Dive into the inaugural episode of “Make Space for More”! In this episode, Melissa Swink shares her journey of starting and growing her Virtual Assistant Services company, Melissa Swink & Co. She explains the challenges she faced as a solopreneur starting out, as well as the limitations any business owner faces when they operate all on their own. Melissa then walks listeners through how she transitioned to working with a team and the BIG benefits it brought to her business! She highlights the opportunities created for clients and team members, the ability to focus on her role as a CEO, and the scalability of her business. Melissa also gives a teaser of future episodes, where she will discuss her growth framework and overcoming obstacles in business. Don’t miss it! 

Key Highlights:

• Many small businesses in the United States are solopreneurs, operating without staff.
• Operating solo can limit income and time freedom.
• Working with a team can create more opportunities for clients and team members.
• Transitioning to a team-based model allows the CEO to focus on growing the business.
• Investing in systems and team members can lead to financial rewards and time freedom.

About Melissa:

Melissa Swink, Founder & CEO of Melissa Swink & Co., has a team of virtual assistants who provide administrative and marketing support for small businesses and non-profits.

Since 2012, Melissa and her team have helped more than 100 businesses grow through the services they offer, and she is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs create profitable, scalable businesses they love.

Her work is all about doing what works (and eliminating what doesn’t) and driving real, measurable results. Visit www.melissaswink.com to learn more! 

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Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Make Space For More podcast where we talk strategies for growing and scaling your business in a way that's authentic and aligned for you. I'm your host, Melissa Swink. And in this episode, I'm going to share more about how I got started as the owner of a virtual assistant services company, and how my business has grown and evolved over time. I'm hoping to share some tidbits with you as far as some of the challenges that I encountered along the way of growing and scaling my company, and also what some of the successes have been as well. So to start us off, the reason why I'm talking about this is I came across a statistic in the Small Business Statistics of 2024 report by Forbes advisor. And that is that 99.9% of the businesses in the United States are considered small businesses, of those small businesses, which is about 33 point 3,000,080% of them operate without staff. That means that 80% of the small businesses in the United States are solopreneurs, they are wearing all the hats, they're doing all the things in their companies. And there's nothing wrong with that, certainly. But I think that when we remain in that space of operating solo, we're missing out on creating opportunities, not only for ourselves, but for others as well. And I'm going to share more about that in today's episode.

So I want to start off by sharing a little bit more about how I got started in this company, and then also how my business has grown and evolved over time. And some of the lessons learned along the way. So I started out my corporate background is actually an operations and logistics, I worked at a building materials company here in the Green Bay, Wisconsin area where I'm from. And I worked at this company through the recession of 2008, with the housing crisis, and all of that going on. And the good news was that I kept my job during that volatile time, the not so great news was I ultimately found myself in a role that was not a good fit for me. And so I got to be in my mid 20s, and decided that I needed to do something different. So I resigned from my position and went out on my own. And I started working as a process improvement consultant here in my area with another gentleman. And during my time of working with small businesses in the consulting area, I realized that most business owners knew what they wanted to be doing. They knew what they should be doing. But there weren't enough hours in the day for them to do it themselves. Or they didn't have the skill set or expertise required to do some of those things. And most importantly, they couldn't necessarily justify hiring a traditional full time employee to do that for them. And I also discovered the concept of a virtual assistant, which back in 2012, in Green Bay, Wisconsin, many people did not know what that was myself included. But as soon as I learned more about the concept of a virtual assistant, I realized that it was the solution to so many of the challenges that business owners were facing, because they could get help with very specific things at their own pace and what they needed in their businesses.

