Module 10: Find Clients and Jobs
Portfolio built, packages priced — now the conversations. This module covers where marketing VA work actually hides, the trial-task offer that opens doors résumés can't, discovery calls and a clean onboarding, and the employed/agency path for when you'd rather skip the client hunt altogether.
Where the work is
Start with agencies. Marketing and social agencies live on overflow: a client signs, the team is at capacity, and the work that piles up is precisely VA work — scheduling, formatting, CRM cleanup, report pulls. Agencies place US-based VA support with their clients at $35–60 an hour, much of it white-label: you do the work, their name is on it, and nobody minds. One good agency relationship is a single conversation that can feed you for a year.
Second: coach and creator communities — the memberships, group chats, and forums where your ideal clients post things like "spent my whole Sunday in my inbox again." Don't pitch in the thread. Be visibly useful there, learn who is drowning, and take it to a DM with a trial offer — that's the next lesson.
Third: your warm circle. Past employers, former coworkers, clients from jobs you left years ago, the business owners you actually know. They've seen you work, which is the entire objection handled in advance. A two-line message — "I'm taking on two VA clients for inbox, social, and email support; know anyone drowning?" — outperforms a month of polished cold outreach.
Marketplaces, with eyes open. Yes, real clients hire on Upwork and similar boards. And yes, you'll see general admin work bid down to the offshore band of $7–15 an hour. You cannot win that auction, and you shouldn't enter it. Compete where the discount doesn't apply: a specialty the client can't easily buy cheap (CRM hygiene, email campaign builds), genuine timezone overlap, and communication a client can relax about. Bid only on posts that need those things — or skip the boards and spend the hours on agencies and communities instead.
You're a US-based VA whose strongest, fastest work is CRM cleanup and lead-list building. Which first move fits that positioning?
The trial-task approach
Nobody hires a VA from a résumé. The résumé gets a glance; the trial task gets the job. Lead with a trial: one small, real deliverable that shows your system instead of describing it. Small means 60–90 minutes of your time. Real means their material — their inbox, their draft, their list — with permission. Fast means a deadline you name and then hit.
A good offer names the artifact and the turnaround: "Give me one blog post — within 48 hours I'll return five scheduled social posts built from it, in your template." Free or paid? For a warm lead, a free hour is a door-opener well spent. For cold outreach, a flat-fee paid trial filters the curious from the serious — a prospect who pays $75 is already a customer in their own head. One trial per prospect, scoped in one sentence — never an open-ended "trial week."
Example DM (Instagram, to a business coach): "Hi Renee — your story about spending Sunday night in your inbox: I winced. I do inbox and content support for coaches. Quick offer: share one folder and I'll triage your last seven days — reply-today flagged, drafts written for your approval, the rest filed — plus a summary of the rules I used. You'll have it by Thursday. If it's useful, I work in 10-hour monthly banks. If not, the summary is yours to keep either way."
Example email (to an agency manager): Subject: "Overflow help — a working sample." Body: "Hi Jordan — I'm a white-label VA for marketing teams: post scheduling, email campaign builds from briefs, CRM cleanup, report pulls. Instead of a résumé, a working offer: give me one blog post and I'll return five social posts built from it, in your house format, within 48 hours, at a flat $75 trial rate. If the work is clean, I take overflow in 10- and 20-hour monthly banks, with async updates your team can forward as-is. Happy to sign your NDA. — [Your name]"
Deliver the trial like a client job: on time, summary note on top (done / noticed / flagged), and the close — "That was a two-hour slice of the 10-hour bank. Want the system to keep running?" If they pass, ask permission before their material appears in your portfolio.
Four trial offers land in a prospect's inbox. Which one is built right?
Discovery calls and onboarding
The discovery call is twenty minutes with three jobs: understand their mess, check the fit, agree the mechanics. Ask what eats their week, which tools they run, who approves your drafts, and how many hours they honestly think this is. Then listen for the red flags, because they announce themselves: "I need someone available basically all the time." "Pay is fuzzy right now, we'll figure it out." "My last three VAs all quit." Each of those is a preview of your next six months, not a puzzle to solve.
Fit includes timezone math, said out loud. Name your working hours, your actual overlap window with them, and your response commitment — "messages answered within four working hours; anything urgent gets flagged in our shared doc." An async system with agreed windows beats a vague promise to be "always around," every time, for both of you.
Onboarding runs in a fixed order on day one. First, a simple written agreement: scope, bank size, rate, rollover policy, 30-day exit for either side. Second, the first bank, prepaid. Third, access — set up through a password manager, where the client shares each account without you ever seeing or storing the raw password. If a client sends passwords in a chat message or a shared doc, treat it as your first professional save: don't use them. Set the manager up together, move the logins into it, and suggest rotating anything that traveled as plain text. Clients remember who protected them before being asked.
Then week one: pick one visible win — inbox zero, two weeks of posts scheduled — and land it before optimizing anything else. This is also where the Module 7 systems switch on: the first update note goes out on schedule even if it's three lines long.
Day one. Your new client drops a shared document titled "ALL MY LOGINS" into your folder — email, banking, social accounts — and writes: "Everything's in there, help yourself." What do you do?
The employed/agency path, negotiating, and your first 30 days
The other road: let someone else find the work. Agencies hire and contract VAs directly — they win the client, hold the contract, and hand you tasks. The trade is real and worth pricing honestly. Agency clients pay $35–60 an hour for US-based VA support, and your cut of that is smaller than running your own roster. In exchange you get no marketing, no invoice-chasing, and steady hours. For a first year, that trade is often the correct one. Employed remote roles sit beside agency work — marketing assistant, operations assistant, executive assistant with a marketing lean: a salary instead of banks, benefits instead of freedom. Everything in this course still applies; your "client" is a manager, and the same reliability systems are what make employees promotable.
Negotiating either path, anchor to your numbers, not your nerves. You know your floor from Module 9 and the specialty bands from Module 1: CRM and tech setup at $40–80, social media strategy at $30–60, general admin at $20–40. Trade the variables that cost you little — more committed hours against the bank discount, a rate review locked at 90 days, a narrower task list. Never trade below the floor. A rate you resent is a resignation letter with a delay on it, and the professional sentence when an offer can't reach the floor is simple: "At that rate the math doesn't work for me — here's the scope that does."
Whichever road you take, the first 30 days set the terms of everything after. Week one: access done properly, communication rhythm agreed, one visible win shipped. Week two: the cadence locks — update notes landing unasked, hour balance reported. Week three: your first SOP handed over for a recurring task. Week four: a short review note — what you handled, what you'd take on next, one question about priorities. That note is what gets you renewed, expanded, or promoted. Run it like a system, because it is one.
An agency offers you a steady 30 hours a month of CRM cleanup at $22 an hour, take it or leave it. Your calculated floor is $31, and CRM work bills $40–80 for specialists. What's your move?
What you can now do
- Find work where it actually hides: agency overflow rosters, trial-task offers, and the referrals both of those produce.
- Lead any pitch with a trial task — 60 to 90 minutes, the prospect's real material, a deadline you name and then hit.
- Run a twenty-minute discovery call that checks fit and listens for red flags early, then onboard with hours, approvals, and channels agreed in writing.