Personal Assistant Resources

The holiday season is quickly approaching and now is the time to prepare. There are events to plan, gifts to buy and wrap,  travel arrangements to be made and much, much more. How will you help others?

The holiday season is the number one time for personal assistants and concierges. Some people may not realize how they can benefit from a personal assistant and may not understand how affordable your help can be. Your first step for the upcoming holiday season is to tell potential customers how you can help them. Give them ideas.

To start, you may want to advertise through flyers or postcards and make sure you list some of the things that you can do for your clients. It will generally take 2-3 weeks for someone to actually respond to your advertising campaigns. Now is the time to begin those efforts.

Second, prepare you elevator speech and always have cards ready. Don’t be shy about telling people about your business. It wasn’t long ago that we were at a busy store standing in line behind a mother and her 3 small children. She had her hands full. We took a minute to make some small talk and suggest that we could possibly make her day a bit better by spending time playing with her children and enjoying her free time. She loved the idea, especially when she found out how affordable it was. We now run errands for her once a week.

When you get the chance to speak with a possible customer, you need to suggest to them how they can use your time. Many won’t know where to begin. Here are suggestions for the upcoming holiday season:

• Provide shopping services for the holidays. This would include gift shopping.
• Gift Wrapping. This is the #1 service we provide during the holidays. Our customers like a personal touch, more than you can receive at the busy malls.
• Event planning and preparation. Many people just hate to plan a meal, pick up the groceries and get ready for an event. While I don’t recommend being the event planner and doing the cleaning, you can easily take care of errands and picking up groceries to help your client.
• Holiday Decoration. Decorating for the holidays used to be a fun family event. Families are so busy these days that they just want things “done”. Helping with the decorations can save your client lots of time. This is also a great job that you can use your own assistants for.
• After the holiday cleanups. This would include packing up decorations, returning gifts and addressing thank you cards.

We’ve found that many of the clients we work for during the holidays continue to use us through out the year. Some have even become weekly regulars all because of the service we have provided for them over the holidays.