How to Start a Virtual Assistant Business With No Experience

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If you think you need experience to start a virtual assistant business, you’re mistaken. All you need to get started is a laptop, some decent Wi-Fi, and the decision to choose action over perfection.

Who Is Abbey Ashley?

I’m Abbey Ashley, and I’ve trained over 7,000 individuals to start, grow, and scale their virtual assistant businesses from scratch. Over the past decade of doing this, I’ve seen the virtual assistants who really scale their businesses, who hit those 10, 20, even 50K months, and the ones who struggle. In my experience, what makes the difference is not previous experience as a VA. The system breaks down into four simple steps, and these are steps that can be taken pretty quickly. In fact, most of my students are able to launch their business and start looking for clients in as little as 2 weeks.

Choose Action Over Perfection

Choosing action over perfection means thinking about how quickly you could make these decisions, knowing that you could try something and if it doesn’t quite work, it’s okay to pivot a little. We’re going to fail forward.And we’re going to rapidly try things. We’re going to make quick decisions, and that’s going to help propel us toward success just by taking quick action.

Step 1: Audit Your Skills

Step number one is to audit your skills. This is easier than ever with ChatGPT. You can go into a brand new conversation and say, I have experience as, and then list out your experience. Again, you don’t have to have previous experience. You can say, “I’m a stay-at-home mom. I volunteered on the school board or the PTA. I’m a Starbucks barista.” Any type of experience works, even if you just say, “I’m a high school graduate.” This process can still work for you.

I’m going to say a Starbucks barista, and I’m thinking of starting a virtual assistant business. List out 30 services I could offer. And then I always add this. Ask me any questions you need to build the list. It’s going to spit out 30 services that I could realistically offer as a beginner. Even if I don’t know how to do some of these things, you can learn. We have to think of it this way. Most small business owners are already doing these things in their business. They’re already answering emails. They’re already posting on social media.

If you understand the general concept, then once you start working for a business, you’re going to be able to go in and really understand how they answer emails, and then you’ll slip into their system. Over time, maybe you improve it and make it better, but this is essentially how it works. The list includes inbox management, customer service, live chat support, appointment scheduling, calendar management, client follow-up, data entry, spreadsheet organization, managing social media DMs, blog formatting, FAQ creation, travel research, and event support.

If there are things on this list that you can’t do, it’s okay. Take them off. You don’t need 30 things to offer. You can start with 10, 15, 20 items and that is totally fine.

Step 2: Package Your Services

Keep your packages simple

Step number two is to package your services. Once you have an idea of the types of services that you could offer to small business owners, you’re going to want to price and package those services. I’ve been training virtual assistants for over 10 years, and my best advice if you’re just getting started as a brand new virtual assistant is to keep it simple.I would strongly recommend just simple hourly packages.

Here’s a look at what that could look like. If my rate was $30 an hour, a package of 20 hours would be $600 a month. Essentially, that small business owner would get 20 hours a month or 5 hours a week of my services. In the package, this is where you list your services. You can have five, you can have 10, you can have 30. But in my opinion, every single package just includes all your services. All you’re doing is charging hourly for any of the tasks on that list. I think this is the best way to get started.

Aim for your core four

For many people, signing one of those packages, let’s say a 40-hour package for $1,200 a month, means working 10 hours a week and making $1,200 a month for your family. This can be a real game changer. Some of you may want to get one, two, three, four clients. Our goal at Virtual Savvy is that you get your core four, because in our experience most people can replace their full-time income with four to seven clients. We’re all about getting that core four, but maybe you just want one. You want that $1,200 a month, and that’s great.

Some people have goals beyond this. This is where we have tons of success stories of our students who have built six and even seven figure agencies because they’ve built a team. It’s not just them doing the work. Once they’ve maxed out their hours, they get subcontractors to do more of the work. Taisa is one of these success stories, and she reports building a million-dollar business using our methods. We’ve decided on the services we’re going to offer, and we have priced and packaged those services. Again, I recommend around $30 an hour as a good place to start. You can do 35, you can do 40, that’s totally fine, but that’s really the sweet spot for these beginner general virtual assistant services.

Step 3: Set Up Onboarding

Step number three is to set up our onboarding. Essentially what we do is we think about what happens when a person says yes. Then we plan out all the steps you’d have to take for when a person says yes, so you know exactly what you’re going to do. If somebody’s interested in your services, I would recommend setting up a Zoom account so you can get on a call and talk them through it. If someone says yes, I want to pay you, you have to have a payment system set up for that. We recommend Dubsado. In the very beginning, you can set up a simple PayPal invoice. That’s totally fine.

We strongly recommend that you have a contract. Students inside of our 90-day accelerator get access to all of our onboarding systems, all of our templates, our portfolio of templates, our discovery call templates, all of that. But you want to have that client sign a contract. Even if they’re family, this is something I’d have them do. I would also recommend that the client have some way to share passwords with you. We use a tool called Dashlane. That way they can share the login information with you. These are the kind of things almost like a checklist that you’re going to want to have when you onboard a new client. Once you feel really good about the steps that are going to happen once a client says, “Yes, I want to work with you,” you’re ready for step four.

Step 4: Land Your First Client

Start with your personal network

Step number four is to land your first client. You want to go out and you want to be marketing your services. There are so many different ways to get clients. You can post on socials. And you can go on LinkedIn. You can apply for the free jobs that are listed in our community. There are free jobs posted there every day, and it costs nothing to join that group. But in my experience, the best place to find clients is your personal network. I know that sounds like you don’t want to reach out to friends and family, but even if your friends and family are not business owners, likely you know one person who owns a small business.

A real estate agent, a health coach, someone who owns a mom and pop store or a food truck. Just like you likely know one person that runs a small business, everyone you know likely knows one person that has a small business. So just that act of telling people in your network, and posting it on your socials, makes a difference. Not your Facebook page that has three followers. Yes, you can post it there, too. But go on your personal Facebook page and your personal Instagram. Literally go through your phone and call people and text people and go to a local networking event.

Tell people in your actual community who know you and love you and want to cheer you on. Tell them about what you’re doing. It’s actually scarier than posting on LinkedIn, where no one’s going to see it. You can hit post and run away. But most clients are going to come from those personal relationships. So you’ve got to get out there. You’ve got to tell someone what you’re actually doing.

Don’t wait until everything is ready

It’s never too early to start marketing, even if you don’t have steps one through three totally done. Let’s say that you’re still figuring out your pricing and your packaging, and you’re still getting your onboarding together. Go ahead and start telling people about your business, because what will light a fire under you is getting a discovery call booked, someone saying, “Yeah, I’d like to talk to you.” You’re going to get your onboarding and your pricing and packaging together real quick if you have somebody actually wanting to work with you.

Every single one of my 7,000 students started exactly where you are. They are nurses. And they are teachers. They were stay-at-home moms executives. They were coming from a place of saying, “I just want something that provides me freedom, that provides me flexibility. And I want to start with the skills that I already have.”

That’s what I encourage for you as well. If marketing is the thing that scares you, and after doing this 10 years, I know that it’s probably the thing that scares people the most, the free training is about 45 minutes long and available on demand. It tells you more about how to get clients. It also covers our accelerator program, which is our 90-day program where people come in, land their first client in those 90 days, and work directly with our team to do so. Start with the skills you already have, and take the first step.