Virtual Gurus: Giving businesses a helping hand
We’ve all had one of those days, working a mile a minute and wishing for an extra pair of hands to help out. And it seems businesses in Canada and across North America feel the same. Many are going the route of hiring virtual assistants to help run their business efficiently and effectively – without the pressure of paying another full-time salaried employee.
Virtual assistants, now more commonly known as VAs, can do anything from data entry and calendar management, to helping create social media and marketing material. But most importantly, they’re helping businesses reclaim the most valuable asset we all want to have, but often lack – time.
For Calgary-based Virtual Gurus, this growing need for business support has seen the tech startup evolve into the largest and most trusted virtual assistant marketplace in North America.
HOW IT WORKS
The Virtual Gurus team matches businesses and entrepreneurs with onshore (North American) freelancers and virtual assistants. Virtual Gurus is known for finding, hiring, and training the most skilled and qualified U.S. and Canada-based virtual assistants. They use a stringent vetting and onboarding process for their virtual assistants and leverage their proprietary matching algorithm to ensure business owners are matched with highly-skilled Canadian and US-based freelancers.
Better yet, they are setting an example for businesses globally. Committed to contributing to society in a meaningful and sustainable way, Virtual Gurus’ social mission is to create employment opportunities for marginalized individuals for whom a nine-to-five office job isn’t accessible. As of January 2021, 91% of their VAs are female, with 40 per cent identifying as a member of a marginalized community (BIPOC, Indigenous, LGBTQ+, alternately-abled) – all of whom are paid a fair wage.
And while the business has grown exponentially since it was founded in 2016, Margaret Glover-Campbell, Chief Operating Officer at Virtual Gurus, says the best is yet to come for this female-founded tech start-up.
Bobbie Racette, Founder and CEO of Virtual Gurus
With more than 20 years of experience in the tech and startup scene in Calgary, Glover-Campbell had shifted her focus to women in technology, and came across Virtual Gurus’ founder and CEO, Bobbie Racette.
As an Indigenous, LGBTQ+ businesswoman, who was caught up in the oil patch layoffs of 2016, Racette’s identity has helped shape the social mission of the company.
“What we truly focus on is, how do we provide employment or entrepreneurial opportunities for people from marginalized communities?” says Glover-Campbell. “We support single moms, people of Indigenous descent, people who identify in the LGBTQ+ community, and people with alternate abilities. That’s our north star.”
“We want to take all this goodness that Bobbie has created over the years and make it grow into something that is truly at the forefront.”
Glover-Campbell likes to draw the parallel between Virtual Gurus and Patagonia. “I shop at Patagonia because they make good quality products and I like their social mission too. We have the same way of approaching things. We try to make sure we provide VAs that match a company’s requirements and we hope that businesses that come to us can get behind our social mission.”
POWERED BY TECHNOLOGY
By having such a large community of VAs with a vast and diverse skill set, Virtual Gurus has set itself apart from its competitors by being able to tailor which of their virtual assistants best fit their clients.
Margaret Glover-Campbell, COO at Virtual Gurus
“There’s no cookie-cutter solution at play, and that’s why it works,” said Glover-Campbell. “We spend a fair amount of time understanding our client’s needs and requirements from a business perspective, to make sure we’re able to match them with the appropriate VA.”
The company’s success also lies in the slick tech that keeps Virtual Gurus running, all managed by tech talent recruited in Calgary – a best-in-class example of Calgarian teams harnessing digital technology to solve real-world problems. Virtual Gurus’ team of tech experts and developers have created a proprietary matching algorithm that perfectly aligns the right virtual assistant with the appropriate qualities and skills, with the right company. They’re looking to bring even more sophisticated technology into the mix too. “From a technology perspective, we’re looking at how does machine learning fit into the work that we do, and what kind of task work could machine learning take off the plates of our virtual assistants.”
THE PLACE TO BE
Virtual Gurus is proud of its Calgary roots. In fact, Glover-Campbell puts a lot of the company’s success down to it being run out of the thriving and supportive tech ecosystem in the city. Having just upgraded to their own downtown office space in Calgary to accommodate their growing team, Glover-Campbell and the rest of the team have noted a tremendous evolution within the tech ecosystem over the past few years. “The ecosystem and support networks that exist now are so much different from even 10 years ago, as there was a time when there was really no niche in the market for tech-based companies.” There are a lot more people who are open to seemingly higher-risk opportunities and that has led to a noticeable shift in Calgary’s economy and workforce, she notes.
