SDH 437: From Corporate to Virtual Assistant and Finding Freedom with Meridith McCarty

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Welcome back to another episode of the podcast. This week I am joined by the lovely Meridith McCarty. Meridith is the owner of McCarty Virtual Services, a full service virtual assistant agency and outsourcing expert. She has been working one-on-one with business owners for the past two years on how to most efficiently outsource work to a virtual assistant to maximize revenue and minimize costs and time consuming tasks.

Meridith was born and raised in Des Moines, Iowa (yes, another Iowan!) and after many moves for her husband Alex's career, she currently is residing outside of Baltimore, Maryland. After their third move in four years, she decided to create the lifestyle she desired and used all of her experience that she had gained in the corporate world to begin her own virtual assistant company, thus McCarty Virtual Services was born.

I originally met Meridith at the She Did It Her Way Summit a few years back. She reached out to me, connecting as fellow Iowans and over our mutual work we do with coaches.

Her husband's career had them moving every 1.5-2 years. This meant figuring out a new 9-5 with every move, which was less than ideal for growing her career because every time she got started, she had to stop again. She realized that she couldn’t keep doing what she was doing and knowing she was never meant to be in a 9-5, Meridith began looking into remote jobs she could do from home when they landed in Newport, RI in 2018. She discovered the world of virtual assistance and she dove all-in deciding that is what she was going to do. She committed to it and never looked back.

What makes Meridith’s journey so amazing is that she never gave herself a ‘plan B’, she was simply determined to make this work. She put all her eggs and this one basket and decided she was going to whatever it took. With this mindset, Meridith set herself up for massive success, though she didn’t know it quite yet.

One of the first things Meridith did was take Abbey Ashley’s (a past She Did It Her Way Summit speaker!) course, and with this course along with her own experience and knowledge she was able to dive right in, get uncomfortable, and start her business.

She assumed her business would slowly, but steadily grow, but what happened was the exact opposite. She experienced growth almost immediately and had to quickly hire a VA to help her out on the back end of her own business. She was not prepared at all for this, despite being a VA herself and knowing what should be done.

As a result, Meridith decided to pivot her business, consulting business owners on how to outsource work to VA’s. She shows them how to determine what to outsource, how to set themselves and their VA’s up for success, and grow their business with a VA in a positive way.

Here are few of Meridith’s key recommendations for before you start looking to outsource:

Download Loom
Record yourself doing routine tasks, step by step
Create a place (whether in Drive or a project management tool) as a training library to store these instructional videos
In this space, also put all of the information a VA would need to be successful (your headshot, bio, SOP’s, your working schedule, etc.)

Her business continued to grow, much quicker than she had anticipated thanks to a referral program she had put into place, and she decided it was time to continue to grow her team.

Her big initiative in 2021 is to get out of actually doing any client fulfillment herself. She has set herself up to be so close to achieving this and now they just need to make that final pivot, as a team.

Meridith lives by the saying,

“Do what you love, and the money will follow.”

Are you a VA looking to go the extra mile on your applications?

Meridith likes to use video submissions in her job opp’s. It shows that the applicant is willing to go the extra mile. This also raises your chances of you being remembered because it dramatically cuts down on the number of applicants for a position, in her experience.

There are definitely moments where as business owners we think that the virtual assistants and people that work for us can read our mind. Obviously, this is just not the case and it really trains you to be super explicit, crystal clear, and over communicate what it is that you want done.

“It also really requires you to recognize that hiring someone is like it is an investment, you spend more time and energy upfront.”

We all have those times that we have failed, we have all been there and hired wrong. You learn by your failures and how you are going to ‘do it next time’. Massive action produces massive results. That's how the business grows and that's how we grow.

As she has grown, so has her family. Meridith now has a beautiful baby who she loves to spend time engaging with. This makes it especially important for her to be able to focus her time when her baby is awake on her baby and when the baby is asleep, on her business. Learning to balance and keep doing the things she loves in her business is what keeps her fueled and fully present for both her family and her business.

Want to connect with Meridith? You can connect with her on Instagram and also find her hanging out on Clubhouse (McCartyVS). You can find out more about her agency via her website as well.

Until next time, keep doing it your way!

Insights:

“It's important to recognize and understand that your leap journey and transition is going to be different from one person to the next.”
“If you can learn from someone and go straight to the source, it's going to save you so much time and energy, and it's going to allow you to accelerate your growth.”
“The key is to take care of the people who are already there because by doing so that will attract and bring more people in.”
“The better that you lay the expectation, the more stringent you are about the qualifying and hiring process, like the less work you're going to do on the back end, and they're going to make your life easier when it comes to that.”