Today on the show, we are excited to welcome Abbey Ashley, Founder of The Virtual Savvy. Abbey has helped aspiring virtual assistants launch and grow their own at-home businesses from scratch. She started her own virtual assistant business as a new mom and was able to double her salary from her full-time corporate job in just 30 days! She has since gone on to grow a seven-figure business with 19 employees and certainly has some key insights to share about how to hire to scale. It's now her passion to help others start their own VA businesses so they too can taste the freedom and flexibility of entrepreneurship.

She is currently building a brand new platform, which you will hear about towards the end of the interview, that is going to make hiring so much easier, especially for creative entrepreneurs, connecting you with virtual assistants that are going to stick around and be the right fit for you and your company. In today’s episode, we’re talking about the hiring process, particularly how to hire for a culture fit over a skill fit. We think that that is one of the most remarkable things that Abbey has unlocked within her own business, and it has definitely been one of the key elements that has factored into her incredibles success.

We discuss how to identify your brand culture, how to speak that into existence within your team, and how to support your team through that journey, as well as how to hire for the perfect fit, of course. Whether you are ready to hire your first VA or dip your toes into hiring employees, this episode is full of practical tips that will be beneficial to you, no matter where you are on that journey. Make sure to tune into this insightful interview with The Virtual Savvy Founder and powerhouse entrepreneur, Abbey Ashley!

Quarantine gave Abagail every excuse to drop any kind of consistency around movement, and now, a full year later, she is trying to get back at it. She has walked three days in a row, and just yesterday Emylee did her first Peloton bike ride in months. After eight minutes in, she felt like she couldn’t do it, but she kept going. But this isn’t what we are going to be talking about today. We are super excited because it’s been a while since we have done an episode like this, where we share a small tweak we made inside our signature program that was uber effective.

It actually kind of blew us away just how much of a difference it made. It's been almost a year since we made this two-phased change. We want to talk to you about it today because if you are offering services or packages and there are deliverables inside those packages that don’t cost you any money but do cost you time, those are sometimes the easiest things to add into a package to add value. There are also instances where you need to re-evaluate what those deliverables are and whether that thing is actually effective, not only for you but your clients as well.

We always knew there would be this moment where, after doing these profit reports, we would eventually hit our goal, and then we would have to have the conversation about what’s next for us. We alluded to it a bit last month, where we had our first loss in over a year, but no part of Abagail was concerned. It sounds bizarre, but we really stuck things out, made some subtle shifts, and March went fantastically. What a concept! We had a loss and didn’t let it linger in our brains for months on end, which, in turn, would have impacted our business for months on end.

Instead, we did a turnaround and saw some amazing stuff happen for us in March. It's funny because it’s not like we did this massive launch or any other big things. We just checked the calendar right before we recorded this to remind ourselves of what happened last month. We planned some stuff; we talked about some stuff; we did a mini-thing, well, someone else did a mini-thing; we invested in some stuff. That's about it! It was lowkey in terms of what was happening behind the scenes. But so much of what we have been doing over the last year has been about building our monthly recurring revenue (MRR).

When you start the hiring process it can be a challenging time with a lot to think about. There are a lot of decisions to be made about how or why you hire someone at a certain point in your business. We have talked about it in the past but today we want to talk about why it is important that you think first about how and where you will get a return on your hire rather than hiring to save time. This is because we know what hiring to save time looks like and we are in a different space to be able to talk about it. So many people only hire to save time and they should be thinking about it in a bigger way.

We want to have this conversation coming from the space of how we think about it now with Boss Project and lessons we have learned, but also there are one-off hires that Emylee has done for her earring business. She hired for stuff she knew she would save a ton of time on. She also wasn’t the best one to do these tasks and if they were done, she would make money faster. So it is interesting how this question of hiring can be viewed in different scopes based on where you are at in your business.

Hello friends! It has been a minute since we have talked about the other businesses we run. We thought it was high time for a little update because Abagail has something new and exciting that she has launched (by the time you hear this it will have been out for a minute). We are going to talk about that but we also think there have been some decisions that we have made very intentionally in our side businesses that we want to break down the logistics behind.

We share these things with you, first of all, because it is fun to chat about, but it is also fair for you guys to hear this part of the process because it gives you a look behind the curtain of something new and growing. It also shows you the reality of how a lot of entrepreneurs and small business owners are, which is multi-passionate!

This is another one of those episodes where Abagail puts Emylee on the spot in front of the audience. She knows nothing and is expected to come up with something out of thin air. For context, we started our business as creative entrepreneurs and designers and all that. What we did not realize we were doing at the time was influencing people. We started this blog, we were putting out content, and ultimately, a large portion of our business has become what we would call affiliate marketing. It makes up a big percentage of what we are doing. So, Abagail has all this background knowledge of what it takes to be an influencer in an affiliate capacity and has made all of these pivots with her second brand to broaden the ways she is bringing in money for this brand. Emylee is admittedly the laziest influencer out there. It is not that she doesn’t influence people; she definitely does, and there are many examples to prove it. In technical terms, Abagail, based on the size of her audience, would be seen as a micro-influencer. There are so many people out there that want to be influencers but they don’t necessarily know what they need to be looking out for. There are some alarming things brands are starting to include in their contracts, and micro-influencers are agreeing to these things, most probably without any idea of what they actually mean. And they could not only negatively impact your business, but they could destroy your online reputation if you do not pay attention to what is going on.