#grandtableau

I don’t know how to answer questions concisely, so sorry about this, but:

I will start by saying that I loved the VA thing, but my position comes with two important caveats (1) I sort of stumbled into it through my network, which I will elaborate on -and- (2) I was living with my parents during this time, rent-free, which is a degree of start-up privilege that not everyone has, and is important to disclose with this advice.

As for how I got started: I had a job in LA that involved a lot of things and when I left LA, my boss asked me to stay on just doing social media stuff part time. I was doing that while I finished up school and I was also keyed into a lot of life coach-y communities largely due to my ties to the personal blogging community. So a woman I kind of knew was looking for a VA, and since I only had the one super part time gig (and some equally part time educational stuff offline) I offered myself up. We chatted, got along, and so I was hired. She’s a health coach who is also just super keyed in and through her I got a bunch of referrals.

All of which is to say: I got started purely through my network. I just happened to have access to a network of people who needed Virtual Assistants and, more importantly, my first major client liked me enough to actively refer me to half a dozen other people.

To that end, life coaching communities are full of people in need of this kind of work, because they are often filled with entrepreneurs starting their own businesses, turning to these online communities for support as they venture out into that wilderness.

It was a really cool space to be in. I worked exclusively with women who ran their own largely internet-based businesses. I learned so much from all of them and the way they ran those businesses.

Money was tricky. When I started out I was asking WAY too little because I really didn’t know and, like I said, had the cushion to get away with that. I started gradually raising my prices for new clients and trying to renegotiate with existing clients. It’s hard because part of what you are saying is “how valuable is my time?” and it’s very easy to devalue yourself.

That part is a lot of trial and error and my advice would be to make sure you’re starting this as more of a side gig so that you aren’t relying on this income while you figure out how to navigate pricing.

Essential & seemingly obvious things that I did not consider in pricing: taxes – if you are your own employer, you are responsible for the employer’s share of your taxes. Fees from whatever service you use to invoice (I used PayPal because it was easy.) Those costs are your responsibility and you have to price accordingly.

I got the job I now have just as I was gearing up to become an LLC, but that’s also something I highly recommend if you’re serious about doing the thing, particularly since you can find yourself handling a lot of sensitive information.

It helps to have some kind of technical competency. Again, because I was working with people who ran online businesses, much of my work required strong proficiency in WordPress and different premium addons as well as MailChimp. At the very least, the ability to pick those things up quickly.

I’m not keyed into this stuff the way that I once was, but I know that there are good FB groups to join for VAs and they are also helpful places to ask questions and get referrals.

There are also sites where you can join a sort of army of VAs on demand. (Zirtual is the only one that comes to mind, but there are others.) You aren’t going to get paid as well that way, but it’s a good way to test the waters and potentially establish relationships with people that you can transfer to just being their regular VA, instead of relying on the site.