I was forced to leave my corporate career to care for our premature son. The plan was I would take care of our son for two years until he is given a clean bill of health by the neurologist. But barely a month into WAHMing, I knew I would never go back to corporate. I was like a fish in a bowl that was thrown into the sea.
Today, family, friends, and acquaintances ask me random questions like…
So you’re a VA? What is that?
What does a VA do?
Can I be a VA like you?
Can you help me become a VA?
Nobody asked me WHY.
Why I do what I do. Why am I so happy doing what I do.
I have conducted a number of workshops on how to become a Virtual Assistant, how to become a WAHM, how to stay sane while WAHMing, and in my last classroom workshop, I shared my VA Success Blueprint. In all these workshops, I ask this question…
Why?
Why do you want to work from home?
And I have received answers like…
I’m tired of commuting to and from work.
I want to earn in dollars, too.
I want to be present for my child’s milestones.
I want to own my time.
These are all good reasons. And the answer to your BIG why will play a big part in determining what niche best fits you. You need a driving motivator to help you develop skills and abilities that will fulfill your BIG why. You are going to design and build your business around your reasons for wanting to become a WAHM. Or a VA. Or a graphic designer. Or even a product-based business. Whatever niche you plan to be in, your motivator will help you develop a long-term and profitable business.
As a long-term WAHM and VA, I’ve been in enough fora and online courses to gather people’s top motivators for becoming a WAHM.
Flexibility
Having the power in your hands to make time for both work and family. You can make time for yoga (or Zumba), take up a hobby (crochet, anyone?), attend a parent-teacher conference (unless you are also homeschooling like us), and still be productive at work.
Independence
Not having a boss look over your shoulder anytime. Having the freedom to be creative on how you approach work. Being able to create systems and processes that work for you so you are more productive and happier with your work.
Mobility
Being able to work anywhere. Work at home, in a cafe, in a hospital lobby, I’ve done all these. Geez, I even brought my work one time in the cemetery, on All Saints’ Day. Migrate to another country in a heartbeat, and bring your job with you.
Earning Potential
The more skills you have, the more opportunities you have for earning more. The harder you work, the more you are rewarded. This does not happen in employment where your salary is fixed. And even your annual salary increases have caps.
Lifestyle
Choose when to work, where to work, and how hard you have to work. Be a part-time soccer mom while still maintaining a full-time status with your client.
Family
Being a hands-on parent. Being present for each and every one of your child’s milestones. Or maybe you want to homeschool your kids. Or be your parents’ caregiver.
Health Challenge
When you cannot commute to and from work every day, or have limited time and mobility to work outside the home. (I used to have blind transcriptionists.)
All these motivators are good to start with.
Sustaining a WAHM life, living it long-term, is another matter. And that’s why you need to have a strong and solid conviction on why you want to be a WAHM.
Let me share with you an example.
About four years into WAHMing, I had a former officemate approach me, asking to help her become a virtual assistant. She was my staff in my corporate life. I worked with her side by side for years, so I knew she could be a VA. So I trained her. Our agreement was that I would find her a client when she’s ready. And I did.
On the day that I signed the contract for her, she quit. She said it’s not for her. So she went back to employment. And to this day, she’s still working outside her home.
Yes, she wanted to become a WAHM. But maybe the life of a WAHM is something that she’s not ready for. Her reason for wanting to become a WAHM was not strong enough for her to weather it out.
You may want to become a WAHM for a wide variety of reasons, but there should always be that one great reason that will keep you going each and every day. Because believe me, it’s not a walk in the park. And it’s not for everyone.
And so I ask you, have you determined your BIG why? Do you have the skills to support your passion? And is your passion supportive of your skills?
If you answered YES to the questions above, then you are ready to become a WAHM.
Do you have questions, comments or feedback about this post? Please leave a reply below, or post them on my Facebook Page.
It’s past the middle of October, and because I always do my goal setting in November each year, I thought it’s a good time to share with you what I have learned to be the top 10 virtual assistant skills that will be most in demand in 2018.
It worked to my advantage because I basically had no competition. Clients were mostly from the US and Canada, and the virtual assistants back then were the locals, meaning the empowered American and Canadian women who started this revolution of working from home. Offshore VAs like myself were very few. And independents like myself were just a handful. Most of the virtual workers I came across with during those days were actually working for companies. Companies find the clients, and they just assign projects to the virtual workers.
In my case, I ventured on my own. I went to Craigslist and scoured through the ads. I built my own website (a hideous one, I have to admit, because I did that at the time that I really had no technical experience), and sold myself to clients based on my corporate experience, my command of the English language, my passion for learning, my get-it-done attitude, and my sense of humor.
