Welcome to the Frugalpreneur podcast. I am your host, Sarah St. John. This episode is what I refer to as a showcase episode where I feature a bootstrapped entrepreneur and they briefly share their tips, tricks, tactics, techniques and tools that help them bootstrap their business and the successes and failures along the way. My hope is that each of these showcase episodes will provide at least one valuable takeaway that you can implement with right away in your own bootstrap business journey. Now onto the episode I was working.

As a paralegal right out of college, which is also what I went to college for. So naturally when I landed a job at a law office, I was super ecstatic. But it really took me a while to realize the red flags and toxic work environment that I was in. It wasn't until Covid hit, however, that things started to change for me. So while everyone else was shutting down, going virtual and working remotely, our office stayed open. And then when I got sick with COVID myself is really when things started to change. So this was late 2020. Of course I had to take two weeks off, but when I went back to work, I just didn't feel the same. I began having extreme chest pain and dizziness that would last all day. This went on for several months, so I ended up going to the hospital several times and seeing a specialist to try to figure out what was going on. All the while my boss kept telling me that I needed to make up the days and hours that I was out. So I I stayed late. I came in early and prioritized my health less and less. I got to the point where I was so sick and dizzy I couldn't walk without my fiance helping me. So I ended up back in the hospital. Not long after I returned to work, my boss had a huge meeting. She called everyone in and she basically told us that she had went through the calendar and counted all the days that my colleagues and I had missed for doctor's appointment and that we would now have a threshold of days we couldn't cross and if we did, we'd be fired. So that was really my breaking point. At that time, I had already came across a virtual assistant training program and I was trying to find some VA work on the side. But a few weeks after that meeting, I officially decided to part ways with the law office and I dove into the world of virtual assistants full time, all while spending less than $100 of my own cash. It wasn't long before I was booked out and already surpassed my 9 to 5 income, working a fraction of the hours. So that's actually one of the best things about a virtual assistants business is you really don't need any upfront funds to get started. Myself, I spent less than a hundred dollars actually setting up my business. So of course you don't have inventory that you have to purchase, you don't have to have any funding to get started as a virtual assistant. All you really need is a computer, Internet and then the software programs that you're going to use. So like you need to have a project management platform, you need a way to take payments, things like that. But the majority of them you can find for zero dollars and zero cents, right? And then as time goes on, as you build your business, of course you can kind of get more like paid subscriptions and things like that to kind of help you as you scale. But as far as starting out, yeah, I got started with my business less than $100. That's between getting my business license, getting all my software set up and everything like that. So. And many virtual assistants start for $0 up front.

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I would say my biggest success is just being able to get started in this business for less than $100, right? I mean there's not many business opportunities where you can say that. And then my biggest failure in bootstrapping my business would probably be that I didn't reinvest as much as I probably should. Have in the beginning. So in the beginning I really was just putting enough aside. I was saving enough for for taxes and then a low percentage of overhead costs as I started buying those paid software subscriptions and things like that. But if I could go back and if I could say one thing that was probably my biggest drawback, it was that I didn't reinvest enough of my profits in the beginning to really help me scale and grow along the way. I would say if you're interested in starting a business like virtual assistants, really don't spend anything you don't have to spend in the beginning, right? You want to start making some profit before you ever pay a dollar for a software subscription. Now the one thing I would recommend, if you find it feasible, is to get some kind of training under your belt, whether that be in the beginning or a few months in. I found that the training that I did in the beginning was one of the biggest propellers that really pushed my business forward. But other than that, really don't spend anything that you don't have to spend. And then as you build your business along the way, just reinvest your profits. So reinvest a certain portion of what you're making and let that go towards like your scaling and your growth phase of your business. So that would be my best tips and techniques. So if you're interested in starting a virtual assistants business or if it's something that you've run across in the past and it interested you but you just have no idea how to get started, I actually have a free training on my website, k vasolution.com and you can head on over there. It's a free, free one hour training webinar and then I also have some other free resources that you can check out while you're there and would love to help you be a mentor along the way and answer any questions you might have about getting started. So feel free to reach out.

I hope you enjoyed that episode and were able to take away a valuable nugget of information that you can implement right away in your own business. If you feel your story would be valuable for the listeners of this show, please visit Frugal Show Guest.