Episode 148: Virtual Assistant 101: 3 Simple Steps to Become a Virtual Assistant

Full Episode Transcription:

(00:07):
Welcome back to another episode of Quick Tip Thursday here on the Ditch the Classroom Podcast. Today’s episode, I’m giving y’all the virtual assistant 101, covering what is a virtual assistant and how you can become one. So I’m gonna share with you three simple steps you can take in order to become a virtual assistant and replace your teaching income while working from home with your babies. First off, let me just give y’all the breakdown on what a virtual assistant is. So a virtual assistant or a VA for short is someone who provides services for a business from a remote location.

(01:51):
Virtual assistants can work with small businesses or big corporations, totally whatever you want to do. They typically work on a contract basis, which means they’re hired for either a one-off project or a monthly ongoing project, but they’re not an employee. So as a virtual assistant, you get to decide when you work, what services you offer, who you work with, and what you get paid. Virtual assistants get paid anywhere from $25 an hour to $100 an hour depending on what services you charge. When you get more into the higher level services you can charge, I’ve even seen more than a hundred dollars an hour. You also do not need years of experience to be able to charge those higher prices. One of the great things about becoming a virtual assistant is you don’t even need prior experience at all. You just need to have a willingness to learn and the ability to figure things out as you go.

(02:58):
So let’s just jump into the three steps you need to take in order to become a virtual assistant. So step number one, first thing you need to do in order to become a VA is to pick which services you want to offer. There are seriously over 100 different services to choose from, and the great thing is that you get to decide what services you wanna provide and which ones you have no interest in. You do not need a degree or prior experience in the service that you want to offer. Again, you just need to have a willingness to learn. Now in our free workshop that we have coming up, I’ll be going over all of the different service options that you can choose from. So we’ll talk more about that at the end of this episode. Step number two is once you’ve decided on your services, you need to create some sort of packages to show your potential clients what their options are.

(03:58):
I usually recommend two to three different options for your clients to choose from. You don’t want to offer too many different things and have too many different packages because then it just gets overwhelming for your client to decide. But have a couple different options. Some people don’t include their prices with their packages when they present it to a client, I recommend including your prices. That way clients have a ballpark idea of your rates before you even waste the time getting on a discovery call or any of that, it’ll weed out the people that really can’t afford you and save you some time. Step number three is that once you’ve got these two foundational pieces figured out, then you’re ready to start looking for clients. I recommend four places to look for clients. Number one, my favorite, is in entrepreneur Facebook groups. This is where I found 90% of my clients and where many of my students in the Teacher Turned Freelancer Academy have found their clients.

(05:03):
There are so many businesses out there looking for help in these different groups. So you can go and just search Facebook and join some and see what’s out there. The next place I recommend looking for clients for virtual assistant business is on Instagram. Instagram’s a great way to connect with businesses who are already on there. You can go into the hashtags that different businesses might be using for the type of business you wanna work with. So for example, if you’re interested in working with people in the wedding industry, you could go into wedding hashtags and start interacting with the businesses that are using those hashtags and then build that relationship with them. And then hopefully they’ll be like, they’ll come over to your page and be like, “Ooh, I need that service. I need to hire this girl.” Okay, so Instagram is a great place to network with potential clients.

(05:55):
LinkedIn is another really good place to find clients. Now, LinkedIn is kind of more for like the bigger corporations, bigger businesses that might be hiring, and so they might be a little bit more structured in like how they want you to do things. If you prefer working with like smaller single person owned companies, I would recommend going with like the Facebook groups or Instagram, but LinkedIn is a great place too. And then the fourth place you can find clients for your new virtual assistant business is through the people that you already know. This is called your warm market. So I always recommend to my students to make a post on your Facebook and let everybody know what you’re doing. Let them know what services you’re offering. Now, what a virtual assistant can do, you never know who is already in your network that might need those services.

(06:50):
Or maybe they know somebody who needs them. So maybe they don’t personally need them, but they know somebody who does. I always recommend that, and a lot of people are scared, like maybe you’re still teaching and don’t really want your coworkers or your admin to know that you’re doing this. You can go to your settings and click show everyone except, and then you can select the people that you don’t want to see the post. So that’s kind of a workaround for that. All right, so real quick, let’s just review these three steps that you need to take in order to become a virtual assistant. First one is you need to pick which services you want to offer. Second is that you need to create your packages for your potential clients. And then the third step is that you need to start looking for clients.

(07:42):
All right, I mentioned our free workshop before. I wanna go ahead and mention it again. On Thursday, January 19th, I will be hosting a free workshop where I’m gonna be teaching you the number one way to leave teaching in six months or less. If you haven’t guessed it already, it’s by becoming a virtual assistant. But in this workshop, I’m really gonna break down for you guys how you can replace your teaching income from home with your babies by your side, and finally pay off all that debt or take those dream family vacations. We’re gonna cover the five Ps that you need in your virtual assistant business. So kind of builds off of this episode today we’re gonna be covering even more things. So make sure to come and register for the free workshop ariannavernier.com/free-workshop. That’s A-R-I-A-N-N-A V-E-R-N-I-E-R .com/free-workshop. Or you can find the link in the show notes. And if you have a question that you would like, like for me to answer for you here on the quick tip Thursday episodes, come into our free Facebook community. That’s at facebook.com/groups/ditchtheclassroom. Scroll to the quick tip Thursday post. Leave a comment on there. I am more than happy to answer your questions, and it makes me so happy to keep doing that. All right, y’all, I love you so much and we will see you next time.