196: Beyond Growth: How to Build a Purpose-Driven Business with Mary Elaine Baker

Andrea Liebross: Welcome to the She Thinks Big! Podcast. Get ready to level up your thinking and expand your horizons. I’m your host, Andrea Liebross, your guide on this journey of big ideas and bold moves. I am the best-selling author of She Thinks Big: The Entrepreneurial Woman's Guide to Moving Past the Messy Middle and Into the Extraordinary.

I support women like you with the insights and mindset you need to think bigger and the strategies and systems you need to turn that thinking into action and make it all a reality. Are you ready to stop thinking small and start thinking big? Let’s dive in.

Hello, my friends, and welcome back to the Time to Level Up Podcast. Today is one of the kinds of episodes I love where I get to interview a very cool and amazing person. Mary Elaine Baker is the co-founder and integrator of VAUSA.

We've been talking a lot here about growing and scaling. She has grown and scaled a great company that provides a service that most of you listening probably need. But she does it in a way which really resonates with me. She does it in a way where she is focused on culture, people, purpose, and passion. She's going to share with you a little bit of her magic.

I want you to listen and think about, “Okay, how could I integrate some of this thinking into my own business so that I could grow and scale just like she has?” Mary Elaine is going to introduce herself.

But a little background, she was an active-duty military spouse. She wanted a business that could create some time, freedom, and flexibility and really adapt to the lifestyle of moving and having kids. Before COVID, she decided to leave her job as a public school educator and start this business after having done the business herself.

She became a virtual assistant and then shortly after realized there was an opportunity to teach others how to do the same thing and serve people along the way. So buckle up and listen in to my conversation with Mary Elaine.

Hello, my friends, and welcome back to the She Thinks Big! Podcast. I'm very excited today to have with me Mary Elaine Baker and for lots of reasons. But we were introduced through, how do we even get introduced? Who introduced us? I can't even think about this.

Mary Elaine Baker: I think it was one of my clients.

Andrea Liebross: It was your client. We got introduced by my client, who's also Mary Elaine's client. She said, “You guys need to meet each other.” That probably was at least nine months ago, maybe a year ago.

Since then, we have gone back and forth a few times. I wanted to invite her on today to share with you her journey, tell you a little bit about how she has grown this business and really now is scaling it to a different level. Thank you for being here.

Mary Elaine Baker: I'm so happy to be here. Thank you for having me.

Andrea Liebross: If you had to introduce yourself, what would you say?

Mary Elaine Baker: I would say Baker and I am the co-founder and integrator of VAUSA. I'm also a mother of two children. I have a 13-year-old daughter and an almost 10-year-old son. A proud veteran spouse to my husband, who's the other co-founder of our business.

We live just outside of Savannah, Georgia. We do some simple homesteading that we're hoping to grow and also homeschool our children. I really get to lead a group of some of the most incredible humans, I feel blessed to know my life.

We are 100% virtual. Most of my best friends I've met online, I can say that. Yeah, we just believe in creating jobs and community for military families specifically. We do that by creating jobs and matching them with clients who with clients who have businesses that are really focused on a bigger purpose or faith-driven company. So we have a big heart for serving people and love working with clients who are trying to steward their business in a way to make a positive social impact.

Andrea Liebross: I love that. I love it. A lot of my clients 100% need your services because they need that virtual assistance. They can't do it all by themselves. I think there's a need, but there's also a place where they start to realize that.

There has to be a shift in their thinking, kind of almost like raising their hand and saying, “Mary Elaine, come help me. I need your people.” What do you usually see in both—I think there are two sides to this—in the clients that come to you and the people that you employ? Where's their shift? How does their thinking shift when they decide, “Yes, I want to do this,” or, “Yes, I need this”?

Mary Elaine Baker: Normally clients, when they come to us, they're either in a state of desperation where they realize, “I should have made this decision years ago. Help!” Those individuals also tend to struggle, I think, with trust in allowing someone into their lives because it's quite intrusive and it's a very vulnerable place to be, especially if you're making a first big hire.

