My business began as the result of the old admonition, “Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.”

What was I wishing for? That I didn’t have to go to that stupid job I hated. That I could work from home, not have to ask the boss for time off to go to school plays and chaperone field trips, and never again HAVE to wear heels and panty hose, unless I wanted to.

2002 was a tough year. I watched my retirement account go from a net worth of $250K to $0 in the space of a few months. Then on the bright winter morning of Friday, December 6, my wish was manifested in the form of my #2 fear: I lost my job. (My #1 fear is outliving any of my children.) I was laid off after 10 years from my programmer analyst job in the Engineering department of the former #2 telecommunications company in the world. As the single mother of three kids with a mortgage and a car payment, I had no time to lose or money to spare. It was time to get my act together. Quick.

While I can code with the best of them and pick up new technologies and languages quickly, I never really fit in with the hardcore coders in my group. I’d rather take a stick in the eye than do boring systems coding crap, but let me loose on web design or a user interface and time just flies. So, I bought the vAssistantServices.com domain and hung out my virtual assistant shingle (seemed like th most expedient route to income at the time), built websites on the side, and spent the rest of my time using the Internet to build a network marketing organization that reached 1,200 in number. (I had started that business before I lost my job.) I learned an awful lot about marketing online during those years – most of it the hard way.

My specialty is, was, and likely always will be helping others to make sense of things they don’t understand. I realized that I had gotten my wish, but still wasn’t doing what I really loved for a living, so I turned the reigns of my network marketing organization over to the leaders I’d developed on my team, turned down all new requests for VA work (and decommissioned the vAssistantServices.com website), said ‘yes’ to all requests for WordPress website development and became a coach. Since then, I’ve been focusing on helping solopreneurs and small business owners use the Internet to grow their businesses.

Ironically, I never set out to blend coaching and web development into a living, but that’s who I am. That’s what I do. And I love it.