Glover-Campbell says it isn’t just the Calgary workforce that helped continue Virtual Gurus’ growth, but the city’s tight-knit community. “It's pretty neat if you want to get connected to somebody, because you're going to know somebody who knows that person. You're going to have that connection where you can reach out, and I have never been told ‘no’ when I've reached out to ask for help.”
“We’ve found the ecosystem to be incredibly supportive around startup organizations. From anybody I’ve spoken to, they just have so many good things to say about the city and how it enables people to work and be successful here.”
These integral connections have gone a long way for the success and continued growth of Virtual Gurus, which is expected to reach an estimated $6 million (a 300 per cent increase over 2020) in revenues this year.
But while the company continues to reach new heights, Glover-Campbell says they want to focus on giving back to other tech companies in Calgary and contributing to the growth of the city’s tech scene. “As we keep scaling up, we want to reach out and find other organizations who are in that scale up mode. How do we find other organizations in that same point of growth, so we can support one another? I think, as more companies in Calgary and Alberta are in this kind of scale up phase of their growth, there will be an ecosystem that grows around us.”
Support in the form of education and upskilling is something the company is passionate about too. Virtual Gurus has used its platform to offer courses to its community of VAs to boost their skills, designing close to 20 courses for the company’s Virtual Gurus Academy. People can learn from some of the best VAs in the industry, vetted by Virtual Gurus, giving them upskilling opportunities that can lead to more clients, and a healthier pay cheque at the end of the month.
A LITTLE HELP FROM BETTY
Ask Betty
You would have thought that the Virtual Gurus team were busy enough in 2020, with a 300 per cent increase in business, but the growing team was also working away on a new project – askBetty.
askBetty is an app that runs on Slack, designed to help users with one-off personal or administrative tasks that they don’t have time to do during their busier days. Operating on a pay-by-task model, requests made through askBetty are broken down into 15-minute increments. Booking a task is as simple as downloading the Slack app and asking Betty to start the task. She’ll ask a few questions and instantly connect you with a human virtual assistant to complete your requests.
The app was just recently approved and launched in the Slack App Directory, a big moment for the Virtual Gurus team. Glover-Campbell sees it as a door to more relationships with companies who need virtual assistants in the long term.
The app launched in beta in late December 2020 and is already receiving positive feedback for what some might call a revolutionary business tool. In fact, Tate Hackert, President and Founder of Calgary financial wellness company ZayZoon, says: “I love being able to delegate the small stuff so I can focus on the bigger picture items. The askBetty team is there when I need to book travel or personal appointments and has even sourced and purchased gifts for me.”
Glover-Campbell adds: “This is the beautiful part of having just that right number of beta users to get feedback from, to make sure that the product you're developing is good and meeting respective needs. There is a terrific improvement process cycle happening with customers right now.”
AN EYE ON THE FUTURE
While 2020 was a challenging year for many, it was also Virtual Gurus’ most successful year. “In a way, COVID-19 was a silver lining for us because when everybody was forced to stay and work from home, that was an expertise we already had.” Virtual Gurus assessed where and how they could help other businesses and startups across Canada, as they attempted to figure out how to operate under a global pandemic.
After the initial shock and financial impact of COVID-19 hit, Virtual Gurus had some clients that were no longer able to afford them. Once those clients got back on their feet, they were able to turn around and re-engage in their services.
“We provided clients with free assistance to help them manage the back end of the business, while the business owners and startups were able to focus on ‘how do I pivot my business to work in this new reality?’” Virtual Gurus focused on fortifying the bench strength of its network and were much more rigorous in who they onboarded for virtual assistants, and how they onboarded them. After all, it was always Glover-Campbell’s goal to have a roster of virtual assistants where, when you came across them, you knew they were a Virtual Gurus’ VA – because of how they conduct themselves, and the care they take in their work.
WHAT’S NEXT
A team filled with ambition, Virtual Gurus is setting its sights on the wider U.S. market. “We’re moving pretty heavily into the U.S., which hadn't been as much of a focus before,” said Glover-Campbell, adding that one of the company’s goals is to increase its geographic footprint, while maintaining its focus on quality, non-cookie cutter service.
With expansion on the horizon, askBetty launched on Slack, and CEO and Founder, Bobbie, making the news across Canada (recently named as one of the Most Compelling Calgarians of 2020) – it seems the world might just be a Virtual Gurus’ oyster.
Are you ready to make moves in Calgary’s tech scene, working with forward-thinking companies like Virtual Gurus? Head to our Live Tech Love Life careers page and see what opportunities might be out there for you.