VA Success Spotlight: Meet Analisa

Meet Analisa Castro, Castro Virtual Assistance.

Before Analisa started her Virtual Assistant business two years ago, she spent about thirty years as a business manager, with bookkeeping and finance wrapped into the role. She was good at it. She also knew what she was worth, and she had reached the point where she was done asking someone else to agree with her about that. 

So she left corporate. She was not going back. 

Here’s the part that surprised her once she started looking at Virtual Assistance: everything she had been doing for thirty years could be done as a VA. The bookkeeping, the finance, the running of a business behind the scenes. The skills were already there. What appealed to her was working from home, setting her own hours, and knowing that the energy she put in would come back to her and her family instead of someone else’s bottom line. 

What almost stopped her was not the business model. It was the fear of not knowing everything.

If a client asked her to do something she had never done, what would she say? Where would she go to find the answer? She describes that now as imposter syndrome, plain and simple. 

And looking back, the thing she wishes she had known at the start is that she knew just as much as everyone else did. She kept minimizing her own experience, until enough conversations inside VA School made it obvious that she wasn’t behind. She was just doubting herself. 

Analisa went through my free VA Business Launch Pad training first, to answer her questions and see whether the fit was right. She looked at other programs too, but what made VA School different for her was that nothing had to be reinvented. 

The systems were already built, the structure was easy to learn, and she had a way to present her business to clients that she was comfortable with, especially the Debit Card System, where clients prepay for blocks of her time. 

Her first client came fast, and from an unexpected place. She sent out her announcement emails, and a family member saw her website and needed one built for their new business. She’ll tell you family is usually not the first to sign on, so that one was both out of the ordinary and a lot of fun. 

Her second client came from a networking group she started attending early on. She knew from the start that she would need people around her to network with and get referrals from, and that group is still feeding her business today. 

The hardest part of building the business, she says, was not knowing when things would happen. When the work would come in. What it was going to look like. 

At some point she stopped worrying about whether it would work and when, and just did what needed to be done. Networked. Set up her systems. She wasn’t going back to corporate. 

And then, this past year, it clicked. Once the systems were in place, the clients started coming. Today she charges $65 an hour, she’s happy with her client base, and the systems she built let her focus on what actually needs her attention. She told me that is what makes her feel successful as a business owner. 

She and I just had a coaching session, and her rate is going up. In her words, she sees the value she brings to the table now in a way she didn’t two years ago when she first set that number. 

Here is the honest part. Analisa has not replaced her corporate income yet. And she’s clear that right now, that is not what she’s aiming for. She has aging parents who need her, and she has already rearranged her schedule more than once for them. She calls that flexibility priceless. It means more to her than any dollar amount. Her goal is a thirty-hour week, which would get her there, and she’s very close. 

She’s also still working on something a lot of us wrestle with: the belief that you have to be in your seat fifty hours a week to deserve the money. She thinks it comes from years of having to prove herself, as an employee and as a woman, and she’ll tell you it isn’t real. It’s a corporate leftover, and one of the reasons she left. The coaching and the community she’s had since VA School have helped her see the value she brings, and let that belief go. 

Her family has come around, too. In the beginning, she doesn’t think they believed she was working. It looked like a hobby. Then her sons were home over summer break and heard her in client meetings, saw the deadlines, saw how busy she was. Her husband, too. Now they see a business. And she likes that she can talk to her boys about being a business owner as something that is always an option for them. 

When I asked what she would say to a woman reading this who isn’t sure she can do it, she said this: 

“Believe in yourself, even if you don’t see the picture fully. If you show up, do the work, and participate, you’re going to build a successful business. But you have to show up and do the work. It’s not going to just come.” 

And one more, because I think this is the real story: 

“I knew what my value was and is. As a business owner, I could decide. I didn’t have to explain myself or fight for something. For any woman who feels like, I want control of my life and what I’m doing, I would say take that leap and just do the work. Plug into the women who are going to help you think bigger.” 

Analisa didn’t need a new skill set. She had thirty years of one. What she needed was to stop asking for permission to be paid for it, and start deciding.