Starting a Virtual Assistant Business While Keeping Your Day Job

You may be ready to start a virtual assistant business, but not able to give up your current pay cheque.

You don’t want to give notice before you have a steady income from your new enterprise. Just letting your boss get a hint that you’re starting a business and you may not have that cushion while you build your client base.

How do you quietly build a virtual assistant business keeping your current job?

The first step is simply not mentioning it. Your co-workers may be your friends, but that’s not a guarantee that they’ll keep their mouths shut. Wait until you’ve actually handed over your letter of resignation to pass around the good news.

You also need to make the effort to be discrete. Don’t interview prospective virtual assistant clients at work, and direct any email about your business to an account separate from your work email. Prospective clients can recognize a work email address and will doubt your professionalism. Your work email is also subject to review by your employer, depending on where you work.

You should be careful about scheduling face-to-face business appointments. While you may have to take time off of work for a meeting, you should ask for personal time off, rather than trying to lie about the reason you won’t be in. Additionally, if you suddenly need to take off several days closely spaced together, your boss may become suspicious. It’s worthwhile to try to schedule all of your meetings and interviews on one day or to time them during your lunch hour or normal time away from work.

Another obvious interview error is showing up to work in your suit or nice clothes, if your work place is generally more relaxed. This sort of change in your behavior can quickly clue your employer in to your strategy.

If you are found out, the only thing that you can really do is own up to the fact. If you claim innocence, and then quit a week or two later, you’ll have burned an important bridge. Your current employer may become a future client or reference. If you burn that bridge, your employer is less likely to give you any sort of references, no matter how good your previous work was.

You may manage to build your new virtual assistant practice with no one the wiser, though. You should keep quiet about that fact during the resignation process, and make every effort to be polite about the matter, in order to maintain a good relationship with your former employer.