But even so, we have a lot of clients who have businesses with plenty of employees who've been in business for a long time. But this is actually the first time that they've hired an assistant for themselves personally.

That's a lot more invasive than hiring an employee to do a job that's providing a service or product for someone else. You're allowing this person access to very personal things, your entire calendar so they're going to see what's going on in your business world and your personal life and they really have to get to know you as a human as an individual and they have to be willing to invest in building that relationship.

That's kind of a step deeper than probably the other employees that they ever hired before. Very rarely do I have people who don't want to delegate, that's kind of the point of this, they're like, “I know I need to and I want to.”

It's really the mental block of, “But how do I get there? How do I actually let go but also not scare away this person? How do I effectively let go of these things but teach them how to do it the way that I need to receive it?” Also, I'm going to have to invest time in this person and already, my time feels so limited.”

I love listening to a recent podcast of yours where you talked about the value of your time and thinking [inaudible] dollars and that obviously really resonated with me. But yeah, I try, when I'm meeting with my clients, to actually give them that message of “Okay, well, how much is your time actually worth? Let's put a number on it. Where are you actually spending your time? Is that the best investment of your time or should you be doing activities that only you can do, where your gifts truly lie?”

Andrea Liebross: I think that I'm going to have to invest time to get this person to develop the relationship, to get them up to speed. Once they start thinking in that way, it's like they build a roadblock.

But getting past that is kind of an aha moment. If I can get past that, it's worth the time. Yeah, that episode is about dollars, thinking of each hour as $1,000, I think it's pretty powerful too. All right, tell me about the people that you're employing. Tell me about the VAs themselves.

Mary Elaine Baker: They are primarily military spouses. We try to keep the average between 70% to 80% of people on our team as being military affiliated. Most of them are military spouses, but they could be veterans or both.

They tend to travel. They're moving every couple of years. Finding someone steady that they can work with is extremely valuable to them because they're having their world turning upside down and they're having to start over in so many ways every few years and build new community.

A running joke in the military spouse world is when I get somewhere new and I have to enroll my child in school, I have to find a stranger to put as their emergency contact.

We laugh at it as military spouses, but it's a sad truth. We're having to start over. Because of that, a lot of military spouses have gaps in their resumes or you can just tell that they are just hopping around and that can scare off a lot of employers normally.

We have a huge heart for that. The unemployment rate for military spouses is, I think, at 21% now, maybe even a little bit higher, which is over four times higher than the national average, which is crazy.

These individuals are extremely talented. They're very resilient and flexible because the lifestyle that they've lived demands that of them. I feel like if you survive this lifestyle, it's either going to make you stronger or it will break you and you're just not going to last in it. We're looking for those individuals who have made the best of this lifestyle that has allowed them to be kind of forged in the fire of it. It has made them adaptable and flexible.

It takes a lot of stress to really nerve them or shake them. They want to contribute financially to their family. They have other gifts outside of the home that they want to use.

What I love the most is when they find us, they come either because they've heard of a friend that has talked about our culture and they're like, “Oh, my goodness, I get a job and I get community,” or they just randomly find us online and they say, “Oh, I want a job like that.” Then they stay because of our community.

That is something that we really try to hire based on values, and we look for certain indicators of our values, authentic connections, selfless service, and intentional growth.

It really leads out the people that don't belong and it attracts all the right people. Then our people just really love the community we've built. There are all kinds of other things that we do to love or nurture them beyond just, “Here’s your job. Good luck.” That's just step one.

Our individuals just love other people and they want genuine relationships. They truly crave that, they need it and they crave it. They believe in serving others because of the lifestyle they live and also just who they are.

So in this position, it's very much a serving position and they love it. It brings them joy and fulfillment and then intentional growth. They're never satisfied with the status quo. They're always wanting to sharpen themselves to learn and to grow and this gives them an outlet where they can continue doing that no matter where military life takes them.

Andrea Liebross: I love it. Tell me, how then did you grow the business? Because you are the founder. What was the journey?

Mary Elaine Baker: Lots of failures. No, we have been extremely blessed to be primarily a referral-based business, which I think that's the best way to grow. You want to create advocates for your company.

Obviously, we believe in providing a fantastic service and doing our best to really hire and attract just high-quality individuals who are values-driven and align with our values. I think that's a buzzword in a lot of business communities like, “Oh, you got to have values. What are your values?”

I think some companies, maybe a lot of companies like to use that as an “Oh, look at me, look at my values on my website. Check. Did it.” How is that showing up in your actions as a company? What are you actually doing on a day-to-day basis to display these? What that turns into is your values should drive your decisions and your actions and your decisions and actions in your company on a collective level, create your culture.

I think we have been able to create advocates, spend very little in marketing, and generate referrals, primary referral-based business because of our culture and being very intentional in crafting it.

Andrea Liebross: Okay, crafting your culture. How do you do it though? How do you craft a culture?

Mary Elaine Baker: Let me back up a little bit. I'm going to tell you, you asked what was your journey or what did you experience. To give a really speedy snapshot of kind of the growth and major things, failures and lessons we learned, we're still a very young company.

We started the business in 2018 officially. It was very organic. It was literally me on the phone with my best friend who was also a ranger wife saying, “Hey, I have this vision. I have this idea to do what I do,” I was working then as a virtual assistant, “But I want to teach other people how to do it. I want to go out and find other people like us, show them what's possible, and then go out and find the clients and then match them and teach them how to work together.”

I didn't mention this earlier, I don't think, but yes, I homeschool my children, but before that, I was an elementary school teacher. Teaching is just in my blood. To me, teaching is just being a communicator.

How can I take a message and a lesson and make sure it's effectively communicated and absorbed by another individual? You don't have to be in a classroom to be a teacher or a communicator.

She said yes before we got off the phone. It was very slow, gradual, one client referring another client, and then, “Oh, hey, I know somebody that would be great working here.”

It was very gradual. But soon I went from having a small number of people that I was interacting with every day to, “Oh, my goodness, I can't interact with everyone on my team every day or even once a week. This is getting a little bit more than I feel like I can mentally and physically handle.”

Keeping a grip on knowing what's going on in my people's lives was always very important to me because I live that military lifestyle. I knew what it was like to be in the trenches of that lifestyle.

It can feel very isolating and alone. For me, it was, “How do I make sure that they're being taken care of?” There's not anything going on on the home front that's going to affect how they show up at work.

Because it always does. We can try to wear a mask for a little while. But eventually what's going on at home is going to affect performance. I never wanted to be the leader that just ignored and pretended that didn't exist.

We're not Corporate America, we're not just looking at numbers, metrics, and performance, we care about the heart of our people. I remember waking up one night in the middle of the night in a panic like, “Oh, my gosh, am I going to be able to handle this? How do I make sure we're growing in a way that I still am living in integrity of who I am and caring for my people?”

Not just them but my clients don't feel like just another number on a piece of paper. That's what I didn't want for anyone on the clients or my team. So I actually hired someone and we call them an Outreach Ambassador. Her job, her role in our business is to literally just check in with our people and see how they're doing.

We're not talking about work, we're just saying, “Hey, I'm just going to check in. How's your child doing? How's your dog doing?” We know the names of their family and we're just, oh, we're celebrating wins, we're sending them cards in the mail. It doesn't take a lot of money, it doesn't take a lot of energy to do that but it just takes intentionality. Having someone just focused on that made a huge impact.

We did that for a client as well. We're just calling to check in. Not to say, “Hey, don't forget to pay your bill.” Or, anything like that or asking even about the assistant, just “How are you doing?” That made a huge difference.

That right there, just showing that you care about an individual as a person and what's going on in their lives will separate you so far from the rest. But then 2020 happened. No one was prepared for that, especially as a completely virtual business, we really didn't know how this was going to affect us or what to expect.

Our clients were freaking out. No one knew what was happening or what was going to happen. I had clients calling me, just saying, “I can't afford to lose my assistant, but I also don't know what this looks like for me financially because all my clients are starting to drop off.”

One by one I just got on the phone with my clients and we worked out individual temporary deals so that they didn't have to lose their person and that relationship didn't have to end.

