Midlife MavericksLast week, my daughter turned twelve. She’d requested a tiered chocolate cake. My mum was landing at the airport. I had twenty meetings in the diary and three newsletters to ship. And a VA who had stopped answering her phone.
Twenty-four hours of messages and calls. Nothing. Then a text from the agency: she’s not coming back.
No explanation. Just silence, then a third party delivering the news.
The 15 Minutes
I waited for the spiral. The version of me from a year ago would have called someone, vented until she was hoarse, gone to bed furious, woken up still behind.
Instead, I opened my SOP folder.
Three months earlier, on a calm Tuesday with nothing on fire, I’d documented the exact process for unwinding a VA. One shared password. A checklist of every system she touched.
Fifteen minutes. Every login killed. Handover points flagged. Three agencies already emailed about a replacement.
Then I picked up my mum and made the bloody cake. We celebrated my daughter turning twelve. Wednesday at 3pm the newsletter went out, same as every week for a year, because someone else’s decision to ghost me does not get to break a habit I’ve fought to build.
Four layers of rich dark chocolate, mascarpone cream cheese frosting, chocolate fudge drip, and cherries. As designed and stipulated by the boss.
[Cake photo here]
Once the logistics were done, what I felt was gratitude. For three months of working with someone who showed me exactly where I’d been bleeding time and money for years. For the brutal clarity of reading my own handover document and realising I’d written a map of every weakness in my business.
Losing her made all of it visible in a way that keeping her never would have.
Quote of the Week
“You can do anything, but you can’t do everything.”
— David Allen
Dennis Has Nine VAs
A few days later I messaged Dennis, a fellow entrepreneur, to push a call. “Give me a couple of weeks. My VA left and I’m swamped.”
“I wouldn’t survive without mine either,” he said.
How many VAs? Eight to ten.
That number rewired something. I thought about every entrepreneur I’ve admired from a distance this year. Running full calendars and consulting on the side while publishing content on four platforms. Some with young kids. I’d watched them and quietly wondered how they fit it all in.
Every single one of them had support I couldn’t see.
If you’re doing that same maths right now, wondering how that woman on LinkedIn manages a full client load and a side business with two kids, she has help. You just can’t see it from the outside.
I sent Dennis a follow-up: “I’ve been drowning for ages. Hired one VA recently and didn’t realise I should have done this years ago.”
Four words back: “Best time is yesterday.”
What One VA Made Visible
Three months with a VA showed me where my time was actually going.
Meeting scheduling and follow-ups alone ate my mornings. Content distribution across platforms took the rest, and the hours I should have been spending on client work were disappearing into operations.
In my world, people do not want a Calendly link. Consulting at the level I work at, multi five-figure and six-figure deals, runs on personal scheduling. Someone needs to manage that back-and-forth, and for years that someone was me.
With a VA handling it, I showed up to full days of meetings I didn’t book myself. My pipeline moved. LinkedIn started generating inbound the moment I showed up. Referral partners now send pre-qualified leads. My first quarter this year produced more quality conversations than three comfortable quarters of last year.
Those 20 hours cleared space for consulting clients and relationships with real commission upside, while improving the systems and quality of what I deliver with AI at a speed I couldn’t touch before.
My revenue stopped depending on a single client. Recurring monthly income from uncorrelated streams. A portfolio career that actually holds.
When I was in banking, nobody questioned infrastructure spend. Operations and admin staff made sure whatever I sold could be delivered. It was how business worked. Then I went solo and started treating every hire as a cost to cut.
OWN IT: Your Move This Week
I went from “I can’t afford to hire” to “I can’t afford not to” in twelve weeks. That shift came from seeing what happened to my revenue when I stopped trying to do everything myself.
There’s a mindset I see in nearly every woman I work with, and I had it too. We call hiring “spending” and frame running on fumes as being responsible with money. Hiring is investing in infrastructure. The same infrastructure you had behind you in every corporate job, without thinking twice. Your business needs it too.
Do the maths. Work out what one hour of your time is worth when you’re doing the work that moves money. Client calls and delivery. Then count how many hours last week went to scheduling and admin.
Multiply those hours by your rate.
That’s what you’re choosing to lose every week. And it compounds.
Reply to this email and tell me: what’s the one task you’re still doing yourself that you know someone else should be handling?
See you Wednesday
