Behind the Service chats with Mary Elaine Baker, president and co-founder of VAUSA, a military spouse and veteran-owned boutique business that provides virtual administrative and marketing solutions for business owners and entrepreneurs who are task saturated. Mary Elaine became a military spouse when she married her husband Brett in 2013. Recognizing the untapped potential of military spouses who often have difficulty maintaining traditional employment, they conceived of VAUSA not just as a business opportunity but also as a vehicle for creating positive social impact by matching this talent pool with entrepreneurs who needed to focus their time on their core business.
Mary Elaine and Brett believe strongly that attracting people who share in the company’s values of integrity, freedom, compassion and respect helps foster an organizational culture with a sense of community that benefits assistants and clients alike. When Mary Elaine isn’t cultivating strong working relationships and mentoring others you can find her raising her family on Wilmington Island and occasionally relaxing on the beach with Brett and their two children.
Behind the Service
Transcription
Erin:
Behind the men and women who serve our country, our fearless leaders who live in the shadows, they stay up late nights, praying, worrying, and waiting for phone calls, filling out mountains of paperwork and keeping research folders on experimental services. But more importantly, they patiently love our heroes back together again.
Erin:
Welcome to your community. No matter what stage you’re at, we’re here to provide expert resources, faithful support, and real life insight into how you can move from managing to living your best life. Your hosts, Libby Bates and Erin McCauley found one another in opposite sides of the country in different stages, but with a common struggle.
Erin:
Together, without outside guests and experts, we’ll open the resources and support you need. Let’s get to the episode.
Erin:
Hey, listeners. Welcome back. Today we’re joined by Mary Elaine Baker from Hire VAUSA, which is a virtual staffing company. Welcome to Behind the Service, Mary.
Mary Elaine:
Thank you. I’m so happy to be here.
Erin:
So listeners, before we dive into some questions, we’re going to go over some fast facts about military spouses and military spouse employment, which is a subject near and dear to my heart. I came in as a civilian employee and then married military. And it was like, oh wow, my career changed, but that’s okay. 92% of military spouses are women. And these stats are from 2017. So 53% participated in the labor market compared to 76% of the general population. 13% are unemployed, which was at the time about three times the national rate. 89% have some college education because there are a lot of programs out, especially recently, for military spouses to get an education, which I love. 30% have a four-year degree, while 15% have an advanced degree, which we’ve got to meet a lot of those women through the VA. Love those ladies. Underemployment, so 31.6% of military spouses are employed part-time but may prefer full-time work. Occupational licenses is pretty big in the military spouse field. 34% of employed spouses work in occupations that require licenses.
Erin:
And typically, military families move frequently, and military spouses find it difficult to transfer licenses from state to state. Although that’s changed, I’ve seen in the past couple of years as well, which is awesome. That greatly helps out. But they do become concerned about the limited number of years that they can commit to any job due to their service member’s reassignment, which I faced a lot of that too. So good and bad. Probably the same as everything.
Libby:
Yeah. So Mary, can you tell our listeners some background about your own journey as a military spouse and what that’s looked like for you?
Mary Elaine:
Before I became a military spouse, I am a military brat myself, so my father, he’s a retired Colonel. And I thought I knew what to expect being a military dependent, but being a military spouse was completely different than being a military child. Man, I swore up and down I would never marry anyone in the military, and God just laughed at my plans. And I met my husband. He was stationed in Savannah, Georgia. And that started a rollercoaster ride. We did not get married until a few years later, and we had a lot of ups and downs in our relationship. And we eventually worked those out and got married. We have two children.
Mary Elaine:
And during that timeframe for the first five years of our marriage, I was an educator. So I was full-time educator and teaching elementary school level children. And I started to get just a little bit burnt out with very frequent deployments. So my husband was an Army Ranger, and just a little bit about Army Rangers. Their cycles are a little different, so they don’t go for long periods of time, but they go very frequently. So about four months is how long on average, and home for about six and then gone again. So a lot of the yo-yo effect, which I was not familiar with at all. Just very frequent. Okay. Let’s adjust to him being home and then, okay, let’s adjust again to him being gone again. So that was our life for many years. My husband was in for almost 13 years.
