SNM273 Becoming a Six-Figure Virtual Assistant with Molly Rose Speed

Jonathan Gree: Becoming a six figure virtual assistant with special guest Molly Rose. Speed on today's episode. Today's episode is brought to you by Descript. Every book, podcast and YouTube video that I publish is transcribed by Descript. I've used all of the competitors and nobody comes close to their quality, and the price is the lowest in the business as well. If you want to speed up production and grow your online business, go to slash Descript right now.

Announcer: Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? If you want to make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams now, then you've come to the right place. Welcome to Serve No Master podcast, where you'll learn how to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep. Presented live from a tropical island in the South Pacific by best selling author Jonathan Green. Now here's your host.

Jonathan Green: Now, I'm very interested in what you do, Molly, and I'm really excited to have you here today because a lot of people think of virtual assistant as someone from a foreign country that you can pay $3 an hour. $2 an hour and can do very limited tasks. Often as part of the price for paying for that is you have to expect a lot of repetition or they get tasks wrong or a lot of miscommunications. But you're working in an entirely different world where people are able to earn starting at $25 an hour, which is amazing. That's like an amazing salary. I'd love to know where your journey began. How did you first get interested in virtual assisting?

Molly Rose Speed: Yeah, I kind of fell into it. I was what I call a corporate cubicle dweller, which I'm sure you've heard a bit from the title of your podcast. And I just wanted a different life for myself. So I quit my corporate job in finance cold turkey, and three months later I found myself as a virtual assistant. Had no idea at the time what that was. This was over twelve years ago. Didn't know that you could get paid for skill sets you already possessed, that you were rather good at, and it snowballs into there. So I just took a leap of faith and started doing it and offering what I knew to do. Basic things like email management and calendar scheduling and booking for a public speaker was predominantly where I started.

Jonathan Green: Yeah. It's really interesting how much the world, especially the last few years, we've realized most jobs can be done online. Most jobs can be done virtually. And there's pros and cons that obviously one of the risks as an employer is that people shave time or don't work as hard when they're at home because you can't see what they're doing. But as a virtual assistant, when you're proactive, you can get a really good response from your employers, right? Like they go, oh, you get everything done. And that's really I know as myself that's what I'm always looking for is like if I say to do something and it just gets done, that's like the dream. So as you started growing as a personal assistant, did you start jumping between employers or managing multiple clients so that you have a bit of financial diversity or do you teach a lot of virtual assistants just have one really big client. What's the path you took?

Molly Rose Speed: Yeah, so when I got started, I wanted to learn as much as I possibly could and this is what I encourage my virtual assistants to do. Be diverse, but don't overdo your book of business. I think that you have to be really cognizant of every time you take on a new client. Can you do your best work with the level of business you already have on your plate? So I think that's very important when I say do the best work exactly like you're saying, do the task, do it well and do it even earlier than it's expected. When clients know that they can tell someone something and it's just taken care of like you said, it's the dream. Even going a bit further. If you see something that's wrong in the business, if something's misspelled spelled or the blog post didn't get the right date, or I'm just making up basic things here, or a zoom link is missing from a schedule which can cause a huge problem in an entrepreneur's day, take care of it without even being asked. I think those are super important things. So the more that a virtual assistant can learn from different industries, the better. Now, from the virtual assistant side, is it much easier to support one business? Really? Sure, the balance of doing that, but it can get a little monotonous. So having a few really great clients on your plate is my recommendation. And then add in some project work as you have more available time.

Jonathan Green: Yeah, that's really interesting. When I do freelance work as a ghostwriter, people always like, Jonathan, you've been doing this along, why do you take ghost range? I'm like, well, because I get paid up front. So mixing in stuff where you get paid hourly or on the back end or at the end of the every two weeks or end of the month is nice. But getting paid at the start of the project, that feels really good too. That's really nice to just get that one big lump sum. So what is the kind of ratio that you tell people to have? I always think of long term projects. Of course my long term projects are high risk because I don't know if they're going to work or not. Sometimes my ideas are bad ideas, so I try to mix in high and low risk projects. That's why I do still do ghost writing. I only say a couple of clients a year, but it provides an assurity. I know that money is there, it's coming in. And sometimes people come to me like, oh, let's do a project together, and we'll make months. In six months, I've already maxed out my risk for the year. So what's the risk profile you recommend for someone who's starting out?

Molly Rose Speed: Yeah. So have those two to three clients on retainer that can fill your 70% of your time. I'd say guaranteed income, you know you're going to get it. They're on retainer. Good, healthy balance of what you're doing for them and the time that it takes and what you're getting paid. And then that 30%. Fill it with a project. So this year, I'm shifting things a little bit personally, and I'm taking one big project a quarter, just specifically doing course creation. Or I have another client or another virtual assistant who is just going to do seven squarespace websites. Right. Just basic things that you can think of. So as a virtual assistant, as you start or a freelancer, as you start to get really good at one specific thing and really enjoy it, figure out where you can add one per month or one big project a quarter and play with that. And I think that's a good way to start doing it and try it, because once you start doing this project work, it gets addicting because it's so in your zone of genius for what you're good at. So it's an easy way to make great money, and then you close the project out and it goes off your plate.

Jonathan Green: Yeah, you've done something that I'm a big believer in, which is learned how to do something, gotten paid to do it, and gotten paid again by teaching other people how to do it. Getting paid three times is my favorite way to grow a business. And a lot of people in I've been doing this a really long time, I've met so many people that are really good at something, and they always say, oh, nobody would ever pay for this, and they're always wrong. I find that the more someone discounts their knowledge, it's really interesting. There are certain things that are impossible to find, certain types of templates. It's literally impossible to find a pre written social media strategy template for a project management software. I've asked hundreds of people, I talked to hundreds of social media experts and offered to pay them north of $10,000 to create one. And it's the holy grail for me. And it's very interesting. And there's all these people to go through, and they can do it, and they always go, oh, why would anyone pay for them? Like, I'll pay you $10,000 to do it, and I don't want to do it. And I've always been curious about it because I've been trying to get one for three years. I probably approach 200 people now about this. You're an expert in the field, so I'm mentioning it to you. It's that it's literally the impossible thing to get, which is a template of series of steps I can pass to my social media team and then can just run the machine. It's very interesting. And there's other things like that where people don't realize that the market is so wide open. Like you talked about website design, there are a lot of page builders and people will pay so much for pre built templates. The page builder that I use now is the fastest one, which means that it's newer, there's not a lot of templates, and there are probably three paid templates on the entire internet. And every single person who uses the software I use is a premium user because it's expensive, like $1,000 to get started in it. And so I'm always interested people that can page build. You realize there are people that are desperate for funnel designs and funnel software. And it's one of the things that I've noticed. I buy a lot of products by ladies because men products never have templates. It never exists on the boy side of the internet. And there's always better templates, better structures, better SOPs. So I buy tons of lady internet products for that reason, because it's always a better perspective, it's always more useful. Like training is great, but the steps I can pass to my team or a worker are so much more useful. So why do you think or how can we help people to realize that people want to pay for your knowledge as well as your time?

Molly Rose Speed: Completely. I love this conversation. I think time, right. I talk about two great commodities we have in life. We have time and we have money. And when you start making enough money, your time becomes way more valuable. So what we're talking about is cutting down your time to recreate those one page web pages by clicking a button it auto builds for you. As a freelancer, that saves hours of time to be able to do so. If you're becoming an expert in your field in creating a system that someone can buy from you and hand off, you can create all this passive income. It can be as basic as here's your ten social media posts for the month delivered to you. Or this is how you clean out your inbox to get to inbox zero. Or this is the template for a proposal. There's thousands of things we could probably sit here and riff on so completely. I think that this is a really great call out and a really amazing stream of income. The places I see this the most with virtual assistants is what you already mentioned. Create those templates for websites if they get really good at that, because they can create them and resell them. But I think there's a lot more areas to look into, especially from the insisting perspective. Google Drive. That's another one. I was going to mention something that business owners can't stand because they're not analytical, they're so creative, they can't get into the nitty gritty of organizing something. So if you create a system on how to clean out your cloud, just basic stuff that we think is so easy that we overlook.

