How I Got My Start as a Virtual Assistant with a Baby on My Hip
Today, I’m excited to introduce a guest post from Dominique Déraiche, the creator behind Mommy VA Blog. Dominique is a mom who traded in her day job for a flexible work-from-home life. In her post, she shares her journey of how she became a virtual assistant, starting with zero experience and a 6-month-old baby on…
Today, I’m excited to introduce a guest post from Dominique Déraiche, the creator behind Mommy VA Blog. Dominique is a mom who traded in her day job for a flexible work-from-home life. In her post, she shares her journey of how she became a virtual assistant, starting with zero experience and a 6-month-old baby on her hip. If you’ve ever wondered what a virtual assistant actually does or how to become one, this post is for you.
My journey to becoming a Virtual Assistant is one with a lot of forks in the road and dead ends.
Truthfully when I set out to work from home and build an online business, I had no idea what a Virtual Assistant was, what it ate for dinner, or how to become one.
All I knew was that I didn’t want to put my baby in daycare, and I wanted the flexibility of working from home.
I used to work for the Federal Government and started my career in the Employment Insurance Call Centre, where I learned how to be proactive, develop strong communication skills, and listen carefully because most of the time it’s what clients aren’t saying that is most important.
As much as I loved the challenge of my job, speaking to clients across the country on a daily basis, and feeling like I was making a difference in people’s lives; it was also stressful to constantly be ‘on’. If you were having an off day, you still needed to power through because people were dependent on you, and you needed to reach your goal stats by the end of the day. Welcome to working in a Call Centre.
I knew one day, I would leave the government for a work from home position but had no idea where to start, or how to go about it. You could say I manifested my reality, but it came with a lot of hardships. Today, I would like to share with you my journey to becoming a Virtual Assistant in hopes of saving you a lot of time needing to throw spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. Hindsight is always 20/20, and there are definitely a lot of things I would do differently if I were to start over today.
So without a clear business plan, like any sane *throat clearing* person would do, I quit my job only with the clear determination that I was going to make it work, somehow.
With a 6-month old on my hip, I set off on my Virtual Assistant journey, hitting lots of bumps in the road, but learning a ton in the process, I didn’t start off knowing I would become a Virtual Assistant, I tried many different paths before finally landing on becoming a VA.
With these actionable tips, you’ll be able to fast track your own journey, should you choose to take the leap, leave your 9-to-5, and become a Virtual Assistant.
Recommended reading: Best Ways To Find Virtual Assistant Jobs
Roughly six months before my baby’s due date, I started brainstorming lots of ideas on how I could make money from home.
At the time, I lived on a quaint 4 acre parcel of land with my 3 horses, chickens and big gardens. I truly loved being outside. I also knew that the homesteading community was booming, with more and more people wanting to leave the hustle and bustle of city life and getting back to our ancestor’s roots.
However, most of the traditional homesteading skills have been lost over the years. I’ve always been someone who loves reading and figuring stuff out, you could also credit my grandma and my mom for nurturing my creative side growing up teaching me how to knit, and enrolling me in sewing lessons.
I took it upon myself to learn how to can food from my garden, hence how my YouTube channel, Canning The Garden was born. I almost cringe writing this because I know some of you will go look me up, but I’ve refrained from deleting my channel over the years because it’s an accurate representation of how my entrepreneurial journey has evolved. I’ve come a long way!
I worked hard at my YouTube channel and put in a full year’s worth of effort getting it off the ground but ultimately the content creation grind of needing to pump out video after video every week got the best of me. Plus, my niche was hard to create content around during the winter months.
At this point, I was running out of financial resources to stay home with my daughter, so I needed to try something else quickly! While I didn’t have the financial resources to spend, I also recognized that sometimes you need to spend money to make money.
With advice from a friend, I decided to hire a business coach. I had spoken to her before spending money on her membership, wanting to make sure she could truly help me because I felt like this was a last ditch effort to be able to work from home with my 6 month old daughter.
She assured me that yes, she absolutely could, she herself being a mom to 5 with a thriving online business helping mompreneurs. So I signed up to her membership, and showed up promptly to her weekly coaching calls, and devoured her course content.
But I was still left with the question, what type of business should I start? I didn’t see my skills working for the government as something I could market and grow a business from. The only thing I knew how to do well at that point and saw potential in were my homesteading skills.
That’s the path I chose, with my coach’s help, I started building out a course of my own, hoping to teach others homesteading skills, particularly water bath canning and pressure canning with the hope of creating a membership site where clients would pay to learn from me and have access to weekly family meal recipes made from scratch.
Once I got to the pricing module in my coach’s course, the doubts started to creep in. I started doing the math backwards thinking of how many membership spots I would need to sell on a monthly basis in order to be able to stay home with my baby. It all started to feel like too much and like my dream was never going to come true. I had put all this effort into building a course, that at this point was just a hobby and nothing I could see becoming a real stream of income.
Luckily my coach sent me a message saying ‘We have to talk’, she had come to the exact same conclusion at the exact same time. I was disappointed and cried on the call, but at the same time relieved that I could focus my energy somewhere else and not waste any more time. She said, ‘Dom, have you ever thought about becoming a Virtual Assistant?’.
At the time, I had no idea what a Virtual Assistant even did or how it could help small business owners.
With that, she hired me for $1,000 per month, and I was to help her with email management, and social media management, showing up to her weekly coaching calls to take notes and pitch her for guest podcast opportunities. In hindsight, I was probably working WAY too much for the amount of money she was paying me, but I was all too eager to learn and expand my skills.
