Episode# 040: Exploring Freelancing + the World Of Virtual Assistants with Micala Quinn
I love this episode because it’s as real as it gets!
I had Micala Quinn on the show and she’s the go-to expert who teaches moms how to build a profitable freelancing business from the ground up! But on today’s episode, it was just Micala and I… her baby was there, too! So it’s REAL. You’ll hear coo’s and cries! But it’s perfect because it’s all the evidence you need that you can build your dream no matter what you have going on in your life.
Micala Quinn is a wife, mom, teacher, online course creator, and podcaster. Her mission is to make sure that every mom in America knows that you don’t have to choose between being a working mom or a stay at home mom. She believes that you can combine both in a way that works for you and your family. Through her podcast, free resources, and paid programs Micala equips women with the tools they need to build a profitable freelance business from home. She believes communicating in gifs is an art form and cheese is her love language. When she’s not working she can be found walking to the park with her kiddos, making cookies, or watching Friends for the millionth time with her cute husband, Colin.
If you’re either someone who is looking to explore freelancing as a way to make an income or build up some income to be able to leave your current job or you’re a business owner who wants to scale and bring on a freelancer, this one’s for you!
What did that road that led you here? What did that look like in the beginning stages before you had this business off the ground?
I like to tell people that I knew three things.
1)I knew that I wanted to get married.
2)I knew that I wanted to be a mom.
3)I knew that I wanted to be a teacher.
And I'm one of those lucky people that like everything that they dreamed of when they were little. Like it all kind of happened. I met my husband and college, we both went to Kansas State University. He was two years older than me.
He went onto law school and then when he graduated, we got married. So I became a teacher. I taught high school English for four years. And then my first year of teaching I planned my wedding and I love to teach and I loved planning my wedding, but I loved teaching. It was awesome. It was like everything that I wanted to do since I was a little girl. My mom was a teacher too and, and I would take all of her school supplies, her leftover school supplies and leftover materials. And I had my own classroom in the basement and I played school like in my summers and my allowance money went to the teacher supply store for my fake classroom.
Everything was great and perfect until I got pregnant with my daughter. And that happened really quickly after my wedding. I thought that I wanted it to be a teacher forever and I taught in a Catholic school and our kids were going to go to Catholic school and I just teach at the school that they went to and we'd get tuition for free and all would be well.
Well, when it came time to start thinking about daycare’s and looking into that, I just got anxious and mad. I was like, well, maybe I don't want to work. Maybe I want to be a stay at home mom. In the conversations with my husband around that topic got really heated because not only did we just get married, we just found out we're pregnant, but we just bought a house. And while we were house hunting, I talked him into buying the house that was right outside of the top of our price range. So it was a stretch and I was like, it'll be great. We can do it. And then a few months later I'm trying to tell them like, hey, I want to quit my job. How are we gonna make this happen? And he's like, Whoa, we don't you…you have to work.
That was our ongoing conversation while I was pregnant. In the back of my mind, I was like, he's going to come around like something's going to happen. We'll figure it out. But it didn't. We broke everything down, looked at our budget and we would have to sell our house that we just moved into. And it just, that wasn't really an option for us. So I had my daughter when she was born in June and I went back to work in early October. And that was the worst year of my life. I hated every single day of dropping her off at daycare, saying goodbye to her.
And it just became a really, really dark place for me that year. And I felt stuck. And then because I felt stuck, I blamed my husband. I'm sure other people listening maybe you've kind of experienced that too. I got to this turning point where I realized, okay, I either have to do something about this, figure out a solution. So I started looking at ways to become a work at home mom probably around December of 2015.
And but I was on break like it was finals time. I can remember starting to look like ways to be a work at home mom, how to be a stay at home mom and make money. And at first everything I found was just not what I was looking for. And I started to just tell people in my real life, Hey, this is what I'm looking for. I want to work from home. I don't want to do one of the call center type jobs. I don't want to be an employee of someone. I want to be able to work when I want. I want to make my own schedule, I want the kids at home, but I also want to make really good money and okay, when I said really good money, I meant like replaced my teacher income. And I'm totally transparent with numbers. I just needed to replace like $2,000 a month. Someone finally told me about this website called hiremymom.com. Which was just an online job source board for moms. (I don’t recommend it now, it’s changed, but it was great for me at the time)
I started applying for every job that came up that interested me and I got a lot of nothing. So for like the first three months it was straight up crickets from hiremymom.com.
For the first three months, I was applying to all of these different positions, stuff like admin, assistant marketing director. I had no marketing experience at all. But the job position in description sounded, sounded good and sounded interesting. There was like proofreading and editing positions, which I was like, Hey, I'm, I'm a high school English teacher. I could totally proofread and edit some stuff for some people. And I got for the first three months it was, it was literally just straight up crickets.
And then like the second three months I started honing in more on my cover letter and making each of those really specific to the job position. And then I finally started to get some interviews and some like some callbacks here. And from there then it was like, okay, I was down to like the top three and finally after seven long months of not getting hired, not landing one job at one position, I, I got my first client and I didn't even really know what freelancing was at this time, but I was hired by a business coach and I was her virtual. I was her virtual assistant.