EP 205: How to Start Your VA Business: Alyssa Avant's Proven Tips

Are you ready to dive deep into the strategies and mindset to help you optimize your business, prioritize your family, and stay true to your vision? Get ready to transform your life and business one episode at a time. This is the Align youe True north podcast, and I'm your host, Brooke Elder. Hello, everyone.

I am so excited to have another guest for you. And I totally forgot at the beginning. Alicia, right? Yes, Correct. Hey. Because it's spelled Alyssa, but I know it's. I was like, Alicia Avent. Is that how you say your last name, too? Yeah. Hey, look at that. We're doing pretty good today. So we have Alicia here, and she is just a delight. You are going to love her, and she has so many great tips for those of you who are in the VA space. So I'm super, super excited to introduce our new.

My new friend to you all. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah. So I would love for you to tell us a little bit about your journey and how you got to where you are now. Okay.

So mine goes back 17 years because I am celebrating 17 years in business this year.

I started when my children were really small. I had a preschooler, a baby, and I found out I was expecting another child soon after. So I ended up with three children. But I was looking for a way to make money from home because I wanted to stay at home with my kids. And my experience was completely in ministry.

I was a youth and children's director for about six years, and then I resigned to stay at home with my children. And I had some writing experience and things like that, and I did some speaking as when I was doing ministry. I was in a. In a seminary program and had a lot of pastors and youth ministers as friends and colleagues, and so they would have me come and speak. So I did some of workshops and things like that for youth and for girls and their moms.

And so that was kind of the breadth of my experience. That was all that I had. And I actually created a blog just as a fun project. And when I began to reach out to these other ladies who I saw were working from home and making an income, one of them actually reached out to me and suggested and asked was I interested in ghost writing some articles or blog posts for her. She liked the writing style that she saw on my blog, and so I said, sure, and began to do that. And she sort of helped me.

She gave me referrals and helped me along the way. I was in what I called an old school forum. So if you Think Facebook groups now, but back then there were these forums and it was a work at home mom group. And that's where I really got started. And it took me, I don't know, a few months to get started. And really that I don't even have a specific date that I started my business. I just know it was October of 2007 because my daughter was a baby. After that, I began to kind of branch out.

As I began to learn for my own business sake about websites and social media and marketing, email marketing, those types of things, I began to branch out and I attended a conference, my first in person conference, late in 2009. And I learned that, you know, there were other people that needed some of the tasks that I've learned how to do. So they asked me, you know, well, how did you get this?

Like my WordPress blog for example, or how did you use your, you know, article marketing or your email marketing? And they said, can you do that for me? And I was like, sure. So I became a VA and didn't even know what a VA was. So that's kind of how my business started. And of course, you know, it's grown over time. Organically, it has grown.

I recently, in the past year and a half, decided to create a team or build a team of VAs. I've always done this solo. And one of the things that I really enjoy doing is helping other women to become virtual assistants. So that is something that I has been kind of a passion project for me in the midst of this as well is I started by doing internships and then created a course. And that has helped me to help other women who want to make an income from home to do so by. Becoming a va.

That is awesome. I love that. And like, not very many people you talk to start way back like in the early 2000s. And that's where I started too. It was like 2006, 2007. And I only remember because my son was really little and I wanted to do the same thing and I taught myself how to do websites and blogs and forums and all of that.

Like, and it's funny because I remember like back then you would see ads on Google and stuff and I remember clicking on one and you could like sign up for this free, like class that they would call you and talk to you about your business and stuff, which like now I look back at, like everyone does that now, but back then it really wasn't a thing. And I remember talking to this guy and he was saying, yeah, the future of marketing is Going to be in social media. And I'm like, what is social media?

You know? Yeah. And not even understanding what it was. Like, I remember the week that Twitter came out and we all thought, what is this? And it used to be very different than it is now. So it was very conversational. And they were like, think about it as like if you were at work standing around the water cooler. Like, I remember them explaining it in that way. And of course, I'd never worked a corporate job or anything, so I was. That was even hard for me to imagine.

But that's how they explained it. But yes, you're right. That is what they told us back then. And of course now you wouldn't. You would. It would be hard to imagine business without social media. But back then it was very hard to imagine. Like, what are they talking about? Right. Well, because even Facebook was just. I mean, I think Facebook came out in 2008. 2009. Right. And it was college students. Yes. Like, I was like, how would you use that for business?

Like, I just couldn't even wrap my head around it back then. Yeah, exactly. And I had it back then, but it was completely different than it is now. Yes, yes. Yeah. It's. It's funny looking back and seeing like, how far, because it doesn't feel like it's been that long. But there's been so many changes, even just the way that we interact with brands and everything now. Like, social media is really everything when it comes to marketing. That's right. It's. That's very true. So.

Well, I would love to hear from you, since you have been helping people, that if they're thinking about becoming a va, what are some tips that you would have them do? Like, because a lot of the times I get people that ask me, like, well, what if I don't like being a va? Like, what is it really like? So let's talk about, like, what is a day in the life of VA look like? And then what are some tips that you have for people who are thinking about becoming a va?

Well, a day in the life usually consists, especially once you have gained clients, consists of doing client projects or tasks. And that will depend on what you. What types of services you choose to provide. And I believe honestly with my whole heart that everyone has marketable skills that they can use to market themselves as a virtual assistant. Anything and everything really can be marketed.

But some of those, like, common things that people may not realize that they have are like you data processing type skills. I say if you can copy and paste Then on a computer, then you can, you know, market yourself as a virtual assistant. If you have organizational skills or know how to plan events or create. For example, if you're really good with calendar management or email, just managing and organizing email.

