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Today on the Capture Crew Podcast Christora and Tom are chatting with their Virtual Assistant, Jacqueline Nwankwo, the CEO and Owner of Vine and Venture Virtual.
You may be wondering what a virtual assistant’s job is, or how they can help you — and we’re going to tell you everything!
There are many types of virtual assistants you can hire, and if you’re not sure what that may look like for you, imagine you are working in an office and you’re hiring an administrative assistant to help you with office tasks – what kinds of tasks would you have them help with?
Now take the office away.
Virtual assistants can help you with anything from detailed administrative tasks, to social media management, branding ,and copywriting, just to name a few things.
A virtual assistant fills the gap in the areas you either don’t have the desire to do or the specialty to get needed tasks completed.
Basically, they help you get your time back!
Christora shared that hiring a virtual assistant has been invaluable to her to hand off tasks that she liked doing but simply doesn’t have the time to dedicate to anymore.
When Jacqueline started Vine and Venture, her vision was to work with E-Commerce businesses, but through connections and networking, she has established a client base of life coaches and wedding photographers.
As part of her brand position, Jacqueline uses her background in the music industry to offer a creative perspective to her clients, giving them a place to flesh out new brand ideas, helping create brand voices and then implementing that throughout their social media and copywriting.
Jacqueline measures success based on her client’s experiences. Are they happy? Are they referring her to others? That’s the big indicator of how she is doing.
Of course, she has metrics and numbers and milestones, but at the end of the day it ultimately comes down to two things, is she retaining her clients, and is she receiving referrals?
She has managed to successfully scale her company while growing steadily, and her tips are perfect for implementation in any business.
You probably won’t be surprised to hear that her tip is that she hires help too! Building a team with diverse skills and backgrounds has allowed her to grow, and also has increase the level of work that she can offer her clients.
Over the course of her business, some things felt very intuitive and some things felt incredibly hard. She had been scaling on her own as a solopreneur until she reached the point that she wasn’t able to say “yes” to more work because of her existing commitments.
It was at this point that she began to bring others onto her team to assist her in the same ways that hiring a VA for your business can assist you.
She focused on what she didn’t have time or energy for, and also on people who specialized in certain areas to take over some of the tasks.
Learning to delegate was the hardest part, as it is for most people.
“There’s a balance you have to strike between knowing what’s going on in your business, and also just trusting the people you hired to do what you hired them to do.”
One thing that has helped Jacqueline be successful is trusting her intuition, and turning down clients that do not feel like a good fit. Early on in her business, she decided she was only going to work with people she aligned with in business values and “vibes”.
She has had to cut ties with partnerships where she didn’t feel trusted as a leader or where she was treated as an employee rather than a partner. Every VA is different, but for Jacqueline, trust and collaboration are important parts of maintaining great relationships with her clients.
Holding these boundaries has allowed her the space to say yes to partnerships that serve both her and those who hire her.
For Christora, she has had to say no to weddings from couples she really wanted to photograph in order to maintain other values that are just important to her, like spending time with her family and getting to travel.
At the end of the day, you have to maintain your boundaries if you want to uphold the things that are important to you. It’s okay to bend sometimes, but try to remember that the more you say yes to now, the less space you have for a yes later on.
Partnering with support, like a Virtual Assistant, who aligns with your values and is dedicated to collaboration, can help you say “yes” to the opportunities you want without compromising your boundaries. Who knows what that next yes might be!
To learn more about Jacqueline, read on for her bio and how to get in touch with her:
Jacqueline Nwankwo is the founder and CEO of Vine & Venture Virtual, a virtual assistance company specializing in supporting coaches and photographers with administrative and creative tasks. Her backgrounds in opera performance, journalism, and administrative management come together in how she partners with business owners to creatively position their brands for growth, while helping them to maintain business systems that serve their goals.
In addition to running the virtual assistance operations of Vine & Venture Virtual, Jacqueline also mentors new and aspiring online service providers in her Venture VA Academy, where she gives them tools and strategies to start and grow VA businesses of their own. She believes that the growth of online service providers can and will forever shift our perception of work/life balance, and especially provide women with career opportunities that allow them flexibility, joy, and wealth-building in unprecedented ways.
Jacqueline currently lives in Chicago with her husband and dog, and enjoys reading, house plants, and her new artistic pursuit of being a (VERY) amateur punk rock drummer.
To connect with Jacqueline, you can email her at jacquelinenwankwo.va@gmail.com, or find her on Instagram @vineandventurevirtual and TikTok @jacquelinenwankwo.
Today on The Capture Crew Podcast Christora and Tom are chatting with Andrea Malakoff on the importance of second shooting. Andrea’s story is unique but also not uncommon from what […]
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