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Laura Nicole: 0:02

Welcome to your Virtual Assistant Coach, the podcast for moms who want to make money from home on their own terms. I'm your host, Laura Nicole, a successful six-figure earning VA and coach, who replaced my college professor salary in just five months back in 2020, after my daughter was born, and I have never looked back. I'm here to help you build a profitable, flexible VA business that fits into your family's lives, so you no longer feel like you're living just to work. Let's dive in. 

This is the very first episode of this podcast and I am just so freaking excited that you are here with me, and I think it's really important that, because it's episode one, we start at the very foundation.

Laura Nicole: 0:49

One of the main questions that I get asked from women who I chat with about how I earn an income and support my family is what even is a virtual assistant? So often I talk to women and they have never even heard of a virtual assistant, which is a big part of why I started coaching, because this opportunity truly changed my life and my family's life. No matter how cheesy and cliche that might sound, it is completely true. So, if you are one of those women who have never really heard of virtual assistants, or you've heard of it, but you still feel pretty unclear about what a VA actually is and does, or if this is something that could be a good option for you to earn an income from home, then you are absolutely in the right place. A virtual assistant, in the simplest of terms, is someone who provides services to small business owners and entrepreneurs remotely. You help business owners with the behind the scenes tasks that keep their businesses running efficiently so that they can focus on their zone of genius and creativity, because there are so many pieces that go into running a small business efficiently, but a lot of those things don't actually have to be done by the business owner themselves, and so they love to hire a VA, bring them in and be able to delegate and outsource those behind-the-scenes tasks, which then frees that business owner up to pour into the parts of their business that they do have to be the one executing. Pour into the parts of their business that they do have to be the one executing.

Laura Nicole: 2:27

Now, there are a ton of different services that you can be offering to clients when you work as a virtual assistant, but I am not going to sit here and attempt to list them all out, because that would be incredibly boring, and I can almost guarantee that you would never come back to hang out with me on this podcast ever again. What I can do, though, are give you some basic examples of the types of services that virtual assistants offer to clients, especially when they're first entering the industry. Some of those services include things like helping to manage their email inbox or their calendar, handling customer support for their existing clients or customers or people who are interested in purchasing their product or service. One thing I always like to know about customer support is that, in the virtual assistant space, that never means being on the phone, because you work with small businesses. They don't have a phone number they're giving out. They'll have an email address that people can reach out to, and customer support is one of the biggest categories of service that's needed by small business owners, and it's one that you can offer even if you have your kiddo's home and it's pure chaos and a literal tornado happening behind you. You can create and organize spreadsheets for your clients and actually handle the data entry or the reporting and tracking of the numbers on the back end of their business for them. In an overarching sense, you can absolutely offer project management, helping them to keep all of their projects and deadlines on track, whether it's just with them or with other team members. Another really common service to offer is client relations, where you are helping their customers and clients through their customer journey or helping to do things like moderate Facebook groups or other communities that they have for their customers. And another cool thing that you can offer to support them is social media assistance.

Laura Nicole: 4:16

Now make sure you hear me right when I say that I said social media assistance, not social media management, because a social media manager is a whole different job. But you can help your clients with the admin side of social media, doing things like actually scheduling out or posting their content, replying to comments, adding story slides to highlight reels or even answering common FAQs inside of their DMs and social media is a very one way or the other service topic. So if you heard that and you got excited and thought, oh my gosh, that sounds so fun, that's awesome. But also know that if you heard that and you thought, oh my God, I do not want to do anything related to social media at all, that you can absolutely be an incredibly successful virtual assistant and never related to social media at all, that you can absolutely be an incredibly successful virtual assistant and never touch anything social media related with a 10-foot pole. Depending on the type of client that you work with, you might even help them with podcast support or travel planning or doing some basic graphic design in Canva, like creating their weekly or monthly newsletter or creating the graphics for a carousel to post to their Instagram. And the really great thing about all of these services and, like I said, there are so many others, but these are just really great entry points is that you can offer almost all of these without having to go learn anything new and just capitalizing on the everyday skills you already have from the combination of your work experience and simply managing your home. So what kinds of small businesses even hire virtual assistants?

