Meet the Team – this week, we’re learning a little more about Charlotte Wibberley, CEO and founder of VIP VA.
As well as leading VIP VA, Charlotte is also an Online Business Manager, Facebook Ads Strategist and Infusionsoft (Keap) Certified Consultant. She offers training, technical support and strategic advice on a range of online tools and helps customers with everything from email marketing to payment processing on ecommerce platforms.
It’s Charlotte’s skills and experience as a business owner that helps make the training programmes that she offers through VIP VA (most notably, the VA Nurture Programme, an online course that helps give people the practical skills and business tools necessary to start a professional and sustainable freelance business) so valuable. Her knowledge doesn’t just come from books, articles, training courses and lectures, but from practical hands-on experience of the positive and negative aspects of running a business. Charlotte knows what works, and what doesn’t work, and shares the invaluable information she has learned freely with those on her courses. She also has an incredible network of professional contacts behind her, from HR and legal experts to design gurus and Kings and Queens of Marketing, so VIP VA accredited members, course participants and hub members have the opportunity to learn from industry leaders in order to further their own skills.
In everything that Charlotte does, it’s clear that there are three huge reasons for her passion and dedication; her husband Andrew and her children Alex, 6, and Evie, 4. For Charlotte, the juggle is real – constantly trying to find a balance between home life and work life, and she doesn’t hide that fact. Whether your business is turning over £5K a year or £5Million a year, each one of us is navigating the winding path that is real life, with its peaks and troughs, and it is only by acknowledging these issues that we can all try to make our work/life balance just a little more ‘balanced’, even if it is just for a day or two! Charlotte has a great ability to keep things real and relevant, quashing the unnatural pastel perfection of ‘instagrammable’ businesses and helping people to acknowledge, understand and appreciate the hard work and effort it takes to run a successful business (and the importance of celebrating that!).
Charlotte launched VIP VA in January 2016 to help support, nurture and champion the VA industry and create a safe haven for high performing VA businesses to collaborate, share their knowledge and experiences and further develop their professional skills. In an era when anyone can grab a laptop, connect to WIFI and call themselves a freelancer, Charlotte campaigns tirelessly for industry standards to ensure that VAs remain synonymous with professionalism, expertise, quality and reliability. Charlotte’s primary aim is to ‘elevate’ the VA profession, trying to make existing VAs recognise and celebrate their own worth as successful business owners, and to help boost the visibility of VAs in the wider business world as remote, freelance team members who can really help UK and international businesses become more productive and efficient.
The VA industry is constantly changing and developing, and campaigning for the elevation of the VA industry can be a challenge if you don’t understand who is working in the field, what they are doing and what kind of customers they are working with! As a result, Charlotte has commissioned 3 annual surveys of VAs (one in 2017, one in 2018 and one this year, due for release in November 2019) to gain greater insight into the international VA community. The results of these aren’t just interesting from a personal level (to see what services people are offering and what the average hourly rate is!) but really help to ensure that the work VIP VA does remains relevant with the community. Charlotte also featured as a case study for Dame Julie Deane’s Self-Employment Review (link: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/529702/ind-16-2-self-employment-review.pdf).
Campaigning for the VA profession isn’t an easy or straightforward task, and neither is supporting a huge community of professional men and women in the VIP VA Hub, but Charlotte immerses herself in her role as mentor, champion, trainer and friend. She’s the captain of the ship here in VIP VA HQ, and we’d be rudderless and lost without her (possibly being eaten by a Kraken).
#FunFact – Charlotte once walked 26.2 miles through London in the middle of the night with 3 VIP VA Mastermind Members in her bra and a cowboy hat, and now cannot listen to country music without coming out in a cold sweat and feeling an overwhelming urge to put on comfortable slippers.