The move nobody warns you about
Four clients, somewhere around $2,900 a month, and a tax bill you fund out of the same account you buy groceries from. That is the shape of a lot of VA businesses eighteen months in, and it is usually the point where someone opens LinkedIn Jobs instead of Upwork.
The reason is rarely the money. It is the admin: five invoices, five Slack workspaces, five sets of priorities that all turn urgent on a Thursday. One employer, one context, paid holidays, and someone whose job is to develop you starts to sound worth a pay cut.
Sometimes it is a pay cut. If you are billing $7,000 a month with three retainer clients, almost no in-house coordinator role will match that, and you should stay freelance. This article is for everyone below that line.
”Virtual assistant” is not a job title inside companies
Search “virtual assistant jobs” and you get agency listings paying $5 an hour to sit in someone else’s resourcing pool. The work you already do exists in-house, but under different names:
- Executive Assistant (and Senior EA, Executive Business Partner)
- Operations Coordinator, Operations Associate, Business Operations
- Customer Support Specialist, Support Operations
- Marketing Coordinator, Community Manager
- Program Coordinator, Project Coordinator
Those are your search terms. Add “remote” and a timezone, and ignore anything that says “virtual assistant” in the title.
On pay, US-based EA roles at Series A to Series C startups tend to post in the $70,000–$100,000 band, with operations coordinator roles landing lower, usually $55,000 to $80,000. Support specialist roles sit lower again. If you are hired outside the US through an agency or an employer-of-record, the same title often pays between $1,000 and $2,500 a month, which is the part job boards never spell out. Compare that honestly against what VAs actually make before you give up a client roster for it.
The strongest candidates I have seen make this move were already specialists. A generalist VA competing for an EA role at a 60-person fintech is up against career EAs. A VA who has run calendars and board-meeting logistics for two founders for three years is not. If you are still generalist, read how to specialise first and come back in six months.
The interview is graded, not vibed
This is where VAs get knocked out, and it has nothing to do with capability.
A discovery call is a conversation between two adults deciding whether to work together. You build rapport, you diagnose a problem, you quote. Warmth closes it.
A company loop is an assessment. You will typically go through a recruiter screen of about 25 minutes, a hiring manager conversation, two or three behavioural interviews with people you would work alongside, and a work sample. At Amazon, your answers get scored against the leadership principles and there is a bar raiser in the loop whose entire job is to say no. At Google, interviewers write up your answers and a hiring committee that never met you decides. Nobody in that chain is deciding whether they like you. They are filling in a form, and a vague answer gives them nothing to write down.
So the thing that makes you excellent on client calls actively hurts you here. “I’m really organised and clients trust me with everything” is a sentence an interviewer cannot score. “In Q3 my founder double-booked twice in a week, so I took ownership of the calendar entirely, moved all external booking to one Calendly link with buffers, and we went from roughly eight scheduling conflicts a month to zero” is a sentence they can.
Six stories, written out, situation to action to result, with a number in each. That is the whole preparation, and it takes longer than you think. Our list of VA interview questions covers the client-side version of this; the behavioural rounds at a company go two or three follow-ups deeper on every answer, which is where unprepared stories fall apart.
Practising against the actual bar
You can rehearse with a friend, and you should, but a friend cannot tell you whether your answer would clear the bar at the company you are applying to. They have never sat on that side of the table.
This is the gap Prepfully fills. You book a mock interview with someone who currently works at the company you are targeting, usually a manager who runs interview loops there, and you get a real round plus written feedback afterwards. Their roster is around 2,000 coaches across more than 1,600 companies, with 20,000-odd sessions completed and a 4.8 rating on Trustpilot. Sessions run on Zoom and cost roughly $169 to $499 depending on the coach’s seniority, with a discount on your first booking. If the session turns out to be useless, they refund it as long as you email support within 24 hours with specifics, which is a better guarantee than most coaching marketplaces offer.
One honest caveat, because it matters for our readers: the coach roster leans heavily towards engineering, product, data and engineering management. You will not find fifty executive assistants on there. The way to use it as an ops or EA candidate is to filter by company first, then pick a hiring manager rather than an individual contributor, because a Google engineering manager has run the same behavioural rubric you are about to be scored against and knows exactly how the hiring committee reads a write-up. Do not pay $400 for a coach whose specialism is distributed systems design and expect calendar-triage feedback.
The free side is worth more than people expect. Their interview questions bank is submitted by recent candidates, and the interview guides walk through each company’s process end to end: who you meet, in what order, and what each round is scoring. The process half of those guides holds up regardless of role. Knowing that round three is the culture-fit screen and round four is the cross-functional partner changes how you prepare for both. They also run an AI interview tool if you want cheap reps on delivery before you spend money on a human.
My recommendation on timing: book one session about two weeks before your first real onsite, not the night before. The feedback is only useful if you have time to rewrite three stories and run them again.
Rewriting the resume for a recruiter who has never hired a VA
A VA resume organised by client reads, to a corporate recruiter screening 200 applications, like a gap. Six logos, no employer, no dates that line up. They will not spend ninety seconds decoding it.
Give your freelance work a company name, list yourself as the owner, and keep continuous dates. Then write bullets about outcomes instead of duties.
Before: “Managed email and calendar for multiple clients, handled customer service and data entry.”
After: “Owned inbox and calendar for two founders, roughly 60 meetings a week combined. Rebuilt booking around a single Calendly link with travel buffers, cutting scheduling conflicts to near zero. Ran first-line support for a Shopify store, taking first-response time from nine hours to under two across about 250 tickets a week.”
Same job, two different candidates on paper. Our VA resume guide has the full structure, and the cover letter guide covers the one paragraph that explains why a freelancer wants to be an employee. Have an answer to that, by the way. “I want stability” is fine and honest. “I’m tired of chasing invoices” is also honest but makes you sound like you will leave when something steadier appears.
The work sample is the round you can actually win
Most coordinator and EA loops include an exercise, and it is frequently the only round where your experience beats a career corporate candidate’s.
The classic version: here are five meeting requests, two of which conflict, a flight that lands at 11am, a board deck due Friday, and a direct report asking for a 1:1. Tell us what you do.
They are not scoring whether your answer matches a key. They are scoring whether you make a decision and explain the reasoning, and whether you flag what you would need to check. Candidates who come back asking which meeting is most important have failed the exercise. You have been doing this for two years across four clients. Decide, state the trade-off you accepted, name the one thing you would confirm with the exec, and move on.
Written exercises work the same way. Short, structured, a recommendation in the first two lines.
Do not quit your clients first
Interview processes at companies take six to ten weeks from application to offer, and roughly four in five applications go nowhere. Dropping your roster to “focus on the search” is how people end up taking a worse offer out of cash pressure.
Taper instead. Keep your two best clients through the search, and plan a handover of 30 to 60 days once you sign. Several VAs I know kept one retainer client permanently alongside a full-time job, which is the best of both arrangements if your employer allows it.
That last part needs checking before you sign, not after. Plenty of employment contracts include exclusivity or outside-activity clauses, and US offers often require written approval for side work. Ask the recruiter directly during the offer stage. It is a completely normal question and the answer determines whether you need to close out your client relationships properly or just reduce them.
If you are aiming at EA and operations roles specifically, our Executive & Admin VA Course covers the calendar, inbox and board-support systems these interviews probe, and how to become an executive VA maps the skills gap between general VA work and the executive side.
Twelve well-researched applications with a tailored resume will beat sixty generic ones, so start there, and book the mock interview before your first onsite rather than after you have lost one.
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