Today, the Philippines is one of the top sources of virtual workers, and the community of virtual assistants is growing exponentially. Workshops are happening almost every week, offered by just about anyone who has a working knowledge on the topic. There are even enterprising ones who offer workshops based on theory, without any hands-on experience at all.
The surge of the virtual assistant population is understandable. More and more people are opting to work from home. Mostly mothers who want to spend more time raising their children, and those who are just tired of battling traffic every day.
What this population growth means is that competition is getting stiffer, and the only way to stay in the game is to keep up with what the market demands.
The virtual assistance niche has been going through some shifts in the past years. When I started out, I was a general VA. Then came the time that I felt that the market was focusing more on specialized skills. Specialized niches pay more, and less stressful. While I continued to offer my services as a general VA, I spent time, money and effort on mastering a niche, and carved out some time from my daily schedule to allow myself to offer shopping cart set up as a project-based service.
Late last year, there was another shift. Clients now look for virtual assistants who can do multiple specialized niches. Say hello to the versatile virtual assistant.
So now, if one has to take on a client who has an online shopping cart, the virtual assistant has to know how to manage the website, manage the shopping cart, write and edit the copy of product description and site content, provide customer service support, edit graphics, manage social media… the list goes on.
Clients, especially the small business owners, are looking for people who can do it all, or at the very least, not afraid to learn every aspect of the business and be part of the operations. As a virtual assistant, these small business owners are my ideal clients, because there is an opportunity to grow.
In the workshop I recently attended, I learned that these virtual assistant skills are what will be most in demand in 2018.
Project Management Skills
Systems Thinking Skills
Online Community Management
Online Marketing Funnels
Writing & Editing Skills
Content Production & Marketing
Multimedia Editing Skills
Online Events Management
Marketing Technology
Website Management
Presently, I’ve been doing a lot of systems thinking, website management, project management, and writing and editing. What I would really love to learn are multimedia editing and marketing technology. I know how to do online community management because I’ve done a little bit of that before, but it’s not something that I would like to offer as a service. I also know content production, but I would like to focus my effort on that towards my own business, not the clients’. 🙂
So how about you? Are you ready for 2018?
Do you have questions, comments or feedback about this post? Please leave a reply below, or post them on my Facebook Page.
This is going to be a self-serving post, but please bear with me.
I call myself a business coach. No formal certificates to go with the claim, just me and my accomplishments as an entrepreneur, and the knowledge gained from the online courses I paid hard-earned money for just so I could learn how to organize my thoughts and processes and put them together in a coherent order.
I started out as a Virtual Assistant, and I have since registered my VA service as a business. So I’m a taxpayer, and still running my business from the four corners of our humble home, together with my husband.
Being an autodidact helped, so it was not long before I was also offering services outside of virtual assistance, like web hosting, website set up, theme customization, and online shopping cart set up.
Virtual assistance is a lifestyle. Some days I plan how our family will spend the day according to my workload, and some days I plan my workload depending on our family activities. Same thing with house chores. Like I can forget about house chores when I have deadlines. Or I can do house chores all day when I know that items in my inbox are not due in the next twelve hours.
Then came the time that I decided to take up a hobby. Because really, working from home can be draining. I needed a reset. And there were thousands of pesos worth of yarns in the house that were untouched. So I decided to take up crochet. And I was hooked, pun intended.
But a hobby costs money. And people who know me know that I’m big on financial management. I always make sure that I’m not spending more than we can afford. So I created another opportunity for me. I started selling my finished projects, and in a few months, I registered another business. So I now have a second TIN, ending in 001.
I’m known in the VA community because I’ve been conducting workshops on how to become a VA since 2013. So when I came out with my crafts business, people have been inquiring if I also have workshops on how to launch a crafts business. That’s how Hobbies to Business came to life.
I’m a results-oriented person, and after doing the classroom workshops for three years, I felt that I was not seeing my desired results, that of seeing my finishers soar in the VA niche.
Paying for a workshop in a classroom setting means an attendee gets what all the other attendees get. That is good up to a point where you get the general idea of what works and what does not. But when one factors in the circumstances of an individual, the general idea may not work anymore.
So I decided to switch to one-on-one coaching. I felt that creating a plan tailored fit for a particular person will give more bang for the buck.
But why coaching? Why not just mentor?
Uhmmmm… Because I also have a family to support. And creating a plan takes time. Time that I should put to use in putting food on the table, providing for the needs of our children, preparing for our retirement, and on a good day, resting.
Not to mention earning back the thousands of dollars that I spent (and still spending) on learning all the things that I could not learn for free.
And this is why my coaching is not free. Of course, I still mentor when the coaching period is over.
The big question now is: Do you want need to be coached by me?