Jonathan Green: Yeah, I had to bring in consultants last year. So expensive to organize my ClickUp. For me, I was like, I have all these projects in here. I don't add stuff in everything's. Disorganized. And they built these probably ridiculously simple things. Whereas that's why I can track when I have a podcast guest, I can put the person in. When you fill out the form, it automatically adds you to ClickUp. Then I just add in the time of when the meet is and the notification is there, and then it tracks you down through the process so that I know when to tell you, oh, I know when every episode is coming out for the rest of the year already. All of that's there. I never had that. I had to bring it outside help. And again, I actually went through probably reaching out to 20 people, because people don't realize how much their help is wanted. Often here's what actually always happens, is that someone is so desperate for the service work, like, oh, I don't want to give you something because then you won't hire me. Yeah, but I'll pay you a lot more per hour to do this. I'll pay you ten times what your normal wage is to build me something that I can just reuse and reuse. And here's the thing. You can sell it to a bunch more people. I'm not paying for exclusivity.

Molly Rose Speed: Yes. Great. Yeah.

Jonathan Green: Often the most valuable resources, people don't realize they're valuable. And I've run into this a lot. So I think what you teach is very interesting, because a lot of people this is how I grew up I always thought I could never be an entrepreneur. Not an entrepreneur. That's not we learn in school. We don't learn in school. We learn to be a good little boy, a good little girl, sit in your chair, be quiet, turn in your papers on time, work in a cubicle. One day, you get to be in a larger cubicle. Then one day, you get to be in a corner office with no windows. And then one day, you get a tiny window, like a prison cell. And by the time you're 60 years old, you get a big window of the whole parking lot. Like, I remember I got a promotion in my mid twenty s to a window view of the parking lot, and people were jealous of me. I was like, this is not my Aspiration ration I'm looking at.

Molly Rose Speed : Yeah.

Jonathan Green: We are always taught these limitations. As far as it's impossible to make money online, it's possible to get a job online. And the problem is, there's a lot of murky information. There are a lot of virtual assistant academies, and there's a lot of people that say they're virtual assistants that are honestly terrible. They haven't been through a training system and they don't know what they're doing, and they oversell what they can do. And all it does is means they just are constantly getting fired. And I've certainly dealt with that over my career. So how do you help people or how do people find you and start to realize that there's more out there, that there's real possibilities?

Molly Rose Speed: Yeah, I think the problem I'm trying to solve for is we already opened the door for this is there's no standardization of the freelance world of virtual assistant world. There's no one certification. That's like being a CPA. You take this test and that certifies you in the knowledge that you have. So it's really challenging and it's watering down the industry really bad. So I wanted to solve for that and also help so many predominantly women in my organization because I target military spouses, because that's my background and give them a path that I didn't have. I just had to figure it out. And it actually really worked because I have a really good work ethic. And I also try to teach them that being an integrity as a virtual assistant is super important. Having an insane work ethic, but also taking advantage of this awesome freedom that you have to work wherever, whenever you want and set great rates, that's a gift. So how can you make this all work and be a powerhouse professional VA? That's what I do in my business.

