Shannon Miles

There was a big gap of time between graduating from college and making that crazy decision.

We spent our 20s getting in a lot of debt and getting out of it and actually saving and having a 401k that we used in 2010 to fund our businesses.

So Brian and I were both working for different corporations and for various reasons came to the point where those seasons were ending and we'd always wanted to have our own business.

and just felt like having this cushion of our 401ks to fund it, and then the idea to offer virtual assistant solutions in a very niche market, it was just the right time to make the leap.

So we quit our jobs on the same day.

But unlike other firms in our space, we stay with the client and the contractor throughout the relationship to make sure that as things with our clients' businesses change, we're able to adapt and adjust with them.

And so we assign a relationship manager that oversees that relationship and really ensures the success of the engagement for the long term.

It's not that far off.

Yeah.

And really, we found, especially in the bookkeeping and virtual assistant realms, that first 90 days is critical.

Like to get off to a good start.

And a lot of our clients have never worked with a virtual assistant before and never had an outside bookkeeper before.

So there's a lot of education that goes into making that successful.

Yeah, we have about 500 contractors, um,

with our team right now and about 61 employees here in the Atlanta Metro area, you know, when people do something that they love, they tell other people about it.

So word of mouth continues to be our number one source of finding great talent.

Now we only bring on, um, about 2% of the resumes that we get.

So we're very selective in who we partner with because it has to check a lot of boxes.

It has to make sense for the longterm.

So we actually have had very little outbound recruiting effort because the pool of resources who want to partner with Belay is so large, we can be very selective.