November 30, 2011
As purser on some of the world’s largest and most demanding megayachts, Jodie Clarke learned how to keep multiple balls in the air while making sure every detail is attended to.
She also learned she didn’t have to be on the yacht to do it.
Her last job in yachting was a year based at the owner’s home, all while continuing her role as purser. She arranged all the paperwork for crew leave, much of the paperwork for yacht movements, balanced accounts, kept telephone lists and guest documents updated, and more.
“It wasn’t challenging whatsoever,” she said.
Now, she’s moved her yachting career ashore in a company she’s started with fellow Purser Sasha Dettori. My Virtual Purser makes available all the skills and details of an onboard purser but without the need for berths or benefits.
Clarke and Dettori see their primary customer as the yacht that’s big enough to need a purser but too small -- either in budget or space -- to hire one.
“There’s apprehension at the beginning -- ‘What do I need that for?’ -- until we explain what we’re driving at, where we feel we can fill some gaps,” Clarke said. “For one thing, in my experience, many heads of department are great on the floor but lack administration skills. We can empower the captain to hire those people and not worry about it.”
Some of the skills and services they offer include arranging crew flights, handling refit preparations, assistance with visa and immigration letters, drafting employment contracts and job descriptions, creating or updating crew manuals and guest compendiums, updating inventory templates and accounting, and serving as relief for full-time pursers.
Doing all those things ashore, Clarke insists, won’t take the place of an onboard purser for yachts that can have one.
“We’re not competition,” she said. “We’re here to help. We do what they [captains or managers] want. It’s up to them to give us freedom or direction. We hope to make life easier for people overloaded with administrative work.”
In fact, one of her goals is to help pursers get some time off. She recently covered for a purser on holiday and spent a month as the virtual purser on an 85m yacht with 28 crew.
“I never got to have a proper vacation,” Clarke said. “There’s an enormous workload before and after because no one really covered in my absence.”
MyVirtualPurser.com launched this summer, and its first customers have been previous bosses and captains who know the level of their skills and quality of their work. But they are confident for their future.
“There’s a huge amount of potential for this,” Clarke said. “I’m a little afraid, actually, what may come.”
Clarke worked on yachts 19 years before she and her husband, Capt. David Clarke of M/Y Laurel, left at the end of 2009 to find shore-based work and raise their daughters. But the economy changed that, so they traveled for the first half of 2010, hoping things would change.
They didn’t.
So Capt. Clarke went back to work on yachts, and she tried to find a land-based job. But she didn’t have much luck.
“People just don’t understand yachting,” she said. “It’s been very hard to apply yachting skills, especially to a shore-based job. So we thought, why not just do this for the yachting industry?”
When she pitched it to fellow purser Dettori, they knew they had something.
“Creating a business has been new and a huge learning curve,” Clarke said. “Economically, we did the whole thing for less than $1,500. Being a purser for different owners makes me good at that.”
Being a good organizer, Clarke was able to create the company using little more than her computer. Research, she said, was almost entirely conducted online. Both technology hubs and Virtual Assistant forums were invaluable.
“Ideally we’d like to follow the footsteps of the VA world and become the nucleolus of a purser network where ideas and experiences can be shared for the benefit of all,” she said.
“In many ways, the purser role seems to be under-recognized in the industry and often the position is completely omitted from pay scales, graphs and surveys that outline every other position,” she said. “We’d love to help change that.”
For more information, visit www.myvirtualpurser.com.
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