What Do Virtual Assistants Do?: A Day in the Life of a VA
Have you ever wondered what it actually looks like, day-to-day, when you're building a virtual assistant business? And then, what things look like when you actually become a full-time VA
When I was first starting my business, coming into the online space was such an unknown for me. I literally didn't know anyone who was running an online business, and from all the research I did, I still wasn't clear on exactly what I was going to be doing every single day.
There are 3 different phases you’ll experience as you build your VA business – Building, Growing, and Scaling – and your day will look pretty different in each phase.
But the biggest thing to take away from this blog article is this: There is no one-size-fits-all routine for Virtual Assistants. One VA could have a day that looks completely different from another VA. The beauty of it is that as a business owner, you design your routine.
So, without further ado, let’s meet our panel of 3 VAs and what their days look like in each phase.
Kat: Build Phase
Kat’s a VA who's just starting out.
She just decided she wants to go all-in on her business, but she's still working a 9-to-5 job. So, one of Kat's biggest challenges in this phase of starting her business is figuring out how she’ll actually have time in her day to build it.
Because here’s Kat’s current reality: She’s working a full-time job and by the end of the day, she gets home and she’s exhausted. And honestly, the last thing that she wants to do is spend more time working…
But if she’s going to start a successful Virtual Assistant business and leave her 9-to-5, she knows she’s going to have to make a major mindset shift.
How does she do this? Instead of thinking, “Oh man, I have so much work to do,” she starts thinking about building her VA business as a fun side project. It’s not a job, it’s not work. It’s fun! And as she stays consistent with that mindset and she continues to enjoy what she’s doing, and sees her own progress, it starts to change her entire life.
For Kat, coming home after a long day at work just to sit down and work some more doesn’t sound like fun. So, instead, she wakes up earlier and works on her business in the mornings.
Kat has to be at work by 9, so she gets up at 6 and puts that extra time into building her VA business. She also uses parts of her lunch hour at work some days, and she carves out whole weekends when she can. She’s had to make some tough decisions sometimes and say “no” to friends, but she knows that these small sacrifices will be worth it in the long run.
So, what’s the first thing we can take away from Kat’s story?
Let's be real: You need to make time to build your business. Maybe you think you’ll do better in the mornings, or maybe you’ll do better at night – that determination is up to you. But it doesn’t change the fact that this is really important.
You’re changing your life, and it won’t happen if you only work half an hour on Tuesdays.
Building a Virtual Assistant business – building any business – requires discomfort. It means breaking out of our normal routines and making time for something we consider to be a priority.
For Kat, this means getting up at 6, getting into her business owner mindset, doing a little bit of visualization work, and then right at 6:30, she starts working on her business until 8. That's an hour and a half she's putting into her business, Monday through Friday.
What is she doing in that time? Good question.
Kat is in my program, the Virtual Assistant Accelerator, so she's doing some program work. But she's also actively starting to reach out to people that she would want to potentially work with.
What does this mean? You know all those people you've been following on Instagram and they’re following you back, or all those people you’ve been connecting with on LinkedIn over your entire career?
Guess what? It's time to tap into those connections! You know those high school people that are on Facebook who you haven’t talked to in, like, a million years? Guess what? It's time to tap into those connections as well!
As it turns out, Kat has done a great job engaging her existing network. So, she spends at least 15 minutes every day going onto platforms where she already has connections with people.
These are people she already has some sort of association with, and she's telling them about her Virtual Assistant business – that she's starting this business and she's looking for clients.
She’s also spending time searching for people she thinks she might be interested in working with and building relationships with them, too. The more she learns about what they do, the better she’ll understand whether or not she wants to work with someone like them.
Right now, Kat’s biggest priority is landing her first client.
She’s putting in the work, finding the time, and making the sacrifices necessary to land that first client and build her business because she knows once she gets a little momentum, things will really start to take off for her.
Melana: Grow Phase
Melana is a step ahead of Kat and in the process of building her VA business; she’s been at this for a while.
She has one great client who's paying her around $2,000 a month, and she has another client – who was technically her very first client – who happens to only be paying her about $500 a month right now.
And if we're being honest, she's probably doing more work for the $ 500-a-month client than she is for her $ 2,000-a-month client…
So, let's talk about this.
When Melana got that first client, she was so excited and happy just to have someone who wanted to work with her. She lowered her rate (which, by the way, is totally normal). Like Kat, Melana’s original goal was to get that first client, and to do it, she did what she felt was necessary.
So, Melana has a $500 a month client that's taking up the bulk of her time – a client who also isn’t an ideal fit, either – and then she has her other client who is a completely ideal client. She loves this client and wishes she could spend more time working with them.
The good news for Melana is that she’s past the point Kat’s working through: Melana has designed her day to go the way she wants it. So, the first thing she likes to do is sit down with her coffee and read a book on her Kindle.
Then at 10:00, Melana looks at her to-do list and focuses on what needs to get done that day based on priority. She also checks in with her clients within the first half-hour of starting her workday to let them know she’s around and to give her a shout if they need help. She understands that communication is key, especially in the early days of landing a new client.
Now, every day is a little different. But it doesn’t usually take long for Melana to get in the zone. She works her tail off until about two before taking a break. She’s had time to do some trial and error, and she’s discovered that this works for her: She likes finding a groove and sticking with it until she gets to a comfortable stopping place.
She checks in with her clients again to see if they need anything. She doesn’t necessarily tell them she's going offline; she's just checking in for the afternoon, especially if she didn't hear back from them after her first message in the morning.
Maybe Melana decides to take a short break, and then she tries to find her third client. Like Kat, she's continuing that hour- to hour-and-a-half routine, trying to connect and trying to find clients each day via her existing connections as well as making new ones.