Erin:
I love that story. I bet it was hard going from used to regular deployments, or even if you were raised during a peace time, you look very young. So I can’t tell for sure, but yeah, that would be, I would imagine that would be very different.
Erin:
So many military spouses choose to become entrepreneurs. What led you and your husband to start your own company?
Mary Elaine:
It was not an overnight decision. I mentioned becoming a little bit burnt out. At one point during a deployment, he was in Afghanistan. I was working well over full-time hours, and I’m sure y’all know, teachers don’t just work a normal nine-five. They bring work home with them, and they’re early, and they’re there late, and they volunteer. My entire kind of teacher’s paycheck was going to pay for daycare one year. We had two littles in daycare, and Brett was deployed. And it was that year that I started reflecting on where’s my return on my investment here. I’m paying student loans. My paycheck is going to daycare. We’re basically living paycheck to paycheck at this point. And I’m taking on full responsibility for the home and children on top of all that.
Mary Elaine:
So I was feeling like there could be more, there could be another opportunity out there. And I just wasn’t sure what, but I knew myself and knew that I wanted something different, something that was going to give us a little more flexibility in our lives.
Mary Elaine:
My fifth year of teaching, my room mom was a volunteer in my classroom, and she was working as a virtual assistant through another company. And I learned more and more about it. And the more I learned, I thought maybe this could be an opportunity for myself. And so that summer I started working as a virtual assistant with another company.
Mary Elaine:
A few months later, I actually left that company and went out on my own. So it was, one, it was understanding that, hey, I don’t need a normal nine to five job to be happy or satisfied. I can create an opportunity for myself. So when I started working by myself as a virtual assistant, I started getting a bootcamp in business. It was more valuable than… My sister got a degree in business, and I was getting the real deal because I was working for multiple entrepreneurs who had very different industries. But the nuts and bolts of how a business works was very similar with all three industries that I was working with. And the more I learned, the more I got good at it. I got good at running their businesses remotely. And that was the brain side of things.
Mary Elaine:
On the heart side of it was, it changed our lives. It really did. It was a time freedom was something I never had before. And now that I had it, I never could go back to not having it anymore. And then I also had my friends asking me, other military spouses asking me, what are you doing? How did you find that? What is it that you do every day? And the more I talked to some of my military spouse friends, I realized, wow, this is a huge need. It wasn’t just me. All of my military friends are experiencing the same frustrations that I had.
Mary Elaine:
And so that’s where the idea of forming a business model that supports military families and having these job opportunities and bridging the gap between people who have the talent and the clients who really need support and some more work-life balance in their lives as well. So that’s where the idea stemmed from. I called my best friend who I graduated high school with, and she was crazy enough to marry an Army Ranger as well. And I said, hey, this is what I’m doing. This is my vision for it. Do you want to do this with me? And she said, yes. So that’s where it started. And it’s been very organic growth since then. That was in, officially, we launched the business in January of 2018. So really not that long ago.
Libby:
I have a two-part question specifically, your workforce towards military spouse employment only? And for those who don’t understand what a virtual assistant is, what does that job actually entail?
Mary Elaine:
First question, yes. We do. Our primary source of recruitment to find people to work is from the military community. So last time I checked, we were about 77% military spouses on our team. It’s been our goal since we started to try to keep that above 70%. And not that anything I can remember, I don’t think we’ve ever gone below that 70%. So we’ve been very fortunate to have a very heavy military influenced team.
Mary Elaine:
Now, obviously that means we do have people on our team that are non-military affiliated. They just have to have the skillset and fall in line with our same values and back our mission. They have to understand what we’re trying to do here. So yes, the answer is yes. We do specifically target that community for recruitment purposes. And it just falls in line with who we are and where our heart is. And all of this, the statistics that were said earlier is the why behind that too.
Mary Elaine:
And then, what is a virtual assistant? A virtual assistant can be almost anything. Okay. There’s someone who’s going to be working for you remotely. It all depends. Whatever they do every day though depends on, one, the skill sets they possess. I think last year, 2020, was a huge wake up call to the entire world on how can you work remotely and have a team that’s remote. So I think everyone got a big forced training on what that could be like. So that has helped us a lot with the educational aspect of it of how does this work.
