We have wide variety of skills that we can bring to the table as a Virtual Assistant.
Our skills are mostly at a mid to senior level. If you are looking for a Virtual Assistant to answer the phone or make reservations for your business trips, we are not the right fit.
If you have projects that need to be done and you need someone that can take the project and get it off the ground and operational, we are a terrific fit.
Andrew has a degree in Marketing. He has worked with several companies where he created online marketing materials, created Press Releases, and created Blog Posts. The CEOs of these companies were very particular and wanted complete control of the final product. The problem that the CEOs had was they could never find the time to get the project started. So they would give Andrew a rough idea of what they wanted - a Press Release announcing whatever. Andrew would create a "first draft" of the Press Release. Then Andrew and the CEO would get on an online meeting where the CEO would basically tear everything apart. But Andrew got the project started. And at the end of that 1 to 2 hour online meeting, the company had a Press Release that the CEO approved. Andrew would then take the Press Release, send it out through the distribution channels and post it onto the company website.
Suzy was a mortgage broker. She had her own company with anywhere from 2 to 10 brokers working for her. Suzy managed the office, setup lines of credit through a number of lending institutions, processed the loan packages, and got the loans closed. She had to juggle constantly changing rate sheets, and lending lines. She had to be certain that every step happened on every loan in the proper order and with the proper outcome. Since life doesn't work that way, she had to constantly adjust and adapt until the loan closed.
I started working when I was 10 years old. I had a nice business mowing lawns for about 10 house in our neighborhood. I then started working a paper route. I had to deliver papers every morning before dawn. We lived in a small town in Arizona, but my paper route was on the far side of that small town. And it seemed like everyone on that side of town had a mean dog that was allowed to roam. Several of those dogs considered the paper boy (me) as a toy to be used for sport and to be generally tormented.
By the time I graduated from college, I had been a short order cook on 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. shift at the Waffle House. The Waffle House was the only 24 hour restaurant in town. The "drunk rush" from about 2 a.m. to 6 a.m. was a treat. I was a grill man at the first McDonald's at Indiana University. There were about 15 sororities and fraternities right up the road. By midnight, everyone in those fraternal organizations was stoned, drunk, or both and needed something to eat. The McDonald's had 8 registers and there was a line 4 or more deep. We ran 2 grills with 2 people working each grill and it was all we could do to keep up.
I laid hot asphalt on roads and parking lots, milled logs in Montana for log cabins, cleaned barns and built livestock fences.
After college, I spent a couple of years selling yellow page advertising in Chicago. Then I got a job working with computer point of sale (POS) systems for the foodservice industry. When I started, our POS system was powered by an actual mini computer. The PC had not yet been invented.
As I gained experience selling POS systems to restaurants, I was offered higher level positions. Companies would hire me to go into a new territory and start selling their POS systems in that territory. I had to design marketing materials so I had something to give the prospect. I had to write the installation guide so that it worked the way that I wanted the installations to work. I had to write a User Manual so that we had something to leave at the customer site after the installation. At first, I was a 1 man band. I had to sell the systems, help install the systems, and then support the systems. Over time, I would build up the territory to the point where I had a full time installer and 2 or 3 full time support people.
In 1992, I was the cofounder of a company called Hospitality Systems, Inc. (HSI). HSI was a windows-based POS. We installed our first POS system at a restaruatn called Rush Street in Kingsport, TN. That system ran until 2022. In 2022, Rush Street was torn down and replaced with a car wash.
At HSI, we had to create all of the processes and documentation. We had to develop the marketing materials. We had to build the website. We designed installation manuals and user manuals. Over time, all of that documentation was brought online into Help Desk software, a Knowledge Base for our in-house support and end users, and a forum for our end users.
For the first 2 or 3 years, I did all of the accounting including payroll. For the first 18 months, I did the payroll by hand. I had to track the hours, sick time accrued and used, vacation time accrued and used, etc. After 18 months, we were able to afford to move to an online payroll system. We planned to take HSI public, so we needed audited tax returns. We used Ernest & Young. At the time, they were one of the "Big 6" accounting firms in the US. I had never done books for a company, but I was able to answer all of the questions that Ernest & Young had.
I left HSI in 1997. I worked with several startup groups. With each of those startups, I did the accounting. I also built and maintained the websites.
During that time, I was involved in a local 100 member community chorus. The chorus was a registered non-profit. I served on the Board of Directors. I was at various times the Secretary and Accountant. I also was involved in a rather large, local Christian ministry with over 1,000 members. I served on their Secretariat (their Board of Directors) and was at various times the secretary, accountant, and webmaster.
In 2009, Suzy and I started Media Motion Online (MMO). When we started MMO, we provided live and on-demand video streaming services. We bought big chunks of capacity from several big Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) like Akamai, Amazon Web Services, and Internap and re-sold that capacity in smaller chunks to customers all over the world. We provided streaming services to a variety of customers. We did live streaming of a brain surgery. We did regular streaming for customers ranging from a number of churches, a coven in Colorado, a large Buddhist Temple, and the Mosque in Karbala.
As usual, I created all of the marketing materials, built the website, did the selling, installation, and support.
At the time, the challenge with video streaming was that it took a certain level of knowledge and expertise to get the live and on-demand streaming setup and working. The video platforms that are available today were not available at that time. So we decided to build a platform. We hired a small programming team that had significant experience with video streaming and Amazon Web Services. We built a User portal where our customers could log in and use our services. They could setup a live stream. That live stream could be a one time stream or be recurring. The live stream could have a single bitrate or do an on-the-fly transcoding where our ingest server would take in 1 stream and transcode that one stream into up to 4 different bitrates.
Once the stream was setup, our software would create a player for that stream and we would provide that player code as an embed for the customer to use on their website.
The portal would then provide the opportunity to automatically archive that live stream for on-demand viewing. There were tags that could be assigned to each on-demand video so that the on-demand content could easily be sorted. We provided a series of templates to our customers so that they could embed one or more of these templates into their existing websites. For a church, they might have a template embedded for their live stream. They might then have a different template embedded for their on-demand archives of the previous services. In that archive template, viewers could sort by the Pastor, the Sermon Series, etc.
We had gotten everything setup and running, we had customers in Russia, Africa, Saudi Arabia, Europe, England, Canada, Australia, and the US including Hawaii.
Just as we were starting to gain traction in the marketplace, both YouTube and Facebook decided to get into the business. The difference between us and YouTube and Facebook was that YouTube and Facebook were public companies with a seemingly endless supply of money. They could provide their services at no charge. We could not provide our services at no charge.
It was a difficult decision to make, but we decided to close the business. We were losing customers every month to YouTube and Facebook. As our customer base declined, our operating losses mounted. We had fixed costs every month to keep all of the hardware and services running. We helped all of our customers transition to the service of their choice. We were able to keep a few customers that did not want to use YouTube or Facebook. And we continued our life.
That is where we are today. We still have customers. Some of those customers have been with us since 2009. But we have time on our hands. So we are looking for a few virtual assistant projects to help keep our interests going.