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8 Work at Home Companies Reviewed

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Two years ago, I started out on my own as a Virtual Assistant. It was a leap of faith–and it is exactly what I hoped for in a work at home dream.  But being a Virtual Assistant isn’t how I started out with working from home.

My first real introduction to working at home happened almost 10 years ago when I landed my first job taking customer service calls from a makeshift desk in my bedroom. Over the last ten years, I’ve worked a variety of work at home jobs for different companies, and I’ve talked to lots of women who wish they could earn something–even a little bit!–from home. Like me, many of them aren’t into direct sales or just don’t have the personality to push product effectively.

Helping women find their niche in the work at home world is a passion of mine. While I absolutely love being a Virtual Assistant, building any kind of business takes hard work and time. I’ve been in the position where I didn’t have the time to wait for six months or a year while I grew a client base and started actually bringing in reliable money every month. We needed the money now, not eventually.

I get asked about where I’ve worked and how to get started dozens of times over the years, and these companies and resources are the ones I share often.

This is where my own quest to find my way in the work at home world took me. I have no affiliation with any of these companies and am simply sharing my personal experiences and how I made it work for us.  My hope is that for those of you who are standing on the brink and not sure how to get in, this will give you some solid direction to go forward with.

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West At Home (Now Alorica At Home)

My very first job–the one I worked from a corner in my bedroom- was through a company called West at Home (now called alorica at home). I had absolutely no experience in retail, customer service, or any related field. I did have good computer skills, and apparently my “phone voice” was satisfactory enough to land me an interview.  Basically, this was the easiest company of the ones I applied to get into.  I had to get a landline set up and buy a phone with a massive battery life and a good headset. The pay was not wonderful, but as much as I would have made at most of the box stores in town. I believe it may have changed to minimum wage at some point, which has gotten better in the last few years in some states. West at Home offers services to a lot of big companies in the USA and Canada, and if you are hired, you may have the option to pick between a couple companies, and eventually certify for more than one.

Pros were that it was extremely flexible. During the fall and winter, I would have my pick of hours and could set my entire week as I wanted. Cons, the hours were grabbed first come, first serve. If you missed the initial time when the hours were posted out, you had to pick from what was left. During the non-holiday season, sometimes this meant that there weren’t very many hours to choose from if you were only certified for taking calls for one company. Theoretically, being certified with a couple companies could have taken care of this problem.

I worked as a Customer Service Rep for a prominent toy and baby supply store. I got the calls that the land stores didn’t want to deal with often, and sometimes it was rough. You have to be resilient, positive and know your stuff. The good news is you have access to a lot of information, and all of my managers were wonderful. I eventually was promoted to a manager position myself. I got married shortly after, and could no longer work with West at Home as they didn’t offer jobs to the state I moved to.

I had also trained to take orders for a flower delivery company. I worked this during the holidays for a few weeks. It was not quite as intense as customer service, but sometimes more tedious and I really disliked upselling.

Overall: West at Home is a good starting point. It will give you experience that can help a lot in getting some of the “better” jobs out there that hire home-based agents.

Convergys

After Scott and I both lost our jobs at the aircraft company and relocated to Tennessee, I spent a while without any internet access. I finally was able to get set up and Convergys was my second experience working for a company out of my home.

Convergys had the best pay and perks of any of the companies I ended up working with. They also had a much more intensive training program which helped me feel prepared for the hectic holiday season and to know exactly what I would be doing.  If I remember right, there were some insurance options and some other perks for working with Convergys. The biggest plus for me when I decided to apply to work with Convergys was that I didn’t need a landline. Everything was done right through my computer. All I needed was a USB headset and high speed internet. This helped keep my initial cost and monthly cost down significantly. Another plus was that you could pick your preferred block of hours, and your number of hours you worked was set each week. So no scrambling to try to make sure I filled up my work week! This meant less flexibility (getting time off was basically the same as if I worked a real job: talk to a supervisor and try to find someone to trade or pick up your hours. This was not a guarantee that you’d be able to find anyone to take your hours and sometimes was difficult to work out).  I ended up working the graveyard shift. I got up at 11 pm and worked from 12 am- 9 or 10 am.  That was absolutely brutal for me as a morning person! But the trade off was that I got Saturdays off- a non-negotiable for me as a Sabbath keeper.

I primarily worked taking orders for a very well known fruit of the month type company. It was a combination of customer service and data entry type work. It wasn’t strictly sales, but I was prompted (and required) to try to upsell the product on each order. I won’t lie. Upselling was really hard for my personality. But it was fun to help people pick out gifts and make suggestions of things that their loved ones would enjoy. The hardest part? I don’t drink and am not familiar with all the fancy wines. Thank goodness for a great, searchable database which helped me with some pairing suggestions or I’d have ended up looking like a fool more than once.  Later on, I had several more positions offered to me. Unfortunately, all of those required weekend working and eventually I needed to take a break from graveyards for personal reasons.