Mary Elaine:
But really no matter what industry we personally serve, everyone typically has these kind of three pillars of what they’re looking for. And that is communication management, and that can come in all kinds of forms from email, phone, social media messaging, LinkedIn. And then task management, so we have a lot of cloud-based tools that we like to do to help manage projects remotely. And that’s the clients to-do lists and could be possibly other people on the team as a whole. But the assistant has a good grasp on what everyone’s responsible for. And time management, so calendar management, time-blocking, making appointments. And typically any other tasks or projects will all come from those three pillars. They come from those main meat and potatoes that a virtual assistant would. Does that answer your question? Okay.
Libby:
Yeah, absolutely. So how do you choose what clients you choose to partner with? And what does that process look like for you?
Mary Elaine:
Yeah, so we do a lot of vetting for our clients, as well as with our team. My philosophy is if I’m not comfortable serving someone myself directly, then I’m not going to pull them on as a client. So we take our time getting to know our clients and making sure that they understand our why, and they understand how we are unique and what value we bring to the table.
Mary Elaine:
The industries can really vary. We have anything from business consultants, restaurateurs, real estate, network marketers, all kinds of things. It really varies. Photographers. So what we do is we get to know our clients, make sure that they are people of great character and values. We get it to know what their business goals are, where their pain points are, where they really need the most help with getting off their plate. And we have an entire proven matching process that we do to make sure that we put them with someone whose lifestyles align, values align, and skillsets line, and really balance out whatever our client’s weaknesses are. Yeah. So that’s how we choose our clients. Most of our clients are referrals though. So in 90th percentile of our clients normally come from other happy clients, which also helps a lot with the vetting process. Yeah.
Libby:
Guys, if you’re a company who is requiring a virtual assistant, hit Mary up, and yeah, you’ll be able to support military spouses in their employment.
Mary Elaine:
Thank you.
Erin:
I love that. It’s very similar. My first job out of college was a recruiter. I was in the restaurant industry though. That was back when they called it headhunting. It’s such a funny word to tell people I’m a head hunter. And they’re like, what? So we just started calling it recruiter.
Erin:
What are some of the biggest challenges and rewards of being a small business owner? And I know you talked earlier about the time availability, which is always the number one thing I’ve heard, but there’s got to be so many others.
Mary Elaine:
There’s a little bit of irony there because the time freedom that I had whenever I was just working myself as a virtual assistant to actually launching business where I’m hiring people, I’m now sales and marketing and all of the hats is that, in the beginning of a business, you don’t have that time freedom. It is, in most small businesses, that kind of goes out the window, and you have to work towards it again.
Mary Elaine:
And so that was a big obstacle because I felt like I was working from the time I woke up till the time I went to bed, and being a mom and all of the things in between. So I knew that I had to be very intentional with making sure that I was letting go of things and hiring people that can take on those specific roles if I wanted to scale and grow my business, and if I wanted to get back to that time freedom that I worked so hard to get. So that was an obstacle is trying to figure out how do I shed all these hats that I now had on my head? Because I was everything, the book keeper, I mean everything, and that’s just not sustainable long-term.
Mary Elaine:
And I think honestly, a lot of our clients come to us like that because they are so overwhelmed and stressed, and they are working in business every day instead of working on their business. And they no longer have time freedom. And so that’s why they come to us. Hey, I know I need to delegate. I don’t even know where to start, but I know I need help. I’m drowning. I don’t want to live like this anymore.
Mary Elaine:
So that gave me an awesome experience because I went from being on one side of the fence to being on the other side of the fence. So I have a lot of empathy for both parties and both positions, but yeah, that was a huge challenge because yeah, I had to learn every role, and then I had to let go of almost every role that I had, and that that can be a little painful.