Jonathan Green: You brought up a bunch of things that are super interesting to me, and the first is that whenever I'm looking at hiring someone, the first question they always ask is, what hours do I have to work? I'm like, I don't live in America, so I don't work on America time, so I don't care when you work. And they're always like, I am so uninterested. I don't really only track hours because people get paid hourly. But I look at the end of the week at how many tasks you have. Like, I had a social media manager for a while, and I looked at all the numbers. They go, Why don't we have new followers? And he goes, that's what you're counting? I was like, oh, you're fired. I was like, the very first day I hired you, I told this metric mastered. And I try to teach people this because I teach Is. I have a couple of trainings specifically about how to be a TikTok manager. And I say your client will number one, look at how much money are you making them. If you bring me a client or customers that cost to generate more revenue than you cost, I'm not going to look at any of your work. I don't care what you're doing. You could be working 1 hour a week, and I honestly don't care if that's not working, then the next thing I look at is how many people you're bringing into the email list. They're not customers, but they're leads. How many leads are coming? Like, if that's not working, I look at growth. If that's not working, I look at how much you're posting. And if I'm looking at how much you're posting, you're probably already on the chopping block. There's not going to be a second conversation. Because when I bring you in, the first thing I say is, here's the metric I'm measuring. And you're exactly right. The really big value of VA is like, understanding what metric matters. Because a lot of people track the wrong metric. I've had so many bad employees, I'm doing so long who was like, oh, I really care about reach. I said, oh, but that's an imaginary number. I care about money because I'm going to use that to pay you. Can I pay you in reach? Which he did not. Like, I was like, the only number I care about is dollars or pounds, I guess, if they're from England or Euros. But that's an understanding that a lot of people miss. And that's why, like, what you're talking about just doing the hours. As a manager, I always have to use this software that tracks people's time and takes pictures of the screens. Why do you do that? Because I catch people shaving all the time. I catch people who bill hours and they're playing like Fortnite for 4 hours. I wish I didn't all the time. It's really interesting that it's like, just be able to do what you say you can do. Track one metric and then have integrity. Literally makes you a top 1% of ya. It's like the bar is absolutely so rare. Just be honest. And another thing I've run into, I'm curious about this, is that a lot of people that I've employed have no aspirations when I want to put them into management. At one point, I was building a really big team and I got burned out on that. But I was like so my best performer was like, hey, do you want to make twice as much money and manage seven people? And she's like, no. And I asked the other person, they were like, no. And I was like, okay, I run into that a lot. And then you have to bring in someone outside and totally messes up company culture. Like a whole thing. I went through a real debacle for me. So that's why this is so interesting. Because I know the number one challenge for any company, any solopreneur, once you break $100,000 a year, isn't hiring. It's systems. It's systems. And hiring is the difference between 100,000 and a million dollars a year. It's it that's the two things that matter every time I get better at systems or hiring. And it's such an opportunity for virtual assistants or online workers. Because if you can just honestly, the salary doesn't matter. If you generate more revenue than you cost and you approach your job that way, that's how you become bulletproof. So

Molly Rose Speed: Absolutely.

Jonathan Green: Can you tell me more about your process? I think another challenge you talked about your industry and being watered down is that virtual assistant is such a broad term that can mean so many different things. Like you can be a video editor, you can be a writer, you can be a blog post writer, or you can beat because sometimes people think virtual assistant is similar to a secretary of personal assistant, but not always. So how do people, as you talk about the market, start to delineate and say what they do or what their expertise is or express their zone of excellence? Because I think that the problem with virtual assistant is it's such a broad term. It's just like saying I work online could mean yes.

Molly Rose Speed: Yeah, absolutely. So this is something I've had a lot of conversations and research into. And to reiterate what you said, you're right. Virtual assistants can say that they know how to create courses and master. Kajabi and others can say that they just do travel booking or they just do TikTok management, which okay, I wouldn't call that a virtual assistant. I call it a TikTok manager. And the beauty of being a virtual assistant or starting there is the sky's the limit if you start to learn these. I have eight core things that I teach them where I expect my virtual assistants to know this, and then my agency can place them with no problem. That's where I want everyone to start. So these are things like email management, calendar, scheduling, travel booking, basic newsletter broadcasting, website maintenance, so uploading blogs, simple changes, not website creation by any means, research and doing KPIs, social media probably going over eight here and then basic bookkeeping. So if they know those things and they start to get their feet wet in a business, then they can start to niche down into what they're most interested in. Now, from there, my VAS are known to become squarespace experts or Kajabi experts. And that's not something I listed initially, but at least gets them to understand the full breadth of an online entrepreneur's business solopreneurs, usually. That's what I'm saying. And my argument is, as a business owner, entrepreneurs, we start a business with one goal in mind, right? We're offering this service or this coach or an author or speaker, but along the way we end up wearing 27 hats. Several of the things I just mentioned, like we're running our marketing, we're doing our bookkeeping, we're doing our operations, and we lose ourselves in our business. So the virtual assistant being able to come in and be that right hand is the sweet spot that I'm trying to solve for. And then from there, virtual assistants, as they gain knowledge, can make the decision to be an expert in one certain field and remove that virtual assistant hat, if you will, and become a social media manager or a course creator.

