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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. 

I have been a virtual assistant now for the past five years, the last half of a decade of my life, which sounds totally crazy to say, but my story about becoming a VA actually didn't start five years ago. It started back in my mid-20s. I had finished my coursework for grad school and moved halfway across the country to live with a boy who, spoiler alert, did end up becoming my husband, but I hadn't actually finished my master's program, and so I continued working in restaurants, which is what I had done all through college and grad school to make some money. I spent all of my mid-20s working in the restaurant industry as a manager, and I was really really freaking good at my job, but I actually didn't get any fulfillment out of my work. I didn't find joy in making people sandwiches, didn't find joy in making people sandwiches, and while I was good at the work that I was doing, I knew in the long term that it was not what I was going to be doing, especially because once we got engaged and then married, my husband and I knew that we wanted to have children and I knew there was zero chance I was going to have kids on a restaurant manager's schedule. After we got married, we actually ended up moving back to the Midwest and my husband got a job at the very school that we had met at, and so I was finally able to focus and finish my master's degree. As soon as I had that bad boy defended, I said see ya to the restaurant industry and I went back to teaching.

Laura Nicole: 2:03

I had been a grad assistant while I was in school and I knew that I enjoyed teaching, and so as soon as I had that degree in hand, I went back at both our local community college and the four-year university and started teaching communication courses, and I did find more enjoyment in this work, certainly, than the restaurant industry, but it still didn't feel super fulfilling. In a way, I felt like I was doing what I should be doing rather than what really lit me up. And after we had been married for a couple of years and I had been back in the classroom for a year or so, my husband and I decided to try to start a family, but unfortunately. My husband and I decided to try to start a family, but unfortunately, life had other plans and decided that it wasn't going to be super easy for us. We ended up struggling with infertility for a couple of years before finally taking a break, and then, about six months later, I discovered on a random Wednesday after class that I was indeed pregnant. And before getting pregnant and before having our daughter, my husband and I had still been living pretty much paycheck to paycheck, despite the fact that we both had master's degrees and we both had what society would deem as quote-unquote good jobs. Hell, I was even waiting tables until I was like seven months pregnant, in addition to teaching double course loads in my college professor position, just to create some extra income to buy all the fun baby things that we wanted. We were in a place where we could barely keep a thousand dollars in an emergency fund, and even if we did siphon some away for savings, we still had mountains of credit card debt from our 20s, and then we had our daughter.

Laura Nicole: 3:44

She arrived, Little Miss, is what you will hear me refer to her as here on this podcast and on my social media and when she was born, I was able to teach online so that I could be home with her. She was due smack dab in the middle of a semester, and so I wasn't taking the whole thing off, but I taught online and I was able to be home with her for the first four months of her life. When she was about five months old, a new semester started and I had to go back on campus, which meant returning to a set schedule. I now had class times and office hours and meetings with other administration, which meant that I had to leave Little Miss to go to work, regardless of what was going on at home, and that literally crushed me. She was always in great hands, she was with daddy or grandma, but it hurt my freaking heart to have to walk out the door and go teach a class just because my job said that I had to.

Laura Nicole: 4:38

Now, an important piece to this too, y'all, is that I never wanted to or thought I would be a stay-at-home mom. I have always loved working. It fuels something in me and I knew that I both wanted and needed to keep working for my mental health and sanity, but also for our family's budget. Me becoming a stay-at-home mom wasn't an option, but me continuing to be on a set schedule that required me to leave our home and leave my daughter also wasn't an option. So I started looking for what my options could be.

Laura Nicole: 5:13

I was talking to my sister, just completely frustrated and crying and just so over the situation and feeling helpless and like I didn't have a plan, and she brought up the idea to me of virtual assistants. I was 33 years old and I had never in my life heard of a VA before. She told me all about what it looks like. She had moved into the online business space and had tons of friends who utilized VAs, and so she was really familiar with them. And I kind of pushed back a little bit, saying I've never been an admin, I've never been an office manager, I don't have that job experience that will transfer here. But she reassured me that I didn't have to have that and that my personality and my skill sets from the work that I had done previously would be a perfect fit for this, and I trusted her because you know you tend to trust your big sister and I decided to give it a go. Right, like what could it hurt to try? And so I did just that.

Laura Nicole: 6:11

I dipped my toes into the VA industry and I signed two part-time clients in the first month and when I say part-time clients, these were very part-time clients. The two of them combined. I was working maybe five hours a week and then about four months in. Also, mind y'all, I was still teaching full-time and I signed a $4,000 per month client. And just for a little perspective here, as a college professor, the best year I had had was making $46,000. So this one singular new client at $4,000 a month would generate $48,000 of income for me in the next year, and that was the moment that it truly hit me off like, this is it. This is the answer, this is the solution. This is not going to just be some small side hustle. This is something that can actually replace my college professor salary and allow me to be home with Little Miss.

