Hi,

I was looking at few Business Plan questionaires and I found this question interesting - what is your direct and indirect competition?

I look at all of us here on the forum, we are eager to help each other strive with our VA business. So in many sense we aren't competiting against each other, but helping one another.

I am assuming Direct Competition means secetaries who works at the client's offices. And indirect would be competiting against another VA.

I am interested in your thoughts about this. If you were to prepare a business plan and had to answer this particular question, what would be your answer?

Brenda

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Brenda A. Jones
www.brevos.com

I think the Virtual Assistant industry for the most part is unique in that as Virtual Assistants we can be direct competition to each other but we are also very supportive in helping each other succeed.

I would see other Virtual Assistants who offer the same or similar services to myself as being the direct competition. Other VAs who offer services quite different from mine such as mostly focused on Internet Marketing would not be seen (by me) as such direct competition.

I would see temp agencies and staffing agencies to be more of the indirect competition. I would consider indirect competition to be someone or an industry that is not like mine but has could have an impact on my business in an indirect way. I'm drawing a blank of being
able to give you an example, but you've got me thinking and I'll post back if I come up with one. I'll also be interested in what others have to say about this topic.

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Kimberly
Facebook Marketing Magic!

I agree with Kimberley. Other VAs are definitely direct competition if they offer similar services. I also view agency temps as a direct competition as they perform similar tasks, even when it's in a slightly different form.

Indirect competition could be, for example, software that replaces/substitutes the VA, eg. voice recognition transcribing thingies that can replace a Wordprocessing VA.

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Heike Miller
www.heikemiller.com

I agree with Heike.

I don't consider secretaries employed by offices as competition in any form. People who have staff admin staff are highly unlikely to employ a VA on a regular basis. I do work for one large company but it's sporadic, probably overflow or stuff that their on-site staff can't do (they usually need templates and forms done). Comparing virtual and on-site staff is like comparing apples and oranges.

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Julia

Yes, I agree with both Heike and Julia in that in office staff wouldn't be direct competition and that something like software that can automate a task that a VA would do would be indirect competition.

I do think though that in some ways a temp agency would be direct competition since they would be outsourcing staff for similar tasks but in other ways it wouldn't since as VAs we strive to be on-going partners with our clients and their business. Additionally, as "partners" we are not employees whereas a temp would be considered more like an employee.

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Kimberly
Facebook Marketing Magic!

Actually I think temps could go either way - competition or non-competition. In my case, most of my clients need someone who can do their work either at their home offices or not in their offices at all and I suspect that an agency might have an issue with sending a temp to someone's home office.

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Julia

What each of you said made a lot of sense, and very interesting. Especially about the software, it was something I never thought about.

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Brenda A. Jones
www.brevos.com

I found another business plan questionarie - future competition.

I am assuming one of the future competitions would be the expanding VA industry. I am guessing within few years or so, the VA industry would have doubled or even more.

What are you thoughts?

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Brenda A. Jones
www.brevos.com