Hi, I’m Dorian, one of the Executive Assistants here at Athena. People often wonder what all we do and what all that we are capable of. Well in short, the answer is, “A lot!” I thought I’d share with you one of the unique situations I ran into recently in my work with one of our clients.
Sometimes it seems like all I do is respond to emails and schedule items in calendars, but there is actually a lot more that I deal with. We all know, a good Executive Assistant is one who finds what’s not working, and suggests a solution to the issue. Executives have a lot on their plate. This is the exact reason why they hired our firm!
A few months ago one of our clients missed paying a few invoices to our firm by the due date. It had come to my attention that our invoice wasn’t the only one not paid. As a matter of fact, there were a few different vendors getting paid after their due date. After some thought and investigation, I recommended different systems to the executive and the finance manager that would help and prevent this from happening again. One option was for me to get trained in paying for invoices. Another option was to create a new email address just for the invoices for the finance manager didn’t have to search through emails to see if something got missed. We chose the second option for the time being and this system has been working well over the past few months and the vendors working with the company are happy.
As an Executive Assistant, I’m certainly not an expert in the things my clients are experts in. However, I am often able to bring a unique solution or idea to the situation because I’m not mired full time in the business. I have a fresh perspective. Sometimes that’s all that is needed to bring things to a new level of workability and excellence.