Overall: I would recommend trying to get on with Convergys. If you need steady hours you can count on, a little higher pay (or it was when I was working, at least!) and don’t have a landline, it’s a really good option. If you don’t mind inbound sales calls (typically for phone companies.), there are even more options you could work and a really good choice for getting started from home while still having some reliable income.

Apple

I got recruited to work for Apple twice. I loved their training program, and it looked like they had great hours. However, I didn’t have an apple computer. At the time, I think they provided a computer for a fee each month, but for various reasons, I didn’t end up taking the jobs. But I liked what I saw and their pay was actually really decent for this kind of job as well. I do think you may be an independent contractor vs an employee with Apple. This means you are responsible for your own taxes completely if I’m not mistaken.

I think you no longer have to actually own an apple computer to work for them. If I was in the market to work for a company, I would be applying there too.

UserTesting

When I was saving up for my wedding,  I did a lot of little side jobs. Much of what I did then was a good foundation for my Virtual Assistant business now. But I actually paid for a couple things just from the income I made testing websites for other people with Usertesting.com. The pros of doing user testing is you can do a quick job in your spare time. It takes 20 minutes to review the site, and you earn $10. That’s pretty good! The con is you aren’t going to be able to sit there and get jobs all day or even every day. There are only so many in the queue and then only so many you’ll qualify for. You can only grab one at a time, and so you have to decide quickly if it’s one you’ll be good at. Sometimes I’d get 5 jobs in a day. Other times it’d be a few weeks before I got anything. But it fell into the odd job category I could do whenever I got the chance and it was interesting to do website reviews.

It was helpful that I had a background in web design for some of them, but all you need is a good headset and good internet. You need to be able to speak clearly and not have a lot of background noise or you’ll get bad ratings and that can cost you your account. Since you’re uploading a video file,

Since you’re uploading a video file, slow internet makes it hard to get the job done. You have 1 hour from the time you accept the job to the time you have to submit your review or it goes back into the pool. Since I sometimes had to record my review twice (Hello random and unexpected sneezing attack!), I do recommend making sure you can get that uploaded in time.

Other Companies

I’ve applied to many companies over the years. Some of them I’ve gone through the hiring process for but didn’t end up working any of their lines for various reasons. All of them I know to be legitimate and they are worth checking out.

More Lead Resources

There are lots of scams out there. It’s not easy to discern between the real and the fake. I found a couple of places that helped me be sure that the places I applied were legitimate and not another scam to either flood me with junk mail or try to steal money from me.

  1. RatRaceRebellion.com -lots and lots of leads and information. It was often my first stop in my job search and where I point most people who are looking for jobs!
  2. WorkPlaceLikeHome.com – leads and discussion by people in the business. Be aware that while it is a good place to get information, people who have a bone to pick with companies go in there and trash talk a lot too. But it’s helpful for finding leads of home based positions that are currently hiring and to ask questions about the process.

Disclosure: I am not affiliated in any way with any of these companies. I’m not getting paid to promote them. This is simply a statement of my personal experiences during the time I spent working for other companies. It is meant as inspiration and encouragement for the people out there who would like to work from home but aren’t able to start their own business for one reason or another.

The Day My Great Grandma Proposed

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My great-grandmother had impeccable tastes.

She always dressed herself as neat as a pin. Her skirts were just so. Her hair was always in perfect place. I remember sitting in her farm house as a tiny little girl, in awe of her perfectly smooth beds and pretty glasses and china.

Her name was Blossom Madaline. She was full of energy. Lively and always up to something, she made me laugh. She sent me books once, and I was in heaven.

We grew up a few thousand miles away from Great Grandma and her orchards. But once she and her friends made a great adventure up to Alaska and she came to visit us. I still remember the sparkle in her eyes as she unveiled the gift she brought us–two big boxes of Bartlett pears, fresh picked from the tree. She’d “smuggled” them across the Canadian boarder to get them to us. Since fresh fruit cost something of a premium in Alaska back then, and often tasted about as good as cardboard, we devoured them like starving kittens. And then, though well into her 70s, she climbed up a steep hill with us to get a view of the ocean and have a picnic.

I thought she was the best great grandma in the world.

So when she proposed on my behalf to Scott a few months after we started dating, I knew I must’ve picked a good guy. It happened like this.

I was visiting Scott in Idaho when we got the news that Grandma was in the hospital. She’d had a bad fall. When you’re in your 90s, that’s never a good thing.

It was just a 6 hour drive to where she was,  so we packed up and headed straight over. I thanked God all the way that I wasn’t in Alaska where making the trip would have been impossible, or Colorado where it would have taken twice as long. You don’t take anyone you love for granted. Especially not your Great Grandma.

