Episode 200: Worried You Won’t Be Able to Replace Your Teaching Income as a Virtual Assistant?

Full Episode Transcription:

(00:07):
Y’all. We are officially at episode 200 of this podcast. That is crazy to me. I feel like we just started yesterday and we are already here, over 32,000 downloads on the podcast. I’m just so grateful for each and every one of you for taking the time to listen to this show because I know your dreams are the same dreams that I had of wanting to quit teaching, be home with my babies, and just still be able to provide a stable income for my family. So I’m so incredibly grateful for each and every one of you, and I would be even more grateful if you would take the time to leave a review on this show. Reviews are the number one way that it tells Apple, Spotify, whoever, that we are a good podcast and they will start pushing us out more and like the search results and all of that, it is just how others find out about this podcast. So if you’ve listened to one or two or three episodes and you have not left a review yet, I would be so grateful if you did, and I have a free gift for you if you do. So, all you have to do is go to Apple Podcast and search Ditch the Classroom, and then click on it and scroll all the way to the bottom and you’ll see the “Leave a Review” section. Click on that, click the five stars. You can write a sentence or two about how this podcast has helped you, and then before you hit submit, take a screenshot. If you hit submit first, Apple sometimes takes a few days to actually show the review, so it’ll take a few days to actually show up.

(02:46):
But if you take a screenshot first and then hit submit, you can email that screenshot to me at podcast@ditchtheclassroom.com, and I will send you a free code to get my Ditch the Classroom toolkit for free. This toolkit gives you the beginning steps to start your virtual assistant business so that you can start working from home faster. Again, this is my gift to you as a thank you for taking the time to leave a review on this show. It seriously makes my heart so happy and makes all the work I pour into this podcast, so, so worth it.

(03:20):
All right. Are you worried that you’re not gonna be able to replace your teaching income as a virtual assistant? I know that this is a fear of a lot of people. I get a lot of questions. How many people have been successful doing this? What income level is possible for me? And when I hear that, I just hear people saying themselves, okay, but can I really do this? Is this really possible for me? And I just wanna say to you that it is, you just have to have the willingness to put yourself out there. A lot of people are concerned that virtual assistance isn’t gonna be stable, like their typical nine-to-five teaching position, but in my opinion, virtual assistants is actually more stable because with teaching, you could go into work tomorrow and they could be like, “We don’t need you anymore. Bye.” Like maybe if you have a union, not, but still, like that just sounds stressful. So with virtual assistance, you typically have, you know, a couple of clients, and if you were to lose one, you still have the income from the others to help you while you are looking for another client to replace one you lost.

(04:30):
So you’re not going down to zero like you would if you lost your teaching job tomorrow. So I think it’s actually more stable. All right? But the way that you figure out how you can replace your teaching income as a virtual assistant is to do what we in the teaching world, callled “backwards design”. So as y’all know, with, you know, giving our students a test, we have to teach them the different lessons that will build their skills to the point where they would be able to, you know, pass that test and use those skills going forward in their life. So we kind of wanna do the same thing with figuring out how much we need to make each month as a virtual assistant in order to be successful, and how long that will take us. So what I want you to do is get a piece of paper, and then at the top of that paper, write down your monthly income goal, all right?

(05:25):
And then figure out how many months you want it to take for you to get to that point. So a really good goal is six months. Six months to replace your teaching income. Let’s just say you make $3,500 a month as a teacher. So it’s May. Now you would wanna replace your teaching income by November if it was six months from now. So on your paper, have a square for May, June, July, August, September, October, November. I guess that’s seven , I don’t know. I taught kindergarten, I can’t math, I don’t know. But write it down. And then in the first month, maybe you’re going to try to land one client at 25 hours a month for $30 an hour. Write down how much that would be. Let me do some math real quick on my calculator. 25 hours at $30 an hour, that’s $750.

(06:21):
You would make that first month if you landed a client at that amount, okay? And then maybe the second month you land another client for the same amount. $750 for the first client, $750 for the second. You’re already at $1,500. Your second month of being a virtual assistant, you’re already almost halfway to replacing your teaching income. So what if you did that again, a third month you’re at $2,250, and that’s only working, like we said, 25 hours per client a month. So what is that a week? Hang on, I can’t math that fast. Guys. 75 hours a month divided by, you know, four weeks. That’s only 18.75 hours a week. You just cut your working time in half. Okay? What if we add another $750 client? So that’s four clients. You’re already at $3,000 a month with four clients, you guys, and that’s, again, only working, let’s see, a hundred divided by four: 25 hours a week.

(07:26):
You see how that works? And then as you go, you can raise your prices and work even less for the same amount of money. It does not take long to be able to raise your prices, and you get to decide when that happens. There’s nobody telling you, “Oh, hey, you get to raise today.” No, you get to decide when you wanna raise your prices and get that raise. Okay? So I walk you really in-depth through this process in the Teacher Turned Virtual Assistant Academy to help you set those goals and make sure they’re attainable and give you the exact action steps you need to take to hit that goal. So if you want that support and that help, and you also want all of the accountability, all of the training videos that teach you different virtual assistant services, you can offer things that sound fun to you, gives you all the templates where you just literally plug-and-play your information and you’re ready to go, then the Teacher Turned Virtual Assistant Program is for you.

(08:22):
So you can check out all that’s included in that at teacherturnedvirtualassistant.com, get registered. I cannot wait to see you guys there and support you in this journey. And if you have any questions for me, as always, feel free to message me on Instagram at arianna.vernier or come into our free Facebook community that’s at facebook.com/groups/ditchtheclassroom. Ask your questions there. I would love to support y’all further. All right, you guys, I love you so much and I will see you next time. classroom.