I heard a statistic in a Grace Lever webinar today that completely blew my mind:

The global online course industry is worth $165 billion each year.

There are many reasons why moving your bricks and mortar business online could be a positive step. In response to the current COVID-19 pandemic, many businesses around the globe had to close their physical doors overnight, with little foresight into when (or how) those doors may reopen.

Whether you’re closing your physical business during this current crisis, as a method for reducing costs and overheads or to scale up, there are opportunities for growth and ease that might not be possible for an offline business. And, moving forward perhaps the best combination is a physical and online business to provide for a safety net if there is another covid-19 spike.

I have been seeing a lot of different expressions in virtual assistant (VA) land of late. Most noticeably the terms Online Business Manager (OBM) and Social Media Manager (SMM).

Apart from a bunch of acronyms that are hard to remember, what does this mean?  Should you call yourself a VA or something else and what does it translate into in terms of the legal steps you need to take to set up and run your business.