Welcome to Part 9 in my VA Subcontracting series – Getting Prepared for Going Away.
And what a coincidence, that’s exactly what I’m doing these next few days! Excellent, it will be all fresh in my mind, and it will give me a chance to make sure that I haven’t forgotten anything.
So, let’s assume that you’ve done your trial run and everything went fine and dandy. Hooray! The VA you found is a keeper!
Now you’ve got to make sure you’ve got all your ducks in a row. Here are some tasks that you should check off your list before you leave:
- send your sub a doc with all the necessary logins and passwords that they will need
- send them any docs that they will require in order to complete the tasks (ex. articles for submission, text for any other kinds of postings, etc.)
- schedule one final meeting to go over any questions that they might have
- give them your contact info of where you can be reached in an emergency (if possible)
- consider giving them access to your computer via remote login, just in case you’ve forgotten something that they may need
- if you are giving them access to your computer, make sure that it stays powered up and is set to never “sleep” so that they are able to log in if they need to
- set up your email autoresponder for while you’re away
At this point as long as you’ve done the training with your sub and you both feel comfortable that everything has been covered, you’re pretty much good to go.
The next thing I would suggest is to schedule a meeting for when you come back to work so that you can both go over what happened while you were away, how it all went, etc. You’re most likely going to be pretty darn busy right after you come back, so schedule this meeting in advance to make sure that it actually happens.
And that’s it! You’re ready to go! You may be a little nervous at this point, especially if this is your first time handing over anything to a VA subcontractor (I know I was!), but if you’ve done your homework and made it this far then there’s a pretty good chance that everything will go smoothly. Trust your instincts, put it out of your mind, and go and enjoy your well-deserved time off!
Keep repeating this mantra in your head: “It’s out of my hands, I don’t need to do anything, even if anything happens it’s not the end of the world and I will fix it when I get back” – then take a deep breath……..then repeat, and repeat, and repeat!
Whew! We’ve almost made it all the way to the 10th and final part of the series! Don’t miss Part 10 where we talk about What to Do When You Get Back…