Jonathan Green: That's very interesting. So one of the things that I run into because so often people mess up their first hire. That's what comes up all the time with my audience. And they go, I'm ready to hire someone, and I go, what do you want to do? Manage my social media. I go, you can't say that. You have to be really specific. What does that mean? Right? Because there are people that have no idea how Pinterest works. There are people that only do Pinterest. So even within social media, it's like this whole different thing. There's people that I encounter people all the time. They go, I know Instagram. I don't get TikTok. I do TikTok. I don't get instagram. And even within I'm a social media manager, there's such a breadth of knowledge or understanding because everyone's idea of how many times a day or a week or a month to post is different. There's no universally accepted answer, right? Some people are like, oh, post one TikTok a day, three Facebooks a week, four Instagrams. And other people are like, oh, 60, you need 60 Twitter a day, right? Three Facebooks, you have to post me at these times. And it's always is different because there's again this kind of gap. I always find that people, when they really mess up is when they don't exactly know what they want. They know they want help, but they don't know exactly what they want the VA to do. How do you help people with that problem? Because I know you also help the other side of helping people to hire their first VA.

Molly Rose Speed: Yeah. So the first step of a business owner hiring a virtual assistant when they come to us is getting them crystal clear. And nine times out of ten, they don't know what they need. They come with, oh, someone told me you needed a virtual assistant. I'm so overwhelmed. Okay, well, you're so overwhelmed that we can't even identify what we need to get off of your plate. So we work with business owners of Basic, like, for two weeks, write down all the things you do. Pretty quickly, I can identify only the things you're meant to do. And that will start to create your job posting for hopefully your first virtual assistant. Or maybe it's a virtual assistant and a content manager or whatever it is. And that's where we have to get the business owner, because if they're not ready, then it's never going to be a successful relationship, and the virtual assistant is going to be overwhelmed, and the expectations of them is going to be completely out of line with what the business owner needs. So clarity is by far the number one thing that business owners need to have before they make their first hire. And then the virtual assistant we can match. Or if you're not with an agency, you can start to look at a job description and feel out, okay, I can meet these parameters and be honest about it and to what you're saying. If you're a virtual assistant or a social media manager, make sure you're identifying those questions in the job interview. What social media platforms are you discussing? What is success for you? For business owners, it might be I just need an online presence. I just want to post three times a week on Instagram so it looks like I'm not dead. For others, it might be, no, this is my lead source, and this is what I need help with. So it depends on their goals as well, I think, for what the placement, is.

Jonathan Green: I think that's really helpful because so often people are so excited to have a hire, and then it doesn't go well, and they wait six to twelve months to try again. The other thing I find that a lot of people, by a lot of people, I mean me starting out, don't do is write down any of their processes. And I think it's so hard to get hired by someone like, oh, management, social media, do it the way I do. Well, what do you do? Right? What templates do you use? What structure do you use? How often do you post? What's your posting strategy or whatever part of the business it is? And we think that, oh, starting out, I don't need processes yet. I don't need to write it down. I'm always remembering this is like the worst metaphor, but there's this episode of Ghostbusters, the cartoon where the guy makes a machine that just sucks all the ghosts in the cities into it, and then it explodes at the end of the episode, and the guy goes, hey, no problem. We'll just build another one from your notes. And the guy goes, what notes? And that's what I always think about when somebody can't describe their process, can't describe their macro. Like, you can't push one button and do it again. You talk about push one button, it rebuilds the website. Can you push one button and make a social media post? And that's really an area where a lot of people struggle. Like as a Ghost writer, I am so templated when I create content, my questions I very rarely ask a question for the first time. I've been doing it so long. I've been doing it for seven years now, eight years, and I ask the same questions every time because I know the questions that work. And it's a structure. I have three outlines. Every book falls into one of the three outlines that I use. And a lot of people go, oh, a creative process has no structure. No, they have the most structure. Like the most successful phone salespeople are following a very tight script. So how can people and this is something I wonder is how can people or when should people start to make templates in their entrepreneurial journey? Because a lot of time they start doing something they don't know. If it's going to work, they go, Why write it down or create a system if I don't even know if I'm going to make money doing it?

Molly Rose Speed: I think from the beginning, the analogy I'm using is like my husband's mastering Barbecuing right now. And you know how if you change one thing, it changes the whole thing. So he started writing all the steps down if it's good, and then he can look back. And I think that's the place to be as a business owner. So if you don't have the mental acuity to do it and remember it in your mind, at least putting some notes in a Google Doc of the steps you took and the outcome, if it worked, is very important. If you're not a written person, using something like loom is great for recording your processes because you never know. As a business owner, you should always have the outcome that I'm going to scale faster than I think I'm going to. Right? That's the goal. That's what we want to happen. So set ourselves up for that by recording our processes. What are the steps that you take every Monday morning? I bet you they don't change if you start writing them down. And you can get super granular on exactly the way that you write a social post or exactly the way that you upload a blog or whatever, the task is at hand. But I think from the beginning, knowing that it's always going to course correct.

