Burford Secretarial – Burford VA Services - Virtual Assistant (VA) and secretarial services for businesses large and small. Sittingbourne VA, VA in Sittingbourne, Kent VA, VA in Kent.

This time five years ago I was sitting at home on maternity leave with a 3 month old baby contemplating what to do when my maternity leave came to an end in the September.  I didn’t want to go back to working full time especially as this was in the city and would require a long commute and mean leaving the house at 7am and not returning until 7pm. I also knew I didn’t just want to be a stay-at-home Mum, that had never appealed to me but I also didn’t like the idea of a stranger bringing up my child.

I started to look at all my options and the things I was good at.  I had been a secretary since leaving school at 17 and it was something I really enjoyed and could do standing on my head.  So I started surfing the web to see if I could become a self employed secretary.  After a bit of searching and finding lots of American sites I eventually stumbled on Society of Virtual Assistants (then known as Scottish Virtual Assistants) the more I read the posts on the forums the more I got excited.  This was something I could do, it would be hard work and I would need to be very disciplined especially with a baby but I knew I could make it work.

I plucked up the courage to talk about it with my husband and to begin with he thought I was mad, but after I showed him the research I had done he started to like the idea and was very supportive.  He helped me with my company name, buying the domain name and with my website.  Other family members were harder to convince but again as this was something I really wanted to do they were behind me (even if they felt I was a bit mad).

Now with a young baby networking was not really an option so I put myself on lots of free directories, went on forums with fellow VAs and a free line entry in the Yellow Pages and the work started to trickle through.  It took quite a while but gradually clients started to become regular rather than ad-hoc and I started to earn some money.  Then two years into the business I had baby number two.  My business was still very small so I could still do the odd day’s work (I had purposely not built it up too much for this reason).

Then last year my eldest child started school and my youngest nursery, I must admit I nearly gave it all up due to some personal problems but I told a few of my closest VA friends and they all rallied round started to outsource some of their overflow to me, this gave me the boost that I needed and I decided that if I wanted this business to be successful then I had to spend more time on it.

I joined a fantastic Skype chat with fellow Virtual Assistants called the Virtual Assistant Support Group (VASG) and as well as making some good friends I have also gained business through it as well.  I also became more active on Twitter and have gained some clients this way.

I became part of Call Team both as a Reseller and Call Handler so that I could give my clients a better all round service.

I also met the wonderful Sally Walker of Sally Walker Media Labs and Susan Odev of MumUltraprenuer who are not only fantastic clients but also wonderful friends.  They have given me the confidence to go to networking events and to promote myself more.

Since September last year my business has gone from strength to strength with more and more clients coming on board.  I was proud of what I had achieved in almost five years that I decided to enter the VA Awards.  Once a year a VA Conference is held for UK VAs where we have a day of seminars and networking with each other and you can nominate yourself for an award which is judged by a panel of fellow VAs.  I decided that this year I was going to enter and I am pleased to say that I won Runner Up Oustanding VA of the Year 2010.

I am so thrilled with my award as this shows that with a lot of hard work and determination anything is possible and what a fantastic 5th anniversary present.

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