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.
🦈 Which shark should you swim with?
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Greetings from a breezy but beautiful Scotland! The March issue of my Espresso AI newsletter goes out on Thursday, and, as usual, I wanted to share a preview of what the existing subscribers will receive. This month’s issue covers: 1. The OpenAI furore You’ve likely seen the headlines about OpenAI's recent political donations and lobbying, and by the looks of my LinkedIn feed, everyone and their Mum is either switching to Claude or at least has an opinion on the subject. In this month's edition, I share my honest take on the whole situation, the "which shark to swim with" dilemma, and why I'm not quite ready to jump ship just yet. ​ If, like many others, you have decided to switch, you'll need step-by-step instructions for the exact process of exporting your data out of Chatters and into Claude (or any other LLM) so you don't lose your memory and chats. 3. Audit your digital toolbox Are you using three tools when one would do? Or maybe you're spending more time fixing AI output than the original task would have taken you manually? I'm fairly sure you're busy enough already, so instead of trying to learn more AI tools, I'm sharing a detailed "Business Operations Manager" prompt designed to audit your existing workflow. It evaluates the true ROI of your tech stack and flags which tools are earning their place and which ones are costing you more time than they save. 4. An OpenClaw horror story You may have seen the story about the superintelligence alignment and safety researcher at Meta who gave OpenClaw full access to her Gmail with a strict "don't do anything without my approval" rule. It deleted her entire inbox - all 4,000 emails. I share the safer alternative I use instead - and why I think connecting your entire Drive to an AI agent is an absolutely terrible idea. And, as usual, the issue contains a list of clever ways real-life Virtual Assistants and business owners are currently using AI. Everything I’ve mentioned is only available to Espresso AI subscribers. If you want to stay up to date with all the many ways you can use AI in your VA business, but you’re busy AF and just want a monthly email packed with carefully curated info, then consider signing up. It's just £4.99 a month. You can cancel at any time AND put it on your business expenses… HURRAH! ​​Find out more and subscribe.​ |
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...