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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

A really big part of why I coach and why I am so passionate about coaching other women on how to successfully and efficiently become virtual assistants is because I want to make it smoother for you. I want you to be able to work smarter, not harder. I want you to be able to learn from my mistakes so that you don't make the same mistakes right, so that you don't get stuck in those loops of the mistakes that I made early on when I was figuring all of this out. That being said, I want to share with you the one thing that I will never, ever do again as a virtual assistant. It cost me thousands of dollars, literally an unbelievable amount of stress, and it almost tanked my entire VA business in one snap decision made from a client. And whether you are brand new to the VA world or you have been here for a while, but you can still learn from this, maybe it's something you still need to implement in your business then I want you to learn from my mistake here right now so that you don't learn the hard way like I did.

Laura Nicole: 1:42

To give you some backstory on this, I, at the time that I signed this new client, I was about six months into my virtual assistant journey. I was very much still a baby VA and I took on this new client, who I was really excited about. We had messaged in the DMs for a while. She was really cool. I loved what she was doing, but I approached it very casually. It felt just like two moms who really enjoyed each other that were going to work together and it was going to be good for both of us. And, being a baby VA who was figuring it out on my own, I didn't understand the true importance of having a contract, and so we did not put a contract in place. We really just had a quote, unquote, handshake, agreement, and for a really long time that was fine. We worked so well together. It was a very natural fit. Working together was easy. It came naturally. We became pretty fast friends, which honestly actually is something that I also would probably never do again. I'm happy to be friends with my clients, but I've learned that there need to be better boundaries in place. Maybe that makes for a different episode and episode number two of things I would not do again. But we were working so well together.

Laura Nicole: 3:01

My hours with her, my responsibilities with her, my pay rate with her, it just kept growing and increasing to the point that after about a year of working together, or a little over, she actually became my only client. I went full time with her and she was my sole client and at the time I was so happy to be able to go full time with her because she was my favorite client. I enjoyed my work with her the most. I was making really freaking good money with her and it just felt easy. Work didn't feel like work right, it was really fun.

Laura Nicole: 3:37

But then my client started going through a really difficult divorce and I'm not going to get into any details on that whatsoever other than the fact that it was really difficult. It was really hard and her business started declining as a result of everything that was going on in her personal life. Her income was slowly dwindling, right, and we were working hard to do what we could to get it back to where she had been. And not only, right, not only was I her VA, but I was one of her best friends at the time, so I knew everything that she was going through and I had so much empathy and felt so much for her and wanted to help, so I knew the inner workings of what things really looked like for her at the time. Right, but what I did not see and what I was a little bit blind to, and looking back on, maybe a little bit naive to, was the fact that, despite our friendship, I was a line item in her budget and one day, fairly abruptly, she decided she could no longer afford to keep me on as her assistant.

Laura Nicole: 4:44

Initially it came in the form of her deciding that we were going to go from a full-time position on a retainer to an hourly rate, working about half the hours and at a decreased hourly rate, and honestly, I was just kind of stunned by that decision. But I also didn't have any other clients. So I felt kind of stuck. I felt like, okay, this sucks. But I felt empathetic because I knew the situation she was in, but I also needed at least that partial income coming in while I started to look for other clients. And then, maybe two months later, maybe I don't even, I can't remember the exact timeline, but a very short amount of time after her making that decision and informing me of our move from full-time to an hourly lower rate, I got a new set of voice messages on my phone one day. Mind you, both of these things happened via very long, like 20 minute voice notes that were sent to me, but this time it was to notify me that she was officially not going to utilize me as her assistant at all anymore, that she simply could not afford it, and that was just kind of that. And at this point we had been working together for almost three years, so a very long time. A relationship had been developed and there was really no conversation with me, no heads up, no transition time. She clearly had talked through it on her own with herself or maybe with someone else, and came to the conclusion this was the right decision, and then simply notified me of that decision.

Laura Nicole: 6:30

And because there was no contract in place because I had never signed a contract at the beginning, because I didn't know better when I was first starting out and I was like, oh, we're two moms, this is going to be great, like we'll help each other. And then I never introduced a contract later on, even when our rates changed or our like structure and our pay structure and everything changed. I didn't implement a contract later on, which I should have, but because I didn't, I had no protection. I had no protection. I had no way to require a notice period. I had no way to require her to pay me out for X number of time based on the work I had done or finishing out the retainer for that month. I simply had no grounds. I had no grounds to do anything to make the scenario better for me and less abrupt on my end, on the financial end of things.

Laura Nicole: 7:29

All that to say, it was a very painful lesson to learn. It was a very frustrating lesson to learn, but in the grand scheme of what my life and career and business was going to look like, moving forward not only as an assistant working with clients, but also as a coach it was a wildly valuable lesson for me to learn because now I can teach y'all about the fact that you need to have a contract in place, signed by both parties, prior to doing any work for a client. Because contracts are not about distrust, right? Contracts are not about thinking, oh, this client's going to screw me over, so let me protect myself now. No, If you have any inkling in your gut that the client you're about to sign with might screw you over down the line or might not be well-intended, then don't work with them, right? But even with the clients that you're so damn excited about and you can see the big picture and you can see the long-term working together you both should want to have a contract in place, because a contract simply protects both of you from different aspects. Your contracts are going to outline your payment terms, your work scope, termination clauses, notice periods, and that is beneficial for both you as the VA and for the client. So even if you trust someone and you're getting along great, you still need one in place before you do any work for them.

Laura Nicole: 8:59

And if a client ever resists signing a contract for like, oh yeah, we don't really need that, da, da, da, mm-, that. Big ass red flag, okay, even for a trial period, put that in a contract, y'all. I'm in a trial period right now, a 30 day trial period with a new client who I'm freaking obsessed with, who I plan on working with for a really long time to come. But you best believe that before we shifted our conversation into actual onboarding her as a client, we both signed a contract and then that contract will get updated at the end of our trial period and it will get updated anytime in the future when we have like significant updates to responsibilities or hours or pay rate. So if you raise a contract to a potential client and they seem hesitant to sign one, please take that seriously as a red flag to really consider if that's actually someone you want to work with. And if they flat out refuse to sign it, my recommendation would be to walk away from that client.

Laura Nicole: 9:57

And I guess another quick, unintended lesson here out of this episode is that boundaries matter. It is so fine, it's honestly good, it's healthy, it's part of that connection and alignment that I talk about all the time with clients. It's good to be friends with your clients, but there is a boundary right for where that friendship, where that working relationship, needs to stay within. It's good to know about your client and know what's going on in their life or with their family and vice versa. Those things are good. That is healthy, but you have to have clear boundaries and roles, otherwise emotions can complicate business decisions, and so having those healthy boundaries actually helps to keep your working relationships stronger in the long term, which is exactly what we want as a virtual assistant.

Laura Nicole: 10:48

If you are ready to land your first client the right way, with clarity, confidence and contracts in place, then I have got something for you. My brand new first client formula masterclass is happening in just a couple of weeks and it is designed specifically to walk you through how to find, sign and start working with your first client successfully. Head to the link in the show notes to save your seat. It is a completely free masterclass and please learn from me. Okay, learn from me and my mistakes. Get the contract signed before you do a single piece of work and make sure you join me for the first client formula masterclass to learn how to sign those clients.

Laura Nicole: 11:35

Thanks for hanging out with me today, Im 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.