045: Kirsten Matthews – How to Spring Clean Your Business For Success & Have More Time For Yourself!

November 10, 2021

“Nobody else sets the boundaries for you, you have to set them for yourself.
You need to pick and choose when you go above and beyond and you need to make sure that when you do go and beyond, it’s with the people that appreciate it and when you have the capacity to do so, so it doesn’t become the norm.”

KIRSTEN MATTHEWS

Hey everyone! It’s Sally here, from Studio Ninja. Today’s episode is all about Kirsten Matthews of KP Virtual Assistant.

Check out some of the biggest points from Kirsten’s interview below:

What can a virtual assistant do to help small business owners, specifically photographers?

I think there’s so many avenues that VAs can do to help business owners and especially creatives. There’s not just kind of one thing. It really depends on what you’re looking for assistance with. So me personally, I do client admin assistant, the behind the scenes, but then you can also get a social media VA, you can get an accounting VA, there’s just so much. Whatever you need assistance with, there’s a VA that out there that can help you. But I think the biggest thing that VAs do is give the business owner time either back to be with their family, or feel in control of their business instead of feeling like an employee in their business. Especially creatives because from what I’ve seen, they tend to get bogged down and stressed in the emails, and, “I’ve got to send contracts and I’ve got to follow up invoices,” and all that jazz. So it’s just giving them back that time that they can focus on what they’re really good at and what they love to do.

So basically any kind of client admin behind the scenes, I can help with. So emailing clients, responding to bookings that come in, backend Studio Ninja management, making sure invoices and contracts and things go out, setting up workflows, all that behind the scenes stuff, but also sending galleries to vendors and kind of anything that’s got to do with the behind the scenes, making relationships and making sure people have what they need, getting the run sheets together from questionnaires that you send out, putting all that together, making a run sheet. There’s so much to help.

Our listeners, they’re hearing this and they’re like, “My God, I need me a Kirsten.” So how can our listeners better organise their business without necessarily jumping straight into a VA right now?

Photographers are quite visual people. So the biggest thing that I would say is to time block and colour code that time blocking. So whether you have it in a digital Google calendar, or whether you have a physical calendar in front of you, get a text or a pencil or whatever and colour block, “Okay, this is my editing time. This is going to be my email time. This is going to be my whatever time,” so that people are like, “Okay, I’ve got two hours to do this,” and then you’re not kind of stressing about, “I’m doing this, but I’ve got to do X, Y, and Z,” because you’ve got that already sorted. You’re going to go to that. And just that time blocking so you can see that you’ve got everything in front of you, you’ve got everything sorted, it’s all okay. So the colour blocking really that I find will help.

How can photographers better manage their work-life balance?

So, the biggest thing that I say, and it’s a little bit hypocritical because I’m not great at it myself. But the biggest thing that I say to people is schedule your time off, because as a business owner, there’s always going to be things to do. There’s always going to be, “Oh, I’ve got to tweak my website or I’ve got to update this or I’ve got to email this person.” Your to-do list is never going to be 100% finished and there’s always going to be things to do. So you need to be really conscious and specific in scheduling time off for yourself. And if you do that, when you are working, you’re much happier. You’re much more motivated. You’re much more energised because you’re relaxed and ready to go. No one benefits from being burnt out. Not you, not the client. It just doesn’t work. So schedule your time off.

Thank you!

Thanks again to you all for joining us and a huge thanks to Kirsten for joining us on the show!

If you have any suggestions, comments or questions about this episode, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post, and if you liked the episode, please share it using the social media buttons you see at the bottom of the post!

That’s it for me this week, I hope you all enjoyed this episode.

See you soon,

Sally