The Challenges of Starting Your Own Virtual Assistant Business

As any business owner will readily attest, starting up your own business is no piece of cake. It takes plenty of hard work, sweat, blood, and more than a few tears to get your dream on the right tracks and take it from a struggling start-up into a successful enterprise. Even when you reach the “successful” stage, you’ll soon realize that your work is far from over.

Unlike an employment job where you’re guaranteed a regular paycheck, even if you don’t do a lot of work, running a virtual assistant business really is a full time job. Full time doesn’t mean just 40 hours a week either – it means working from morning until night, into the early hours of the next day’s morning, working over the weekends, skipping vacations because something important comes up, and so much more. In the end, you’re going to be putting a lot more of your time into your work than you ever did before, but the payoff at the end is what makes it all worth it.

If you’re thinking about starting up your own virtual assistant business, there are some things that you need to ask yourself before you quit your day job to focus 100 percent on your dream:

Are you motivated?

Motivation is going to play an ever increasing role in your success as a virtual assistant business owner. It won’t be difficult to stay motivated at first, that much is true. But once you start to sink into the daily grind you’re going to start to question whether it’s all worth it. Questioning like that doesn’t mean that you don’t have the motivation, but giving up or slacking off is going to completely ruin all of the progress that you’ve made so far. It might be hard to get up in the morning and look at the 14 hour work day in front of you, but with the right level of motivation you’ll see it through, and as the days pass you’ll find that you end up working less and less for more and more money. It’s the first year that really kills a lot of people.

Do you have the right knowledge?

If you’ve worked as an assistant in a company before, you probably have a very firm grasp of all the skills that you’ll need to be a star virtual assistant. The problem with running your own business though is that you need a whole new set of business skills on top of those virtual assistant skills that you already have. You have to deal with marketing, getting new clients, setting up a website, managing your taxes, detailing your billable hours for clients, and a lot more tasks that go above and beyond what a simple office assistant would normally be required to do. Luckily, there are guides that can help make the process easier, and if you need a transition step you can always work for a virtual assistant company while taking business classes on the side.

Susaene Thomas is a qualified virtual assistant enterpreneur  and a well know blog writer on these topics.From her college days onwards she has been in to Virtual assistant field due to which she got more exposure on this subject.If you would like to get Susaene’s Virtual assistant help or blogs related to assistant works please go to her website: