Ep. 11: Virtual assistant businesses (with Abbey Ashley of The Virtual Savvy)

Abbey Ashley is the CEO of The Virtual Savvy, a million dollar business catering to virtual assistants. Her signature program, The SavvySystem, is an online training program that helps virtual assistants start and grow their own business from scratch. It’s her passion to make freelancing fun. That means more freedom, more flexibility, and more time to spend with family.

Where to find Ashley

• Website: thevirtualsavvy.com
• Virtual Assistant Launch Business Checklist (free): thevirtualsavvy.com/checklist

Read the full transcript below.

Melissa Guller: Before we share today’s interview, I want to take a minute to give a special shout out to podcast listener, Rayna Royal. Here’s what they said in their review on Apple podcasts. “The act of turning knowledge into income is revolutionary. Everyone has something that can be shared with others. No matter your background or skills you have, knowledge or experience that can be shared through an online course. ‘Everything is Teachable’ rings, true time and time again. Thank you for starting a podcast on top of the already great platform.” So Rayna, thank you so much for your kind words. It means the world to all of us here at Teachable, and if you’d like to receive a shout out on a future episode, please leave us a review in Apple Podcasts. Now on to the show.

Abbey Ashley: You don’t have to solve all of their problems. Whoever your ideal audience is, you don’t have to solve every single one of their problems. Just what is one thing that they could change in their life that will make a big impact on their life. Teach that and yeah, you will. You’ll see a lot more success stories come out of your courses.

Melissa Guller: Abbey Ashley’s online career started when she became a ghost writer for an online course creator. She also hated her job at the time as a phone operator and knew she craved something more entrepreneurial and fulfilling, especially since she and her husband found out that they were pregnant. That’s when Abbey became a virtual assistant or a VA, and over the next two years, she earned a full time income as a virtual assistant while slowly building up a website and an email list of just about a thousand people. Today we’ll learn how she turned that list of a thousand into her first $8,000 online course launch, and then three years later how she’s turned that course into a million dollar business. I can’t wait to share how she did it.

Announcer: Welcome to Everything is Teachable, the podcast that takes you behind the scenes to learn how everyday creators have transformed their skills and passions into online courses and businesses. To introduce this week’s episode, here’s your host, Melissa Guller.

Melissa Guller: Hey everyone. I’m Melissa from Team Teachable and today I’m here with Abbey Ashley. Abbey is the CEO of The Virtual Savvy $1 million business catering to virtual assistants. Her signature program, the savvy system is an online training program that helps virtual assistants start and grow their own business from scratch. It’s her passion to make freelancing fun, and that means more freedom, more flexibility, and more time to spend with family. Well, Abbey, welcome to the podcast.

Abbey Ashley: Thanks so much for having me.

Melissa Guller: I can’t wait to learn more about you. I know I’ve seen your face in some lovely testimonials around the Teachable website for years, and so I’m thrilled to, you know, take us back in time and learn how it all started. So to kick things off, what were you doing before you became a virtual assistant?

Abbey Ashley: Before I became a virtual assistant, I was actually working for an online university, so I was still working remotely, but it was a job that I literally hated. I had to be on the phone all day with students who were like angry about one thing or another and which was not the most enjoyable job. But I did love working from home, so I got that part. Right. Um, but yeah, that’s, that’s what I was doing before I became a virtual assistant. And so then it sounds like maybe the motivation was, uh, I don’t like this, but how did you then decide you did want to be a VA? Yeah, so I mean there was definitely another motivation as well.

Abbey Ashley: So I’ve always been entrepreneurial for sure. I’ve had that just in my blood. My dad was an entrepreneur. I mean that’s, that’s always been something I’ve always had, you know, business ideas, you know, those 3:00 AM wake ups when you’re like, Oh, I should do this, you know, I have the notebook, I have the a hundred domains, always have. So I’ve always had kind of that entrepreneurial spirit. But I was actually working at this online university and my husband and I got pregnant. Uh, our daughter was actually due on our one year anniversary. Surprised. We were not planning on having kids that soon, but so I was actually pretty far along in my pregnancy and just starting to really think through, man, I don’t know if I want to go back to work. Like I don’t want to, I don’t know if I want to send my kid to daycare to work at home at a job that I don’t even like like that just because I knew I couldn’t have her at home with me because I was doing phone calls all the time.

Abbey Ashley: And so I just thought, you know, I’m going to have to think of something else to do. And so a friend of mine suggested that I look into virtual assistants and so I scoured the internet. This is 2013 just scoured the internet, found every little piece of information I could find and literally the next day started calling myself a virtual assistant. Wow. So before we even dive in, maybe for listeners who haven’t heard of this term virtual assistant before, can you just give us a little bit of a definition? What do you do and what does that day to day look like? Definitely. So it’s a really broad term. I’ll throw that out there first, but really anything that someone could do, it’s usually administrative or marketing tasks that you could do remotely, could kind of go under that virtual assistant umbrella. So let’s say there’s, you know, a mom and pop shop that needs help with their social media management or you know, maybe there’s an online course creator who also does coaching and they need help with invoicing or blogging or there’s so much, there’s so much that you can do anything from data entry and appointment setting, phone calls, all the way up to higher level skills like running Facebook ads.

