Gwendolyn Young’s idea for Your Virtual Admin Expert began simply as a solution for her to manage her health while still doing work she enjoys. Gwendolyn believes she has always had the talent and the drive to help high-ranking leaders. So, she turned her 15+ years of corporate administration and operations experience into Your Virtual Admin Expert. She shares, “I knew that entrepreneurs could benefit greatly from having someone on their team who could understand all the moving parts of their business. I wanted to make an impact behind the scenes, and Your Virtual Admin Expert allowed me to do that.”

Gwendolyn was diagnosed with systemic lupus in 2013 and had to leave her corporate career on long-term disability. She decided she didn’t want to return to a workplace where she would have to choose between taking care of herself and performing a job she enjoyed after months of barely functioning. Gwendolyn asserts, “I knew that it had to be possible to do both, so I set out to research opportunities working from home and realized that there was an entire industry doing what I was good at.”

Gwendolyn discovered that individuals have been providing administrative and operational help to others online for years. Your Virtual Admin Expert, LLC was founded after much prayer and consultation with a few close friends.

Gwendolyn had the opportunity to personally experience how all aspects of a medical facility influenced the patient while working as an administrative support worker in the healthcare industry. She says, “If the front desk didn’t do their job well, it affected medical records and the physicians. If medical records didn’t do their jobs well, it affected the physicians and the patients, and if the physicians didn’t do their jobs well, it affected the patients and billing.” This is where Gwendolyn’s dreams and passions for ensuring that all the pieces fit together perfectly come to fruition. It was a logical transition for her to become an operations specialist since she enjoys figuring out how to make things operate better together.

Gwendolyn’s role as CEO and Founder of Your Virtual Admin Expert, LLC is to ensure that everything we do and say yes to advances our vision and objective. She is responsible for the company’s growth, for establishing long-term, sustainable partnerships with clients, and for ensuring that the team has the training and resources they require to provide excellent service to the company’s clients.

Her time is spent speaking with new potential clients and partners, doing podcast guest speaking to increase visibility, releasing new podcast episodes to maintain the company’s authority, meeting with clients to ensure the team understands their goals and the role the team plays in assisting them in achieving them, and developing new programs and/or services. Gwendolyn is heavily involved in tracking metrics and targets to ensure the business stays on course or recognizes when it needs to pivot.

Before Becoming an Entrepreneur

Gwendolyn would have been regarded as a statistic by most people until she became an entrepreneur. Gwendolyn was born to a 17-year-old single mother and was considered a latchkey child by some. She was in charge of coming home immediately from school, locking the doors, doing her schoolwork, and reading her Bible passages every day. She became a mother at the age of 19, and by the age of 23, she had three children and was married. At the age of 28, Gwendolyn gained her first corporate job, and her affinity for administration and operations began.

According to Gwendolyn, she struggled with setting limits and had to learn how to do it properly. She enjoys serving and assisting others, but she quickly realized that doing so may be detrimental to her health and mental abilities if she did not set limits. She mentions, “I overcome challenges by always going back to why I started this business in the first place, and it gives me the right perspective and the renewed strength I need to keep going.” Gwendolyn is also a ‘solutionist’, so she always quickly turns to how she can resolve this, how she can overcome this, and asks what the plan and path forward are. She has learned to get good at not remaining stuck and to keep moving forward, even if it happens to be at a slower pace sometimes.

Your Virtual Admin Expert

Your Virtual Admin Expert is an online business management support agency for established professional service providers, coaches and consultants who are helping others get the mental, emotional, physical, and financial well-being they deserve.

The team is expert at helping them manage the backend of their business, so they can focus on their clients, their growth, and their profits. Gwendolyn shares, “Even before we decide to work with a client; we have a discovery call, where we listen and learn about the client’s business, how they work, what’s most important to them, and what they are trying to accomplish.” She further adds, “We can fully understand if this is a client we can work well with and help them get results.” Once the team has chosen to say yes, each account begins with a client call to discuss the customer’s vision, goals, and what success looks like in the next 90 days. She feels that this is a vital initial step since the team will not be able to properly help the client until they have a clear understanding of their goals.

Sharing Success and Words of Advice for Business Leaders

Gwendolyn has already achieved most of her ambitions. She describes it as having the freedom and flexibility to take care of herself without asking permission, such as taking Friday afternoons off to spend with her grandson, working from wherever she wants in the world, providing jobs for other women, and sharing her journey with other emerging entrepreneurs, all while earning enough money to support herself and her family. Gwendolyn considers this a huge accomplishment, and her objective is to keep doing all of those things.

Gwendolyn is presently enrolled in a Service Business Accelerator program sponsored by Sistahbiz, a business accelerator providing affordable options for coaching, training and services to help Black women build scalable, sellable models and access the back-office support, financial and social capital that they need to play big in business, which is assisting her in charting a path to seven figures. Her long-term goals include continuing to work with a business coach as a mentor, getting the firm certified as a women-owned and minority-owned business so it can do business with the government, and establishing herself as a thought leader in the virtual assistant and operations field.

Gwendolyn’s words for aspiring women are, “You matter. Your voice matters. Your gift matters. Feel the fear and go after your dreams anyway; you can do it. I would say connect with other women who are doing what you desire to do; learn from them, sit with them, and use that wisdom to grow yourself and others.”

Gwendolyn believes that it is absolutely crucial to have a mentor to grow as a leader. She says, “As individuals, we don’t always know or see our blind spots, and we can reduce our learning curve significantly by having a mentor.”

She urges company owners to identify exactly who they need on their team and build up that profile; hire for fit, talent, and capacity, trust them to perform their job, and pay them well while being a full-time business leader. She states, “Those who take ownership of their role, have a true vested interest in the agency and client’s success, hold themselves to a high standard of accountability, have integrity, and value teamwork.” She further adds, “Hire and work with people who like to get results! Nothing else matters if you can’t get results! “

Website: https://www.yourvirtualadminexpert.com/