Virtual assistants all over the world start up their VA businesses for different reasons. There are also varying degrees to the scale of the business and how far you want to take it. For some the business is set up to provide additional household income, a contribution to the bills, and living costs etc, for others it could be personal income, and for others still, it could be their entire livelihood, the basis for their future, and their children’s future, if the latter is the case in your VA practise, you may want to consider your scalability, and the best way to do this, is to practise what you preach – more on this later on…
I am going to tell you a personal true story, to show you how my situation changed, almost overnight, and how scalability and growth became the only option for me, sometimes the universe makes decisions for us, and we have to act on them, this post is about ensuring security and sustainability as a business owner. You never know how or when your circumstances may change, but whatever happens to you, you can know that your virtual assistant business can be ready to adapt if it needs to.
Where It All Began…
When I first considered becoming a VA I was coming up to age 24 and wanted to travel and work remotely, working online seemed the best option, and providing I was able to make enough money to fund my travels as a young single woman, then that’s really all I was concerned about at the time. It didn’t really matter where I stayed or even what I ate, there was just me. The amount I needed to earn was nominal.
After I had been away a couple of years and during my time abroad I met my husband, who was from America, when we discovered I was pregnant, it was a surprise, but a lovely one, we knew that we had to hang up the backpacks and consider what we were going to do next. Both of us had an inherent sense of adventure, and didn’t really want to stop travelling, I am also an extremely practical, grounded kind of person, and we had to rethink our plans because of the new arrival about to enter into our lives.
What Happened Next…
Moving to Europe was the most sensible option for us, but because we were not married at the time, and due to visa restrictions, it meant that I was the only one between us legally able to work and earn a living in Europe while we were waiting for visa stuff to go through for my partner, we were told by the embassy it could take months, or years even.
We spent a couple of months in a log cabin during the summer in France, I was quite heavily pregnant by then, and we were basically taking each day as it came, but during that time I had some serious concerns, which needed to be addressed, such as:
- How were we going to pay for our new family when our funds ran out?
- How were we going to do this quickly?
- How can I secure and solidify a sustainable business, so that if one or more of my clients dropped off the map, it would not have an impact on my family?
- How were we going to make enough income to support us all, when there was only me able to work?
- How were we going to do all of this with a newborn baby? I only had a very finite amount of hours I would be able to work.
I had sold everything I owned before I left the UK, including my house, and ironically so had my husband, given that all we had were the clothes on our back and a bit of money in the bank to get by on, we sat down and worked out how much money we needed to make monthly to cover expenses and live as a couple, we then added on the average cost of a baby, we are relatively simple people, and kept costs to a minimum, but once we had a figure, a minimum amount of income we required, we then had to add contingency on top of that for unforeseen circumstances, and then of course some sort of ability to save. It wasn’t a small figure (since we were planning to stay in Europe), in terms of what I would be able to earn on my own providing virtual assistance, so scalability would be the only option, not just to keep up with the amount of money I had to earn, with a finite amount of time as a new mum, but also for security and being able to sustain the business in the potential event that a client’s circumstances changed, and low and behold, about a year or so later the recession hit us and clients did inevitably drop off, work slowed down, and I was pregnant again with my second child, but by that time, I had scaled up just enough to make it through and keep my team members on with me.
What I Did Next…
Ever since that moment of realisation that I had to make this business work, I have been engrossed in virtual assistance and entrepreneurship, I read books and articles from people like Yaro Starak, Tim Ferris, Gary Vaynerchuk and Seth Godin about marketing and business in general, I spent hours and hours researching into how to take my offline expertise and services online, I also had never owned a business like this before and had to learn the ropes for that too, so I investigated into my options as a location independent online business owner and spent hours with accountants discussing business registrations and offshore company formations, and what once was a means to an end to give me a bit of cash to help me travel around, had turned into a serious, online business venture, which was quite literally built through a ‘make or break’ scenario. I registered my company in November 2007, at the age of 26, when my son was 2 weeks old, within 4 weeks I had my first client, within 4 months, I had started to implement my plans for scalability, hiring my first virtual assistant to help me, and within 1 year I had successfully been able to provide enough income to keep the business and our lives consistently ticking over.
Things To Consider…
Around this time, my husband’s visa finally came through and he came to work with me in the company, now we are sharing both parental responsibilities for our 2 children and working within the business. While this may seem quick, there was certainly nothing easy about it, I stayed up late until 3 or 4 am a lot of the time in order to speed up the growth process, I did a lot of the technical implementation myself, having spent a year or so while I was travelling learning Dreamweaver, and I wasted a lot of time and money on trying and testing different systems and methods of marketing — I had an amazing motivator which kept me going though, my family.
Within 2 years from the time I spent in that log cabin, the ideas, the support from my husband and my unyielding determination, turned VMF into a 6 figure virtual assistant company, with professional independent Virtual Assistants (collectively my team) working alongside me primarily from the UK, U.S.A. and France, and it continues to grow monthly. What worked for me was scalability, setting my practise up to expand and to grow to the point where if 1, 5, 10 or more clients were no longer able to utilise our services, for whatever reason, economy, death, change of life circumstances, there would be a minimal impact on the company, on these VA’s, or my team members further afield and the clients around me.
How To Scale Up?
Scalability is not for every VA, it’s really, really hard work, and to be honest, I never believed originally I would be able to take the business as far as I have, I just hoped I could… I don’t think I would have done it had my family not depended on it, I was fine as a solo VA, managing the workload myself, and I would of been happy to continue in such a manner, but at that time, I had never considered the future, or the circumstances I would find myself in. The really difficult part, which really does take an extraordinary amount of skill and attention to detail, is the process of attentively regulating business expansion and scaling-up from being a small business owner (solo VA), to managing an international corporation while balancing the unique skills within a team of highly trained specialists to meet the ever-evolving requirements of a rapidly expanding client base – while maintaining the same level of quality as if you were still doing it yourself, and because of this I would always advise you, if you are going to consider scalability to “invest in very high quality people,” without compromise.
The fact is, owning a scalable business means that you have to let go of certain things and delegate – basically we have to practise what we preach to our clients, and as VA’s we are constantly telling clients they should not be doing everything themselves, they should be focussing on the growth and development of their business, and they should be outsourcing professional support to an independent business owner in order to do this. Scalability in a virtual assistant company is about being the virtual assistant and the client simultaneously, it’s looking at your business from both sides of the fence, and listening to your own advice – exactly the same advice you give to your own clients 
Are You A VA? I Would Love To Know What Drives You In Your Virtual Assistant Business? Comments Below 
P.S. This post is dedicated to my friend Ella who has just had a new baby boy, Johann Miles.
