Based on the Glasgow's south side,  Virtually Sorted has become one of the country's biggest virtual assistant services and now works with 40 different companies across Britain, employing more than 10 people. Using their website interface, Melville hires a pool of secretaries, bookkeepers and typists and acts as a kind of online sub-contractor, while the team of PAs work from home. Now the team  are up for the national award.

Melville said: "We're delighted with the nomination. It is quite funny to see the other finalists' names and see that they are all PAs for big firms like Shell. I don't know if we will win but it does show that the services that businesses like ours provide are being accepted."

Melville  applied to the Prince's Scottish Youth Business Trust before her 26th birthday.  The trust gave her a loan and helped her with a business plan to get the firm off the ground. Virtually Sorted went on to win the best new Glasgow start-up in the PSYBT Awards 2006.

Now, as well as the virtual PA service, the firm is also working with a US developer to create virtual PA software. Melville says that currently her company is using Smartsheet for project management of messages, workloads, and storing documents.  "Google's Cloud Computing is not secure enough," she says, "but we do use the Google calendar."

"When we launched there was the problem of Virtual Assistants being seen as an amateur service. The impression was that firms like ourselves employed anyone who could type and answer a phone. The whole market has evolved. With the sheer volume of work and the number of firms on board, we couldn't work like that. We need people who are up to the standards of a good PA."

And talk of an economic downturn doesn't  worry her. In fact, it could help business. "We are in the funny position of being able to take advantage of the credit crunch. A lot of firms, especially smaller firms, require someone to manage the office and take care of administration, but will maybe need to revise their plans to hire their own PA. That's where we can come in."

Web: www.virtuallysorted.com
http://www.smartsheet.com/
 Source:http://www.eveningtimes.co.uk/