Mary Elaine:
I would also say that another challenge was I didn’t go to business school. A lot of what I learned was through working for other very successful businessmen and women. And so one of the obstacles I had was I was learning as I was building. Building the plane as I was flying. And I still feel like we’re doing that a lot of the times. And that was a challenge at first too, because I like to get things right. So I had to be very comfortable with failing a lot and making mistakes and just moving right on. Learn, okay, pick up the pieces and move on. So pride and ego had to just go somewhere. I had to get over myself. I had to get over all pride and ego and be willing to be a student for years. So two big challenges, definitely.
Libby:
I think finding that work/life balance is key because I know for myself, running this small business, and it’s just a podcast, but I’ve recognized that I spend way too much time on tasks when it’s not necessarily needed at the time. And I forget about some of the things that are more important in my life, like my actual life. So it’s definitely important to recognize when you need to divvy up tasks to other people so that you’re not overwhelmed, and you’re actually paying attention to the things that are going on around you. And I think small business ownership is super challenging. So I appreciate what you said there. You definitely have to put your pride and ego at the door and check it.
Libby:
And I know that resiliency is key to successful lives for our military service members and their families. So what are some key steps spouses can take to ensure that they’re thriving in what many find to be a stressful life?
Mary Elaine:
So there is no magic pill for anyone, and every person’s circumstances… We can all say, hey, we’re military spouses, but each individual relationship is so different, and every branch is different. There are so many shades of gray here that everyone is going through.
Mary Elaine:
One thing that really helped me when I was in the trenches of, I would say, some of the most stressful times of our lives was reminding myself that this is not my forever. This is a journey that I’m on. And there are lessons that I need to be learning through this period of stress, through this period of sometimes heartache, sometimes just extreme circumstances.
Mary Elaine:
There’s one time my husband was in Afghanistan. A hurricane was coming, mandatory evacuation. We live on an island. I could spit to water right here, deep water access. And I had my two kids in tow, and we just had to say, hey, I hope our home is still okay when we come back. And we packed up and left. My husband was calling me, and he said, hey, what are you up to? And I told him, and he had no idea that there was even a hurricane out there, and much less that we had to leave, pack up and leave with what little belongings we had and just hope that things were okay.
Mary Elaine:
We came back to a mess, house flooded, just piles and piles of ruined things, which also taught me to just let go of things. And if it’s in a cardboard box a few years later, just throw it away. You don’t need it anymore. But I would say that’s an extreme story, and certainly not the worst thing that could happen. But I just remember thinking through that, wow, this is just one of those crazy stories that you can’t make up. And this is just a season of our life, that it is just going to be like this. It’s just going to be one crazy story. And one day we’re going to look back and laugh, or one day, we’re going to look back and say, remember when.
Mary Elaine:
But we learned so much about ourselves. We learned about so much about our own resiliency, our own strength and what kind of pressure we can handle. We learned to let go of the small stuff, literally and figuratively. I learned to just laugh. I think military spouses, a lot of times can be looked at with having a very warped sense of humor. Sometimes that humor is the only thing that’s going to get us through. We just have to laugh through the pain.
Mary Elaine:
So I would just say, work on mindset. If your mindset is not right, seek a counselor, seek a therapist, find a great support group and people you can talk to and be very observant of what kind of thoughts you’re having, because a lot of us, most of the things that we experience as a military spouse, we cannot control. And if you focus on the fact that you can’t control it or focus on the what ifs, the things that you’re having anxiety over, things that haven’t even happened yet, you’ll be miserable every day. So mindset.
Libby:
I love that. Mindset is super important because when you’re in that negative headspace, it changes everything about your life, just your whole day can go to crap because you wake up with a bad attitude. So I love that.
Mary Elaine:
And that’s something we can control. And I think we forget that. We can change that. We can fix that. We can work on it.
Libby:
Yeah. For sure. So how can our listeners find out more about Hire VAUSA?
Mary Elaine:
Sure. Our website is hirevausa.com. We’re all over social media. We’re on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram. Our website is pretty thorough. We’re even on YouTube. I don’t think we’ve uploaded something on there in a while, but there are some really good videos there that can… There’s some testimonials and things that you can watch to learn more.
Mary Elaine:
But our website is a great source and our social media too. We’ve been going live past few Fridays, talking about frequently asked questions and what it’s like to work on our team. And then on Wednesdays, we usually have a Work with Me Wednesday. So one person on our team will talk through what their normal day looks like working from home.
