VA Success Spotlight: Meet Cindy

Meet Cindy Howard, Lightning Admin VA.

When Cindy decided to learn to knit, she told a friend her first project would be a pair of socks. 

Her friend gave her the advice every beginner gets: start with a scarf. 

Cindy wanted to knit socks. So she bought a sock pattern and everything that goes with it, and she sat down and started. She ripped it out and started over six times. About a month later, she showed her friend one finished sock. 

Her friend took it, looked up, and said, "Oh my gosh, you knit a sock!" 

Nobody had told Cindy that socks are supposed to be an advanced project. She just kept at it until she got it. And now, in her words, she can knit anything. 

I'm telling you about the sock because that is exactly how Cindy built her Virtual Assistant business. 

Before VA School, Cindy was working at a deli for $14 an hour. Part time, because if they made her full time, they would have had to pay her benefits. 

If everything went right, she thought she might someday get to $18. That was the ceiling, and it was not going to support her kids. 

What she needed was work she could do from home. Something that would let her pick her kids up from school and be there when one of them was sick and still pay the bills. She was Googling every search she could think of. Legitimate work-from-home jobs. Work-from-home bookkeeper. Anything. 

That's how she found my free training. Her words: "I thought, this is what I need to do. I can do this." 

Here's what she was bringing to the table. Secretary jobs from the 1990s. She could file papers, answer phones, and figure out computer systems. She didn't think anybody would hire her for that. 

What she found when she started networking and listening to business owners was that most of what they needed, she could learn as she went. A lot of the time, they already had a process and just needed someone to take it over, so they walked her through exactly how they wanted it done. 

"Whatever skills that I didn't already have, I can quickly learn them. It doesn't take much." 

This is the question I hear constantly: what happens when a client asks you to do something you don't know how to do? Cindy's answer is refreshingly simple. 

She goes to YouTube and to the tutorials inside the platform itself. If that doesn't do it, she tells the client she got stumped and asks if they know. If they don't, she opens a support ticket with the platform. Then she writes down the steps, so nobody has to figure it out twice. 

That's it. That's the secret. 

Now let's talk about the money. 

When Cindy started, she was hoping to make $20 to $25 an hour. That would have felt like a huge win compared to the deli. Then she got into VA School and heard me say she should start at $40 or $50. 

"$40 an hour, no one's going to hire me for that. But they did." 

Then she raised her rates. And she was scared every single time. "I thought, that's it, my business is over, nobody's going to hire me. And they did every single time." 

Cindy charges $60 an hour today. That's more than four times what the deli paid her. 

For years, she deliberately kept her business small, right around $18,000 a year, so she could be home with her kids. I mention this because it's a choice every Virtual Assistant gets to make: you can turn the volume up or down as your life changes. 

This year, Cindy turned it up. Her biggest client alone brings in about $33,000 a year. One client, worth nearly double what her whole business used to make in a year. 

When I asked what she loves most about this work, she didn't name a task. She named her biggest client, because he isn't just handing her a to-do list. They sit down together, come up with ideas, figure out how to market them, and research what to do next. 

"I'm growing somebody else's business as I grow my own." 

She loves taking the admin off a business owner's plate and watching what happens next. "You can watch them open up. They're like, oh my gosh, this is taken care of, okay, now I can do this thing, and it makes their business grow. Which in turn makes more work for me!" 

She also loves that she didn't have to start at the bottom of anybody's ladder. She makes her own schedule, picks which meetings she goes to and works from the couch when she feels like it. And her clients see her as what she is, a business owner. 

That matters more than people realize, and Cindy is honest about why. She's 50. 

"Nobody's going to hire a 50-year-old to grow, you know what I mean?" To get hired at her age, she'd already need the experience and skills for the job. 

As a Virtual Assistant, it works the other way around. "There's no limit to what I can learn, and there's no limit to how much I can grow." 

Cindy is one of our community ambassadors now, and she's living proof of how far a Virtual Assistant can go. 

Back when she was just getting started, Cindy told me that if I could do it, she could too. 

She was right. She raised her rates when she was scared, learned whatever she didn't know, and kept going until she got it. Just like the sock. 

If Cindy could do it, so can you.