And why do you need a business coach anyway?
Here are eight reasons why.
You need help getting started.
You have the skills, the qualifications, and the time to be a VA, but you don’t know how to get yourself out there. You don’t know how to find clients, or better yet, you don’t know what type of clients will be the best fit for you. A business coach who has been there and done that can steer you to the right direction.
You need a push to the next level.
Most people I know launch into the virtual assistance niche and just stay there. Three, four years into the niche, and they are still chasing clients, instead of having clients chase them. A business coach can guide you how you can move up to the next level. Just let me know your goals, and I can help you create the steps to reach them.
You are stuck.
You can get to a point where you get antsy where you’re at. You’ll feel tired and may even feel like giving up and start on another path. Or you can be just bored with the repetitive motions you go through each day. A business coach is someone you can discuss your thoughts with and help you find clarity to get you moving forward.
You have a “shiny object syndrome.”
I know this because I’ve been there. I would see social media posts of what other virtual assistants are doing, and I’d think, hey, I want to do that, too. When this happens, I lose focus of where I’m at. That is a dangerous attitude to have, and fortunately, I caught it early and was able to avoid doing it again. As your business coach, I can help you steer clear of this issue.
You need to have more balance.
You may find yourself working more and more for the success of your business and neglecting your family, or it can be that you’re spending more time with family that you don’t have enough time to spend on your business to make it successful. An experienced business coach can help you achieve a lifestyle that will allow you to enjoy both family and business. And throw in a hobby into the mix, too!
You need to find your purpose.
If you got into the virtual assistance business without knowing your “why” yet, a good business coach can help you find at least three of them. Knowing why you’re doing what you’re doing will allow you to focus on your unique selling proposition and identify your target audience.
You need a sound action plan.
Every business needs one. A business coach won’t make it for you, but they can help you narrow down what is essential and what is not, making your plan easy to implement. Because really, a great action plan is nothing if you cannot implement it.
You need accountability.
A virtual assistant is not an employee. A virtual assistant runs an independent business so there’s no one looking over your shoulder to see if what you’re doing matches your goals. Having someone to call you out when necessary is crucial to the success of a business.
You need a cheerleader and a friend.
That’s actually number 9, and I only said 8. But who’s counting? And yes, personal experience says we VAs need a friend. Working from home can be lonely. Lucky for me, I got to hire my husband, so I have an officemate to have coffee breaks with. Or give me a massage. And then there are days when I give my daughter a project, so I have someone to “bully” in the office. But some of us don’t have the perks I have.
I told you this post is self-serving. But only if you will hire me as your business coach. If not, then this is just another one of those informative posts that I put out there for my readers.
All 8 of them.
And if today is your first time to visit my blog, I thank you and welcome you with open arms. And I hope you’ll come back.
Been wanting to do this for a long time now, but have been dilly dallying because I’m afraid of the responsibility of managing a group. But it has to be done.
My dream is to build a community of people whose views on family, creativity and success resonate with mine. I need a platform where I can speak to people directly and encourage them to interact. I have a story to tell, and I want to encourage people to tell me theirs, too.
But here’s the thing.
I don’t need want a big community. The goal here is not to have a thousand members. The goal is to be able to interact with people and for all of us to be comfortable with each other. Comfortable enough to ask for help. Comfortable enough to be real.
And I really want to help others find their footing on this thing called WAHM-ing. That’s hard to do in a big community. I can spread myself so thin that I might not be able to help at all. So I’m going to build my tribe slowly. And be as real as I can be. My audience will find me.
I was going to write about the upcoming Philippine Homeschool Conference happening on October 7 at the Treston International College today, but just before I logged in, I opened an email from Coursera letting me know of new courses that they think would interest me.
And I got to thinking, maybe I should write something different. Like adult homeschool.
Our eldest child was homeschooled in elementary. Then she moved on to a Science high school. She’s now in college, and doing pretty well. Our two younger children are still homeschooled. Not showing signs of wanting to leave our home academy yet, but each year, I prepare for that eventuality.
Homeschooling our children taught me a lot of things. In fact, I may have learned more from them than them from me. It depends on how one views learning, actually.
I think our approach to homeschooling is more on guiding our kids to be autodidacts. Maybe because I’ve found my happiness in being an entrepreneur without ever taking a formal course on how to become one. I learned on my own. I was in adult homeschool from the time I left my corporate life. And I think it paid off.
Benefits of going to adult homeschool
I’m earning more.
Well, not that much. But more than what I would be earning had I stayed in employment. I’m staying competitive in today’s job market because I am teaching myself new skills. I can offer other services using skills I didn’t imagine I’d know when I was working in a conglomerate. It’s just like, send-more-entries-for-more-chances-of-winning type of thing.
I’m growing my circle of friends.
When I enroll in a course, I make sure that I visit the forums. I meet people from different countries and stay connected with some. Also, with my increasing knowledge base, I become confident in offering new services. In the process, either I find myself serving a new client, or working with a new colleague with a different set of expertise. Either way, these newfound contacts are amazing.
I’m enjoying my life more.
When I learned how to crochet, it was a revelation. I never thought I’m a creative person. But I am. I know that now. I’m claiming it.
When I learned how to set up online shopping carts and websites, you are not going to believe the happiness I felt. Like I was doing the jig in my mind, only to realize I was actually doing the jig, period.
Each time I troubleshoot a site, adding a bit of code here and there, it felt like my chest would burst with pride.
Adult homeschool changed me from being a passive consumer of knowledge to actively choosing what I want to learn. From crochet, knitting and quilling, to affiliate marketing, coaching and coding. And as I learn each new skill, I enjoy the positive feeling that comes with finally doing it on my own. Of becoming a master, later on.
Common Barriers
Time.
I know a lot of people would wonder how I find the time. But the thing is, I don’t. I don’t find time. I make time.
I have a busy work life. My virtual assistance business is busy. I have more crochet projects than I can comfortably handle. We don’t have a househelp. And we homeschool. So when do I get the time to be in adult homeschool?
I make time.
I download the course videos on my phone, and listen to them on the drive to and from the grocery. Instead of being online on Facebook, I’d spend my downtime watching the videos. Or if there is just audio, I crochet while listening to the lecture. And whenever possible, I choose a course that allows a student to finish at her own pace. Or at the very least, something that will not require too many exams.
Cost.
You can do this for free.
Here are my top picks on free education:
Coursera – This is my go-to site. They work with top universities to offer free online classes. I have a few certificates from the courses I took with them.
Khan Academy – I enrolled my kids here, and then I got hooked myself. My favorite part is practicing my math.
Code Academy – There’s free, and there’s PRO. Depending on your needs and your end-goal. For now, I’m staying with free.
Udacity – This is like Coursera, but more on technical courses.
CreativeLive – Needless to say, my favorite section here is the Craft and Maker Topics.
YouTube EDU – This one, I discovered through my son. He found it himself. Told you, he knows more than I do. There’s primary and secondary education, there’s university, and you can also subscribe per subject.
Duolingo – I have bookmarked this site, but I have yet to try it out. I have once taken a foreign language course in Coursera. It’s called Financial Accounting. So maybe I’ll try this site soon. I might fare better here.
There are hundreds more sites you can learn courses from, absolutely free. The list above are just the ones I have tried out. But if you are really that hungry for knowledge, just go to Open Education Database, or Open Culture. Those sites will give you more than enough choices.
Here’s an example of a video from YouTube that my son watches.
Location.
I’m writing about adult homeschool, remember? So unless you are planning to bring your learning materials with you to the grocery, the doctor’s clinic or to a boring get-together at the beach, your location should not be a problem.
Study in the car, on the dining table, even in bed.
I do all these. But mostly, in my home office. I really like my office. A lot.
So anyway, learning new things can also help beat old-age ailments like dementia and Alzheimer’s. It keeps our brain healthy.
To enjoy learning, here are a few tips.
Adopt a growth mindset. Was it Oprah who said, “What you believe, you become“? Believe that you can learn new things, and you will. One is never too old. I learned crochet when I was forty-something.
Change your idea of learning. Forget the idea that you need to sign up and pay for a class to learn something new. Or that you need a certificate to show that you actually learned something.
Set your goals. Like I give myself at least three goals a year. Migrate a site. Create a pattern. Read 5 books on self-development. Anything. Whatever applies to you, and whatever you think will make you happy and accomplished at the end.
Identify resources. I already shared with you my top picks for my own adult homeschool, so start with those, and add your own.
Ask questions. Your family. Your friends. Maybe reach out to the author of the book you’re reading. Or take on an accountability partner.
Join groups. Start with the people you know. Find people who have the same learning goals as you do. It’s more fun to learn that way. Unless you really are the introvertest introvert.
Put your knowledge to work. Learning crochet is not much fun if you only have one set of hooks. That’s me trying to justify my 4 sets, and another one to arrive soon. But seriously, take some action. Listening to podcasts about health and fitness will be wasted if you won’t even follow a healthy diet or get a good workout once a week.
Share what you’re learning.
I just did.
And I promise to write about the Philippine Homeschool Conference next time. Meanwhile, I hope you enjoyed this one.
Do you have questions, comments or feedback about this post? Please leave a reply below, or post them at my Facebook Page.
