VA Success Spotlight: Meet Shamayne

Meet Shamayne Brown, Camp Virtual Assistance.

A few weeks ago, Shamayne walked into a Boot Barn that just opened in her area. 

She used to be a retail store manager for Boot Barn, so walking through those doors brought back great memories. She enjoyed that work, and she's the first to say so. 

But this time she walked in as a customer. And then she walked out, back to a life where she chooses her own hours, runs her own business, and spends her days with her son. 

Let me tell you how she built that. 

Before she was a Virtual Assistant, Shamayne wanted one thing: the option to work from home. Managing a store meant nine-hour shifts on someone else's schedule, and no amount of enjoying the work changes the long hours. 

She joined VA School in 2023. Today she has nine clients at $68 an hour, she has fully replaced her retail income, and she's already planning her next rate increase, because she learned that lesson too. When taxes and insurance and everything else go up, your rates need to go up with them. 

Here's what I want you to notice about how she got there, because it's the opposite of what the internet tells you to do. 

Shamayne is incremental. She picks one thing, she does it at a sustainable pace, and she does not stop. 

There are a lot of loud voices out there selling the fast way. Do this formula. Skip the slow stuff. Shiny object syndrome is everywhere, and Shamayne knows better. 

She said "I invested in VA School, I believed in Belinda, and I decided this is what I'm going do." 

She set herself a small, steady growth goal instead of a crazy, heroic one and she achieved success. 

When people tell me they can't start because they can't do it big, I tell them about Shamayne. 

Here's another detail I love. At one point she had eighteen clients, and it was too many. So she made a choice most people are afraid to make: quality over quantity. She is completely comfortable saying "this is not a good fit," and this year she's referred the clients who weren't right for her to other VA School grads. 

That's what confidence looks like. And clients pay for confidence. 

Now, if you're picturing Shamayne doing complicated tech work, she's not. In her words: "I've heard a lot of people talk about how techy you have to be in order to be a Virtual Assistant, and that's absolutely not the case." 

She does organizational and structural work behind the scenes. She follows up with the people her clients meet at networking events and builds structure around whatever is causing mayhem in their lives. 

Her clients hire her because they don't have time to get their world organized. She does that for them. The skills she built managing a retail store transferred right over. 

And then there's the biggest reason this all matters. 

Last year, Shamayne had a baby. Baron is 17 months old now, and she calls this season a beautiful challenge, which any parent of a toddler will understand. 

When Baron was born, she scaled back her workload. Her clients understood, because she had chosen good ones. When he was three or four months old and the work piled up, she hired childcare help so she could keep delivering quality work. She made that decision as a business owner, on her own terms. 

She told me: "It's even more important to me to have the time to spend with him. That means everything to me. I wouldn't have had that option if I was still working my retail job. It just wouldn't have happened." 

That's the whole thing right there. Not the nine clients, not the $68 an hour, although I'm thrilled she has both. It's that when her life changed, her business flexed around her family instead of the other way around. 

One thing at a time. A steady pace. Three years in, she's the one walking out of the store. 

Look at her go.