Reasons to Offer Web Design as a Virtual Assistant

 Today I’m excited to offer a guest blog post from Kristen Leigh, a freelance web design virtual assistant for her clients. When she first left her corporate job to work online as a virtual assistant, it wasn’t what she thought it would be. But because she was smart and scrappy, she turned her online VA business around to offer a high-demand niche service that her clients really needed.

She’s here to share some gold about why you might want to niche down yourself to become a website designer when working as a virtual assistant.

Here’s Kristen Leigh’s Story as a Virtual Assistant Who Busted Into the Online Space with Digital Web Design:

It only took me 6 months of being a full time “virtual assistant” to question why I left my job in the tech industry. Like, WTF did I do that for?!

For goodness sake, the office I worked in had a foosball table, a couple different gaming systems, a room to nap in, $20 bi-weekly massages, and summer food trucks!

Health insurance and all that important stuff was pretty good, too but… did I mention the $20 bi-weekly massages? With those types of perks you’d think I worked in Silicon Valley rather than the outskirts of Boston!

So why in the world did I quit my job for the uncertainty of entrepreneurship? I left those amazing perks behind because the work I was doing wasn’t fulfilling to me.

Honestly, I was bored.

I’d worked in eCommerce in some capacity for nearly 6 years, not because I wanted to but because it’s the career I happened to stumble into immediately after graduating college.

You can imagine my horror when 6 months after ditching the job and those amazing perks, I wasn’t sure that being a “virtual assistant” was right for me.

The Bait and Switch: Work and Travel the World

Back in 2017 I stumbled upon a program that taught women how to start an online business and travel the world.

Totally baffled by the fact that traveling full time without being a travel influencer was a thing, I started researching every traveling virtual assistant I could find.

I feel all that research tricked me into thinking that the moment I went full time in my business I’d be making 6-figures, Airbnb hopping, and living a luxury lifestyle.

You feel that way, too?

That’s why six months into my business – that’s six months of working 40 hours a week in my business and zero hours a week on my business – I felt really discouraged by the business I had built.

Going back to corporate wasn’t an option.

I knew the career path I could easily get back into wasn’t right for me so I started changing up my service offerings instead. I went from identifying as “just” a virtual assistant to identifying as a web designer.

So I stopped offering every single thing under the sun and started offering web design and only the digital services that truly fulfilled me.

That shift was monumental for me. Did it get me to six-figures? No. Did it allow me to Airbnb hop? Technically, no.

But it did allow me to buy an RV and travel the United States for a year and a half before the world came to a screeching halt in March of 2020.

So this is where I tell you that you, too, should add web design virtual assistant to your digital service offerings.

But don’t just take my word for it. Instead, let me explain 4 specific reasons of exactly how offering web design as a digital service provider changed my business and life.