Also, if you maybe you and your family love to travel and you've done a lot of travel planning in the past, there are people that will hire you to help with their travel planning for their events and for just them personally or their business plan, business travel. I actually have a huge list of tasks that people hire virtual assistants to do. I can share that, a link to that with you and your audience.

But to get started, you have to think about the skills that you have, but also think about who is someone that you would like to work with. And you kind of try to marry those two pieces. Like, okay, I have these skills and I really who are, who is someone that would need those skills. So for me, for instance, I have always loved to read and so authors have always fantasized. You know, I was always been fantasized about the fact that, you know, how do authors come up with their stories?

It always fascinated me about, you know, the life of an author was always such an intriguing thing to me. And so I was fascinated with that. And therefore I wanted to work with authors. So I had to learn, okay, these are some of the tasks that I could do for an author that would help them. Or you can approach it the other way. You know, okay, I have these skills.

Maybe you're really skilled in graphic design or something like that, and you find that there is a niche group of people, a target market that would benefit from those skills. So those are a couple ways you can do it and that will get you kind of on the right track to the types of services that you can provide. So that's a really good. You know, I always tell people that's a good starting point to start to brainstorm and think about who you can serve and what skills you can provide. I love that.

That's so good. And being able to. I love that you mentioned like think of who is it that you want to help. And like, I never thought about like your example about the author. I love that because when you start thinking about the people that you want to be serving, you want to do it in a niche that is something that you're interested in because that's going to be just make your job so much more fun. Yeah, exactly.

Or you know, if it's somebody you've served in the past in some kind of capacity, you Know, I know people that have experience like indirect sales, so they might serve someone who's in direct sales. They have experience in real estate, so they might, you know, work for a real estate agent. Just. I mean, the possibilities are honestly endless. But it gives you. It gives you a path to take and helps you to kind of see what you can offer. Yeah, I like that.

And then it helps you to start kind of narrowing it down a little bit so that way you're not just, I'm a VA jack of all trades.

I can do anything. But you start. So many people tend to want to do that because they think that will be easier to get clients. The only way that I say to, you know, maybe offer different types of general services is when you're first getting started to learn what you enjoy doing. But you want to niche down as quickly as possible because then you will resonate with the clients that need you.

And it will be much easier to find clients if you're specializing and niching down into a specific service and target market. That's great. That's great advice. So thinking through your journey of helping VAs then now you have kind of this VA agency. So let's talk a little bit about your journey with that. So if there are people who are VAs and they want to start their own agency, I'm sure you've learned a lot through that process.

And so there are things that you want that you could tell people about, like what to do and maybe what not to do in starting an agency. Yeah, I tell you, that was one of the hardest pieces for me. I guess that's why I waited like almost 16 years to do that. I started the agency in July of 23, 2023, so not very long ago. I want to say that the. One of the most important pieces is to make sure that you know what you want to offer your clients and don't try.

For me, I feel like the best thing that I did was I kept offering the same services and I trained the people and or found people who were already trained in those services instead of trying to like widen my services or anything like that, you know, I still wanted to very much specialize in the types of services that I was already providing. For me, that's email marketing, social media marketing, and content repurposing.

And so I was able to, through my internship program, train others who they had similar skills. But I train them in the way that I handle my clients, having a very specific way that I onboard those clients and set them up with their virtual assistant. Was important. And one of the things that I actually learned from a client of mine was to establish SOPs or you know, the way your system of operations, the way that you do things. And that has been so helpful for me.

And that's actually standard operating procedure. I get that wrong every time. But that is one of the most helpful things that I've done.

She started having me do that in her business probably two to three years ago. And I learned through the process of me setting those up for her that hey, this is very helpful. It's basically just a set of steps and you just type it out word for word. You know, this is what you do. And there's also some tools that you can use. There's like plugins and things for. Not plugins, but extensions. I use Google Chrome and there are several extensions.

Tango is one that will help you to like you're tell you're on there showing them exactly how to do a process and it will type out the instructions for you. And so things like that have been super helpful because obviously everybody has their own way of doing things and it's fine. But to have a specific set of steps will make things go a lot faster for you and your team. And so you're not having to go back and recheck work and you know, just making simple, making it simple.

And as much as you can streamline and simplify as possible, I would encourage you to do. Yes, yes, agreed. Like you're speaking my love language now. I'm very much like systems process. Yeah. Or you know, write out all your SOPs. And like I have a certain way that I like my sops and so I have just trained AI. So I use Claude AI, that's my favorite one. And so I have it. This is how I want my SOP written out. And then I just do loom videos of recording what it is that I do.

And then you can take that transcript, I upload the transcript into AI, it writes the whole SOP with this is what good looks like. This is what like here are some frequently asked questions around it that we could answer. And then I just go and put that, I keep all of mine inside ClickUp.

And so I put all my SOPs in there and like it's been game changer to do that because then especially as a va, if you're trying to train somebody else on how to do it or if you are like I know a lot of VAs that they then like turn into online business managers, you know, and they start like raising, going up that, like, operations ladder that you are then in charge of training other people on what your job was. And so if you have those SOPs, that helps so much. It does. That's absolutely true.

That's awesome. Well, if people want to know more about you and about, like, you have your internship, like you said, you have courses and stuff like that, where can they find information about you?

Okay, so I have a couple websites for the virtual assistant, though. The ones who want to become a VA or if you're a VA VA and want to, like, scale your business, it would be@virtualassistant advantage.com and then for my business itself, our agency is Alicia Avant and Company. Awesome. We'll make sure we link those in the show notes. And it's been so great to have you on here. Thank you so much for sharing all of your great tips and I am sure that it's going to help so many people.

So thanks so much.

Awesome. Thank you for having me.