Erin:
So you’ve given us a lot of advice. You’ve given us, at least me anyways, a lot to think about. But if you could leave our caregivers and our spouses with another word of advice, what would it be?
Mary Elaine:
Find your people. And I know that can be hard when you’re moving frequently. I have met some of the best friends of my entire life virtually. I think we sometimes get lost in the virtual space and think there’s a lot of bad that comes with social media, but there’s a lot of good that can come from connecting with people, like-minded people, or people who have experienced some of the same heartaches and troubles that you have. For example, I’m sure the audience right now, whoever’s listening to this podcast are some people that speak the same language, understand what it’s like. So little communities like this, get tapped into. Find your people.
Erin:
So listeners, this week I’d like to encourage you to do something productive at home. Find some online courses to take to learn and further your education. Also update your LinkedIn profile and all your social media profiles because employers do look at that kind of thing. Nowadays it’s kind of the process. Keep up with all current certifications and update your resume as you change jobs, because they look at that as well.
Mary Elaine:
Yeah. I’m going to reiterate that. We received applicants all the time, and then we’ll interview them, and they’ll talk about recent employment that they have that’s not on their resume. And we’ll say, why is this not adding up? So absolutely update your resumes and your LinkedIn. We look at all that too.
Erin:
Before I go into our scripture, I wanted to ask one question to clarify for our listeners. One of the big topics of military spouse resumes is volunteer work. Do you all encourage people to put their volunteer work on their resume?
Mary Elaine:
Yes. Yes. A hundred thousand percent, put your volunteer work on there.
Erin:
Okay. Good deal. I think so too, but I’ve heard a few people in the corporate world are like, what is that there for? But I would assume too that a lot of times, it’s just the difference in languages. A lot of times you don’t know how involved some of these military spouses are in their community and the value that comes from that, the experience that comes from that.
So today we’re going to read out at 1 Peter, chapter five, verse two, and then I’m going to get a little preachy. So sorry about that. So care for the flock that God has entrusted to you. Watch over it willingly, not grudgingly, not for what you will get out of it, but because you are eager to serve God. And my husband explained this to me a long time ago, that when we look at us and our, who we are in Christ, a lot of times we have to compare that to who we would be without Christ. And for me, it’s a very vast difference. And I’m going to give you an example.
My husband has taught me really to pray with our daughter. I didn’t know how to pray with my child outside of now I lay me down to sleep, that kind of, you can read out of a book. But when it comes to just basic everyday things where you start to see anxiety come up, that was not my strength. And so today on the way to school, when I was taking her to school, we read 1 Corinthians, chapter 13. So we were talking about love. And a couple miles down the road, after we prayed, she tells me that her iPad didn’t charge last night. She was like, my iPad didn’t charge. I think something must be wrong with it. She’s only nine. It’s a big deal in her life. And I could already feel my anxiety start to rise because all in my head is, I can’t afford a new iPad right now. And it had nothing to do with her, but I was going to have a lot of anxiety, which isn’t good whenever you’re taking your child to school, unless you want an anxious child at school who can’t focus on their work. I didn’t really know what to do.
So I did what my husband told me to do, and I started praying with her. I said, do you want me to pray with you? And it wasn’t, I think before my husband encouraged me to go through this granularly, I would’ve just said, dear God, help us fix the iPad or fix this for us, which maybe isn’t beneficial for her. And so instead I just explained, this is how she communicates with her friends. This is a big deal to Gracie, God. So, therefore, we know it’s a big deal to you. And just help us through this circumstance, that kind of a deal.
And it was such a great moment. And if I wouldn’t have done that, I wouldn’t have been watching over the flock that God has entrusted me with because a lot of us caregivers and spouses, that is our flock, our family, and we ought not look past them to look to the world. So that’s just my own little, that’s how that spoke to me today. I hope that it speaks to you all too. And I hope that you’re encouraged by that in some way.
Libby:
Thanks for listening to Behind the Service podcast. If you enjoyed today’s show, will you leave us a review? It helps more people like you find this podcast. And remember, subscribe. We’ll talk to you next week. Bye.
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