This month we celebrate our National Heritage Day and it is with great pride that we do so. Our former President and global human rights icon Nelson Mandela said of it: “When our first democratically-elected government decided to make Heritage Day one of our national days, we did so because we knew that our rich and varied cultural heritage has a profound power to help build our new nation.”

We said it when the pandemic was at its peak and we’ll say it again – the ingenuity of people when the chips are down is quite remarkable. Many businesses totally reinvented themselves and some people are now running two businesses instead of one if the temporary business they built is a sustainable one. For many though spring and the slow return to business could not have come a moment too soon. It is a spring that comes on the tail end of a very long hard winter and not everyone was able to create new businesses, so they are now rebuilding the businesses they had.

It seems quite strange that in a country like South Africa with its diverse range of cultures that one seldom hears of service providers that can accommodate people in their Mother tongue. In September, on Heritage Day, we will celebrate our cultural diversity but many people here only speak their own language.

There has recently been much discussion about working from home, as the pandemic forced millions of people into this situation whether they or their companies liked it or not. Large and small businesses alike found themselves managing employees remotely - a predicament that many were not comfortable with. The question that arose therefore was “is working from home a blessing or a curse?” Fortunately, there has been a lot of good advice to help them. We released several advice pieces on better ways to work from home and have offered some great ideas for home-based businesses that one can start-up.

The lockdown from the COVID-19 pandemic left many business people feeling helpless and redundant. Tradesmen, in particular, felt the pinch as they could not go into homes or onto sites other than for emergencies. As we phased back to normality, many had huge backlogs and had made office staff, who no longer seemed to be relevant, redundant. This meant that when they got busy again many contractors were overwhelmed with admin and various other tasks that just slowed them down. We have, throughout this month, been posting articles, giving case studies and examples of the many ways that a good Virtual Assistant can really help contractors of all kinds. Our A, B, C of how we can help you…

Michael Pretorius is the owner of CT Floors, a rapidly expanding specialist industrial and commercial flooring company focused on seamless concrete protection systems. Michael is as passionate about delivering value as he is about finding solutions to complex challenges for his industry-leading clients. He is the consummate Entrepreneur with a constant eye on expansion and a gift for extracting the best from employees by empowering them through creating the opportunity for self-improvement.

The casualties in the workforce of many businesses is one of the saddest thing about the whole COVID-19 disaster. We hope this useful advice on how you, as employers, can assist your employees through applying for the Government assistance known as The Temporary Employee/Employer Relief Scheme (TERS), will help. This relief is offered to employers facing distresses and unable to pay salaries and according to Arlene Legate, president of the SAPA, it is actually the responsibility of such companies to make use of it. She also assures us that, despite initial setbacks, payments are being made.

Since COVID-19 has sent us all scurrying into our homes and learning to do more business online, we have been trying to assist you with knowledge about the many ways that Virtual Assistants (V.As) can help you to streamline your online business. For those of you who have only recently learnt to do more business online, remember that the best way you can make it work for you is to involve online services that are familiar with the territory. The virtual world is a somewhat different place in which to do business, but not a daunting one if you have virtual assistance. Once you engage a Virtual Assistant, two main things you can do to really make that partnership work for you is to learn to delegate and not to underestimate how specialised they can be.

Outsourcing is nothing new, but at this time when we are still in the grip of COVID-19, the outsourcing of qualified people well versed in the virtual business world now makes more sense than ever. Virtual Assistants are exactly such people and the many ways that they can help you to streamline your business are quite significant. V-Assist are experts at this and hence we have devised this series of articles which we hope you will find useful.

Lockdown doesn’t need to be ‘shut down’ your business at all. At this time when virtual is better than venturing out, become more aware of, and start utilising online tools to build your business’ and your own skills. Instead of just giving up you could be giving yourself and your business a huge boost through e-learning and these are some options: