Zone of Genius – Maria Carras

“Consistency is the key to pretty much anything you do in life.” Maria Carras

Entrepreneurial opportunities often avail themselves to people in the most unconventional way. Having that wit and passion is what is required to identify and grab these opportunities and work towards scaling them up into thriving businesses. Our guest today, Maria Carras, was able to do just that and says it’s all about consistency and persistence.

Maria Carras is the CEO & Founder of Maria Carras | Creative Virtual Assistance — a training membership for virtual assistants and matchmaking service for business owners seeking marketing & admin support.

After running her own successful virtual assistance agency for 7 years, Maria now coaches & mentors new and established virtual assistants through her Inner Circle membership, her coaching programs, courses, and free Facebook community of over 1,700+ passion-driven women, the Start, Market & Grow Your Virtual Assistant Business community. She has helped hundreds of women launch as location-independent virtual assistants and has helped over 200 business owners create freedom in their business by matching them with their right-fit virtual assistant.

In today’s episode, Maria will talk about her business and what motivated her to get into entrepreneurship as well as the success factors that have led her business to thrive.

Listen in!

Social Handles

https://Instagram.com.carrascreative.com/

https://Twitter.com/carrascreative/

https://facebook.com/mcarrascreative/

  • I have the big passion to help women sort of create a similar path that I did for my own business. [2:59]
  • I became an entrepreneur about 2011, but I kind of followed a very traditional path and I went to university and thought I’d get a corporate job, climb the ladder and later retire. [3:08]
  • All of a sudden, I kind of fell into entrepreneurship by becoming sort of a virtual assistant when I moved from London to Greece. [3:30]
  • When I started, I got more clients than I could handle myself and I started to build a team where I subcontracted work to them. [4:41]
  • I thought that I needed to let more people know about this, especially the women who were finding it really hard to either go back to work or find jobs. [5:06]
  • Now, the demand is never going to go down for virtual assistants because we’re living in this world where mostly everyone is working remotely. [5:33]
  • A lot of people are turning to side hustles, or getting laid off from their jobs, and they’re looking for other opportunities, and building their own businesses. [5:45]
  • The demand for virtual assistants is really going up and it’s a great time to kind of explore this opportunity. [5:54]
  • You get people to shock their potential by getting them to focus on their zone of genius and handing off everything that isn’t within their zone of genius. [7:20]
  • Virtual assistants give you your time back where you can focus on what brings you revenue and grow your business. [7:38]
  • I hope to help entrepreneurs by making them realize that, even though they’re feeling like they’re not ready to hire a virtual assistant. [7:57]
  • The time that we’re living in, so many brick and mortar businesses are having to turn to digital means of reaching their customers and many are not familiar. [11:44]
  • That’s where VA could really come in and guide you and help you do that. [11:58]
  • We’ve matched about 200 virtual assistants in the past year, which is incredible. [13:24]
  • This gives our VAs that confidence and that momentum to build a life of freedom and flexibility and a career that they love. [13:33]
  • It also gives the business owners that gift of time and the ability to scale their business with a team. [13:44]
  • Commercial break. [14:05]
  • I learned that I’m a lot more persistent and resourceful than I thought I could be. [15:27]
  • I love being challenged in that way and I kind of became obsessed with the online space and digital marketing. [15:58]
  • My secret is consistency and I have shown up every single day in one form or another for the past 10 years. [16:30]
  • I started building a community from the very beginning of my virtual assistant journey by building a list. [16:51]
  • I wanted to coach others because I got so much fulfillment from empowering other women. [18:02]
  • As a VA, I kind of specialized in working with coaches, and course creators because I wanted to learn from them. [18:18]
  • I was obviously inspired by what they were doing and what worked for them and I was able to take that knowledge and apply it to my own business. [18:31]
  • I tell my virtual assistants to work with people that they can learn from especially if being a VA isn’t the end goal. [20:34]
  • Hire virtual assistant to give yourself time and freedom. [21:55]

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Thank you to our December sponsor!  KukuaBiz can provide dedicated and affordable talent from Kenya to help you grow and scale your business. Virtual employees are skilled in administrative functions, sales, podcast management, video editing, marketing, social media marketing, website design and management, and more.

Learn more: https://www.kukuabiz.com