Virtual Assistant for Teacher-Sellers
You started your business because you were passionate about your idea, or because you saw a hole in the market that you could fill, or because you want to change the world. (Hey, I’m not judging!) That’s pretty freaking awesome, but…there’s more to running a business than just executing your idea. That’s why I’m here with this post to talk about how I set up my business finances!
When I rebranded my business, I decided to hire a photographer to get new professional headshots. As I’m sure you can tell by looking at my website, I had a pretty clear vision in mind for my branding scheme and the style of photographs I wanted.
But…I also wanted my own personal stock photo library, which is an idea I had after browsing through some of Melyssa Griffin’s blog posts.
I want to start this post by saying that I come in peace. Really, I do. I want to strengthen the relationships between virtual assistants and clients, and that’s my motivation behind writing posts like this one.
But it drives me a little crazy when I see bloggers and other entrepreneurs and business owners talking badly about virtual assistants. I don’t mean in the sense of, “This virtual assistant took my money and didn’t complete the job.” They’re justified in…spreading awareness, let’s say, about that VA’s unethical handling of their working agreement. What I’m referring to is when people make claims that VAs are “just” stay-at-home or work-from-home moms and imply that they don’t have any real skills.
Taxes. Blech.
It’s a topic that most of us happily avoid discussing, but like them or not, they’re a reality. When you’re employed by a business, you know that you have taxes withheld from your paychecks. Depending on your state, federal, state, and/or city taxes are withheld. You file the W-2 form, and the accounting team with your employer takes care of those withholdings for you.
But what about when you’re self-employed?
I’m going to jump right into the nitty gritty on this one, because it’s on my mind and because I had to deal with it recently while I was doing work for one of my clients. Let me give you a bit of backstory:
For two of my wonderful clients, I provide the service of searching for copyright violations of their Teachers Pay Teachers products and then sending cease and desist emails to the violators on their behalf. This is a process that sometimes gets a bit involved, and I’ve even had to work with one of my clients’ lawyers for violators who weren’t responding to (or even opening) my many emails. When I most recently logged into my client’s “legal” email account (A.K.A. I made a Gmail account called legal.myclientsbusinessname for this purpose), I saw the following response from someone I’d emailed about her school’s website having posted one of my client’s Teachers Pay Teacher’s products:
