Even if you do, you may find that ‘research’ can get exasperating and take up a lot of your time. That’s where a Virtual Assistant steps into place. No matter what online research you require for writing your blog, book or paper, you can outsource ‘research work’ of various natures to your VA and focus more on composing your written work. Generate Blog Post Ideas & Page Optimization If you are struggling with finding suitable keyword-rich titles for your blog posts, give your Virtual Assistant a rough idea of what you are expecting in terms of the title for the post and what the blog will contain. Your VA will carry out all the keyword research required to target the right audience and also come with up ideas for your next blog posts. Apart from this, get your VA to keep your blog pages optimized and can carry out competitor research so that you can gauge where you stand. All this data, presented in a comprehensive, easy-to-understand format by your VA, should be able to ease a part of the writer’s block and give you the freedom to write your piece in a relaxed manner. Drafting Blog Posts If you continue to have a problem with writing in a lucid manner or you are not finding the time to complete your blog for the week, have your specialist Virtual Assistant work on a draft for you. All you will have to do in the end is go through it, format the content and hit the ‘publish’ button. Your Virtual Assistants, being jacks of all trades, are also talented wordsmiths. You’ll be surprised with the lucrative ideas they give you and the quality work they can come up with! They can

Four Fool-Proof Ways To Overcome Writer’s Block With a Virtual Assistant Read More »

Writer’s block is something every writer struggles with at some point in their lives. Since the lifeblood of every writer’s success lies in their ability to churn out quick quality content, a writer’s block could throw you off balance, especially if you have strict deadlines to meet. The feeling of not being ‘good enough’ to write is all too familiar. But most of the time, a writer’s block is not really a ‘block’ at all. It’s just endless self-criticism and a noiseless outburst of the ‘stress’ you experience when you have to produce work that will not be viewed by your readers as flaming pieces of garbage. If people pen their thoughts down without worrying too much about perfecting the sentences, the flow of writing improves and gives the writers a rough skeleton to work with for later. Contrary to popular belief, a writer’s block usually occurs during the initial phases of writing and is common among professional writers, novelists, academicians, researchers and the like. Many a time, people put their lives on hold until they can find the inspiration to write. Some of the activities that people indulge in for inspiration include going through ‘how-to’ blog posts on overcoming writer’s blocks (shooting myself in the foot?), taking long walks outside, completing household chores, reading poetic novels or hoping to find some inspiration by watching the plants in their backyards grow. Though these may provide stimulus for some, it does not necessarily work all the time. What You Should Ideally Be Doing? Writers have to invest countless hours of research and pore over a number of resources before they actually get down to writing the first few drafts. With hours of prep work, professional writers almost always struggle for time. All this creates an even bigger problem if the writer is prone to experiencing writer’s blocks every now and then. The trick to overcoming a writer’s block is to work around the problem smartly. Though a request for help with writing at this point may be perceived as a critical weakness, it is in fact one of the smartest things a writer can do for his/her writing, without taking away the glory they deserve. Hiring a Virtual Assistant can give you enough room to work around your creativity and will give you the space to write at leisure without letting the brass tacks or prep work get in the way. Though indirectly, this could help with overcoming writer’s block because you will have fewer things to worry about and will be able to concentrate better on the composition of your thoughts. Leave the research, keyword searches, vocabulary sheets and lots more to your VA. You’ll find that no matter what you compose, be it an online blog or a book, outsourcing a few aspects of preparatory writing work to a personal virtual assistant can definitely ease the pressures of a writer’s block. Get your VA to: Do The Research Work Whether you are working on a research paper or writing a blog series, you will be required to do some amount of research if you want your final, written piece to look credible. Engaging your audience is crucial and presenting data or checking out the facts behind people, locations, characters and subjects can help you do just that. For example, in the following two sentences, you’ll notice a difference in how the information is presented. The research and detail that goes into the second sentence will make you understand why the second sentence will be considered more reliable in the eyes of a reader. Example 1 “Mike stole an orange bag from the Selfridges store and ran out as quickly as he could.” Example 2 “Mike stole an expensive, orange, suede satchel from the Selfridges store and ran out as quickly as he could.” A reader would most definitely be drawn to the second line, because it is a lot more descriptive and also gives the illusion that the bag is stolen from the store actually exists at Selfridges. The devil is in the details and carrying out proper research before any kind of writing, will only make your writing piece honest. If you are starting out as a writer, you may not know where to look for information. Even if you do, you may find that ‘research’ can get exasperating and take up a lot of your time. That’s where a Virtual Assistant steps into place. No matter what online research you require for writing your blog, book or paper, you can outsource ‘research work’ of various natures to your VA and focus more on composing your written work. Generate Blog Post Ideas & Page Optimization If you are struggling with finding suitable keyword-rich titles for your blog posts, give your Virtual Assistant a rough idea of what you are expecting in terms of the title for the post and what the blog will contain. Your VA will carry out all the keyword research required to target the right audience and also come with up ideas for your next blog posts. Apart from this, get your VA to keep your blog pages optimized and can carry out competitor research so that you can gauge where you stand. All this data, presented in a comprehensive, easy-to-understand format by your VA, should be able to ease a part of the writer’s block and give you the freedom to write your piece in a relaxed manner. Drafting Blog Posts If you continue to have a problem with writing in a lucid manner or you are not finding the time to complete your blog for the week, have your specialist Virtual Assistant work on a draft for you. All you will have to do in the end is go through it, format the content and hit the ‘publish’ button. Your Virtual Assistants, being jacks of all trades, are also talented wordsmiths. You’ll be surprised with the lucrative ideas they give you and the quality work they can come up with! They can

Superhero Syndrome At Large Among Small Business Owners

Being a superhero for your children, spouse, parents or partner is great, but the same cannot be said about your business. Sure, you may run a successful single-office agency and could be the jack of all trades for your business. But do you realize it could be detrimental if you are the master of none? Most entrepreneurs take great pride in completing every task and jump at every small opportunity to be the only ones at the helms of their businesses. Chris Ducker, the author of ‘Virtual Freedom’ has coined a term for this situation and calls it the ‘Superhero Syndrome‘, a prevalent condition wherein entrepreneurs and small business owners believe that they can handle everything on their own without having to delegate or subcontract work. Though there is nothing wrong with handling everything yourself, it is only prudent to outsource dreary business processes to specialized Virtual Assistants at the right time. This could save you from facing a burnout in the long run, can positively impact your business and give you the opportunity to let professionals handle specialist tasks at a fraction of the cost! What’s more, you have access to a large pool of skills and can outsource practically any aspect of the business you like! So, what do you do, you ask? What you should really be focusing on as a small business owner is to give more value to your clients, measure results, build ideas and re-strategize your business for the future. Take a look at what you need to know about overcoming the ‘Superhero Syndrome’ Repetitiveness And Systemization In a business, you’ll find that a lot of processes are repetitive and the repetition can in fact, be systemized. Consider a car service centre, for example. When a car has been taken to a service centre, mechanics take their time to gauge the problems with the car before they get down to fixing them. However, when it comes to specialized jobs such as fixing the filters in the car or changing the cover for the seats, mechanics may not be able to handle these tasks themselves. There are specialized contractors and suppliers who provide these products and/or services. When a filter or a seat cover needs to be changed, service centres will not waste their clients? time and their resources by learning how to change these filters internally or manufacturing leather seat covers themselves. They will instead, outsource the work to the professionals who carry out bulk supplies of these certain products outside the service centre. A final markup to the price is added, before handing your car back to you. Ergo, the service centre is benefitting from making additional money out of a job that they are not even doing and are building a name for themselves. This is all thanks to the fabulous job done by the specialist suppliers/vendors, who helped the centre with their timely ? ‘behind-the-scenes’ support. Okay, So How Does It Help My Business? Think about a similar situation for your business. You could outsource everyday functions to a professional Virtual Assistance company like GetFriday and end up saving a lot of time and money. This will ensure that you don’t work your way out of your own business and will also give you the time to re-focus on the core functions while your able team of Virtual Assistant professionals work behind the scenes and handle other aspects of your business for you. On The Lighter Side? It is okay to have delusions of being a superhero. But learning when to get your sidekicks (in this case, your Virtual Assistants) into the picture and sharing the load with them can help you do a better job of running the business and still give you the opportunity to govern the work being done. Let’s take the classic examples of Batman and Robin for instance. Though we know which one of the two shoulders the mantle all the way through, Robin’s character was created for two very simple yet important reasons- 1.Batman needed a friend, a brother and a confidante. Someone he could talk to because a hero can very often find himself ‘alone’ in the humdrum of everyday life. 2.Robin, the Boy Wonder, was not just a wingman, but also a vigilante who kept Batman from making the wrong choices and was always around to ‘help’ Batman fight crime. The reasons are straight forward. No matter how big a superhero you are, you will, at some point, require ‘help’. Whether it is a boy in green hot-pants who comes to the rescue or a resourceful Virtual Assistant, halfway across the world from you, a helping hand is all you need to ease your work burdens and can make you and your business a better one. Got It. What Do I Do Now? Take control and start by making a list that contains the following three columns- Outsourcing what you don’t like to do Outsourcing what you shouldn’t be doing Outsourcing what you can’t do Once you have written down your tasks under each column, it will become easier for you to delegate your work to your professional Virtual Assistants. Your online virtual assistants will work flexibly to understand and learn the ways of your business and probably do your work better than what you would have done! Rest assured, your Virtual Assistants can handle pretty much all your boring business functions and do a lot more specialist tasks that you wouldn’t be able to do yourself i.e. handling all your web page requirements, writing blogs, graphic designing, specialized SEO services, email management, accounting and so much more! Be a real superhero by outsourcing unimportant functions in your business and take out more time to do high-value work, build networks or make time for the family. This will help you focus better on doing the things you love, can do and should do!

Superhero Syndrome At Large Among Small Business Owners Read More »

Being a superhero for your children, spouse, parents or partner is great, but the same cannot be said about your business. Sure, you may run a successful single-office agency and could be the jack of all trades for your business. But do you realize it could be detrimental if you are the master of none? Most entrepreneurs take great pride in completing every task and jump at every small opportunity to be the only ones at the helms of their businesses. Chris Ducker, the author of ‘Virtual Freedom’ has coined a term for this situation and calls it the ‘Superhero Syndrome‘, a prevalent condition wherein entrepreneurs and small business owners believe that they can handle everything on their own without having to delegate or subcontract work. Though there is nothing wrong with handling everything yourself, it is only prudent to outsource dreary business processes to specialized Virtual Assistants at the right time. This could save you from facing a burnout in the long run, can positively impact your business and give you the opportunity to let professionals handle specialist tasks at a fraction of the cost! What’s more, you have access to a large pool of skills and can outsource practically any aspect of the business you like! So, what do you do, you ask? What you should really be focusing on as a small business owner is to give more value to your clients, measure results, build ideas and re-strategize your business for the future. Take a look at what you need to know about overcoming the ‘Superhero Syndrome’ Repetitiveness And Systemization In a business, you’ll find that a lot of processes are repetitive and the repetition can in fact, be systemized. Consider a car service centre, for example. When a car has been taken to a service centre, mechanics take their time to gauge the problems with the car before they get down to fixing them. However, when it comes to specialized jobs such as fixing the filters in the car or changing the cover for the seats, mechanics may not be able to handle these tasks themselves. There are specialized contractors and suppliers who provide these products and/or services. When a filter or a seat cover needs to be changed, service centres will not waste their clients? time and their resources by learning how to change these filters internally or manufacturing leather seat covers themselves. They will instead, outsource the work to the professionals who carry out bulk supplies of these certain products outside the service centre. A final markup to the price is added, before handing your car back to you. Ergo, the service centre is benefitting from making additional money out of a job that they are not even doing and are building a name for themselves. This is all thanks to the fabulous job done by the specialist suppliers/vendors, who helped the centre with their timely ? ‘behind-the-scenes’ support. Okay, So How Does It Help My Business? Think about a similar situation for your business. You could outsource everyday functions to a professional Virtual Assistance company like GetFriday and end up saving a lot of time and money. This will ensure that you don’t work your way out of your own business and will also give you the time to re-focus on the core functions while your able team of Virtual Assistant professionals work behind the scenes and handle other aspects of your business for you. On The Lighter Side? It is okay to have delusions of being a superhero. But learning when to get your sidekicks (in this case, your Virtual Assistants) into the picture and sharing the load with them can help you do a better job of running the business and still give you the opportunity to govern the work being done. Let’s take the classic examples of Batman and Robin for instance. Though we know which one of the two shoulders the mantle all the way through, Robin’s character was created for two very simple yet important reasons- 1.Batman needed a friend, a brother and a confidante. Someone he could talk to because a hero can very often find himself ‘alone’ in the humdrum of everyday life. 2.Robin, the Boy Wonder, was not just a wingman, but also a vigilante who kept Batman from making the wrong choices and was always around to ‘help’ Batman fight crime. The reasons are straight forward. No matter how big a superhero you are, you will, at some point, require ‘help’. Whether it is a boy in green hot-pants who comes to the rescue or a resourceful Virtual Assistant, halfway across the world from you, a helping hand is all you need to ease your work burdens and can make you and your business a better one. Got It. What Do I Do Now? Take control and start by making a list that contains the following three columns- Outsourcing what you don’t like to do Outsourcing what you shouldn’t be doing Outsourcing what you can’t do Once you have written down your tasks under each column, it will become easier for you to delegate your work to your professional Virtual Assistants. Your online virtual assistants will work flexibly to understand and learn the ways of your business and probably do your work better than what you would have done! Rest assured, your Virtual Assistants can handle pretty much all your boring business functions and do a lot more specialist tasks that you wouldn’t be able to do yourself i.e. handling all your web page requirements, writing blogs, graphic designing, specialized SEO services, email management, accounting and so much more! Be a real superhero by outsourcing unimportant functions in your business and take out more time to do high-value work, build networks or make time for the family. This will help you focus better on doing the things you love, can do and should do!

Ten Reasons For Small Businesses To Outsource

The year 2009, for entrepreneur Chris Ducker, was fraught with commitments above and beyond necessary. He had a doting family to go back home to, but being an entrepreneur meant that he had to forego his personal time and suffer many sleepless nights because it was more about being ‘in’ the business rather than being ‘on top of things’. Luckily for him, he made some smart choices and was well on his way to gain that much-needed respite through outsourcing. Now, he works an average of 6 hours a day, can look into personal commitments, focus on building new business goals and advocates Virtual Assistance services, all the time! If you’re managing a start-up and you’ve blown that amazing business opportunity because you missed a follow-up deadline or were too tied up with routine administrative operations for your business, then hiring a Virtual Assistant is something you might want to consider. However, the thought of hiring a Virtual Assistant for a first-time outsourcer can immediately trigger a feeling like the world is about to zap all the cash from your bank account. But it is not always so. In one of the earlier blogs in the series, we stressed on how to decide ‘when the right time is to outsource. In this blog post, we’ll give you plenty reasons as to ‘why’ you should outsource- especially if you are a small business owner or an entrepreneur. Read on! 1. Reduced Costs As much as small businessmen would like to believe, hiring a virtual assistant can in fact save you money instead of stretching your budget. Since a virtual assistant is not a full time employee, you won’t need to worry about payroll taxes, sick leave, vacation pay, health insurance etc. In the case of virtual assistants, they only get paid for the hours they work and in turn, add more value to your investment. For example: You might end up paying an in-house employee for 40 hours of work per week, despite the employee taking coffee breaks, going out to use the restroom and making ceaseless phone calls. However, if you hire a Virtual Assistant and you have purchased only 20 hours worth of work per month, you will end up paying the Virtual Assistant for only 5 hours of work per week! That’s a difference of almost 8 times! Ergo, it is safe to say that the costs of hiring a VA are a lot lesser as compared to hiring a full-time employee. 2. You Don’t Need To Provide Office Space The best part about outsourcing is that you don’t need to worry about providing an office space for your Virtual Assistant. Global Virtual Assistants use their personal computers and their own internet connections to execute the tasks you send them. If you are a small business and you think that hiring a group of in-house employees and providing for large offices right away could cost your business, outsourcing could come across as a boon for you. 3. Training For VA’s Is Not Required Every year, businesses spend thousands of dollars on training employees to update their knowledge on new software, tools and the latest technology. By outsourcing your work to a Virtual Assistant, you can easily save on all this money because Virtual Assistants are already trained and are quite well-versed with the latest online tools and software because their jobs demand it. Depending on the nature of tasks you want to outsource, you can either choose general Virtual Assistants, who are jacks-of-all and are all-rounders, or you could choose to hire specialist Virtual Assistants who are proficient at one particular job. 4. A Pool of Resources To Choose From If you choose to partner with an outsourcing company, you’ll be working with a melting pot of specialists and gain access to a large pool of online resources. You won’t have to go looking to hire specialists, sifting through countless applications and interviewing hundreds of people. If you are a small business and you don’t want to waste your company’s resources and time searching for the right specialists for your job, partnering with an outsourcing company is easily be one of your best bets. Once you SignUp, you will be able to outsource tasks of multiple natures to your Personal Virtual Assistant and then relax, knowing that your tasks are in safe and experienced hands. 5. You Can Quit Anytime Firing an in-house employee can be a long and tedious process and there may even be instances, wherein you will need to abide by employee agreements if you want to avoid lawsuits. With a Global Virtual Assistant however, you don’t need to worry about any of it. You have the flexibility to fire your virtual assistant instantly and easily if deadlines are missed or the assistant repeatedly makes mistakes despite feedback. 6. Get Your Tasks Completed On Time & Efficiently As a small business owner, you’ll realize that you have a ton of work to complete, no matter how important, tedious or repetitive. Who said that being an entrepreneur was easy? The trick to finding the right balance, is to work on tasks that have greater value (monetary or otherwise) and outsource the rest to your personal virtual assistant. This way you’ll find that your other tasks (which you don’t like to do or find too boring or time-consuming to complete) are being handled a lot more efficiently and are completed within the stipulated deadlines. 7. Boost Productivity If you are a hard working entrepreneur or a small business owner and want to get more done in less time, you can boost your productivity with outsourcing. Having virtual assistants take care of all the tasks that you don’t like to do yourself means that you will gain that extra hour or two to focus on other important jobs and tasks at hand, thereby maximizing productivity and making more time for yourself in the day. 8. Re-Location & Travel Becomes A Lot Easier If you are traveling, have

Ten Reasons For Small Businesses To Outsource Read More »

The year 2009, for entrepreneur Chris Ducker, was fraught with commitments above and beyond necessary. He had a doting family to go back home to, but being an entrepreneur meant that he had to forego his personal time and suffer many sleepless nights because it was more about being ‘in’ the business rather than being ‘on top of things’. Luckily for him, he made some smart choices and was well on his way to gain that much-needed respite through outsourcing. Now, he works an average of 6 hours a day, can look into personal commitments, focus on building new business goals and advocates Virtual Assistance services, all the time! If you’re managing a start-up and you’ve blown that amazing business opportunity because you missed a follow-up deadline or were too tied up with routine administrative operations for your business, then hiring a Virtual Assistant is something you might want to consider. However, the thought of hiring a Virtual Assistant for a first-time outsourcer can immediately trigger a feeling like the world is about to zap all the cash from your bank account. But it is not always so. In one of the earlier blogs in the series, we stressed on how to decide ‘when the right time is to outsource. In this blog post, we’ll give you plenty reasons as to ‘why’ you should outsource- especially if you are a small business owner or an entrepreneur. Read on! 1. Reduced Costs As much as small businessmen would like to believe, hiring a virtual assistant can in fact save you money instead of stretching your budget. Since a virtual assistant is not a full time employee, you won’t need to worry about payroll taxes, sick leave, vacation pay, health insurance etc. In the case of virtual assistants, they only get paid for the hours they work and in turn, add more value to your investment. For example: You might end up paying an in-house employee for 40 hours of work per week, despite the employee taking coffee breaks, going out to use the restroom and making ceaseless phone calls. However, if you hire a Virtual Assistant and you have purchased only 20 hours worth of work per month, you will end up paying the Virtual Assistant for only 5 hours of work per week! That’s a difference of almost 8 times! Ergo, it is safe to say that the costs of hiring a VA are a lot lesser as compared to hiring a full-time employee. 2. You Don’t Need To Provide Office Space The best part about outsourcing is that you don’t need to worry about providing an office space for your Virtual Assistant. Global Virtual Assistants use their personal computers and their own internet connections to execute the tasks you send them. If you are a small business and you think that hiring a group of in-house employees and providing for large offices right away could cost your business, outsourcing could come across as a boon for you. 3. Training For VA’s Is Not Required Every year, businesses spend thousands of dollars on training employees to update their knowledge on new software, tools and the latest technology. By outsourcing your work to a Virtual Assistant, you can easily save on all this money because Virtual Assistants are already trained and are quite well-versed with the latest online tools and software because their jobs demand it. Depending on the nature of tasks you want to outsource, you can either choose general Virtual Assistants, who are jacks-of-all and are all-rounders, or you could choose to hire specialist Virtual Assistants who are proficient at one particular job. 4. A Pool of Resources To Choose From If you choose to partner with an outsourcing company, you’ll be working with a melting pot of specialists and gain access to a large pool of online resources. You won’t have to go looking to hire specialists, sifting through countless applications and interviewing hundreds of people. If you are a small business and you don’t want to waste your company’s resources and time searching for the right specialists for your job, partnering with an outsourcing company is easily be one of your best bets. Once you SignUp, you will be able to outsource tasks of multiple natures to your Personal Virtual Assistant and then relax, knowing that your tasks are in safe and experienced hands. 5. You Can Quit Anytime Firing an in-house employee can be a long and tedious process and there may even be instances, wherein you will need to abide by employee agreements if you want to avoid lawsuits. With a Global Virtual Assistant however, you don’t need to worry about any of it. You have the flexibility to fire your virtual assistant instantly and easily if deadlines are missed or the assistant repeatedly makes mistakes despite feedback. 6. Get Your Tasks Completed On Time & Efficiently As a small business owner, you’ll realize that you have a ton of work to complete, no matter how important, tedious or repetitive. Who said that being an entrepreneur was easy? The trick to finding the right balance, is to work on tasks that have greater value (monetary or otherwise) and outsource the rest to your personal virtual assistant. This way you’ll find that your other tasks (which you don’t like to do or find too boring or time-consuming to complete) are being handled a lot more efficiently and are completed within the stipulated deadlines. 7. Boost Productivity If you are a hard working entrepreneur or a small business owner and want to get more done in less time, you can boost your productivity with outsourcing. Having virtual assistants take care of all the tasks that you don’t like to do yourself means that you will gain that extra hour or two to focus on other important jobs and tasks at hand, thereby maximizing productivity and making more time for yourself in the day. 8. Re-Location & Travel Becomes A Lot Easier If you are traveling, have