Abbey Ashley: So now not every VA can do all of those things obviously, but really taking the skills you already have and offering them to small business owners and you usually sell them in some kind of a package. So rather than an employer having to hire, you know, a full time employee, they can say, Hey, you know, all buy this package of, you know, 30 hours for the month and you know, have just a set price for that package of hours. And then maybe I’ll be using just you know, five to 10 hours a week.

Melissa Guller: That’s a really interesting business model. I know it works for you and for a lot of virtual assistants to sell your services and those kind of packaged ways. But I think that might be a new way of thinking for a lot of listeners.

Abbey Ashley: You know, in my opinion, virtual assistants, it was just the gateway to the whole online space. For me, I didn’t realize course creation was even a thing. I didn’t realize that this whole online world even existed back in 2013 and for me, offering services was a way to kind of make money pretty quickly. Honestly. I mean you think about an online course, which is my main source of income now, but you need quite a few people to, to purchase your course, to really be making good, consistent money with it. Uh, it’s really a volume game where with offering services, I mean most freelancers have between four and six clients. So you really have to get four people to say yes to potentially replace your full time income. Which is was the case for me. I was able to replace my full time income in about four months, so I was eight months pregnant. I basically replaced it during my maternity leave and didn’t have to go back to work. So that’s one of the things that I love about freelancing, whether it’s, you know, somebody wants to be a freelancer forever, they want to build an agency or whether they just say, Hey, this is just what I want to do to make money while I build my online course, which is really what I did.

Melissa Guller: Yeah, and you made a great point too that it allowed you to get up and running really quickly and it probably also allowed you to test the waters a little bit to see does this service makes sense for me or do I prefer one type of virtual assistant work versus another maybe. And to hone your own expertise as a VA for sure.

Abbey Ashley: So I was doing like appointment setting phone calls at first and then I found, I, you know, I realized I’m doing exactly what I was doing before. Like I’m talking on the phone and I’m like trying to do these phone calls when my baby is sleeping, like this isn’t working. What am I doing? So I stopped offering that service and because it was my business, I could do that, you know? So that was, that was really nice.

Melissa Guller: Yeah. And when you are first learning all of this, how did you teach yourself what to do? Like did you just Google it all or how did you learn how to be a VA 100 hundred

Abbey Ashley: percent Googling [inaudible] I mean really, I, I, people have called me the Google queen forever and I’ve, I’ve realized that most people who end up being successful virtual assistants or freelancers, a lot of them are just really, really good at the power of Google and YouTube. And it’s just like, not saying that you should, you know, your services as, Oh, I can do all these things if you really can’t do them. But if somebody hires you to do one thing and then they say, Hey, I’d also love help, you know, setting up my podcast. I’m always honest with them and I’ll say, you know, Hey, that’s not something I have experience in, but I’m a fast learner, so give me a couple of days and let me see what I can come up with. And usually my clients would be so impressed by that and I’d come up with a plan and they say, yep, let’s do it, let’s execute on it. So I think that, you know, being honest, but also just being willing to learn is really, really important when you are in kind of the service business.

Melissa Guller: That’s amazing advice. I hope listeners really took note of that feedback because I can’t tell you how many contractors or freelancers I’ve worked with where nobody is going out of their way to be proactive like you are with that honesty. Like, Hey, I don’t know how to do this, but let me see what I can put together for you. So I feel like anyone who does go that little extra step to try to problem solve is going to set themselves so far ahead of the pack. Yes, 100% so I know that that’s how you started. You were a virtual assistant, how did things kind of evolve from there? Yeah, so

Abbey Ashley: like I said, I really didn’t know much about the online course business. I, my first couple clients as virtual assistants were, you know, I had an insurance agent and a health coach and then I got some like fashion blogger, which I thought was really cool. He was like in South Africa and I’m like, Ooh, I have an international clients. And so really excited. So what actually happened is I ended up working with a blogger that I had been reading his blogs for a really long time. I decided to kind of pitch my blog writing services to him. I enjoyed writing and so I thought, you know what, I bet I could write a blog for him. So I just, I took about a week, he had no idea it was going to do this. He didn’t even know who I was. I took a week and I created a blog for him and he wrote like 1500 2000 word blog posts.

Abbey Ashley: So this was like a pretty Epic post. And so, and then I just sent it to him and I said, Hey, you know, I, I’ve been reading your content a lot and I just thought that maybe you would like a blog post that was on the subject. I noticed that you’ve never really done a subject like this before. And he was so blown away. I don’t think he actually ever really used my blog posts, but just again that, that extra effort, he was really, really impressed for it and pretty much within the week I was kind of ghost writing for him. And so, um, he became one of my biggest clients, um, who’s paying me like 60 plus dollars an hour, which was really, really good for me at the time. That kind of started my online course career because he would have these online course launches.

Abbey Ashley: OK. So he, he had online courses on how to grow an email list was kind of the big thing he was selling at the point. And he would do these online course launches and they would make like three, $400,000 every time in like a two week span. And I’m just sitting behind the scenes here just like totally amazed. I always say it was like the best paid internship that I ever received you because I’m literally just sitting behind the scenes in like these team meetings where he’s talking about like what went well and what didn’t go well and I’m helping him write the emails to go out to people. And it was just incredible. And so for me, that’s where I learned a lot about course launching and all of that. And because he had an email list, like a course on building an email list, I realized, man I should probably start building an email list cause it seems like this is a really valuable asset.

Abbey Ashley: So you know back then and I guess it was probably like 2014 ish, I just slowly started, you know, putting freebies out on Facebook groups, throwing some stuff out on Pinterest. Just kind of asking my friends and family, asking my mom to be on my email list, like whoever would be on my email list, I would get them on there. And so I slowly started growing a list and then at a certain point it was actually in like 2016 so it took about two years for me to get a little over a thousand email subscribers. Again, just picking away just here and here and there, no paid ads, no anything like that. Just literally just asking people to be on my list. And at that point in 2016 I decided to ask my list, Hey, okay, you’re here. What do you want to learn from me? And pretty much unanimously people said, we want to know how to become a virtual assistant, because that’s kind of what I was emailing people I guess about was just my life as a virtual assistant. So that’s kind of when I got the idea for the online course.

Melissa Guller: Huh. So this is fascinating to me. So you were still working as a VA, that’s how you were earning income, and then you were also building up this audience of a thousand people. And I really appreciate the fact that that took you two years because I think it’s very easy to look online and see people who have hundreds of thousands of email subscribers and it’s tough to see how long it took them to get there. For some of them it may have taken five to 10 years. Yes, and I think that if I could like say one thing to people, I’m like just keep doing it. Like, like just keep moving forward

Abbey Ashley: because it does sometimes it takes a long time and I think that email list building and even course creation a lot of times is the long game. I would say services are the short day and you can make money pretty quickly online with services. An online course is the long game, but it’s amazing once it starts rolling because it really is that snowball effect. Zero to a thousand was so hard. It was painstaking really to get those thousand subscribers. But then you know, a thousand to 5,000 was a little easier. I’m still hard, still very hard, but I had kind of gotten a flow a little bit. Then 5,000 to 10,000 even easier, 10,000 to 20,000 even easier. We literally get hundreds of subscribers a day. Now we just hit. So I do big. I, I can’t really like say talk about my list size too much because we, I do clean outs, like if people have an open my emails, I clean them out every like three to six months. But we usually range around like the 40,000 subscribers Mark now and we’re getting hundreds a day

Melissa Guller: and you know that that just happens on autopilot. So now it’s easy. Now I don’t have to try, but it was not like that in the beginning, you know what I mean? And so I think that if people will just do the hard work up front, like it really does pay off in the end. That’s such amazing advice and so helpful to hear you talk about to the, the snowball effect because most people listening might be in those early stages where it might feel like you’re not making a lot of progress. But if you do just keep picking away at it and making the time, it will pick up at some point. It’s all about just the hard work and the pay off 100% and I also loved, I just wanted to point out one more thing where you mentioned that email list building is the long game but the services is the short game.

Melissa Guller: I think it’s such a smart mix of how you are kind of doing both at once. You are finding a way to earn money with services but still playing that long game of building up the email list and I don’t want to get too in the weeds, but something you’ve mentioned that hasn’t come up in a previous episode is that list cleaning concept and so I don’t want to get too like technical about it, but I think that’s an important note. So I’m curious, why do you do list cleaning? What is that for people who haven’t heard of it? Yeah. So what I do is I use an email platform and I know there’s a lot of email platforms out there and they all kind of have their own way of doing things,

Abbey Ashley: personally use ConvertKit. And so what we do with the email list clean-out is that it’ll tell me what my cold subscribers are. So those are people who have not opened an email from me within 90 days. And so for me, especially when you get into like the tens of thousands of email subscribers, you’re paying a lot of money for those. I mean, it’s hundreds of dollars that you’re paying every month for that email list. And so I’m kind of under the impression like if somebody isn’t opening my emails, like why are they there? They’re bringing my email, my list rates down. And I know like at the beginning when we first have an email list, it’s just like, Oh, it’s like terrible. When we get those unsubscribes, it’s like, no, someone didn’t want to hear from me. Now I’m like, Ooh, good. Less people I have to pay for. You know, just go ahead and it’s okay if you don’t want to hear my content because you aren’t my ideal audience.

Abbey Ashley: And so if people aren’t opening my emails anymore, then maybe they’ve just moved on from this season. Maybe they don’t want to be a VA anymore. And so what I’ll do is I do a week long reactivation series. So I send a series of three emails, usually Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and it’s just the first one subject line is like, Hey, are you there? And then the next one is, I don’t actually remember what the next one is, like open up like last chance or something. And then the last one is actually you are unsubscribed is the email I send out, but we don’t actually remove, remove them from the list until a couple of days later. But we get so many responses so that you are unsubscribed are like, no, no, no, I’m still here. I prompt this, I want to be on your list. So those really get people to open up the emails and then if they want to stick around, of course stick around.

Abbey Ashley: But if not like this last time, we just deleted I think 9,000 people from the list. Um, just and my open rates are like skyrocketing again. And I think that, you know, if you have high open rates in your emails, it helps. Well Google and whatever platforms you’re using to know, Hey, these, these are good emails, they should stay in the inbox and not in the spam folder. You know? And I just have like personal goals of what my email open rate should be. So that’s why I do like list clean out probably. It’s usually every six months, honestly.

Melissa Guller: Well, I love hearing about that because I think especially today there are a lot of vanity metrics that you could look at how many Instagram followers you have. Even a website traffic at a certain point could be a vanity metric or the number of email subscribers. Because ultimately if these people aren’t going to buy from you or they’re not interested in what you’re offering, then they’re just kind of muddying the water and it’s a lot harder to tell who’s really engaged with you. Yes. I think it’s a huge challenge a lot of us are facing in this day where you can buy followers and all these bots exist and there’s maybe a time and a place for those. But I think maybe having a huge number should not be the goal. Having customers should be the goal. I think

Abbey Ashley: it gets a fight that I know it’s a fight that I’ve had to go through a lot because those vanity metrics, I mean people really do care about, I’ve gone to conferences before where I went to this one conference I was asked to be like a, not a speaker but like a facilitator at it. This was about a year ago and at this point I had a multiple six figure business, but this was mostly for like influencers, which there’s nothing wrong with being an influencer. I know there’s people who make good money and that’s awesome, but they were like Instagram influencers. Well I’ve posted like four pictures of my kids on Instagram and had, you know, probably like a thousand followers at the time. And so I literally like didn’t get invited to their special VIP lunch and all this stuff. And I’m sitting around with some of these people who have hundreds of thousands of followers and they’re like, man, it’d be really nice to start, you know, actually making money and not just getting free swimsuits and stuff.

Abbey Ashley: And I’m like, what? Like what is this? And it’s just, it’s so funny because we see these people with these huge numbers or people that tell these huge email list or even people who tell like how much money they’re making. Honestly, uh, last year I was denied on a podcast cause I hadn’t had $1 million a year yet. I was really close to it, but I hadn’t quite hit $1 million. And they said, come back when you’ve had $1 million a year. And I’m like, you know what? My profit is probably much, much higher than some of the people who have been on the show. And so at the end of the day, like I think those things are important. Yes, you should have goals to grow your revenue, you should have goals to grow your social media channels and things like that. But at the end of the day, is your business profitable? Like are you making money? Because that’s really the only metric at the end of the day, in my opinion, that really matters. And it’s the one that people don’t talk about that much.

Melissa Guller: I just want to react to all of this with the 100 emoji. I’ll follow you back all of this, it’s kind of like my little soapbox I’ve been on recently, so that’s important to talk about because I think especially for creators, just getting started, follower count is one of the first things that you see and it’s one of the first things that other people notice about you. So I think it’s totally understandable why you would focus on that or feel like you need to focus on that. But you know, at the end of the day, if you’re making money and we started talking about services and how you only need four to six clients to start earning some real money, and that’s not a huge number at all, but it’ll still make a meaningful effect on your life if you can get four solid clients. Exactly. I think this is a nice kind of transition point for us to get back into the online course itself. So you had mentioned that when your email list hit a thousand people, you started asking, what can I do for you? And they said I’d be, please teach me all the ways. And so at that point, what did you do? Did you start making an online course? So I did

Abbey Ashley: thing that I actually learned from this mentor. Um, he’s really big into validating your course idea by actually selling it before you create it. So it’s one thing for people to like opt into a beta. Like, Oh, I’m going to do this free beta and look, 300 people joined or you know, whatever. We think it’s really successful. All you’ve really validated, if you do like a free beta, this is, again, this is the way I’ve done it. I know people have their other methods, but in my opinion, all you really validated with like a free version of your course is that people will pay $0 million for your course. So I don’t even care how much it is. Like I think that it’s important to validate your course idea with the actual like exchange of money. And so what I did is I threw up a sales page and I said, okay, you guys said you wanted to learn this.

Abbey Ashley: Here’s what I’m gonna do. I’m going to create this course. I went ahead and I created the course outline so it was going to have 10 modules and here’s what I was going to cover and you know, it’s going to start on this date and I’m going to release, I’m going to release a course or not of course, but a module every single week for 12 weeks or whatever it was. And I said, you know, this course is eventually going to be nine 97 but I’m going to open it for this one week only and I’m going to sell it for four 97 and I had, during that time, 16 people have my list of a thousand people purchase, which was $8,000 in my pocket for something I hadn’t even created yet. Wow. And that was like, I mean that’s when that was the whole like, Oh my gosh, this is real.

Abbey Ashley: I think that was like the settling in moment. You know, I have been reinvesting a lot of the money for my services back into the business. And I, I think this was the first just realization of like, Oh my gosh, I can do really do this. And so I went on and I created the course. Right. Which was awesome cause I had students actually being able to give me interaction and tell me what they wanted in it and I could release the modules and have it really interactive. And it made the course I think really, really good because of that. And then you know, after I finished the course about three, four months later, I launched it again. And so I pretty much have done two course launches since that point, since 2016 and the number, like my course launch number just goes up every time because my audience is growing now. You know, as a general rule, I can usually convert anywhere from like one to 5% of my list, which I know is kind of a big gap. But it kind of depends on a couple of different factors. So I, you know, as my list grows, as long as it’s my quality list, then I can gauge, all right, I can predict I’m going to make about this much during this launch.

Melissa Guller: I love this idea. I think this is such great advice about validating the idea, especially because if you took the opposite approach, let’s say you had just decided to make an online course and then put it up for sale, there’s no guarantee anybody would even want it. And then that could be so much time wasted. Or even maybe it’s sort of the right topic but not exactly what your audience would want. So the fact that you pre-sold the course and then the students could interact with you and give you feedback and they got a great deal. Right? They got it for half price. Right. So it feels like it’s just a win win for all of you and then you have something that you can sell again and again, which it sounds like is exactly what you’ve done.

Abbey Ashley: Exactly. I literally just sell the exact same thing over and over and over on repeat. I will say this though, I did get it wrong before I got it right. The part of the story I didn’t tell earlier is that when I was probably at like 500 subscribers, I spent three months creating courses, three courses. I don’t know why. I don’t know why. I decided I needed three courses all at what? So I spent about like three or four months creating these three courses, blood, sweat, tears, late nights into these courses and release them. And nobody, no let me, I stand corrected one person but I have one guy buy for $97 and I was like, Oh that was so much work for not enough money. Cause people didn’t want what I was selling.

Melissa Guller: Yeah. It’s a tough truth to realize that people don’t want what you’re offering but it doesn’t mean that they don’t want anything that you might offer. It just means you haven’t gotten it quite right yet.

Abbey Ashley: Yup. And I was, I was even like do it. My husband and I are obsessed with shark tank and so I was going and I was reading through like some of the, like these top tips from the sharks. And one of the things they said is that the most successful entrepreneurs don’t, like most people have a business idea and then they’d come up with their business idea and they try to find an audience for their business idea. He’s like, if you can build an audience and then ask that audience what they want and then sell it to them like time and time again, that’s going to be the most profitable business model.

Melissa Guller: Absolutely. I think that’s come up in, if not every single podcast episode that we’ve done or far, almost all of them that if you don’t listen to your audience and then give them what they’re asking for, then you’re going to get kind of left in the dust. I think a lot of the creators I’ve talked to have mentioned that they thought they were going to sell one thing to a certain type of audience, but they ended up learning that their audience was not who they expected. Maybe it was more women than they thought. Maybe it was a different age demographic than they thought, or maybe the pain point was different. But unless you’re asking, which you mentioned, you literally just emailed them and asked, Hey, what do you want? For me, it’s not rocket science to do and anybody can send an email, but it has a huge payoff. So since you did that first launch, and I know you’ve mentioned that you have launched that course again a few times, how else has your business grown and can you walk us through the last couple of years?

Abbey Ashley: Yeah, so the last couple of years have just been crazy. So I’m a really big fan of just focusing on one thing at a time. So I’ve really just narrowed like this course, like I said, I just kind of sell this course over and over and over and over, and then I kind of try to focus on one traffic source on a T at a time. So we went, you know, right when I launched that very first time, I took that $8,000 I made and I invested in a Pinterest manager. And so I started really trying to drive traffic through Pinterest because I was already blogging. That was something that I liked to do. I liked writing. I wrote for some of my clients and so I was like, Hey, I think Pinterest would be a good place to really go all in and try to get traffic from.

Abbey Ashley: So I hired a Pinterest manager and we, you know, kind of perfected getting some organic traffic through Pinterest. Then I was like, okay, that’s kind of running without me. I can try a different traffic source now. And so I went all in with a Facebook group and so that Facebook group is about to hit 40,000 members now. And literally now, like three years later, I’m like, Oh, I think I’m going to try YouTube. So I’m really, really like slow, but I want to do things really, really well. And so I just kind of trap, like try to focus on one traffic source at a time. Um, so that’s been, I’ve been doing that. And then I did eventually introduce a secondary product and that is called savvy vault. And it, my signature course is called the savvy system. My second course is called savvy bolt and it is tech trainings for virtual assistants.

Abbey Ashley: So, you know, we have a Teachable course, you know, we have a canvas course and a convert kit course and things like that. Um, so it’s just kind of like a Backpocket resource. We released a new tech course every month. It’s a membership model, which is also something that I’ve loved about Teachable, is that I’ve been able to run a membership site through Teachable. So we just add a new course to that every single month. And so those are the two things that I sell. So it works really well as an upsell to when people buy my course, my signature course, 50% of people buy the up too. So it’s just a really nice, they pair together really well. And so those are literally, I just sell those two things and keep going on repeat and try to just improve my method every single time that I sell it. And we just did a course launch that hit 450,000 in sales this, this past January. So it’s, it’s definitely, it increases every single time and it’s, uh, just just grows as I continue just to kind of stay focused on those, those two things.

Melissa Guller: So, Oh my gosh, I have so many thoughts. So when was your first launch for timeline? My first launch was in December of 2016 so from December of 2016 to January of 2019 you went from $8,000 to $450,000 and we also have an evergreen funnel that does about 80,000 a month now. Sorry, are doing like okay. Overall

Abbey Ashley: it’s been crazy. Sometimes I’m just like, what is my life? What is happening?

Melissa Guller: Well, what I love too, I mean you said so many smart things, I can’t wait to say all of them again. The focus that you had on just the one thing at a time, just having that one course, how long did you only have one course for? About a year and a half, maybe two years. I think that’s so smart because I think it’s very tempting to make a lot of courses to appeal to a lot of people or try all the traffic sources and all this media places, but by focusing in it seems like you really got to know one traffic channel or what your customers really wanted and I think that probably saved you some sanity too.

Abbey Ashley: 100% and really I think any of them, there’s so many different ways to gain traffic and I think any one of them will work if you just pick a strategy and just stick to it, keep doing that strategy. I really think any of them will work. It’s really just a matter of sticking to it.

Melissa Guller: [inaudible] yeah, that’s a nice theme. That’s come up a couple of times about sticking to it and I think with social media and traffic sources, there are so many you could choose, but instead of going kind of shallow and dipping your toe in the water on all of them instead of, you can really go deep and start to understand one traffic platform of your choice. I’m sure you’re right that the benefit, we’ll just kind of multiply if you put all your efforts in one direction. I 100% believe that. And I think it’s tempting to to say like, Oh, what if I dabbled a little here and dabbled a little there? And I think people can still do that if you want to test the waters a little bit and see if you personally like Pinterest or like YouTube or see where you think your audiences. I think that that’s great to like test it out for a minute, but then maybe decide and commit to one for a few months and see how it goes. Totally.

Abbey Ashley: And I’ll say this too. I think that this is important. We, so I just revamped my signature course now. So that course that I created in 2016 I literally have been selling that exact same course for the past three years now. I’ve made little updates to it. You know, I’d interject a video, another lesson or whatever, but I just revamped my entire course this year. And so for three years, like I’ve literally made over $1 million from a course that was filmed from my laptop that I bought off of Craig’s list from camera, from Craigslist. I think that we sometimes think that we have to have this really fancy set up. And I mean, yes, I think you should try to do the best with what you have. You know, like try to, you can’t buy expensive lighting, sit in front of a window, things like that. But I wouldn’t let your lack of resources prohibit you from, from really creating that course or or doing that big thing. Cause I look at the stuff that I did back in 2013 and 2016 and I’m like, Oh that was terrible. But it worked. Right. So I think that a, I think that that’s probably important to note too.

Melissa Guller: Yeah, that’s great advice. And to your point, I think people notice the content and the lessons that you share with them. And if you’re a really wonderful teacher and you have knowledge to share, it doesn’t really matter to them if your lighting is a little bit dark, right? They’re just here to learn from you because you’ve had some kind of success for you. It was being a virtual assistant and they wanted to learn how to do that. But we all have knowledge that we can share and a little bit of a, you know, cheap video quality or maybe you haven’t perfected the art of editing here and there is not going to turn anybody away if you have something really high quality to offer them. In terms of knowledge,

Abbey Ashley: a hundred percent I always say like everything is a draft one like this, like my version of my website right now is probably like a draft three and someday there’ll be a draft for my course is like a draft too. This is the second time I’ve done it and we’ll do a draft three at some point. Like it can get better over time. I’m going to do the best I can right now but be okay with that and go ahead and release it before it’s perfect. Release it before it may be, looks like everybody else’s. Just go ahead and put stuff out there cause you can just continue to improve it as you go.

Melissa Guller: That’s such a healthy approach to think of everything as a draft because I think it’s very tempting to say, Oh no, no, it’s not finished yet. I can’t launch this course or this website or this blog of this video, it’s not done. But I think a lot of people who do end up becoming very successful don’t ever have the sense that something is done, but they let it out there anyway. Exactly. I’m curious too, to hear, obviously you’re doing a lot of things very right. Has anything been maybe surprising or unexpected

Abbey Ashley: good for you? Yeah. Um, so I think that, I think I had this idea that once I would have this online course and like, you know, I saw these people doing this big thing that like once I arrived at this certain point, I don’t know, I guess I felt like there’d be like this certain feeling or this certain like of now I’m now I’m here, but I think that now my sense of entrepreneurship is even higher. Like I’m already like, Ooh, now I want to start something else and now, and I don’t know if I knew that was in there. And so I think that that’s, that also I feel like could be encouraging for people who feel like they have a million ideas. Like, I think I used to be so hard on myself about like, Oh, I would start this and stop it.

Abbey Ashley: I’d start this and I never follow through with any of these ideas. And I thought, okay, if I could just find the one thing and stick to it, well I found one thing and I finally did stick to it and yes, it has changed my life and it’s changed my family’s life, but I’m still thinking of new ideas and I’m still like, I think that that’s, that actually proves that you are an entrepreneur, that that is, that is who you are and it’s part of your DNA to, to just be creating, you know, like to always be creating and to, I don’t know, I think that that was something that I didn’t really expect. I thought that like, okay, once I find the right business idea, then that will be my thing. And yes, of course, this is my thing. I’m not going anywhere, but I’ll just say like that sense of entrepreneurship and creativity I think is just even higher now.

Abbey Ashley: I’m like, Ooh, what else can I start? What else can I do? You know? And that, that element of just having to focus again on one thing at a time. Like I try to challenge myself to only have one side hustle. So when I was working a full time job, like building my VA business was my side hustle. When I was a VA building my online course, that was my main thing. And then building my online course was my side hustle. Well now my, my online course is the main, my main thing, right? It’s my main focus. So I’m like, Ooh, what kind of side hustle can I have now to be building something else? You know? I think that that the entrepreneurial mindset I think just doesn’t go away and I think it’s healthy and I think it’s something that we should take time to, to kind of cultivate.

Abbey Ashley: Yeah. I love hearing about that spirit within you, but also the way that you’ve found ways to focus. So for people who maybe feel like they have too many ideas to choose from right now, I think it might be a relief to hear that you can choose one. See it out, commit to that for a little while and know that in the future you could try other things or maybe you find that you don’t like one and you move on to the next, but instead of just feeling paralyzed like, Oh, I can’t possibly do all of these at once, it’s okay to just pick one because there’s plenty of opportunity in the future. If you want to try a new Avenue or kind of expand in a different direction, definitely I end up, you need more ideas. I have a list of probably like a hundred of them.

Abbey Ashley: I have purchased so many domain names. It’s crazy. I’m sure that’s very relatable for a lot of people listening, like the perpetual domain name purchasing or just constantly thinking of new ideas and Oh, what if I tried this? I think a lot of creators have that feeling in common. 100% so I’m curious before we start to wrap up, imagine if you were a brand new creator and you were just getting started today. What are some of the things that you would do first, right off the bat? Oh um, build a list, build the list, build the list, build the list, and it’s okay if you don’t. I think a lot of times people get really stuck on like, Oh, I need to have my client avatar. And there’s all these like projects out there of you know, what kind of shoes with your person where and what kind of, you know, where do they shop at the weekends?

Abbey Ashley: And I was never very good. Like I don’t know, like I just, I still buy my shoes from like Walmart and target. Like, I don’t know, I’m not really into all that, so I don’t know. But what I do know is that I generally like talking about this thing, you know, and I think it’s okay to start your email list with something that’s a little bit more broad or just just start talking about something that you really enjoy and it’s okay if it shifts over time. Right. You know, I was talking about all things like entrepreneurship and for a while I talked a lot about branding and then I started talking about virtual assistance with my list. So those that journey from zero to like 5,000 those people probably had no idea what the heck I was doing because every single week I was emailing them about something different, but I was still building and I was still talking to them on a consistent basis. I mean since 2013 when I had those first like 20 subscribers, I’ve been emailing them pretty much every single week. So they know me and they’ve been able to grow with me. So just start building that list even if it’s a little bit at a time. And I think that you’ll see good results if you’ll stick to it.

Melissa Guller: Great advice. So before we do go, what’s next for you? I know you mentioned your one hundred ideas and counting, so what are you thinking about?

Abbey Ashley: Yeah, so I think I’m actually going to start a podcast. You’re talking about this a little bit before the call? Yeah, I really want to start thinking I’m going to start Abbey ashley.com which if you go to it right now, it just redirects to The Virtual Savvy. So don’t try. But I think that, I think I would like to talk a little bit about course creation and just interview creators kind of like you guys are doing and I don’t have any intention of really probably selling anything on that site. I just, I’ve made a lot of good friends in the industry and I just, I think it’s really interesting to hear their stories and so I think that’s kind of my little side project for now.

Melissa Guller: Yeah, I can definitely speak to the fact that a huge benefit from podcasting is just the chance to get to talk to really interesting people, whether that’s meeting somebody new or if you already know people in this space. A chance to really like show off some of your friends and how wonderful they are and their expertise is. I’m curious to hear how did you decide and who knows if this might shift, but how did you decide to put it under a different domain instead of doing a podcast under The Virtual Savvy?

