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The first year going full-time as an entrepreneur can be stressful and exciting, all at once! You answer to YOU, and no one else, and if I know YOU, you’re ready to make the most of your first 365 days as CEO. That’s why we opened up the Goal Digger Podcast Coaching Sessions again. I am so excited to dig in with a first year full-time entrepreneur.

Amanda Rush Holmes is a Southern mama, educator and founder of The Virtual Assistant Studio, a virtual assistant agency that helps female bloggers and influencers create content that converts. She’s led dozens of women through her signature course, The Virtual Assistant Studio, where she teaches moms to build a profitable virtual assistant business so they can make full-time income during nap time.

Amanda is on the Goal Digger Podcast for a one on one coaching session to dig into first year challenges that I know she can turn into growth opportunities. We’re talking about selling and marketing different products and services, pivoting away from services to focus on digital products, what to look for in a team member, and boundaries for yourself as a leader. 

Leading a Remote Team

Amanda started her business during peak pandemic and since her focus is virtual assistants, it only makes sense that her team is totally virtual and remote. Leading a remote team has it’s unique challenges and she asked how I lead my own remote team to ensure they’re confident to make decisions on behalf of the brand.

One of the things that I found that has been absolutely pivotal for my brand and for my team is allowing your team members to feel ownership of an entire process start to finish. That can be super hard at the beginning because a lot of times, as the CEO or as the boss, we’re only handing over tiny pieces of a process that someone can either do better for us or that we could do, but we shouldn’t be doing.

But if you can find a way to give your team full ownership from start to finish, they’re going to feel like they own this piece of the process, and it’s also going to invite them to figure out new ways to do it or to experiment or to explore and see. Giving that permission from the very beginning allows people to see gaps in the systems or allows people to see opportunities and that encourages them to make it their own process.

Balancing Services and Education

Amanda offers both services to clients and has an education side of her business, and sometimes the services spill over and take up time that she could be spending on education. She asked how to best balance these two sides, and I love this question. 

One of the things that I think is so incredibly important when you are navigating both a service-based business, but also a business that can scale digitally, is to create clear boundaries around the amount of service work that you are going to take. I’m talking about having a very black and white yes and no system of what your point is on the service side that’s going to cover your income, that’s going to cover your team’s income and any overhead that you have, and saying no to everything beyond that.

Now the beauty that comes with that is if you are having to turn away people for the service side one, it usually is the supply and demand that you can increase your prices. It also creates an opportunity to give you the freedom of time, which is required to grow that scalable side of your business, that digital side.

Gasoline on the Fire

Amanda is already seeing such great exponential growth, but she’s a girl after my own heart and asked about the strategies and methods that have proven successful in my business and serve as “gasoline on the fire” of what’s already working. 

For me, organization is huge. Creating systems and processes that can be duplicated has been absolutely key to my scaling and growth. Creating SOPs (standard operating procedures(, workflows, and other things that can eventually be handed off to a teammate can absolutely transform things.

I offer more ideas for scaling your business in this conversation, so hit play!

More from this Coaching Session

It’s so fun getting to speak into the lives and businesses of Goal Diggers like Amanda Rush Holmes. We chat about value ladders, creating a company culture, and so much more. Tune into the coaching session wherever you get your podcasts. 

To learn more about Amanda and the Virtual Assistant Studio, follow her on Instagram @thevirtualassistantstudio.

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