Jonathan Green: I think that's really good because I actually was shooting I shot five or six looms before this call because I was teaching one of my VAS one of my research writes, I said, here's the three steps short, video short, video short. And oftentimes I got to go back and watch them. Sometimes I have to go back and watch a training. There used to be really great tools. They don't make them anymore, where you could take they were like steps. You'd take a screenshot and you could write a description. Then you take another screenshot and write a description so you could create instruction manuals. Unfortunately, all those companies that make that software, they went away. And there's just one left that charges you a massive fee per picture you take. I'm like, well, who's going to use that? Only idiots of corporate who don't mind paying way more than it's worth. So Loom really has been I think they found their spot in the market, which is, that's what I use it for. Because when you write down the written version structure, sometimes you miss a step. Like, I learned from someone who was like their whole area was macros. He's like, a macro is when every time you push the button, the same thing happens. So if you follow the set of instructions to make a sandwich and there's a step missing at the end, there's no sandwich. And you learn that's the test. He has people do, and they always forget to write down, like, take the bread out of the refrigerator later. So if you don't include that step, you're not going to get a sandwich. And it's really interesting when you think of it that way is are these structures enough that someone could sit down, read those and do an okay job and get the thing you're expecting? It could be a bad social media post, but at least it's a social media post that looks like it's from you. And that's, I think the really value of videos, because you might forget when you're explaining, but the video will include every step. So I think this has really been great. I think it's very interesting that not only do you train people be virtual assistants, you actually help them to get to employment because I think that's where a lot of people get stuck. They're afraid to go out there, respond to job posts or postings or let people like people always say to me, jonathan, how do you get so many ghost rank? I just tell people I'm a ghostwriter, that's it. I don't do anything. I don't have a ghost writing website. It's not mentioned on my website. It's all referrals at this point. But whenever I meet people in person, they say, what do you do? I just say, oh, celebrity ghost writer. And that's generated enough leads for the last six or seven years just by saying it in passing. Often people don't want to say it until they're an expert.

Molly Rose Speed: And there's such a huge need for what you're talking about. Like, ghostwriting is in high demand, so you're recognizing the market needs this. People can't find good ghostwriters. That's really hard to do and you're confident in it, sounds like, and you have results, all of those things. If freelancers virtual assistants can start thinking like that. I am not only a virtual assistant, I'm a really, really good virtual assistant. The market needs me and I know I can deliver results. Just shifting that little bit and having integrity behind that is super important.

Jonathan Green: Yeah, people don't want they look down on certain things like, oh, I don't want to tell people I'm a ghostwriter until I've had a bunch of clients. Well, no one's going to hire you if your LinkedIn profile doesn't say it, if your Facebook profile doesn't say, if you don't have a business card that says if you don't tell people, well, then nobody knows. If it's a secret, the people who want to hire you also won't find out. And sometimes people only want to get clients. Oh, I only want to get a client through Craigslist and that's fine. I've gotten a lot of clients through Craigslist. Like, I've done really well on there. When I was starting out, that's where I got all my business way back in 2010. So I don't have a problem with that. But the number of people who, hey, my friend said you're a ghost writer. That's how almost every client conversation starts. It's that just planning, that seed, and it's fine. I'm a virtual assistant. What happens is I don't know a lot of virtual assistants. Most people don't. I only know the ones I've ever hired. Right? So then you're actually really unique. So when I says, oh, I need an assistant, I know someone. And you get so much business just from getting the word out to get started. But you're right about the confidence. Thing is that I started out out at so much less, more than I think it's 45 times less than I charge now. My first book when I did a client in 2016, and now I charge definitely more. And honestly, the books aren't that much better. It's less work for me because I've gotten better at it. I'm smoother, at. I used to do so much more research and a lot more effort, a lot more sweat into it. But now I have, of course, a little bit more confidence. And that's what people pay for, is the confidence I often talk about. People are like, well, what about my writing samples? Guess what? Nobody reads them. I can tell you right now, nine out of ten clients don't even ask me for a writing sample. And the ones who do never read it. Never, never. I thought about actually putting on, like, a send receipt on the zip file to see if they ever unzip it. So I was thinking about last week. I was like, I want to find out if anyone even unzips it, because I don't think they do. They're actually just looking to see if you say, yeah, I have a sample. What people are looking for is confidence more than anything else, because I figured out early on, if I just act like they're lucky I'm even talking to them, everyone hires you if you just act, oh, I don't know if I'm going to take on any new clients. What's your book about? Let me think about it. That's all it takes, right? And then there's a lot of fear about pricing. Oh, if I raise my price, and it's like, no matter what my price is, there always someone who goes, oh, that's too low. I don't want to hire you. The number doesn't matter. It could be a million dollars a book. And there's somebody goes, I don't want to be with the trash writer. I need a $2 million book person. I'm like, I'll do two, but it's too late, right? Why? That happens.

