Transcript Of The Recording:
Why I am not a fan of the term VA or Virtual Assistant,
I want to explain that without hurting people’s feelings but it might be more challenging than anticipated.
For the record, I was never a VA, but I hired plenty of them in the past.
Here is my realization:
The VA label has been shredded to pieces where it started to belong to only Tier 2 and 3 countries.
If you were to scout for a Virtual Assistant on Upwork or other freelance platform, you end up with the same demographics that offer a service for cheap.
It got pushed so far that most of them simply start to lower their rates during an interview just to get the job.
The problem with that?
You start to devalue an entire industry and an entire group of people that are doing 5 jobs at the same time.
A lot of my friends tend to go with the phrase: I am going to build X, hire a cheap VA to do all the groundwork, and take it from there.
VA comes with the association of being cheap and it’s often because they did it to themselves
If you keep lowering your rates, you end up with an entire demographic doing the same thing to stay “competitive” and therefore you end up at the bottom.
Another reason, if not my primary one, is that by labeling yourself as a VA, you attract the wrong kind of employers that want to use, abuse or extract every sweat and tear you have for a couple dollars per hour.
There are companies, and wannabe so called entrepreneurs that are okay setting ethics aside to make 100X the money you make.
Every time, I talk to VA’s or people labeling themselves as a VA, I urge them to start changing the narrative.
Instead of staying a jack of all trades, they should:
- Focus on one or two skills
- Focus on one or two major verticals or niches
- Become a true expert
- Start calling themselves: Expert in XYZ
Here’s the difference.
You can call yourself a VA and basically stay at the bottom since that’s the association
OR
You can call yourself an Expert in workflow with exceptional organizational skills and start raising your rates.
You can say you’re a VA with email marketing experience or you can flip the script and tell them you’re extremely good in email sequences and email marketing with ConvertKit or Mailchimp.
The more specific you tend to go, the higher the rate you will be able to charge.
The choice is yours.
It’s one of the key topics I try to teach at The Super Hustle. How to raise your rates as a contractor and move away from the bottom tier.
You can struggle at the bottom all your life or build a gameplan where you start as an allrounder but end up becoming a true expert in a more specific field.