Ben Zises’ Post

Delegate or outsource tasks in your personal life that consume valuable time and energy. This can include hiring a cleaning service, ordering groceries online, or outsourcing administrative tasks.

WHY ARE YOU NEEDED?   As an administrative assistant, you are hired to relieve your busy employer of a great deal of work, especially the details of fice procedure and other matters that do not require your employer’s personal involvement. You’ll act as a liaison between your boss and the rest of the company.    Sometimes you’ll act as a buffer. Depending on the size of the company, you may also be called on to perform tasks normally outside the secretarial role in sales, banking, billing, payroll, accounting, advertising, public relations, purchasing, and more.   Every businessperson dreams of having the perfect administrative assistant, and every administrative assistant dreams of having the perfect boss. Hopefully, you and your boss will become so well adjusted to each other that you’ll work as a team, each trusting the other to carry part of the load in harmony.

Let's talk about wearing many hats 🎩🧢👑 Working within smaller organizations, especially within a Family Office, can be a bit like being part of a circus – you never know which hat you'll be wearing on any given day. Although my title reads "Director of Finance", thanks to the vibrant dynamics of our office, I often feel like I should add "...and Miscellaneous Tasks Specialist" to my LinkedIn profile. Let me paint a picture (pun intended). We were on the hunt for a new Personal Assistant for one of our clients. In the interim, it was all hands on deck. This led to a particularly memorable evening where I found myself in a different country, inside a client's second home, monitoring painters. As the sun set, I realized the front door's fresh coat of paint wasn't drying fast enough. Not one to be defeated by mere paint, at 8 pm, yours truly, grabbed a blow dryer by recommendation of the painting company and started blowing away at that door. Here I am, Director of Finance by day, impromptu door-drying specialist by night. It's moments like these that remind me of the importance of flexibility, adaptability, and a sense of humor in our professional journeys. Whether you're watching balance sheets or, quite literally, blow-drying a door, it's all in a day's work! No matter the twists and turns your role takes, I'll always champion the importance of embracing the unexpected and rolling with the punches.

I tried to get my head around the post office scandal from an IT Procurement perspective. I binge watched with great emotion the ITV program, which reminded some of my personal experience when I had to restart my life (thank you the UK for helping) after 8 years in the French army (my eyesight was deemed insufficient to carry on my officer career), everything stopped suddenly :salary, career, accommodation etc. Anyway, my point is that the situation with the procurement and implementation of this software called Horizon is very, very common in fact: the client is committing to a large contract (often many years) with a supplier to provide a business-critical technical solution to run a complex business in real time. Timing is usually crucial: a budget has already been allocated, a supplier has been chosen, the software seems to match the requirements. But life is not perfect, and issues start to happen which is very common again. What can you do? Ask the right questions and make the right people work together, sounds simple and easy but it’s not especially when two large corporations must work together. Identify the issues and their impact is key in order to submit a real time solution. I have got countless examples of similar problems where a solution was available, but the right senior managers or right technical staff were not involved enough. It is also very rare to completely scrap a project and uninstall a software; it’s possible but very costly without real guarantee to be in a better place afterwards. So, 90% of the time the client reluctantly does carry on with the same supplier. There is always an element of risk when moving to a new technical solution (even if it is working perfectly well in a different firm by the way): the IT environment especially is always specific to a firm, hence specific problems which cannot be always foreseen on a technical level. My humble advice would be to take more time during the selection process and do attend yourself a demonstration in the test environment, dare to ask embarrassing or sometimes basic questions at this stage of the project. If you do not understand the system fully, there is a problem, or an issue will arise later. Also work more on a plan B, what is your main exit strategy basically ? Don’t be embarrassed, most firms do not have any…