Leading the next chapter of The VA Handbook - supporting VAs to build professional, sustainable businesses. Bringing my experience of running a multi-award-winning VA agency and building a team to help VAs not just get started, but grow with structure, confidence and long-term success.
💝 Two resources I think you'll love
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Greetings from bonnie Scotland! This week's edition is a little different from usual. I've come across two things recently that changed how I plan my personal and professional lives, and I wanted to share them with you. The first is a phenomenally insightful YouTube video by Daniel Pink. At first, I was like "Urgh, New Year shizz, same old, same old", but I hit play and discovered the content was different from any other planning advice I've come across. It's 26 minutes of absolute gold dust. I've actually rewatched it a few times since it came out in January, which is very rare for me. All of the advice was insightful, but I really liked his "premortem" exercise. This is where you imagine it to be the end of 2026, and the thing you said you wanted to do didn't happen. You then work out what might have caused you to fail and work backwards to pre-empt the obstacles. The video is fantastic and well worth a watch. A friend who is always spot on with their literary recommendations left a voice note telling me about this book last week. They'd just completed the 'baseline quiz' and wanted to thank me for being such a good friend. Obviously, I was completely intrigued and went to check it out. I assumed the book would be about financial literacy, but it's actually about creating a personal blueprint for a life full of meaning, connection, and joy. You start by taking a short quiz to provide a baseline to measure your progress against as you balance and build your life. I do love a good quiz, but my baseline score was a real eye-opener. My Social Wealth and Mental Wealth scores were strong, and I knew my Physical Wealth score would be low, but I was taken aback by my Time Wealth score. It turns out that while I thought I knew what my priorities were, and believed I was focusing on them, my answers suggested otherwise. Now that I’ve established a baseline to start from, I’m working on defining my “Life Razor”. A razor (as in Occam's razor) is a philosophical principle that allows you to shave away unnecessary choices or explanations so you can make clearer decisions. I'm really enjoying the process of redesigning my life, and I think you'd love this book. ☕ Espresso Shot Let's take Daniel Pink's "premortem" idea and make it work for your VA business. Enter your own numbers and context into this prompt, then paste it into your AI tool of choice THE PROMPT "Imagine it's the end of 2026. My VA business is under-booked — I have fewer than [X] clients, and my monthly revenue is below [£X]. I'm regularly working evenings and weekends despite wanting to keep to a 4-day work week. I've been running the business for [X] years and primarily serve [type of client]. Give me the 7 most likely reasons this has happened, ranked by probability. For each, suggest one specific, actionable fix I could start implementing this week — not theory, not "consider your mindset", but a concrete next step." Modern but busy AF VA? Then sign up for my monthly Espresso AI newsletter for more handy VA-centric prompts like this. 🪄 Other useful VA resources
That's it from me - have an awesome day! PS: Just signed up and missed an issue? Read previous Coffee Break newsletters here. |
The VA Handbook
Leading the next chapter of The VA Handbook - supporting VAs to build professional, sustainable businesses. Bringing my experience of running a multi-award-winning VA agency and building a team to help VAs not just get started, but grow with structure, confidence and long-term success.
Hello Reader, The next edition of the Espresso AI newsletter goes out on Thursday, and I wanted to give you a little preview of what paid subscribers will receive. The May issue will include: 1. A simple prompt for making big business decisions If you’ve ever gone round in circles over a serious business decision, this provides a structured way to use AI to help risk assess and stress-test the implications without it hijacking the outcome or telling you to just go for it.2. A thoughtful task...
Hello - and happy Thursday!I’m just back from a great couple of days up north where I spoke at the first Manchester VA Conference.My session was all about confidence and how it doesn’t usually appear before growth - it tends to come because of it.I’ve actually really struggled with confidence over the years, and still regularly do.Most of us are waiting to feel fully ready before we put ourselves out there, raise our prices, pitch ourselves or take the next step… but growth rarely works like...
Hi Reader, After a hectic couple of weeks of travel and events (and more lined up for next week!), this week has been all about getting my head down and cracking on. As much as I love getting out and about, meeting people and learning new things, there’s nothing quite like time working ON my own business and moving things forward.This weekend is a Bank Holiday in the UK (hurrah!) so we get an extra day to spend as we please. My children are away with their dad, so I’ll mostly be playing...