FAQ

Every business – big and small. If you’re bogged down with administrative tasks and can’t focus on your work, it’s time to call a VEA.

We are based out of London, ON with team members all over Canada.

Not necessarily! And this isn’t a bad thing. We assign you with a VEA who has the skills and time to take on your work that best matches your needs as a business owner.

We utilize several platforms to ensure the best communication – Slack is preferred and our clients are invited at no cost to them. This allows us to maintain oversight into our client’s accounts. Email is great while phone calls are to be reserved for emergencies only. Texting is not accepted.

No. We work for our clients by blocking time off for them each day, Monday through Friday. The size of your workload determines the amount of time we block for you. All blocks are flexible to suit the needs of our clients and team.

We schedule a kickoff call and send you a form to fill out ahead of it. This helps us determine what our agenda is for the kickoff and it serves as a “one source of truth” for your account going forward.

Invoices are issued at the beginning of each month. We accept payment through Plooto as a Pre-Authorized Debit (PAD) agreement. We will accept credit cards with an additional 3.5% fee added on.

We may already know how to accompish it, and if we don’t, we may have a team member who would love to learn it and add it to their skillset. While we can’t offer everything, it’s always good for you to ask! Finding solutions to your problems is our goal, but if something is truly out of our scope, we’re excellent communicators and will let you know (one way or another, your problem will be fixed).

We bill by the minute of audio tape, not the time it takes to complete the task. Our transcripts are verbatim and court ready.

People often wonder if it would be easier to work with a single VA rather than come to a boutique agency like us. The biggest differentiator is that when you work with one of us, you get the collective knowledge of all of us. We are continuously collaborating together on behalf of our clients, solving problems and creating solutions, all while our clients focus on their work. Pretty great, hey?

We utilize LastPass as our secure password management system. Only the leadership team has access to the main account and has the ability to share and revoke logins as necessary. Regardless if you use LastPass or not we will use it. We also employ the use of Chrome profiles for each account, and each employee has a company computer that has Bitdefender installed.

Usually same day. However, if you send a message and your VEA has already signed out for the day, you can expect a response when they sign into your account on the next business day. Slack is the best place for this!

No! As we are a fractional company, we are all working on multiple accounts. With that, we juggle priorities of all of our clients and also make our own health and wellness a priority. So you aren’t always going to know what time we log into your account but rest assured that we will not let things slide.

We try our best to! We train more than one person on your account (billed) so that if someone is sick one day or a VEA takes vaction, someone else from the team can provide coverage. We do have projects and retreats from time to time that require all our staff so there are still times that coverage isn’t available.

Our service standard is 48 hour notice, however we understand urgent work can develop at very short notice. If that is the case, send your VEA a Slack message and ask for their capacity to complete this in your required timeframe.

It’s important to keep the lines of communication open with the VEA and discuss your concerns and suggested areas of improvement. We are forever learners and accept that mistakes happen and no one is perfect. At the same time, you can reach out to Aspen and provide your feedback. Together you can work on a positive solution moving forward. It’s important for us to give the best service possible!

Always start with your VEA and they can bring it up with Aspen to discuss. Depending on what your contract details are, the additional work can be done whether a new agreement needs to be created or if the existing agreement contains enough scope.

We LOVE them. Most of the time when we enter an account that promises they have them built already, we find they are not quite good enough for us to roll with. So we build them as we go and make sure that anyone stepping into our shoes can execute those tasks with confidence!

Each person on our team comes with different experiences and backgrounds. When each of them onboard they have courses to take as a part of their onboarding with us. These include Project Management, Minute-taking, Violence in the Workplace and ClickUp Certifications.

We only use web-based programs because they’re accessible from any device, don’t need installations, and updates are automatic. This makes them easier to maintain, more secure, and ensures everyone has the same experience no matter where they work.