Save 60 Minutes A Day

Save 60 Minutes A Day With GetFriday

As the saying goes, even a second is precious for a busy person and saving a whole 60 minutes is equivalent to striking a pot of gold. To have 60 whole minutes of your life back, could mean spending more time with your family, catching that movie you wanted to watch at the theater, jogging with your pet, Bruno at the beach, relaxing at the spa or just unwinding on the couch. To assist you all your business, personal and administrative requirements, GetFriday’s Virtual Assistants can help offload your work while you catch that much needed break for yourself. GetFriday has now come up with a series of ‘Save 60 Minutes A Day’ videos for you, capturing the very essence of how our virtual assistance services could help a client offload tasks and make a difference in his/her life in the process. The first of these videos, titled ‘Meet Jane’, is about a working mother of two, who is also an entrepreneur of a successful e-commerce store. Not being able to strike a balance in her work and personal life, Jane gets really flustered, but manages to change her life for the better by hiring a GetFriday Virtual Assistant! Her virtual assistant helps her by saving 60 minutes of her day everyday, by handling all her e-commerce back-end work for her, while she finally gets to spend some quality time with her kids! We are going to have a lot more videos in the ‘Save 60 Minutes A Day Series’, so, stay tuned for more updates!

Save 60 Minutes A Day With GetFriday Read More »

As the saying goes, even a second is precious for a busy person and saving a whole 60 minutes is equivalent to striking a pot of gold. To have 60 whole minutes of your life back, could mean spending more time with your family, catching that movie you wanted to watch at the theater, jogging with your pet, Bruno at the beach, relaxing at the spa or just unwinding on the couch. To assist you all your business, personal and administrative requirements, GetFriday’s Virtual Assistants can help offload your work while you catch that much needed break for yourself. GetFriday has now come up with a series of ‘Save 60 Minutes A Day’ videos for you, capturing the very essence of how our virtual assistance services could help a client offload tasks and make a difference in his/her life in the process. The first of these videos, titled ‘Meet Jane’, is about a working mother of two, who is also an entrepreneur of a successful e-commerce store. Not being able to strike a balance in her work and personal life, Jane gets really flustered, but manages to change her life for the better by hiring a GetFriday Virtual Assistant! Her virtual assistant helps her by saving 60 minutes of her day everyday, by handling all her e-commerce back-end work for her, while she finally gets to spend some quality time with her kids! We are going to have a lot more videos in the ‘Save 60 Minutes A Day Series’, so, stay tuned for more updates!

Coping with the deluge

GetFriday has been in the news quite often in the last month including getting onto the Wall Street Journal and an exclusive online daily in the UK called ‘The First Post’. Here are the links to those articles. Outsourcing your life – Ellen Gamerman for the Wall Street Journal Outsource your life – Linton Chiswick for The First Post. Coping with the deluge of inquiries ever since has been tough. No one wants to wait and everyone wants an instant assistant. The company has been hiring and training staff on the double. We also heeded some feedback on the web about our slow sign up process and put up the membership form on the website for download. But the resource allocation still has to be manual. Due to the shortage of staff we have also put up an announcement on the site about the wait time after sign up. Despite all this we have been keeping our promise to all those who signed up with us by either commencing service on the due date or well ahead of it. -GetFriday Management

Coping with the deluge Read More »

GetFriday has been in the news quite often in the last month including getting onto the Wall Street Journal and an exclusive online daily in the UK called ‘The First Post’. Here are the links to those articles. Outsourcing your life – Ellen Gamerman for the Wall Street Journal Outsource your life – Linton Chiswick for The First Post. Coping with the deluge of inquiries ever since has been tough. No one wants to wait and everyone wants an instant assistant. The company has been hiring and training staff on the double. We also heeded some feedback on the web about our slow sign up process and put up the membership form on the website for download. But the resource allocation still has to be manual. Due to the shortage of staff we have also put up an announcement on the site about the wait time after sign up. Despite all this we have been keeping our promise to all those who signed up with us by either commencing service on the due date or well ahead of it. -GetFriday Management