Abbey Ashley: Yeah. So for me, The Virtual Savvy, it talks so much about virtual assistants and I love virtual assistants. And that is still something that I, I’ll probably talk about that a little bit on my kind of other website. However, I think that it’s really important to, you know, talk to your audience about what’s relevant to them right then. And for me, I don’t think that most virtual, most of my virtual assistants or people just heard about the VA world, they have never that, you know, they’ve never made money online. They’ve never anything just, they’re working their nine to five or their whatever. Um, and so for most of them I’m like, just focus on getting your first couple of clients. Like that’s really what I kind of zero in on. And so when it comes to, you know, how to have an Instagram strategy that’s going to get more people into your course, it’s really not relevant to them at that phase, you know? And so I’m kind of breaking it up of like, this is, this is where I think people should kind of start, start with services, you know? And then that next phase, if they’re ready for that, if they want to start learning about that while they’re in the VA world would kind of be over on the separate site. So that’s at least where I’m at for now. We’ll see what happens.

Melissa Guller: That makes a ton of sense though. It’s just a good awareness about your audience and I’m sure there are a lot like you, a few years ago where as you mentioned you weren’t really ready for the online course right when you were starting to offer services, so I can see how that would feel maybe overwhelming or be a few too many steps too far ahead to talk about online courses to your audience. Yeah, I think that that’s

Abbey Ashley: thing too. We can, I know probably wrap it up soon, but I, something for me that was really hard in the beginning was feeling like I needed to solve my clients’ problems from a to Z. And really it’s like if I can just be really, really good at solving their problems, maybe from like a to G, you know, or a to D like here, here are the, these are the problems that you’re having from here to here on your journey. This isn’t your entire journey. You know, I’m, I’m, I’m not teaching you how to do X, Y, Z. I’m just teaching you this one thing and how to do it really, really, really well. So you really get that transformation. But at a certain point they, they’re done with my program, they’re ready to move on to somebody else’s. And I think that that’s okay. I think like releasing people to move on to the next thing is, is important. So that way I can really, really be good at the one thing that I’m, I’m really teaching. And so that’s kind of another reason why I just want to keep The Virtual Savvy is just really focused on getting people started in the virtual assistant world. And then if they want to grow and scale and do other things, I’m kind of gonna kind of direct them elsewhere.

Melissa Guller: I think that makes a lot of sense for a ton of reasons. But one of which is that you’ve become known as like a GoTo place for virtual assistance and it’s so clear that if people are finding success in your program, they might recommend it to somebody else who is looking for exactly that. So by becoming a little more specific and solving from, you know, a to G, like you said, now people will think of you instead of a lot of people who try to do it all. It’s harder to recommend a general list over a specialist sometimes for sure. And then I also think it helps you find success for your students. It’s so much to promise somebody the world from a toZ and to really do everything for them. That could be a course that would never end. So by on just one part, I think I would, I would guess that a lot more of your students have gone on to be successful virtual assistants because it’s attainable.

Abbey Ashley: Yes, yes. And I think it’s a, it’s a low barrier to entry. You can get in, learn this thing and it makes like do this small thing that’s gonna make a big impact on your life. And that’s what my course teaches. And I think that, you know, for all the course creators listening to this, you don’t, you don’t have to solve all of their problems. Whoever your ideal audience is, you don’t have to solve every single one of their problems. Just what is one thing that they could change in their life that will make a big impact on their life. Teach that. And yeah, you will. You’ll see a lot more success stories come out of your courses.

Melissa Guller: Love it. Well, do you have any last words of wisdom or inspiration for our listeners? I know you’ve already given so much to us.

Abbey Ashley: No, I mean, just thanks for having me on here. I absolutely, I love Teachable. Teachable has been my platform this entire time. So those of you guys who have gone with Teachable, very good choice and um, yeah, just really stick with it. I think that that’s the biggest thing. It’s just persistence and experimentation I think have been the two biggest factors in any success that I’ve had in my business is just sticking with it, try new things and then when something works do more of what works.

Melissa Guller: That’s great advice. Where can people connect with you before we go if they want to learn more? Yeah, definitely.

Abbey Ashley: So a The Virtual Savvy.com is my website all about becoming a virtual assistant. I have a checklist and starter kit for those of you guys who did want to start with services. Starting a VA business is a great way to do that and so you can go to The Virtual Savvy.com/checklist in order to download that step by step guide on how to get started.

Melissa Guller: Perfect. And I’ll make sure that there is a link in the show notes as well in case people want to reference that later. Okay. Awesome. Well. Abbey, it’s been such a pleasure having you and I hope that people took notes during this episode because I feel like you gave out such great advice throughout, so thank you again for joining.

Abbey Ashley: No problem. Thanks for having me!

Melissa Guller: Thank you for joining us this week! You can learn more about Abbey, The Virtual Savvy and Teachable in the show notes at teachable.com/eit11. Before you go, make sure you subscribe to our podcast so you can receive new episodes right when they’re released, and if you’re enjoying the podcast, we hope you’ll leave us a five star review on behalf of Team Teachable. We hope you enjoyed this episode about virtual assistants and entrepreneurship with Abbey Ashley. We’ll see you in the next episode of Everything is Teachable.