Remember, she's doing this while working full-time in her VA business with her two clients.
This can feel like a lot. I don't think I've met a single person who's like, “Oh yeah, it's a breeze!” No, it's going to feel like a lot because not only are you now a business owner with clients, you’re also trying to balance finding more clients.
Melana’s two clients are bringing her $2,500 a month. And while that’s nothing to brush off, it’s probably not replacing a corporate salary. And remember, that first $500 client of hers isn’t really an ideal client, and is taking up a lot of her time.
She wants to find another client she can bring on to either balance out the difference in what she’s making between her current two clients or possibly replace the first one altogether.
Now, Melana may fall into a trap here… And she’s not alone – a lot of new VAs do.
As she’s doing her new client research, she might get really in the zone again and look up and suddenly realize, “Oh my gosh, it's 5:00, and I haven't had anything to eat today. I should probably eat something.” So she goes, and she eats something…
And then… she might sneak in a few additional tasks for her clients before she takes the rest of her evening to herself.
This may not seem like a big deal, but this is realistically what it could look like for you if you’re not careful and you don't set boundaries.
Something that tends to happen, especially when we start working full time in our business, is that we start treating our business like our 9-to-5 job because it's the only thing we know. We end up recreating some of the environment we just left. But we don't want to recreate that, right?
So we need to get really intentional about what we are doing in our day. We are now responsible for saying to ourselves, “Hey, you need to take a break.” We are now responsible for saying, “Okay, this is when you start working, and this is when you end.”
This is what it looks like when you're in Virtual Assistant business build mode. And like I said, it's it's a lot.
If you think of the progress that happens here, when we're starting our Virtual Assistant business like Kat, we’re in a 9-to-5 job, and we're trying to find clients. It's a day packed full of doing things. And then Melana, she's building – she doesn't have that 9-to-5 anymore. Now she has clients that replace that time, but she still needs to continue finding clients to build her business.
Once Melana gets past this build mode – which could take a year or more – and finds her 3 to 4 amazing dream clients, she can start to settle into more of a routine. Things will start taking less time to complete, and she’ll get more time back to do other activities and hobbies and things she hasn’t been able to do in a million years or that she’s always wanted to do.
But to get there, she needs to put in the time now to build on the small growth she established.
If you don't put in the time now, like Melana is doing, you'll never get there.
Nicole: Scale Phase
Nicole has been running her VA business for a few years now, and she’s a complete pro.
She knows what her ideal client looks like and what kinds of services she’s best at, and she’s resourceful enough to figure things out when she’s unsure about something a client needs help with.
When Nicole came to me, she had 4 clients. This probably sounds like she’s exactly where she should be, right?...
The problem, however, was that they were all paying her around $28 an hour, which was a straight-up crime.
Nicole was managing one client’s podcast and doing LinkedIn outreach for another client – offering so many premium services. It was unbelievable to me that she was only charging $28 an hour!
Unfortunately, most Virtual Assistants just accept this at face value. But it doesn't have to be that way.
When Nicole started working with me, she said she liked two of her 4 clients. She didn't like the work she was doing for the other two clients, and she hated that she was still charging hourly. She had a package set up for one client, but it was deliverables-based. So, she was still very much tied to the time it took her to complete that one deliverable.
When she came to my program, she said, “My business is working, and it's making money, but not as much money as I want. I have no time, and I'm so overwhelmed. I'm working, like, 60 hours a week. I know this isn’t sustainable. I've tried to find other people, I've worked with another coach, but I haven't been able to find anybody who can help me and teach me how to actually increase my rate with these clients.”
Nicole’s first goal was to figure out how to switch to value-based pricing. Her second goal was to find new clients to replace the two she didn't really want to work with anymore.
So, what does Nicole’s day look like? Well, her day looks pretty busy again.
Now, let me just say that, almost a year into her business, Nicole got into a very good groove and was able to have time and a little of the freedom she wanted. But she wasn't making the amount of money she wanted to be making.
When you're scaling, and when you're making a big change in your business and pivoting, it's really important to remember that you’re almost back in build mode. You're going to need to spend time doing #allthethings.
Nicole’s biggest challenge right now is that her business work – the work that she needs to do for her own business – is always second to her clients.
We're trying to flip that together, and it all comes down to mindset work and figuring out a schedule – again – that works for her.
Where You Are
You may not be in a 9-5 job. You may have been laid off or maybe you're a stay-at-home mom right now. And maybe you do have a little bit more time, but but sometimes that extra time you feel like you have isn’t real. It's more perceived time.
I work with a lot of stay-at-home moms in my program who think, “Oh yeah, I'm at home all day. I could totally start my VA business! I'm ready! I could dedicate, like, 5 hours a day to doing this!”
But when it actually comes down to doing it, in realistic terms, things never go according to their original expectations.
This is why we just walked through 3 different stories. What your day looks like when you're just starting out won’t look the same as your day when you have 2 or 3 or 4 clients, or when you're trying to let one go and swap one out because you're trying to scale...
Your days are going to look different – and not just from day to day, but as you continue to grow and build and scale your business.
The best part of becoming a business owner is that you get to design every single aspect of your day, and you can do it with much more intention, freedom, and flexibility than you would have ever before. You are making the rules now.
As you read through these different stories, I hope it’s given you something to think about. Instead of thinking, “Ooof, that may not work for me,” try flipping your mindset script and think, “Ooh, that's not going to work for me, but what can I do instead?”
Be the problem-solver. As a great VA, you’re a problem-solving pro, right? (Yes, you are!)
That's why you're doing this. So, think about the routines we went through here and figure out what bits and pieces you can pull into your own routine.
Don’t wait. Start this week and build your days with intention.