Molly Rose Speed: But yeah, too late so much. And having that whole booking process down is also something not to discredit, right? When someone comes to you, needs to hire you, what does that discovery call look like for you? Every piece of that you're the expert coming. They're coming to you, needing your services. But virtual assistants often become the person on the receiving end, where the business owner is like, this is what I need. Tell me all the ask me all these questions. No, you're the expert. Come into their business and say, I did a little audit of your business. This is what I'm noticing as well. I saw from your email that you need these five things. This is my background in supporting these specific things. I have capacity to take on one more client right now. Make the scarcity just like anyone else would, and to your point, just the confidence, and it'll change the game. And then once that phone call is over, sending them that in written form, like being really organized and actually acting as an organized VA, which we need to be through. The interview process, is also something people don't do or for. You sending writing examples, they don't open them, but it's part of the process that you can't discredit.

Jonathan Green: Yeah, I think this has been really great. I think a lot of people are going to see, oh, I can actually make good money as a VA. It's an opportunity, and it doesn't have to be the end of the road. You go through your program, you learn how to be a VA. You start making money, and you use that money to buy software, tools, or training. You need to building your own thing, whether it's your own software, your own templates. That's what I used to do. Like, I started off selling SEO services. I did it for about 18 months, and then I started making courses about SEO, and I never looked back. I was like, oh, I can make more money doing this part of it, right? I'd rather sell shovels than do shoveling. And that's really kind of always more iterations, but it's also fine if it's what you want to do forever. But I think that, like you said earlier, the market is expanding so much right now, the demand outpaces the supply of writers by ten x right now. It's such a seller's market, whether you're doing blog posts or articles or any type of writing. And there's all these AI tools coming out right now, and everyone's like, oh, they're going to replace writers? I'm like, no, they just make it easier for me. I writing a new book. AI just doing the first draft, but AI always sounds like AI. It's not even close to replacing a person. And you can tell. And now Google's put out a new algorithm update that reverse engineers because they have the same AI software we do. Because it's their software, they can tell if using all the transcription services. They're using Google's API. So Google knows if it came from one of their transcription softwares and where it was done. And all that means they can suppress that. So the need for writers who are creative and can think is actually growing. And it's the same for most online skills. People that can do TikTok, people that can do instagram, people that can do Facebook, people that can do ads. The need is so much bigger than supply that I think it really is a market where the VAS are going to start to have a huge opportunity, especially the ones that can actually do it. That's where the real advantage is. So I think this is very exciting. Where can people find out about you online, find out more about your programs and see if, oh, maybe this is something I want to do.

Molly Rose Speed: Yeah. So if you're looking to become a virtual assistant, I have a professional certification program that you can find on virtualassistantacademy.com, and it teaches you the business side and the initial tech side of being a VA. As we discussed, there's a lot that goes into it. If you're looking to hire a virtual assistant, you want to go through a professional service to do that. I own an agency called Virtualassistantmanagement.com. We professionally place you with virtual assistants and have a great success rate and love being able to match predominantly military spouses with business owners.

Jonathan Green: That's great. I think people are going to love that. And again, that's Virtualassistantacademy.com, guys, so make sure to check it out. Thank you so much for spending so much time with us today, Molly.

Molly Rose Speed: Thanks so much for having me, Jonathan. I appreciate it.

Jonathan Green: Thanks for listening to today's episode. I love podcasting, and it's never too late to start your amazing podcast. Get started with my free guide at forward slash checklist.

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