Virtual Assistant

Getting snowed in

Tim Ferriss’s book has done wonders for the popularity of this service. The number of people who want to sign up has increased dramatically and the credit goes to Tim for opening people’s eyes to the potential of outsourcing. We have been keeping an active eye on blogs about comments on the GetFriday service. Quoting from Tim’s own blog he says “Even GetFriday, which has done great work for me, is getting snowed under with work since their mentions in the book. The price of success! Be careful what you ask for ;)”. This is very much true. Though we had prepared well for this, you aren’t ever completely prepared for the reality. So it is a fact that we are struggling to keep pace with the enquiries. However our processes have evolved so well over the last year that we have been able to cope with the influx amazingly well. We also found some blogs where prospective clients had posted that our sign up process was not online and that our service was good post the sign up. Let me explain this. The sign up process is intentionally not online. While the sign up and payment for our other sister service “YourManInIndia(YMII)” – the Indian concierge service is completely online, we kept it offline for GetFriday. It is nice to think of a factory situation where you sign up online, pay for a plan and get alloted a human robot automatically as an assistant. It may work well in a highly automated supply chain and manufacturing system where parts are sourced as you place your order for let’s say a computer (like Dell), or even in the world of digital downloads, software etc. But here we are dealing with providing human assistants and it requires a great deal of resource planning and fitment before we can assign an assistant to a client. Hence the sign up process is kept intentionally offline wherein we study the requirement, send an appropriate form, get a secure fax sign up from client before commencing service. In our opinion it is better to have a slightly longer process of understanding client requirements and sign up than have a prolonged process of waiting to get an assistant assigned after an instant sign up. This isn’t instant coffee or Nirvana. Again this may change in the near future if we are able to automate resource fitment and allocation. Another article that has brought quite a buzz for us in Canada is this one by Patrick White for the Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper. Thanks to Patrick we are now known in Canada as well. On a closing note, we are getting snowed in but we aren’t finished yet with taking on new clients. We remain as keen as ever to serve more and more people globally and make their lives better. If there has been a prolonged wait with our service, kindly bear with us we should be having you on board soon. -GetFriday Management

Getting snowed in Read More »

Tim Ferriss’s book has done wonders for the popularity of this service. The number of people who want to sign up has increased dramatically and the credit goes to Tim for opening people’s eyes to the potential of outsourcing. We have been keeping an active eye on blogs about comments on the GetFriday service. Quoting from Tim’s own blog he says “Even GetFriday, which has done great work for me, is getting snowed under with work since their mentions in the book. The price of success! Be careful what you ask for ;)”. This is very much true. Though we had prepared well for this, you aren’t ever completely prepared for the reality. So it is a fact that we are struggling to keep pace with the enquiries. However our processes have evolved so well over the last year that we have been able to cope with the influx amazingly well. We also found some blogs where prospective clients had posted that our sign up process was not online and that our service was good post the sign up. Let me explain this. The sign up process is intentionally not online. While the sign up and payment for our other sister service “YourManInIndia(YMII)” – the Indian concierge service is completely online, we kept it offline for GetFriday. It is nice to think of a factory situation where you sign up online, pay for a plan and get alloted a human robot automatically as an assistant. It may work well in a highly automated supply chain and manufacturing system where parts are sourced as you place your order for let’s say a computer (like Dell), or even in the world of digital downloads, software etc. But here we are dealing with providing human assistants and it requires a great deal of resource planning and fitment before we can assign an assistant to a client. Hence the sign up process is kept intentionally offline wherein we study the requirement, send an appropriate form, get a secure fax sign up from client before commencing service. In our opinion it is better to have a slightly longer process of understanding client requirements and sign up than have a prolonged process of waiting to get an assistant assigned after an instant sign up. This isn’t instant coffee or Nirvana. Again this may change in the near future if we are able to automate resource fitment and allocation. Another article that has brought quite a buzz for us in Canada is this one by Patrick White for the Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper. Thanks to Patrick we are now known in Canada as well. On a closing note, we are getting snowed in but we aren’t finished yet with taking on new clients. We remain as keen as ever to serve more and more people globally and make their lives better. If there has been a prolonged wait with our service, kindly bear with us we should be having you on board soon. -GetFriday Management