So. You want to know how Virtually.Stacey actually started.
Fine. Pull up a chair. We’ll do the real version. Not the polished LinkedIn one where every shit moment was secretly a gift from the universe and burnout was just a stepping stone to greatness.
Before
For years, I worked in Facilities Management on a US Air Force base. Project management. Operations. Logistics. The whole lot. The kind of role where you become the person everyone runs to when something is on fire. Sometimes literally. Often a printer.
I climbed up to Operations Manager. Had the title. Had a team. Had a task management system that ran all the other spreadsheets.
The Amey days were busy as hell. The kind of busy where you start eating lunch at your desk, then stop eating lunch entirely, then wonder why your hair is falling out and your jaw aches and you can’t remember the last time you finished a sentence.
I told myself I thrived in chaos. That I was built for it. And parts of me genuinely were. I could untangle a problem nobody else wanted to touch. I could hold thirteen plates and a conference call. I was the safe pair of hands.
The thing nobody mentions about being the safe pair of hands is that nobody ever asks if your hands are okay. 💖
The moment something had to change
There wasn’t a single moment. People love a clean turning point. Mine looked more like a slow leak.
Working through weekends. Snapping at people I love. Crying in the car before going in. Pretending I was fine in meetings while my body was actively filing for divorce from my brain. Googling burnout symptoms at 1am, then closing the tab because surely not, surely I’m fine.
I wasn’t fine.
Then a full system shutdown. Signed off sick for the first time ever. Staring at the ceiling with absolutely nothing left in the tank.
I didn’t start Virtually.Stacey in 2023 because I had a five year plan and a beautiful business strategy. I started it because I was at home, wrecked, scrolling TikTok in the recovery phase of burnout, and I saw what a VA actually did and thought “hang on. I’ve been doing this for over four years. I just never had a name for it.”
What scared me most
Money. Obviously. Going from a steady salary to “good luck, hope someone pays you this month” is a special kind of hell. The kind that wakes you up at 3am doing mental maths you definitely shouldn’t be doing at 3am. Open the banking app. Close it. Open it again. Do more maths in your head. You know the dance.
But the bigger fear was quieter.
I’d built my entire sense of being useful around being the person who carried it all. Without the office, the title, the team and the chaos to wrangle, who was I? What if it turned out I was just… bad at this on my own? What if the thing that made me good was the structure, not me?
Spoiler: it was me. It was always me. Took me a hell of a long time to clock that.
What freedom actually meant
I thought freedom meant working in pyjamas and taking Tuesdays off and being my own boss in the smug LinkedIn way.
Turns out freedom means being able to book a GP appointment without a 14 step approval chain. It means saying no to clients who treat people like robots. It means working with my brain instead of against it, even on the days where my brain is being a proper drama queen about absolutely everything.
It means building something that actually supports the people the corporate world chews up and spits out. Neurodivergent humans. Disabled humans. LGBTQ+ humans. Anyone who’s ever been told they were “too much” or “not enough” by a system that was never built for them in the first place. 🌈
Pyjamas are a bonus. Tuesdays off are still mostly a fantasy. But the rest of it? Real.
The early days (a beautiful mess)
If you’re hoping I’m about to tell you it all clicked into place straight away, I’m so sorry.
The first few months were a mess. I over researched everything. Posted on TikTok with no clue. Second guessed every decision I made and then a few I hadn’t made yet. Built a website I hated. Undercharged because I was scared no one would come back. Said yes to work that wasn’t right for me.
I cried at least twice over bloody Canva. Standard.
I once wrote a quote, deleted it, rewrote it lower, deleted it, rewrote it again, and ended up sending it for less than where I started. If you’ve done this, no judgement, we’ve all done this.
And then, slowly, the right people started showing up.
Neurodivergent founders. Disabled business owners. Freelancers drowning in admin. Humans who’d been burned by services that didn’t see them properly. People who needed someone to look at their inbox and not make them feel like an idiot for letting it get to 3,000 unread emails.
That was the bit that clicked. Not the launch. Not the branding. The first time a client cried with relief on a discovery call. 💖
That’s when I knew this was the thing.
What I wish I’d known
A few bits.
Rest is part of the work. It’s not the reward you get for finishing the work. It’s the thing that lets the work happen at all. The corporate world had me convinced these were the same sentence. They are not.
You don’t have to pick your niche on day one. You can let it find you. Mine found me when I stopped trying to sound like every other VA on the internet and started being my properly, weird, unicorn flavoured self. 🦄
The people you’re meant to work with will recognise you when you stop performing. Just keep being the version of yourself that scares you a bit to put online.
You don’t need to have it all figured out before you start. Nobody has it all figured out. Some people just have nicer websites and louder confidence.
And the thing your old job taught you to mask. The bit where your brain works sideways. Where you need lists and reminders and breaks and a bit of softness. That’s the whole offer. That’s why people pay us. Because we get it. Because we’ve lived it. Because we’re not going to make anyone feel small for needing help.
So that’s the story
Burnout. TikTok. A leap. A mess. And a business that genuinely tries to be a hug for your brain.
If any of this sounds familiar. If you’re in your own version of it right now, somewhere between “I can’t keep doing this” and “but what if I tried this other thing.” If your inbox is feral and your to-do list is a horror film and you don’t even know where to start.
You don’t have to figure it out alone. That’s what we’re here for.🦄
