Business Opportunities Weblog

February 25, 2008 by Angela Shupe | 0 Comments

The Guardian:

Coffee breaks are the norm for many in the working world.

But for virtual assistant (VA) Jaime Lee Mann, who works from her Kingston home, a cup of java in a café setting during the day with company older than Sesame Street- age is a true treat.

“It’s just so nice to get out and have coffee with an adult,” this mother-of-two sighs with a smile as she settles into a seat at Beanz in downtown Charlottetown.

Mann is one of the growing number of virtual assistants who provide business support services such as bookkeeping, telephone answering, marketing, website maintenance and design, scheduling, e-mail management and other general administrative duties to small business operators who don’t need a full-time staff person.

“It’s a huge industry that nobody’s heard about. It’s like a secret industry,” says Mann, who started her Mann Made Time VA business about two years ago.

Before that, she had worked in an administrative capacity, mainly in the real estate industry. But when her first daughter, Casey, now two-and-a-half, was born (daughter Shelby is six months), Mann knew she didn’t want to return to the regular work world.

Being an entrepreneurial spirit, she mulled over a myriad of business options that would allow her to stay at home. By chance, she discovered the VA industry.

In just four months, her work roster was filled with realtor clients and other businesses such as a software developer and business consultant.

Mann recently moved into a multi-VA company so now she has a team of about 15 associates in Canada and the United States to whom she forwards work she cannot take on herself.

She has clients as far away as Newfoundland and New Orleans. Most are retainer clients who book blocks of time over a specific span of time instead of her working on a project-by-project basis.

Being a work-at-home mom presents its own challenges, many of which Mann has highlighted in a series of e-books on how to start a VA business.

“One whole chapter was dealing with distractions at home,” she says.

“You have to be really, really scheduled and use nap time to its full advantage. The biggest thing is if you can focus on the really important stuff while the kids are in bed, and since the kids are number one — they are the reason I started this — I’ll often get up early before they’re even out of bed in the morning.”

Of course, working at home means there’s no getting away from it.

“That’s the thing, this darned computer, it’s always there. Work doesn’t go away,” Mann says with a laugh.

Image from Stock.xchng.

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Tags: Virtual Assistant