It's Official-I Blog!

I have two things to celebrate this week:

1. My first official month in business
2. The launch of my first blog

Both are very exciting milestones for me and I hope to be able to celebrate many more milestones like these. I'd like to start off my first blog post by discussing each of these benchmarks as a way for you to get to know me and my business a little better.

The Business
After years of working for "the man" and feeling undervalued, unappreciated and unheard (that's a lot of un's) I knew I wanted something more. I talked about "someday" having my own business and frankly I think my husband was tired of hearing it. To be honest, wanting my own business was about as far as I had gotten. I really had no clue about what I wanted to really DO.

I knew I had a ton of skills and wasn't afraid to tell everyone about it. People started asking if I would be interested in doing a project or two for them. "Of Course" I said, and so it began. Someone was paying me what I was worth and was happy with the work I was doing. Hmmmm I thought. Perhaps there's something more to this. Before long my evenings and weekends were filled with freelance projects. I started researching and researching and when I was done, I researched some more. I discovered there was an entire industry out there of people called Virtual Assistants. It appealed to me in a big way and I knew right away this was THE BUSINESS I had been searching for.

I became a regular on sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter and soon was building relationships with total strangers who were interested in my story. I knew I was on to something!

I finally decided on a name for my business and as soon as that happened I put my website together as quickly as possible. I had a list of services ready to go and I was promoting the heck out of my new venture. Before long I had my first official client!

I was also approached to begin freelance writing which was another dream of mine. I've always wanted to be a writer and now finally someone was giving me the chance! My husband and I made a deal that when my writing income and my income as a virtual assistant equaled that of my full time paycheck I could quit.

I'm happy to report that I was able to do just that this past June. With the blessing of my boss and best wishes for a prosperous business I left my little job and officially went into business full time!

I thought I would have a few weeks after quitting my job to get settled and ease into my new life. It didn't quite happen that way. I picked up my first retained client and another one about a week later! Things got busy fast and I'm so grateful that this is the biggest problem I have right now!

Now that I've gotten into a little bit of a groove I decided it was time to really kick start my business and signed on to work with a coach for the next three months. We start our journey together tomorrow and I couldn't be more excited!!!!!!!!!

The Blog
I'll admit this whole blogging thing scares the hell out of me. But I'm a writer by nature and everything I've researched tells me that this is a great way to promote my business and share my knowledge with the world. I hemmed and hawed about it for weeks but finally decided NOW is as good a time as any.

I created Virtual Girl - Virtual World as a compliment to my business website and look forward to using it to educate the public about using or becoming a VA and as a platform to share my experiences of being a VA.

It is my hope that as my readership grows I will accomplish my primary goal of having this blog and that is to help others.

I welcome all of my new readers and I promise, future posts will not be this long! :)

Thank you for taking the time to get to know me! I look forward to getting to know you as well!

Until then, happy blogging! :)
Jackie