Laura Nicole: 5:54

I would say that the vast majority of small businesses who utilize VAs are going to be businesses in the online space. So online entrepreneurs, coaches, course creators, podcasters, influencers, etsy shop owners, network marketers, but then also therapists, realtors, photographers, wedding planners basically any small business owner who simply has too much on their plate. It is really common to work with people who operate their business online, because when you are a virtual assistant, you don't have to be in the same place as your client. Now, that doesn't mean that you can't work with local small businesses, because you 100% can, but it also means that you have the literal whole world at your fingertips, because you can work with clients who live in any time zone in any country on any continent, and there are hundreds of thousands of online small business owners out there who need the support of a VA. The other really cool aspect of that is because these small businesses span such a wide array of industries. You will absolutely be able to find clients that you align with, not only with them on a personal level, but also just believing in their business and loving who their business impacts, so that you feel fulfillment by supporting their business with your time and energy. The demand and the market for virtual assistants is already massive, and it is only going to continue to increase as new businesses are started every single day. I am so thankful that you are here and I am so excited to go on this podcasting journey and to be able to have another avenue to help you and other women and moms just like you be able to create this flexible income on your own terms as a virtual assistant.

Laura Nicole: 7:49

Which leads me to an important point, which is that to be a virtual assistant, you do not need any kind of certification or degree. There's no going back to school to obtain a new degree or going through a four-week crash course certification in order to have some special certificate or diploma that is suddenly going to help you be wildly successful at this. You simply do not need them. And while we're at it, there are a couple other myths out there that I would like to bust real quick. Number one you do not have to be a tech expert. You do not have to be techie. As long as you are proficient on the computer right as long as you can send emails and put things into a Google sheet and type and maneuver Google and search things, and you're a quick learner so that you can learn the softwares and programs that your clients use because they will teach you those then that's truly all you need in terms of tech skills.

Laura Nicole: 8:53

You also don't have to have any direct admin support experience in order to become a virtual assistant. I talk to so many women all the time who literally tell me Laura, I don't have any experience, how could I do this? And what they're meaning is that they don't have experience either directly as a virtual assistant, or they don't have experience in an admin type role, which is what this is right Just virtually. And when I tell you that, I promise the skills that you have from any type of job that you have held in the last five to seven years. We will be able to pull those skills out and transfer them into services. In the VA industry. You do not have to have direct admin experience. I never had direct admin experience and I have been able to build a six-figure income consistently for the last half a decade.

Laura Nicole: 9:47

And the last myth that I want to bust is that you do not have to have a big social media following or presence to be able to find and sign clients. I mentioned earlier that, when it comes to services, if you have zero interest in doing social media, you don't ever have to, and the same thing applies for how you market and network with potential clients. If social media is your jam and content creation is fun for you, then absolutely that's a networking tool that you can utilize, but you can also fill your client roster without ever posting a single reel, and a key piece of info here that I want to make sure is very, very clear is that when you work as a virtual assistant, you are not an employee, you are not a W-2. You are a 1099 independent contractor, aka a freelancer. So these business owners that you're working with, they are your clients, not your boss, and being a freelancer honestly is actually very empowering, I think. A lot of times in our society a 1099 or an independent contractor can sometimes get their reputation of being unsteady or unstable when it comes to earning.

Laura Nicole: 11:04

But personally, I love the fact that as a VA, you have so much control. You have control over the clients that you work with and the businesses that you support. You have control over the services that you offer and the rates that you charge for those services, and you have control over how much or how little you work and when you actually work. There's no set schedule in the world of VA, which means that you can work when it works for you. You actually get to live your life first and then fit your work in around it. I don't know about you, but to me that sounds like the most empowering, freaking way to be able to help support my family financially, because I don't have to sacrifice time with them in order to do so.

Laura Nicole: 11:53

If this episode has gotten your wheels turning and you're nodding along, thinking to yourself I could probably do that. You absolutely can. When I tell you, in the last two and a half years of coaching literally hundreds of women how to get started in this industry, I cannot think of a single conversation that I have had with someone, as they're deciding if they want to pursue this, where I've concluded the conversation with saying, oh no, sorry, not going to work for you. Every single one of you have skills that we could be monetizing as virtual assistant services and you can absolutely make this your reality. If you're wanting to get more insight about whether virtual assistant work will be a good fit for your personality and your lifestyle and your income goals, then I want you to check out my free Could I Be a VA? Quiz?

Laura Nicole: 12:49

I'm going to drop the link in the show notes for you below. It kind of takes me back to our teenage days taking those little quizzes in Cosmo, except this is like the grown-up version. Please be sure to follow and subscribe to the show, because next episode you'll be hearing about how I went from grading papers and living paycheck to paycheck as a college professor to running a six-figure VA business that actually gave me time with my daughter and my family and a true sense of time, freedom and flexibility. I would also love for you to send this to a mom friend who came to mind as you were listening to this episode, so that she can learn about this option too, because there's a chance that she doesn't even know virtual assistance is an option.

Thanks for hanging out with me today on your Virtual Assistant Coach. If you loved this episode, be sure to share it with your best friend, your sister or even your favorite coworker, who you know wants to start making a flexible income. I'll see you all next time.