Farewell Message from the NAVAH Advisory Council

Announcement

Modesto, California – January 3, 2011 –

Dear Friends,

The North American Virtual Assistant Headquarters Advisory Council would like to thank all of you for your role in our success. Through you we have met and exceeded our goal of being a progressive association that encourages individualized success paths for the betterment, diversity, and recognition of the Virtual Assistant industry. That is why we are both saddened and gratified to bring our association to a close.

Due in part to the recent changes in business culture, the VA industry is blossoming in a way that it has never been given the opportunity to before. As such, the needs of our industry are changing, and to fight these changes or ignore them would be to do a disservice to our colleagues.

Thanks to each Virtual Assistants' tireless efforts our industry is mainstreaming. We are being accepted as a standard part of the business culture by a growing number of other industries and organizations. Such inclusion is what we at NAVAH have striven for through increasingly progressive skill enhancement, business building exercises, and VA Today Magazine. We were determined to help other forward-thinkers modernize our industry's profile even though we knew it would eventually make our role obsolete. Such was our passion for the VA industry.

When Virtual Assisting was a fledgling field, we benefited from having a recognized standard to identify those who strove for excellence in our line of work. As the VA position has become a part of the standard business culture, the need for industry-bestowed certification is effectively extinct. Mainstream organizations look for accomplishments that are universal and easily identifiable such as MS Office certifications, collegiate degrees, or continuing education units. We must break out of our insular mold and embrace our new status as part of that mainstream. That includes accepting their standards. To remain rooted in archaic and clannish approval systems would be a mistake on our industry's part. For NAVAH to encourage such stagnation would be a mistake on our part.

There are other long-standing Virtual Assistant associations that will disagree with our assessment. It is quite possible that it is in these organizations' best financial interest to do so, regardless of their tax status. Nonetheless, this is where we at NAVAH see our industry going, and it is what we see as best for our colleagues, and, as always, we put your interests above our own. Encouraging success has and continues to be the cornerstone of NAVAH.

We would like to publicly thank all of our members and associates for allowing us to be a part of their success!

Wishing you abundance,
- The NAVAH Advisory Council

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