2021: Freedom Makers' Year In Review

2020 went down in the business record books as one of the strangest and most unpredictable years in history. We will remember 2021 similarly, even though we hoped it would be much different! A year that was to be one of society transitioning to a post-COVID-19 era, the pandemic continued to loom large. 

But small business ownership proved resilient and strong! 

According to NPR, during the 16 months from March 2020 to June 2021, a record number of entrepreneurs began new business startups. Thanks to having extra time due to shutdowns and financial cushions provided by stimulus checks, many people took the plunge and opened their own businesses. This was the positive trend business forecasters had hoped would happen during the 2021 economic recovery.

At Freedom Makers, we feel fortunate to have experienced many positives within our corner of this small business industry! Check out some of our 2021 highlights:

GROWTH

Freedom Makers experienced over 200% growth in 2021! In just the 3rd quarter of 2021, we gained 40 new clients and our Freedom Makers worked over 4500 hours. We are thrilled to be growing, and we are beyond grateful for the trust our clients have placed in us.  And as always, we are ridiculously proud of the hard work, dedication and value our military spouse virtual assistants are delivering.

While we are excited by our remarkable growth, we know it is important to create a solid plan to scale while holding true to our values and business ideals. As we grew during 2021, our focus became increasingly directed on our systems and processes, on our core team, and, of course, on our Freedom Makers. 

COMMUNITY

In 2021, we welcomed over 100 well-qualified, eager, and ready-to-work Freedom Makers to our team. Our roster is chock full of military spouse virtual assistants with a wide range of experience and expertise, allowing us to expand our service offerings… and we are always looking for more talent. We continue to receive enthusiastic feedback about the work our Freedom Makers do and the ways they are helping their clients succeed, and we couldn’t be more proud. 

This year, we worked hard to best equip our Freedom Makers to land their first clients and lend even better support to clients already being served. We fleshed out and streamlined our Onboarding Procedures for new Freedom Makers by creating an onboarding video and conducting video interviews with the help of Zoom. We also created a tracker that makes sure nothing gets missed through the process. 

We continue to ensure all new Freedom Makers: 

1. Understand how we work as a company.

and

   2. Know and epitomize our core values of reliability, accuracy, availability, decision making, and communication. 

Our new Freedom Makers - like our veteran ones - embrace our guiding principles. 

COMMUNITY AND TRAINING

We endeavored throughout 2021 to enrich and enhance our company culture by encouraging peer-to-peer communication and community building through our internal Facebook page. Freedom Makers ask questions, seek guidance, offer up useful tools and support each others’ successes. 

We instituted monthly, free training for our community of virtual assistants and saw a significant uptick in attendance at the sessions throughout the year. Our Freedom Makers always look to learn new skills and strengthen others! We have also made “popcorn training” available. These short videos are Loom recordings that focus on easier-to-learn things like adding a brand logo to Canva, finding the best free images on the internet, the best website to help navigate time zone conversions, etc. We even created a self-reporting tracker for training so that Freedom Makers can earn badges as they grow their skill sets. In addition to formal training such as these, we have started one-on-one feedback sessions on such things as professionalism.

Overall, we’ve increased our internal resource offerings so that each Freedom Maker has the opportunity to grow as individuals and bring more value to current and potential clients. It is a win-win, and we will continue building our resource library in 2022.

In 2021 we also encouraged our Freedom Makers to focus on maximizing their profiles so that clients can best understand their skills and talents. We continue to believe that profiles trump resumes and want clients to be able to see and best understand which Freedom Maker is right for them. 

Finally, we also improved and streamlined our Kick-Off Call to set up both the client and the Freedom Maker for success. Expectations are set up front on this call. 

SUCCESS MANAGEMENT TEAM

Success management was also a big focus of 2021. 

What started as a trial became a permanent operating procedure for us! Adding a core member to the Success Management team enhanced this critical part of our company culture, ensuring both clients and Freedom Makers feel entirely supported. Jenny Boyles works to provide Freedom Makers with the resources they need so they can provide top-quality work to their clients. Eleanor Lynch continues to safeguard our rapport with clients and be their primary point of contact. Together, Jenny and Eleanor streamline communication and smooth any friction points as client-Freedom Maker relationships unfold.

We understand the trust it takes to bring someone into a small business, and so it remains one of our very highest priorities to have our clients’ expectations surpassed. Of equal importance to us is showing our Freedom Makers the respect they deserve for the hard work they put forth.