We just said, “Hey, we'll reevaluate this in a couple of months. We're just going to play it by ear, but let's not make any drastic decisions until we know what this really looks like long term.”

Thankfully, we didn't really lose any one. I think we maybe have lost one permanently through that. But then what happened was the tides turned and we went from everyone freaking out to everyone wanting to hire a virtual assistant.

I wasn’t prepared. My team wasn't prepared. We experienced an insane amount of growth in a very short amount of time. I promise you that it is just as terrifying as all your clients dropping you off overnight.

I don't have a business background. Everything I learned, I self-taught or I learned from other people much more experienced and smarter than I am in the entrepreneur world, which are a lot of my clients, honestly.

That taught me that my fears that I was having early on in the business of “What if we grow too fast?” It all became real because we hired too many people, we said yes to too many clients that we never should have just because our doors are being banged down.

I mean, we couldn't match people fast enough. My team just kind of went in this hyperactive mode. It took almost two years to recover from that, and we had to intentionally downsize.

We’re saying yes to anyone and that's why we narrowed our focus to, we don't really care about the industry, what we care more about is, are you a purpose-driven company or a faith-driven company, either one of those, that's trying to make a bigger impact to our community and our world? That right there was a night and day difference.

Andrea Liebross: It was a way to sift through all the people out there and really zoom in on who you wanted to work with.

Mary Elaine Baker: Yeah, absolutely. I always say we value people over profit. That's what makes us different and we put our people over our profit. Not saying profit isn’t important, it's extremely important. The saying is no margin, no mission. You need that margin to be able to make the impact that you want to make. It's very important.

But you can't do that at the expense of forsaking your people. I fully believe if you take care of your people, they're going to take care of everything else. If you hire the right people, it is certainly who, not how. They're going to figure it out and you're going to be able to overcome hardships and challenges together because you've picked the right people to surround yourself with.

Andrea Liebross: Tell me about those four priority pieces.

Mary Elaine Baker: Yes. My husband makes fun of me all the time because I'm like, “Listen, I'm a teacher. I can't help it. I got to think of creative ways.”

Andrea Liebross: Yeah. I'm with you. I'm with you.

Mary Elaine Baker: It’s just in your head. I'm surprised at this point I don't have anchor charts all over my office with these on there, but it's coming. The four priority pieces I have are people, purpose, passion, and presence. It used to just be people, purpose, passion, but I added presence because I realized that it's really easy to get caught up in a rat race in life or in just the busyness and hecticness of life.

I recently read a book, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry and I'm blanking on the author. But that book I read a couple of years ago just really convicted me in so many ways of how distracted we are, and I am, and I think most of us are, and that we're just so busy to the point where we lose focus of where we need to be spending our time, our money, and our energy because we're just being reactive to all the stuff that's being thrown our way or squirrel and now we're going this way.

I feel like a very focused leader, a very present leader is powerful, that can kind of rise above the noise and the static and really see what's going on and be intentional with who you're spending your time with and what you're doing with your time.

So I added that as a high priority. It's presence, it's people, and it's purpose, never forgetting why you're doing what you're doing, and never losing your passion for it. It doesn't mean everything's going to be fun but your passion and your purpose is what's going to help you get through those scary moments and those scary times like, “Oh, crap. We just grew too fast, what am I doing right now?” or, “All my clients just dropped off overnight, what am I going to do?” If you forget those four priorities, you're going to panic. Oh, look, there's another P. Panic.

Andrea Liebross: I don't want to make that a priority though.

Mary Elaine Baker: You're going to panic and you're going to make fear-based decisions and scarcity-based decisions. I think those four things will help ground you when everything else around you seems to be swirling out of control.

Andrea Liebross: What do you say when someone says, “I want to move from growth mode to scale mode,” what do you think they need to do in order to get to that scale place?

Mary Elaine Baker: Honestly, I always ask people why first.

Andrea Liebross: Okay, good question, yeah.

Mary Elaine Baker: I think it's a powerful question. There's nothing wrong with wanting to grow for the sake of growth. I think all high performers are just hardwired for that. I mean, we can't help it. It's fun. We like challenges.

