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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.

Laura Nicole: 0:33

If you have ever scrolled Fiverr or Upwork and seen a ton of postings that are looking for virtual assistants but only paying like $5 an hour, then I'm sure you have felt your stomach drop and thought to yourself like how could I ever compete with that? How is anybody ever going to pay me $25 plus per hour? But here is the truth: you are not competing with that.

Laura Nicole: 0:57

International virtual assistants and US-based virtual assistants both serve their purposes, but they are like comparing apples and oranges. They might both be fruits, but they are like comparing apples and oranges. They might both be fruits, but they are not the same thing. So in this episode, I'm going to break down for you why those $5, $7, $8 listings aren't a threat to you or your virtual assistant business, how both types of virtual assistants fit into this market and why the right client for you is going to be happy to pay $25, $30, $35 per hour for the value that you bring to their business. So I don't know if you know this about me, but I go live on TikTok almost every day so that I can talk to as many women as I physically can about this opportunity of making money from home as a VA. And a question that gets asked all the time when I'm on these lives is well, what about the $5 VAs? Aren't clients just always going to hire a $5 VA instead of paying $25 for me? And I get why they have that question right, because then when I ask follow-up questions, I come to learn where they have actually been looking for clients, and it almost always is on freelancing sites like Fiverr and Upwork or in those really, really big Facebook groups like the I Need a Virtual Assistant Facebook group.

Laura Nicole: 2:19

And yes, in those specific spaces, most of the postings are going to be geared toward international virtual assistants who have those lower $5 to $7 an hour rates. And that's because those platforms y'all they are price driven okay, they are not relationship driven. Not only are they putting up postings and saying that they want to pay $5 to $7 an hour, but they also typically are just posting for like one-off projects where essentially they're looking for a task rabbit right. They just want to hire someone to come in, do the project, get it done and then go about their day. But that's not what we want. We don't want to work with clients who want to just bring us in, have us knock on our project and then never work together again.

Laura Nicole: 3:02

So I know, if those are the spaces that you have been looking to try to find clients to work with, then, yeah, you probably feel like the whole market is designed for these $5 an hour VAs. But that simply is not true. And to help you kind of understand why that isn't true, we're going to go a little bit more into this apple versus oranges metaphor because I want to make sure that you have an understanding of what the virtual assistant market kind of looks like as a whole. Okay, so let's just pretend okay, bear with me and like the kind of silliness of it, but let's just pretend that international VAs are the apples in this scenario and US-based VAs are the oranges in this scenario. Okay.

Laura Nicole: 3:45

So the apples, the international VAs, tend to focus on more repetitive, lower cost tasks. A lot of times they are going to be tasks that are more tech in nature, where their cultural or language nuance isn't essential. They don't need to be speaking English as their first language in order to complete the task. And hiring an international VA is really ideal for businesses who need bulk support but on a budget, or if they have a big tech integration they need done but they don't want to pay an arm and a leg for it. So those apples, the international VAs, tend to be a bit just more task-oriented, get in, get it done, doing tasks that, again, typically are never forward-facing, they're not customer-facing because of the language barrier. And then when we consider what US-based VAs tend to bring for business owners, right, the oranges. What the oranges are bringing to the table is the ability to handle higher level support and those client-facing tasks, because the US-based VA is going to be able to really adapt better to the cultural context, to the native language and alignment with the business.

Laura Nicole: 4:57

A US-based VA very often is not brought on just as like this task rabbit to just knock things off a to-do list, but they're brought in to actually be a piece of the team, right, to be a part of the team, to be a sounding board for the client or potentially help with strategy in some facet of their business, and both are valuable. Right, I love apples and I love oranges you will often find both of them in my home but when I want or need an apple, I'm going to grab an apple, right, and when I want an orange, I'm going to grab an orange. I'm not going to take the apple just because it's cheaper. Right, it's not like I'm never going to pay for an orange because I could just always get an apple cheaper. That's not how it works and y'all a lot of times, especially small business owners who have a bigger business or they're further along in business, they're often going to have a mix of people on their team.

Laura Nicole: 5:56

It is very, very common for business owners to have an international VA for certain tasks and then US-based VAs on their team for other tasks. So truly, there's no competition there, because the ways that these two different VAs would be used are just very different from each other. Both insanely valuable to a business owner, right, but different. They are not interchangeable, which means that you simply are not in competition with each other and, for the most part, y'all those clients that actually are looking for the US-based VAs and they're willing to pay what a US-based VA costs they are typically not posting on and scrolling Fiverr looking to hire someone and bring them in that way. They're looking for someone that they can trust. They're looking for someone that they can communicate with, someone who brings proactive problem solving, someone who can work collaboratively with them, and so those clients who are going to be happy to pay you $25, $35 an hour. We're going to be finding those people through networking and referrals and those more specific online community spaces like Facebook groups specific to your EIDL client avatar or memberships, or even local entrepreneurship meetups. They are not going to be found scrolling through Fiverr and Upwork.

Laura Nicole: 7:16

When I tell y'all that I have been a VA for five years and I have never once even thought about making a Fiverr or Upwork account, and yet I have always had dreamy clients who I literally am obsessed with supporting on my roster, it's because I take the time to actually network and build connection and build trust with these potential clients which leads me to signing higher value clients who see my value and are happy to pay for it. And I am not the only one, you guys. There are so many US-based VAs. There are so many US-based VAs. There are so many women in the Superstar Assistant Academy who have booked out and who have signed clients, who have never touched Fiverr and Upwork, and they also have never had clients push back on their rate when they tell them $25 an hour or tell them $30 an hour because they are implementing the system to actually network intentionally and create connection with these clients.

Laura Nicole: 8:12

I promise y'all this is a quality over quantity situation. Having one real, genuine, authentic conversation with a business owner will beat submitting 50 cold job apps on Fiverr or Upwork any day of the week. So the main moral of today's episode, y'all, and the main thing I want you to take away from this, is that international VAs at a $5 to $7 an hour a rate while that may seem intimidating or it may sound defeating, or it may sound like holy guac, I'm never going to get paid what I want to get paid. I really hope you hear me and take me seriously when I tell you that that is not the case and you all simply are not in competition with each other. You're both in the same market, but you are serving very different purposes that truly don't overlap with each other.

Laura Nicole: 9:02

So please don't let that get you down, don't let that get you frustrated.

Laura Nicole: 9:13

Do not let that be the reason that you give up on your goal of becoming a virtual assistant and creating this income for your family, because that would be a literal shame. So if you're ready to learn how to actually find the clients who will value you and are happy to pay you your rate, then you need a game plan. My mini course, the client magnet, will show you exactly how to figure out who that ideal client is and then how to actually network intentionally and strategically so that you can position yourself to attract the right clients and start signing contracts without wasting all of those frustrating hours on Fiverr or Upwork. You can grab the Client Magnet Method at a discounted rate for being a podcast listener. The link will be in my show notes and start building your client roster the smart way. 

Thanks for hanging out with me today as your virtual assistant coach. If you love 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.