Our reputation for providing excellent virtual assistant services is growing, and our Success Management Team is in a great place to ensure continued success!

TRANSPARENCY, TIME TRACKING & IVY

Time tracking at Freedom Makers has come a long way. If you’ve been a Freedom Maker for a few years, you might remember when we used to track time on shared Google spreadsheets. Freedom Makers would have to search for the Google sheet, type in the date, type in the task, and manually timestamp each entry. Then they would “tally up” their hours and manually submit them twice per month. You can imagine this might get time-consuming and difficult, especially when supporting multiple clients! 

We launched TwinBee in 2020 as an upgrade to our old system but realized some of its offerings still did not match the needs of Freedom Makers or their clients. So in 2021, we took what we learned from TwinBee and created Ivy, our new and beloved billing and time tracking portal.

After months and months of hard work, Ivy was ready to “go live” in May 2021. 

Ivy has proven to be another significant step in our promise to meet our client’s needs and ensure our Freedom Makers have good tools at their disposal. Ivy provides our clients with a seamless billing experience and access to their Freedom Makers’ time entries. With Ivy, clients can set up subscriptions or automatically reload their accounts. They have greater visibility into available hours and hours worked.

With Ivy, Freedom Makers can easily clock in and out and switch between clients seamlessly. They are able to view their up-to-date payroll information and view their client’s prepaid balance.  Ivy ensures even better transparency, which we strongly believe enhances the trust between our clients and their Freedom Makers and between Freedom Makers and our core team.

Ivy is awesome, but no system is perfect! We have been listening to feedback from clients and Freedom Makers and will be working to implement improvements to Ivy over the next year. If you have any feedback regarding Ivy, please do not hesitate to reach out to us!

PARTNERS AND NEW FRIENDS

Freedom Makers appreciates our thriving partnerships! In 2021 we sought new ways to nurture our valuable relationships through our social media channels, webinars, and quarterly newsletters. We looked to partner with entities that share our mission and can provide our clients with things we cannot.

Our newest partner, Skyline Business Solutions, is a perfect example of this pairing. They offer specific expertise in some service areas (like bookkeeping) that exceeds what our virtual assistants can offer. Through our partnership, we are able to refer clients to Skyline, which helps us ensure that our clients have all their needs met.

We are always thrilled to celebrate our partners’ successes and growth and let our people know when good things are happening! In 2021 we worked hard to become a reliable resource for our partners, clients and others working within our business landscape. We hope that our nearly weekly blogs, article sharing, and valuable tips and tricks will help connect us as a community and provide those we serve with relevant and substantive content.

Also in 2021 we were invited to participate in outreach and broader community events. We provided a Master Class on How to Become a Virtual Assistant for the AMSE community. Jenny Boyles, our Freedom Makers Success Manager, joined the Hiring our Heroes’ newly formed Remote MSEEZ as the TRAIN pillar chair. 

Our partnerships grew and evolved this year. We will keep building our connections and supporting one another so that we continue to best serve our clients, constituents, military families, and veterans in the business space.

INTERNAL TEAM

As any business scales, it is likely to need more help - and Freedom Makers was no different this year!

In 2021, we grew the internal team with five new Freedom Makers pulled from our own ranks. Laurie, Amy, Kaci, Sarah, and Reanna each assist or assisted the core team with different areas of operations, making sure nothing slips through the cracks. With their help, we are even more agile and responsive. Each new internal team member is excited to be helping us grow, and we are thrilled with their work and commitment to our values as a company.

Finally, the Freedom Makers management team happily came together for a successful, first-ever, in-person Strategic Planning Session in Dallas, Texas! While we have always been forward-looking as an organization, we typically focused on each next quarter.  It was great to finally have a chance to all be together to talk and plan out our goals for 2022 and beyond! Great things are in store.

WELCOME, 2022!

It is nearly impossible to predict what 2022 will look like, but we are confident it will be a great year. Thanks to our clients’ continuing trust and support, we can provide meaningful work opportunities to military spouses all over the world, and for that, we are eternally grateful. 

As we travel into the new year, we are mindfully re-examining our core values to ensure we always hold ourselves accountable to our intended purpose. We believe strongly in our mission and know that we have a gold mine of talent to offer our clients. The need for excellent virtual support services will, without a doubt, continue to be in high demand in 2022, and we very much look forward to engaging new businesses that will be happy to discover what our awesome Freedom Makers can do.

If anything is certain in 2022, it is that Freedom Makers will continue to, in all ways, strive for excellence.

Happy New Year and Cheers to 2022!