Hey, lend me your ear, newbies. This is a great field to move toward if you’ve had a drive to do administrative work and don’t already work in a physical office to relieve that urge.
Recently, layoffs have put skilled people into a tight place. They have the skills and are looking for places to market them. Tough thing may be that these folks need ‘today’ money. Only for the VERY skills, VERY connected and VERY fortunate, will a new virtual assistant business become ‘today’ money even close to today.
More likely, just as with most other business start-ups, the money will be day after day after tomorrow. Or even further out.
If you want to put your knowledge, abilities and skills to work for you in your own business…become another Virtualista so to speak, be prepared to BUILD and BUILD. Then WORK, LEARN, WAIT, MARKET, LEARN, WORK, HANG-ON.
There are some excellent networking possibilities that can give you a jump start such as VAnetworking.com There are both free sides and paying sides for you to cruise and learn what has been shared by the network in the past. You can pose questions and ask for evaluation and opinion. Be ready to take advice that is softly delivered, but not soft experience by a long shot. The virtual assistant members are, as a rule, very polite and gentle with newbies. However, their time in the trenches makes their experience a very active one, not passive. Try to apply what they share with you if you can see it might apply to you. You can always go back, but listen, take what you can use and run with it.
At Particularly Virtual and on @Bar JD Virtual Professionals, we know from working on the business since 2003, it can be discouraging. We know that sometimes a REAL job is the answer to today money while spare time is spent planning, learning and preparing for the future business. If you don’t want it badly enough to wait, then you may miss out. That doesn’t make a statement on you, but face the point fairly that stopping your pursuit of a business in the virtual world is your decision at any point.
When anyone ventures out into the independent business world as a ‘part-time’ thing, there is no part-time anything. That means working full time to survive and subsidize your equipment, learning, networking and more. Then working on that learning and planning during the time that you might like to be watching TV or playing golf or whatever….it is that ‘part’ of your time that your business can and will demand until you either become busy, then successful or you quit.
