VA Success Spotlight: Meet Jen

Meet Jen Cohen, EssentialJen.

Jen Cohen’s workday ends at 1:00. Her clients know that, and they plan around it. If one of them hands her a big project on a Thursday at 12:30, she tells them she’s signing off in half an hour and they’ll pick it up Monday. 

If someone asks for something outside what she does, she says so, and they find another way. That’s how Jen runs her business. 

It took her 28 years in a corporate job to get a workday like that. 

For years she hoped that as she got older they’d let her go part-time, and eventually it became clear that wasn't going to happen. 

Then COVID sent her home in 2020. She wasn't sure about working from home at first. Then she found she loved it. She was more productive, more focused, and happier than she’d been in a long time. She’d never known that was a possibility. 

A year and a half later, her employer announced everyone was coming back to the office full-time. No remote option. The thought of going back filled her with dread. She started having panic attacks. That was her wake-up call, and in January of 2022 she left without a concrete plan. 

She put out resumes. Jobs she was perfectly qualified for. Not even an interview. She saw quickly that you can sit on Indeed all day and never get hired. 

When I asked what pushed her to build a business instead, she said, “I had to. It was either that or get a job.” 

She joined VA School in September of 2022, gung-ho from day one, and said the path looked viable right away. Only one thing worried her. Jen is an introvert, and the networking part was outside her comfort zone. 

She tried online networking and never could connect with anyone on a screen. So she went in person. She went to meetings and met the movers and shakers in her town. Those same people are now her friends and are involved with her clients. She doesn’t network anymore because she doesn’t have to, and she’d do it again tomorrow if she did. 

What she didn’t expect from VA School was the people. She hadn’t known there was a whole network of women working this way. “Once you’re in that, you just see everybody else doing it.” 

A couple of years ago I told students to find an accountability buddy and Jen thought, “I don’t need one. I do my thing.” Then another student reached out and said, “Hey, what Belinda said. Do you want to do that?” The other woman didn’t think she needed accountability either. She just wanted someone to talk to. They’ve been on Zoom every other week ever since. 

Today Jen has two main clients and a couple of sporadic ones. She works 15 to 20 hours a week, and 15 is her sweet spot. She’s at her desk from about 7:30 until 1:00, four days a week, with Fridays off when she can manage it. At lunchtime she closes the computer and doesn’t look at a screen the rest of the day. 

Her rate is $60 an hour. She makes about twice what she would have earned if her old employer had let her go part-time. When things get slow, she looks around a client’s business, points at something that’s a mess, and offers to fix it. Suddenly she has a project. 

This past September marked four years since she started VA School. This January makes five years since she left her job. She told me neither number seems possible. 

Then she said the thing I’ve been thinking about since. What she has now is exactly what she wanted from her employer all along. She could have done this work inside a job. Instead she did it herself. No office politics. “I was able to create what I wanted, but a lot better.” 

If you’ve been waiting for your job to give you the flexibility you want, Jen waited for that for years. Then she stopped waiting and built it herself.