And that, my friends, is how I got my first client and began my journey. After 5 years I am still learning a lot every day and am now even shifting into starting my own Pinterest Management services business, with the hopes of working with other bloggers in the near future. While not knowing what exactly the future holds as a person who is self-employed, the magic is in knowing that you can always shift and reinvent yourself. There are no rules to working online!
If I were to start over as a Virtual Assistant today, there are many things I would do differently, but wisdom is earned when experience is gained.
Here are my top 5 baby steps to starting your own Virtual Assistant business.
While quitting a well paying government job is probably not advisable or realistic for everyone, when I first decided to make money from home I jumped all in by quitting my job.
Sure, I could always have found something else should it have not worked out, but there truly was no other option in my mind. Make a decision and stick to it! It’s easy in today’s world to try something but never see it through to the end (there’s also value in knowing when to quit, but that’s a story for another day), most people aren’t doing enough of the right things and are quick to throw in the towel.
Something that I love to do, and it helps me visualize my goals is to create a vision board of what I want my year to look like. I create it in Canva (free simple to use design software), and save it to the desktop of my computer. This way it’s something I see every single morning as I start my work day, and helps me align my actions with the goals I want to achieve in my own business.
One of the roadblocks on my Virtual Assistant journey was failing to see what was right in front of me.
All those skills I acquired working for the Government? Those are transferable skills I still use today as a Virtual Assistant. Even if you’ve never been a VA before, I firmly believe we all have the necessary skills we can use and apply as assets to starting a successful Virtual Assistant business.
Take 20 minutes, grab a scrap piece of paper and brain dump all of the skills you’ve learned from the various jobs you’ve had in the past. It doesn’t matter if the job was in administrative services or customer support, write down everything, even the common skills!
Once you’ve written it all down, take an objective look at what could be applied to the Virtual Assistant services you might offer.
Facebook groups are a gold mine for finding potential clients to work with. I’ve met some of my best clients through Facebook Groups. It is a good idea to set aside time every day to network and build an online presence, ask questions and show up in groups where your target audience hangs out. When you consistently provide value, your ideal client will start noticing you and sending you DMs about your services.
It’s really that easy! I have clients reaching out to me who I’ve never heard of before, but they’ve been lurking around in groups, observing, and then finally pulling the plug and sending a message for more information on my service packages. Start showing up as the expert you are!
Set a goal for yourself to leave at least 10 comments per day on various posts with people you potentially see yourself working with.
Just be careful, some Facebook Groups are really strict about self-promotion, and try to do it in a tactful way.
A portfolio is like a resume that contains the VA services you offer, the systems you use, your pricing, testimonials, and contact information. I am a big fan when first starting out, of doing work in exchange for testimonials.
This not only helps build your credibility to back up your skills, but it gets your feet wet in the industry without needing to commit to building an expensive website, or investing in different software.
Heck, many VAs book themselves out with just a portfolio! Starting a business doesn’t need to be expensive or complicated. Start simple, and build upon it as you have the resources to do so.
There are lots of free Canva templates you can use to get started with building your portfolio. Or if you want a beautifully designed and well put together option, there are thousands of templates for sale on Etsy that will get you that cohesive look.
With time, you’ll definitely want to increase your prices, we tend when first starting out to undervalue our worth. Which is ok! We all have to start somewhere, but as you gain experience and expand your skill set, it’s important to determine a higher rate for your services, the value you provide business owners.
You are not only saving them time, but you are also saving them money since they aren’t needing to hire full-time employees. Saving them thousands of dollars on medical insurance, employment benefits, etc.
When raising your prices, you’ll want to consider things like:
I know many of you hold it in your heart to want to work from home, whether it’s for similar reasons as my own, to be home with my daughter, or simply because you are sick of the commute and the 9-5 grind. I want to let you know that you can do it!
If I can, with a six month old on my hip, working early in the morning, during nap time, and in the evenings, so can you!
If anything, I wish I could go back to when my daughter was little and tell myself that everything will be ok! Stop stressing and enjoy these moments. Sure I was always present with my daughter, but most of the time my mind was elsewhere trying to figure out how I was going to make this all work. Trust yourself and your ability, you are smart, and more than capable. Thousands have done it, and so can you.
You may not have all of the answers or all of the solutions to the various problems you will undoubtedly encounter, but with a little bit of grit, determination, and reaching out to the vast community of Virtual Assistants and freelancers online, someone out there has experienced what you have and will be more than happy to lend a helping hand, guiding you in the right direction.
You have a few options, you can follow the actionable steps above and go at it at your own pace but there is also tremendous value in being part of a community of like minded individuals who are on the same journey as you.
Just like I did by hiring my business coach, without her I never would have made those important connections, landing her as my very first Virtual Assistant client.
Now, I am not recommending that you go out and purchase expensive Virtual Assistant courses, there are thousands of online courses out there, but I am recommending that you find like minded individuals who will encourage you, help you brainstorm ideas, and help you along the way. I’ve made tremendous friendships online, with some people who I have never met in person, and without them would never have made it as far as I have today.
Being an independent contractor and freelancer is an excellent career choice, and a community I am definitely proud of being a part of. With hard work and determination, I can’t wait to welcome you too!
Are you interested in becoming a virtual assistant?
Author Bio: Dominique Déraiche is a blogger and writer passionate about helping moms build flexible, online businesses. She shares practical tips, strategies, and insights on becoming a virtual assistant, productivity, and making money online at Mommy VA Blog. When she’s not writing, you’ll find her spending time with family, testing new business ideas, or taking a walk with her dog Toby.
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