Introducing the Virtual Assistants (VAs) of the Hey! Do I Need a VA? Podcast

0:00 Hi, welcome to the podcast that explores what virtual assistants want business owners to know when they start asking themselves the question, Hey, do I need a VA? I'm Rachel Davila. And after 18 years as a virtual assistant going it alone, I experienced the steep learning curve from the other side of the VA client relationship when I hired my own assistant. Joining me on this podcast is a group of friends and colleagues who all have their own take on what busy entrepreneurs need to know to find, hire, and work with a virtual assistant and mindfully answer the question, Hey, do I need a VA?

0:44 Let's get this episode started. Hi, everyone. Welcome to our very first episode of Hey, Do I Need a VA? The podcast. Joining me today are my friends and colleagues, Leanne Ermele, Bree Bevy, and Sydney Hubbard. And I'm your host, Rachel Davila. And my business is Extra Hands Virtual Assistance. We're going to go around and share with you a little bit about us and why we feel we're the experts for this topic to help clients who may be on the journey to finding a VA ask the important questions of what they need to know to find, hire, and work with a VA.

1:33 So I'll wrap up. But Leanne, you're in the top right of the screen. So I'm going to let you go first. Tell us who you are, what you do, how long you've been in business. Where you're located. All of the big juicy pieces. Okay. I'm Leanne Ermele. My business is Handling Business, and I'm located in San Diego. People can find me at handlingbusiness.com. I started my VA business a little over 25 years ago, back when VA wasn't actually a thing. I had to explain what a VA or a virtual assistant was to everybody.

2:14 I left corporate America when I gave birth to twins with special needs and was no longer having the ability to work a regular nine to five job. Still needing to make an income, I turned to admin work and doing it virtually. Back then, clients would do things like fax me their handwritten notes, and I would create PowerPoint presentations and put it on a disk and mail it back to them. Remember, 25 years ago. Okay, guys? Not just last year. Over time, technology improved, which was awesome. I added newsletters, websites, and now all things technical to my services. I enjoy technology, and I'll enjoy learning what I can do with technology.

3:00 My clients benefit from my geekiness, and I get to do something that I enjoy for a living. Yeah. That's me. So, if anyone has a technical question for me, I just refer them to Leanne. I appreciate it. Technology is not my friend. So thank you, Leanne, for geeking out on technology. We need techie VAs like you. All right, Bree, tell us about you. Thanks, Rachel. My name is Bree. I'm actually in Canada, so I'm located in Edmonton, Alberta. I kind of stumbled into being a VA. I had a childcare business in my home for 20 years and got to the point where that didn't work for my family, but I still wanted something that was flexible, that I could work around my family's needs and be there for my kids.

3:51 I had a friend of mine who was struggling and having some things going on in her business that she was looking for support for, and so I offered to help her out. She was like, I wish I could organize things like you and coordinate things like you and find out and research like you. Within a week, she was like, how can I hire you? I was like, this is cool. You would pay me for this? Within six months, I transitioned out of my childcare business and started working for her. I started going to conferences, taking all these courses and found out that this was something I really, really loved. I started getting more clients and kind of growing things from there. I was sitting in a campground with my family working from a waterfall because we happen to have service. I'm like, this, everybody should be able to have the opportunity to do this, stay at home moms or people who feel stuck and don't want to do what they want to do.

4:37 And so I decided to try and build an agency. So I now have a team of eight of us and it's amazing. We all work together. We all have different strengths and we all coordinate and collaborate together so that clients kind of have a one-stop shop is what we're trying to do. So you don't have to go find different people for all the different things and try and get them all to talk together. We do that in the background and we help walk clients through not knowing exactly where they want to start or what that looks like and just kind of bouncing ideas and being that team member with them to kind of walk them through where they could get support and what that could look like and see, ride the waves with them. Because as we all know, an entrepreneur journey is not what you ever think it is. And it always has the roller coaster ride that you didn't see coming.