Laura Nicole: 7:11

Now, that doesn't mean that I left teaching right then, and there I definitely didn't. I am a very logical-brained person and I wanted to make sure that this income was sustainable before walking away from my full-time job, and the really cool thing about VA work being as flexible as it is is that you absolutely can do that. I was able to build up and sustain a comfortable income as a VA before walking away from teaching. I would do my VA work while home with Little Miss right? She was still a teeny, tiny little nugget and I would work with her sleeping on me. I'd have my computer on my lap and her on my chest, or working from my phone while she was nursing, or I would steal 10 or 15 minutes here and there when she was spending time with my husband or spending time with her grandma or her aunts and her cousins. I worked in the nooks and pockets of my day to create this amazing new income for my family.

Laura Nicole: 8:03

And then, when my daughter was 10 months old, the lease on the townhouse we were living in was up for renewal and my husband and I decided, you know what, we're actually not going to renew that because we want to take the steps to become homeowners. But if you recall, I mentioned previously that we barely even had $1,000 in an emergency fund, so we damn sure did not have the money for a down payment on a house. So we decided to move out of our townhouse and into my mom's basement in order to save the $1,900 a month that had been going toward rent and be able to save it toward a down payment instead. So we moved myself, my husband, our 10-month-old baby and our 80-pound bulldog 20 minutes across town into my mom's half-finished basement. One side of it was our living basement, one side of it was our living room, one side of it was our bedroom and my office and then, of course, little miss got the nice finished second bedroom upstairs.

Laura Nicole: 8:59

When we first moved into my mom's house, my husband and I had talked it through and said we are okay with being here for max two years, because we truly thought it would take close to that full amount of time to be able to save enough money to buy a house. But it did not take us a full two years. We had moved into my mom's house in August and then on Christmas Eve of that year we signed a contract on a new build home and then that home was finished and we closed on it in April and moved into it in May, and the only way that we were able to save that extra money for a down payment was from my new virtual assistant income. We used my husband's income to cover our life and our bills and our expenses, and then we used my virtual assistant income to save for the down payment. So we were able to move our little family from a half-finished basement in my mom's two-bedroom condo to a brand new four-bedroom 2,500-square-foot house with a huge backyard for Little Miss and our dog, Ralphie.

Laura Nicole: 10:00

So if you ever hear me say that virtual assistant income can be life-changing, that's what I mean. I know it sounds cliche, but our lives would not look the way they do right now if I had not made this step in my life to become a virtual assistant. Within a year and a half of becoming a VA, I had doubled my college professor salary, and that number alone was an income I literally never thought I would make. I mean, I didn't even think I would ever make above $50,000 a year, let alone almost hitting $100,000 a year. And in two and a half years I had tripled my college professor salary. And not only was I able to triple my income because obviously, yes, the money is freaking great but the best part of that is that I was able to create that income while also getting to be home with my baby. My daughter stayed home with me until she turned three and started going to 3K. She never went to daycare or did anything else in the interim, so I was home with her building this income and building this business, while also being home for every nap time and every meal and every bedtime and every milestone. I mean there's literally nothing better.

Laura Nicole: 11:16

Since I became a virtual assistant five years ago, a lot of things have changed for my family. We were able to buy a home and landscape the backyard which if you've ever landscaped a backyard, you know that it's not cheap and we actually then had to do it all over again when we moved to Arizona. We had to sell a home, buy a new home, re-landscape a new backyard, and we even put a pool in this one. We've been able to pay down tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt that we had accrued in our 20s. We've been able to travel more and go spend time with family. We now live in Arizona and our family is in Colorado and back in the Midwest in Michigan and Ohio, but because of what I do to earn an income, I'm able to take my daughter and go back to Colorado for a week or two weeks at a time and then fly out to the Midwest and spend two weeks at a time with family there. Those are the kinds of things that make this so amazing, besides the money, because if I had a traditional job still, or I was still in the classroom and had those classes and office hours and things to hold, we would never be able to take those trips.

Laura Nicole: 12:20

Now I do not share my story as a look at me or a way to brag. That is absolutely the farthest thing from the purpose of sharing my story. The purpose of showing y'all how this has panned out is to show you that it's possible for you too. I am not a unicorn. I am just a mom who was looking for a solution and worked hard to make it happen. So if you are listening to this podcast with a baby on your hip, or driving home from a job that you are so freaking drained by, or you have this dream to make money while also being present with your family that you've been ignoring, I need you to hear me when I say that this is not out of reach for you.

Laura Nicole: 13:05

I didn't have a perfect plan. I didn't have tons of time, I didn't have a bunch of special connections. A perfect plan. I didn't have tons of time, I didn't have a bunch of special connections. I didn't get lucky. I started and I got intentional. You don't have to have it all figured out, you just have to take the first step.

Laura Nicole: 13:21

Hopefully, hearing my story and the way that it has changed our lives completely is inspiring and motivating to you, because that is my goal. I want you to know that you can have your cake and eat it too. You can create a paycheck while being present with your family. If you're curious about what this could look like for you and how you can actually get started taking the steps to make this your reality, I have a free class. That is the perfect place to start. I will drop the link so you can grab the recording down in the show notes. 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.