VA Success Spotlight: Meet Cassandra

Meet Cassandra Taylor, Silver Thatch Solutions.

Cassandra has a background in IT. She has three kids, and after homeschooling them, she decided she was ready to go back to corporate. 

So she took a job. And they asked her to move her family far from home so she could sit in an office and manage a virtual team. 

Sit in an office. To manage people who weren't in it. 

That was the moment she started looking for something else. 

She and her husband had been seriously considering a franchise. Nearly five figures, and they were willing to spend it, because what they wanted was location freedom. Then she found VA School. 

She joined in July. She launched her business in December. In January she had her first client. By February she had earned back every dollar of her tuition. 

Today she charges $70 an hour, and she's built a business that fits her family instead the other way around. 

But here's the part I want you to sit with. 

When I asked Cassandra what she'd say to a woman on the fence, she didn't talk about the money. 

She went straight to the real fear: Do I trust myself to follow through and show up when it starts to feel hard? 

And she didn't know. 

And she did it anyway. 

And she was honest with me about what it took. She said the good news is you'll have your own business, and the challenging news is that you'll have your own business, and you'll wear all the hats. 

What got her through wasn't willpower. It was showing up to the VA School study halls, and the women who quietly became her accountability partners and her friends. 

I asked her when she knew it was going to work. 

Not the first client, she said. The second one. A referral, from a woman she'd never met, in another state. That was the moment she could see the system underneath it. 

Here's what she told me at the end, and it's the line I keep thinking about:

"You might as well bet on yourself." 

Cassandra didn't wait until she was sure of herself. She just stopped waiting to be sure.