VA Success Spotlight: Meet Amy

Meet Amy Schmitt, Savvy Schmitt VA.

Amy was out on a walk when her son called. 

His brother's fiancée had planned a surprise birthday party in Cleveland, and he wanted to go, but he was short on money for the hotel. He's still in school and works very part time, so needing a little help is not unusual. 

Amy stopped in her tracks, opened the banking app on her phone, moved the money into his account, and kept walking. 

She didn't have to check with anyone first. She didn't have to wait until Friday. It took about as long as it takes to read this paragraph, and then she finished her walk. 

As a mom, I'd call that a luxury. 

I want to tell you how she got there, because it didn't happen quickly and it didn't happen in a straight line. 

Amy taught school for more than twenty years. She left the classroom in 2021, and what followed was a stretch of not knowing what came next. She took a job at a shoe store. Twenty-one dollars an hour. She will tell you the store was wonderful and the people were good to her, and she genuinely loved it. It just wasn't the life she wanted to build. 

She came into VA School after a free training. Her words about that time: I didn't know how to create a business. 

She had spent two decades running a classroom, which is a room full of people and moving parts and problems that arrive without warning, so it was never a question of whether she could do the work. She simply had never been shown how to set up a business of her own. 

She left the shoe store last June. 

Here is where she is now. Fifteen clients on the books. One of them pays sixty dollars an hour and the rest pay fifty. She bills somewhere between ten and fifteen hours a week, which works out to two or three hours a day. 

Halfway through this year, she had already matched what she made in all of last year. 

Amy is not bringing home what she brought home as a teacher. She acknowledges that without any apology. What she has instead is two or three hours of work a day, a rate two and a half times what the shoe store paid her, money that is hers to decide about, and every other hour of the day belongs to her. 

She's not finished, either. Her goal is to double her revenue again next year. 

The way she gets clients is not complicated. She networks in nearby towns, she is the secretary of her main networking group, which means she is the one at the table checking people in and handing out flyers and knows everyone's name. The result? She signed another new client in May. That's what showing up in a room over and over creates. 

But the reason I asked Amy to be in this spotlight is what happened in February. 

Her father got sick. From February until he passed, Amy went back and forth to Indiana, over and over, for six months. She kept her clients. She kept her business. She was there for her family the entire time. 

She told me: if I had been teaching, I never would have been able to do that. Never. 

That's the whole point. Not the fifteen clients and not the fifty dollars an hour, although I am glad she has both. It's that when a big life event happened, she didn't have to choose between family and making money. 

In October she is coming to Williamsburg for our live event for Virtual Assistants, and she's paying for that trip herself. Two weeks later she's going to Chicago to see her high school friends, and she's paying for that herself too. 

Four years ago she was a teacher who didn't know what came next. Look at her go.