5:19 And so it's nice to know that you don't have to ride those things on your own. And that's what we strive to do is to team up with our clients and be through all that with them. Nice. And don't forget that you have this new social media component. Yeah. So we do social media strategy planning as well. So for people who are starting out, they're really stuck on just even the ideas and what to what in the universe they want to post on their social media, but they don't have necessarily the capital to be able to pay somebody else to do it. We have strategy calls where we'll sit down with you. We'll come up with what the content strategy will look like, create a strategy plan that you can then go and implement and we can meet monthly and just come up with the ideas for you have somewhere to start coordinate, get the ideas.

6:02 And then you can take that and implement it on your own to reduce costs, but be accessible and still have support. It was very helpful. I went through her pillars and then I come up with the ideas, but my assistant, Sydney, who is next gets to put it together for me. Yeah. How about you? I'm Sydney, Sydney Hubbard. I started the work like a year and a half ago. I'm I'm in my sophomore year at UC Berkeley and I started doing the work the summer of my senior year.

6:51 It started really just as a way to make some money. And I talked to my mom and my mom works with Rachel and I was like, oh, I can, I can help Rachel because I had been doing social media, Canva stuff. And it's, it's very, it's very fun for me. It's very simple for me. And and yeah, and then I developed my own little business called Rose Design and Tarot.

7:35 And yeah, that's, that's what I do. I'm the newbie. I'm the doer VA. I anything that a client throws at me, I will do it, learn to do it or hand it off to probably Leanne. Yeah. And I use they've unpronounced. Thank you. Thank you. Yes. Sydney has been very helpful for me. And part of that help was in recognizing that there is a difference between being the VA, the virtual assistant for clients and being the client with a VA.

8:23 And Sydney taught me a whole lot on my journey when I hired them because it was something that I had. I was always the one leading clients through and seeing how different VAs can be and how they handle business differently. That was really what sent me on my journey to help clients navigate through the finding, the hiring and the working with a VA landscape. I've been a VA since 2005. I found it on accident.

9:05 I was looking to be a professional organizer and my friend was like, you need a business name. And I went to the internet, which was fairly new back then and found a website of a virtual assistant. And I was like, what is this magic? This is exactly what I want to do. And what was great was I ended up talking with her, the owner of that business, because she was here in San Diego where I live. And she talked to me for an hour and there was no competition. There was no, oh, you can't be a VA because I'm a VA here.

9:46 It was this wonderful magic community of women entrepreneurs helping women entrepreneurs do their thing. And I loved that feel about it because then I could take my skills and gift it to other business owners and see that ripple that comes from when you're doing your zone of genius and you're helping your clients do their zone of genius and their clients get the benefit of all of that. I just love that kind of ripple effect. And so I am so grateful for Leanne and Bre and Sydney for being on the journey with me for their collaboration and support in helping my business grow, but also in when I don't know what I don't know, they can step in and help me, which is what I love because it helps each of us individually and it helps our clients.

10:54 And so having them on this journey with me for you, our listeners, or if you're watching this on YouTube, you get the benefit of all of our collective knowledge and experience. And I really hope that you ride this journey with us to learn how to find, hire, and work with a VA. We have great content for you. The topics we've created for this season of the Hey, Do I Need a VA podcast? I think you're really going to get some useful knowledge on your journey too. If you have any questions, you can email us.

11:38 I will put all of our contact information in the show notes. Well, actually, Sydney will put all of our contact information in the show notes, but we are all here to help you on your journey. So thank you for joining us for episode one. Stay tuned. Thank you for joining us on this episode of Hey, Do I Need a VA? The podcast. If you found this episode helpful, please leave a like, comment, or review, and feel free to join our Facebook group, Find, Hire, and Work with a VA for more tips and tools. If you have any questions, please email them to heyvapodcast.gmail.com.

12:18 We'll see you next time.