For nearly 10 years, founder Nick Loper built Virtual Assistant Assistant into the Yelp of virtual assistant companies, offering a vast directory and review platform for outsourcing services.
And while the company never hit huge traffic numbers — about 15,000 unique visitors per month — it reached the right people. For would-be buyers, reaching a highly-targeted audience proved to be valuable.
So valuable that in 2020, Loper sold Virtual Assistant Assistant to entrepreneur Mica Harvey for what he described as a low six-figure deal.
Loper bootstrapped the company to roughly $5,000 per month in revenue. “The team was super lean,” he said. “I relied primarily on Fancy Hands for research, a freelance writer to create the company profiles, and an assistant from Okay Relax to help format those for WordPress.”
Lessons Loper learned by selling Virtual Assistant Assistant
While he’s thrilled to have sold the company, Loper said it was difficult saying goodbye to a profitable project he’d worked on for nearly a decade. Through the sale experience, Loper learned some accounting lessons he plans to apply to other businesses.
“One of my challenges was organizing the financial elements of the business because a lot of the accounts and links were intertwined with other projects of mine,” he said. “If I had to do it all over again, I’d be better at silo-ing the project and having better revenue attribution.”
“It’s kind of nerve-racking opening the doors to potential buyers and divulging your secrets. When the funds finally transferred — the biggest deposit I’d ever seen in my account — I breathed a sigh of relief.”
Now that Virtual Assistant Assistant is with its new owner, Loper is focusing on Side Hustle Nation and its podcast, The Side Hustle Show. Through this content-focused company, Loper shares his entrepreneurial journey and offers practical advice for people interested in creating a side project to escape the 9-5 grind.