We're climbing one mountain, now we're looking for the next. We're just like, “Okay, that was fun. I need to do it again.” We kind of thrive on that. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I think that's what separates a lot of high performers from non-high performers, one of the qualities.

But I do think it's good to examine your heart on it because if you're solely focused on growth for the sake of growth, there's a fine line between enjoying the journey and you like the challenges and you like to accomplish goals and I'm never fulfilled.

True fulfillment and gratitude, if you don't have fulfillment and gratitude and enjoying the journey or are you hoping that that next step is going to bring you fulfillment? That's dangerous. That's a dangerous game to play. You don't want to be in that game.

I like to always ask why first, just to see where their heart posture is with this and making sure they even know why they want it. Are you doing it because you think you're going to look better? Do you just want it to have a certain title and just say you did it? Well, then what's the next thing? So I like to ask that.

The next thing is what are you doing to invest in your people and in your culture? Because if you grow for the sake of growth and you're growing and you're hitting these numbers and you're hitting these goals, but yet you're looking behind you and you trampled a million flowers in order to get there, did the ends justify the means?

Are you making sure that the people that got you to where you are today are going to, they're likely not going to be the same people, maybe, but it's likely not going to be the same people, the same circumstances, same things that are going to help you get to the next level.

But all of that, the growth may be nice to see on paper and on your PnL but if it's negatively impacting your culture and if you're not making sure that your culture is prepared for that kind of growth, you're going to experience a lot of pain. I think it's much easier to craft things from the beginning and be intentional about it than it is to be reactive and try to pick up the pieces after the fact.

Andrea Liebross: Agreed, agreed. So it goes back to people, it goes back to culture, and it goes back to making sure that you still have a purpose and passion in a sense that aligns with who you want to be as a person too.

Mary Elaine Baker: Yeah.

Andrea Liebross: What do you think when someone says to you, “I'm not sure that I can do this job,” or they don't have faith in themselves, that probably does happen sometimes, like, “I really want to do this but I'm not sure that I'm the right person or I'm going to be cut out for it. Can you help me?”

Mary Elaine Baker: For people that we hire?

Andrea Liebross: Yeah.

Mary Elaine Baker: That normally doesn't come out in an interview. No.

Andrea Liebross: That's true. Six weeks down the road, they might feel that way, right?

Mary Elaine Baker: Well, yes. It is that four to six-week window that will start to see confidence shaken. We run on EOS, and so normally when we see, we say right person, right seat, right person means do they align with your values? We have KPIs that we're looking for that match up with that. It's either a plus or a minus on that or a plus-minus. So they have to be the right person. That's non-negotiable.

But normally those individuals that say that, they are the right person. Something else is shaking their confidence. So I like to ask and verify that they get it, “get it” just means are all neurons firing? If you were to ask them just general questions about the role and what it requires and what it needs, can they verbally explain that to you and just get it?

But there's a difference between getting it here and then the execution of the doing. The doing part of it is capacity. That could be mental capacity, physical capacity, hours in the day, emotional bandwidth, and also the hard skills, the skills necessary to be able to execute it. I may be able to read a job description and say, “Oh, yeah, I understand what this is requiring me to do or what they want for me to do.”

Now when it comes to the execution of it, I may need either supplemental training or learn a specific tool or sharpen up on something that I can take a course for. But normally, the hard skills are found out really early. I mean, that's part of what we do is we're testing for that. We're verifying they have the previous experience for it.

So it comes down to capacity in do they have the actual hours and the mental bandwidth and the emotional bandwidth for what this job requires. You may not always know that until we're in it because we're working with other people and there are other things that a job description just can't detail and explain.

Then there's the “want it.” “Want it” is “Is what this job requiring aligning with your god-given gifts?” Like you're waking up in the morning excited and energized. That doesn't mean you enjoy every little task of what you're doing but the gifts that it’s requiring you to use, one of the tools assessments we use is a Working Genius by Pat Lencioni and there certain geniuses like galvanizing, discernment, tenacity, enablement, invention, and wonder.

