Step 1 of 10
Northstar Home Services
Northstar Home Services is a fictional five-person home-services business. The owner is spending too much time on routine administration and wants help keeping information, scheduling, and follow-ups organized.
The owner sends you a folder, an inbox simulation, a calendar, a customer spreadsheet, and several recurring instructions. Your job is to process the work in a sensible order and document your decisions.
Understand the requests, clarify what's necessary, prioritize, execute, check, report, and close — the same eight-stage workflow from Lesson 2, applied across all 8 tasks below.
Triage these 10 fictional messages. Pick a category for each, then check your answer.
0 of 10 checked.
Calendar
- Working hours 8 AM–5 PM
- No meetings on Wednesday mornings (the owner does site visits)
- 30-minute prep buffer before any customer walk-through
- The main supplier is based in a different time zone (UTC+9) — Northstar is UTC+8
- Customer walk-through — customer asked for "Wednesday at 9 AM"
- Supplier call — supplier proposed "3 PM their time"
- Team check-in — flexible, "sometime this week"
- Insurance agent call — "Friday afternoon"
| Item | Placement & reasoning |
|---|---|
| Customer walk-through | The requested Wednesday 9 AM conflicts with the no-meetings rule — propose Wednesday afternoon or Thursday morning instead, with a 30-minute buffer before it. |
| Supplier call | 3 PM their time (UTC+9) = 2 PM Northstar time (UTC+8) — schedule for 2 PM, noting the conversion in the invite. |
| Team check-in | No fixed constraint — slot in an open block, e.g. Monday 10 AM. |
| Insurance agent call | Friday afternoon as requested — e.g. Friday 2 PM. |
Needs owner confirmation: the walk-through's actual new time (since the customer's original ask conflicts with the Wednesday-morning rule), and confirming the supplier's time zone assumption before sending the invite.
Spreadsheet
Clean this customer/contact spreadsheet: standardize fields, flag duplicates, note missing required information, and describe your rules.
Research
Research three scheduling/dispatch software options suitable for a five-person home-services team. Compare price, features, limitations, and sources.
SOP
Task management
Two competing requests are started below — add at least one more, then identify priority, dependencies, deadlines, status, and next actions.
AI assistance
Use AI for one appropriate administrative task in this engagement — for example, extracting action items from one of the emails above, or drafting the confirmation text template from Task 5. Keep the source fictional and verify the output manually.
Security
What's the safer response?
Final submission checklist
Check each item honestly against the 8 tasks you just completed.
You've finished the course.
All 13 lessons and the Final Simulated Client Project are done. Together with your 13 lesson work samples, this project completes your 14-piece starter General Admin VA portfolio.
Remember: these are training work samples from a fictional practice environment — genuinely useful evidence of what you practiced, but not paid client work or proof of real experience. Present them that way.