Being Good at the Work Isn’t Enough to Build a Good VA Business
Your skills might make you an excellent VA. Building a business around them requires a whole other skill set.
You’re good at what you do. Actually, you might be amazing at it.
You organise the chaos. You spot what’s missing. You remember the thing your client mentioned three weeks ago and quietly make sure it gets done.
You build the automation, manage the project, organise the launch, tame the inbox, deal with the customer and generally make life considerably easier for the people who hire you.
Your clients trust you. They recommend you. They might even regularly tell you they don’t know what they’d do without you.
Lovely.
But I have a slightly uncomfortable question for you.
Are you as good at running your business as you are at supporting theirs?
Because they’re two very different skill sets.
Your skills got you here.
Most experienced VAs aren’t struggling because they don’t know how to do the work.
You’ve probably brought years of experience into your business from previous roles, then added another layer of knowledge through the clients you’ve supported since becoming a VA.
That’s valuable.
And if clients continue paying you, renewing their contracts and referring other people to you, you already have plenty of evidence that you can deliver. But competence can hide a multitude of sins.
A busy client roster can make an underdeveloped business look successful for quite a long time.
Money is coming in. The diary is full. Clients are happy. You’re busy. So everything must be working… right? Not necessarily.
Sometimes you’ve accidentally built yourself another job
Look underneath the client work and things can get interesting.
Maybe most of your clients came through referrals, so you don’t really have a consistent way of generating leads.
Your pricing has evolved depending on who asked for what.
Your services have been tweaked so many times that you’re not entirely sure what the standard version is anymore.
Your processes mostly live inside your head.
Your marketing happens when you remember, or have time after client work.
You haven’t looked properly at your numbers for a while.
CEO time exists theoretically somewhere between “finish the report” and “collapse on the sofa”.
And your plan for the next 12 months? More clients would be nice.
Sound familiar?
From the outside, you have a successful VA business. From the inside, you’re wondering why running it requires so much of you.
That’s usually the point where working in your business isn’t enough anymore. You’ve got to start working on it too.
There are skills for the work — and skills for the business
Nobody really prepares you for how many different disciplines business ownership involves.
Being excellent at email management doesn’t automatically teach you how to sell. Knowing Airtable inside out doesn’t teach you how to price. Being an incredible project manager doesn’t automatically give you a marketing strategy.
Client delivery is one part of your business. There’s also:
Sales.
Creating opportunities and confidently converting the right ones.
Marketing.
Helping the right people understand who you are, what you do and why it matters to them.
Finance.
Understanding what comes in, what goes out, what’s actually profit and what the business needs to generate to support your life.
Operations.
Creating systems, processes and ways of working that make the business easier to run.
Client experience.
Intentionally shaping everything surrounding your service, from first enquiry to final goodbye.
Strategy.
Knowing what you’re building and making decisions that move you towards it.
Leadership.
Being willing to make those decisions even when the comfortable option would be to carry on exactly as you are.
That’s the other work. And unfortunately, nobody is paying you an hourly rate to do it. Which is exactly why it’s so easy to neglect.
Referrals can hide a multitude of sins.
Now, I LOVE a good referral. Someone essentially saying, “she’s brilliant, you should speak to her” before you’ve spent a penny acquiring that lead? Yes please.
But there’s a potential trap here.
If you’ve built most of your business through word of mouth, you may never have needed to develop the muscles required to consistently generate opportunities yourself.
Then a long-standing client leaves.
Suddenly, there’s a four-figure-a-month-shaped hole in your revenue and you realise you haven’t actively marketed your business for two years.
Your website hasn’t been updated. Your mailing list is gathering digital dust. You’re not entirely sure what you’d say if someone asked why they should work with you rather than another VA.
And now you need another client. Preferably yesterday.
A referral is a fantastic lead source. It isn’t a business development strategy by itself. Your business needs ways of creating opportunities that aren’t completely dependent on somebody else remembering your name at exactly the right moment.
Your clients cannot always get the best of you
This one can sting a little.
Because we’re service providers. We’re wired to deliver.
Client deadline versus writing your own newsletter? Client wins.
Client request versus reviewing your services? Client wins.
Client project versus documenting your processes? Client wins.
And suddenly you’ve been saying “I’ll do it when things calm down” for approximately three financial years. They probably aren’t going to calm down. You have to deliberately make space.
Protect time in your own business for exactly this reason. Make the first week of every month CEO time.
Start your working day early and give yourself at least an hour beforehand to work on the business before client delivery begins, then keep space at the end of your client-facing day to work in the business and prepare for what’s coming next.
That time isn’t leftover time. It’s business time.
Because if every useful hour you have belongs to clients, who exactly is building your business?
You don’t need to become an expert in everything.
Before you look at that list of business skills and start researching seventeen new certifications, behave. You don’t need to personally master every discipline involved in running a business. You need to understand enough to make good decisions about them.
You don’t need to become an accountant. You do need to understand your numbers.
You don’t need to become a brand strategist. You do need clarity about who your business serves and what you want to be known for.
You don’t need to become an automation specialist. You do need ways of working that don’t depend entirely on you remembering to do everything manually.
You don’t need to do everything.
Some things you’ll learn. Some you’ll improve. Some you’ll delegate. And some you’ll get proper support with, because spending fourteen hours trying to teach yourself something that an expert could resolve in two isn’t always the money-saving masterstroke we convince ourselves it is.
Business ownership isn’t about knowing everything. It’s about knowing what your business needs.
It’s time to ask a different question
Earlier in your VA journey, you may have spent a lot of time wondering: am I good enough at what I do?
Eventually, your clients answer that question for you. They stay. They pay. They refer. They trust you with more.
At that point, there’s another question worth asking: is the business around what I do good enough to take me where I want to go?
Because your brilliance deserves infrastructure. Your skills deserve positioning. Your client experience deserves intention. Your income deserves strategy. And your life deserves a business that has been designed with you in the picture too.
Being a brilliant VA can get you a long way.
Learning how to become a brilliant business owner? That’s where the possAbilities really start to open up.
Ready for more?
The Success Files is where we talk about the bit beyond being good at the work, building the business around it.