So I started offering virtual assistant services in fall of 2012. And grew to the point where I reached my own capacity. I couldn't take on any more clients couldn't take on any more projects. Also, in 2014, about two years into the business my daughter was born. And so for the first time, my schedule was not completely my own. If she was sick, or there was no school, no daycare, work stopped because it was all just me. And so a few of the challenges that I had during that solo business owner phase, not only did I reach that capacity, my income was limited ultimately to the hours that I could work. No matter how I structured my packages, no matter how many times I raised my prices. Ultimately, I could only earn as much as I was personally able to work, I could only earn as much as I could deliver. The other challenge with that is that I had unpaid time off anytime that I was not working because my daughter needed me or we went on vacation or something like that. There was nobody doing the work. There was nobody getting paid. So I was really stuck in this position of I created a job for myself, which on one hand was great, it was paying my bills, but there was an opportunity for me to really have that time freedom that I craved by being a business owner and my income was very, very limited. So I decided in In 2018, to give working with a team a try, I ultimately ended up hiring two subcontractors, two with very different skill sets. One was very organized and analytical, the other was very creative, where she would create graphics and social media content, things like that with our team. And we work together, they worked primarily behind the scenes, and I was still very client facing. The challenge with that business model was that I spent my time as an air traffic controller. So even though I was able to work with more clients and do more projects, because I had the help of a team, I was I traded that time in for the constant back and forth communications and the project management, I would meet with the clients talk about, you know, their support needs, and I would relay that information to the team and vice versa, I'd be overseeing all the work. And that's how I function for quite a long time until eventually, I reached my my capacity point, again, versus how many calls I could have in the day how how much I could relate to the team, I ultimately became the bottleneck in my business with that model. And so I have been working, especially in the last I would say two to three years of changing that business model.

So I want to show you a little bit about what that looks like today. So I have, all of our clients are matched with a lead virtual assistant, who serves as their right hand their main point of contact, the person who's doing the project management on their account. From there, we also have a team of more specialized virtual assistants who do things like graphic design, copywriting, social media management, bookkeeping, and accounting, things that require a very specific skill set. And that is overseen by our lead virtual assistants. So they're empowered to bring in the help that they need in order to get our clients tasks and projects completed for them. On top of that, we have our senior virtual assistant team, which do a lot of client and team management. So they're making sure that our clients and our team members are working well together successfully. They're there to help troubleshoot when needed answer questions, and also provide backup support as needed. If we have a team member who's going on vacation, or maybe the client needs a very specific skill set area of expertise, our Senior VA team is there to help. What that has done is that has freed me up from always being the go to for questions and for, you know, really distributing the work to being able to work on my business and fully step into my role as a CEO. So some of the additional successes that we've been able to experience under this business model, going back to my original statistic is that we've been able to create many more opportunities for our clients, because we're able to serve more people and help them grow and scale their businesses, and work with an amazing team. We've also been able to blast so many talented people with work opportunities to serve those clients in those businesses that they want to serve. I also have enjoyed in my role as CEO, the ability to work a 20 to 25 Hour Work Week, and focus my time these days on growing the business, making connections with other business owners looking at joint ventures, really leading my team and making those connections. And you know, one of the things creating this podcast and being able to share more about strategies for growing and scaling companies from solo and, and building up from there. Based on my experience with our team, some of the successes in the current model that we have. We have quality control built in. We have checks and balances in place, because we've got multiple team members involved in different accounts. We're able to create a more consistent client experience because we have this team structure in place. The business as it's grown really has become less about me and more about the people that I'm leading and we're serving. We have this scalable business model now that we're able to continue to support additional businesses in their growth journey and be able to provide work to more and more people.

Ultimately when I look back at the way my business has changed, since I operated as a solopreneur to now having a team of about 20 We have 20 times against our revenue. Since since then, profitability has grown five times. So investing in systems investing in team has given a return that I could never have imagined. I know in the beginning, it seems like when you grow from solopreneur, to investing in things like software, things like team members, it feels like an expense. But I can tell you being on the other side of that, it's definitely been rewarding, not only being able to bless other businesses and other people, but it's also been rewarding financially and in time freedom as well. So with that, I encourage you to tune into our next episode of Make space for more, where we're going to talk more about the framework that I've used personally, and the framework that we use for our clients, to help them grow and scaling their businesses, and what each of those phases look like. We're also going to talk about in future episodes, what holds us back from making those changes that we know we need to make in our business, and also how to break free. Most importantly, we're talking about, here's where we've been, here's where we want to go, how do we do that? It's not so much about what we want to do or why we want to do it. It's, it's really getting down to like, Okay, how do I make that happen? I know that I'm stuck, how do I get unstuck? How do I grow? How do I serve more people? How do I create more time for myself and do more of the things that we love? We're going to dive into all of that on this show. So thank you so much for joining me and I will see you in the next episode.