What we've noticed is if someone doesn't have, let's say, tenacity, which in this context of this assessment is they love to finish, there will be nothing unfinished, their follow-through is at 100% every time, that's either in their genius or competency, they're really going to hate being in an admin position.

I mean, it is nothing but details, follow through, consistency, lots of moving projects going on, lots of different task management things that are going to require. They have to be able to just be naturally energized by it. Are the activities naturally energizing for you or are they draining for you?

Some days are just going to be harder days than others. But in general, I say this to clients as well, is what you're doing on the day-to-day using your actual gifts, I mean, 80/20 rule is a sweet spot for most people, 80% of your time spent doing energizing activities versus not?

If so, then you really need to re-evaluate where you're spending your gifts or not using your gifts. Normally, confidence is shaken because one of those are off somewhere so we try to pinpoint what it is.

It could just be general overwhelm because the client is just raining delegation at a faster pace than they can absorb. In that case, that's a whole other ballgame. We're going to discuss that with a client and we're going to work on a solution together. But, yeah, I normally try to ask questions revolving the “get it” and “want it” capacity to make sure that those are all still yeses.

Andrea Liebross: I use that EOS too, so I totally get what you're saying. It's interesting because usually whatever's at the surface really isn't the problem. You've got to dig deeper. You totally have to dig deeper.

Mary Elaine Baker: Yes.

Andrea Liebross: Well, this has been super fun talking about all these things. I loved our conversation. What would you say to someone who's considering hiring a VA? What do they need to think? What would make this a “Hell yes, I'm in, I totally need this,” what do you think they need to ask themselves?

Mary Elaine Baker: One of the things is what would you do if you had 10 more hours in the week given back to you? What would you do? There's no really wrong answer with this but I think some people struggle at first. Some people say, “Oh, I just keep working more. Everything I'm doing right now, just more.”

I usually raise my eyebrow out of that like, “Would you really? Is that where you should be?” But some people say, “I would start going to the gym again. I would spend more time with my grandchildren. I would go on more dates with my spouse.” That is really where a lot of business owners have found themselves.

They went into entrepreneurship because they wanted freedom. They wanted financial freedom. They wanted time freedom. I went through this journey myself. There's so much irony in what my journey was because I was the assistant, had so much flexibility and freedom.

Then I said, “I'm starting a business.” Lost all of that and had to literally put myself in my client's shoes and learn how to delegate and let go and grow a team of people so that I can gradually get this business to not fully rely on me. I think it was Robert Kiyosaki who said, this is another question that I would ask is, “Do you own your business or do you own your job?” Because there is a difference.

Andrea Liebross: I have a podcast actually on that. Like, is this a job? Is this a business? Are you an employee? Are you the CEO? Depending on how you think about it.

Mary Elaine Baker: Yeah. If you had a family emergency and you had to go take a month off, would your business survive? Would it survive? That's like a gut punch to a lot of people to ask themselves that question.

But to me, I feel like hiring an assistant is kind of that first step of getting back to that freedom that you started out to getting, to want, that's why you wanted this, and most people should have made that decision years ago and most people, when they have an assistant, they're like, “Oh, my gosh, my only regret is that I didn't do this sooner because now I have freed up,” forget the time and the day, “and now I have freed up brain space to be creative again, to connect with people again, to think about the next big thing I want to accomplish or to work on that. I haven't even had time or mental bandwidth,” again going back to capacity. So yeah, that's what I would say. I would ask them.

Andrea Liebross: Love it. Perfect question. If you had 10 more hours in the week, what would you do? Okay, friends, very interesting, isn't that? Just a very interesting conversation, how she really ties together the culture and the people.

I loved when she talked about when someone says, “Okay, this isn't working out. Is it really not working out or do they just not get it, want it, or have the capacity to do it? I think a lot of times, when we ask ourselves one of those three questions, we get to the root of the answer.

We get to the root of the answer of why we might not be growing or scaling at the rate we want to. So make sure you get your hands on a copy, though, of She Thinks Big in the coming weeks because the audiobook is coming out if you didn't already know that and you need to be an audiobook listener and it's always best to have the real book too along with the workbook. There are so many bonuses.

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