When we got there and into her room, she lit up when she met Scott.  She took his hand and pulled him close and said “You will marry her, right?”

Never mind that we’d only been officially dating for a few months, She knew a good guy when she saw one. And what was the reason in beating around the bush? The only answer she would hear of was when Scott leaned over and whispered into her ear “I plan on it!”.

That’s when she got a big grin on her face and said something about red headed great-great-grand babies. Those red headed grandbabies were high on her wishlist.

A few months later, Grandma slipped away. I was heart broken.

She didn’t get to hear the story of how Scott flew in and surprised me with his proposal. She didn’t get that seat of honor I’d envisioned her taking on the front row when I got married.

But when I walked down the aisle, I thought of her and smiled a little. She couldn’t have asked a better man to marry me.

Today thought of her  again as I watched that man walk down the driveway holding the tiny hand of our baby girl. Our red headed little munchkin. Just exactly what she’d always wanted.

I smiled to myself. Great Grandma Madaline would have been tickled pink.

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In loving memory of Blossom Madaline Hudson, the sweet woman I am honored to call my Great Grandma. 1913-2008

 

All Birth is Brave

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Today I need to say something. I am a csection mama, and I’m not ashamed of it.

It’s not been exactly easy. Sometimes I still run my hand against the scar and ache inside a little. At the same time, I am grateful. That cut means today, I have a living baby girl.

I had always known exactly what I wanted my labor to be like. Natural labor. Minimal interference. Preferably no pain medication. Quiet, and only the absolutely necessary number of attendance. Just Scott and I there to hold ourlittle one for the first time. I wanted it to be beautiful and intimate. Empowering.

But that’s not what happened.

Pregnancy wasn’t hard for me.

True, my feet became unrecognizable, swollen blimps for which I could find no shoe or sandal. I walked barefooted for five miles almost every day, and I felt great!

True, I had two pregnancy rashes from head to toe that sometimes itched so badly I thought I might go crazy. But I didn’t care. It wouldn’t last forever, and at the end…we got a baby out of it!

Over all, being pregnant was easy. All 42 weeks and 2 days of pregnancy.

I knew my date of ovulation. I knew that babies don’t always arrive by magic on the 40th week.  I was okay with waiting on labor. It would happen.

But it never did.

On the last day that my midwife was legally allowed to attend, I checked in to a room at the woman’s center and the first one of all of my dreams for labor and delivery slipped away.

Trying one thing after another to kickstart my body into natural labor. Induction. No progress. Meconium so thick in the fluid that it was more like slime than liquid. Hour after hour of contractions with no breaks between the peaks. A fever that spiked out of no where and wouldn’t go down. They feared infections. And my baby suddenly going into distress. More than 36 hours after checking in, I found myself being wheeled away for an emergency csection.

Absolutely nothing that I’d dreamed of for my labor and birth experience happened. Everything I feared, did.

I was just thankful at that point to be okay, and that she was okay.

And then it started. The guilt and shaming by people who I needed to be supportive and happy with me.

  • I took the easy way out.
  • If I’d done x y and z, none of this would have happened.
  • It was my fault for not fighting the system harder and just waiting to see what happened.
  • Baby would come when she was going to. It was my fault for “rushing it”.
  • What did I expect was going to happen by going to the hospital instead of staying at home?
  • I didn’t really give birth. I was just “lucky” and “weak”.
  • I got what I asked for.
  • It was my fault.

I believe that they probably meant well. Perhaps they thought they were encouraging.

But could I have changed the outcome of my experience? Probably not. Did I try everything? I did all that I knew to do. And in the end, Scott and I made the best decision we could for the health of our child and for my health. It was the scariest thing I’ve ever done.

But at the end? We got a baby out of it. A gorgeous, chunky redheaded baby girl. She was perfect. I was okay. I would heal.

But that’s how it goes with cesarean mamas. We’ve been through something hard. Traumatic.

Csections are not a lucky break. Most of us fought our way through labor, hoping, praying, trying everything we could to give our baby the best possible start.

Two years later, I’m still healing from my csection, physically and emotionally. Recovering from a surgery like that and taking care of a colicky newborn is not for the weak.

We all – natural mamas, epidural mamas, csection mamas, want the same thing: a healthy baby at the end. We are all good mamas. We all do what it takes to “get the job done”.

But for us who delivered our little ones into the world on a table in an operating room instead of at home or in labor and delivery, we often get shame.

We’re left to believe that we’re less of a woman because our birth wasn’t “how it was suppose to be”. We get the message from around us that others believe that we weren’t brave or strong enough to do the real thing, and it’s loud and clear.

Of all the things in the world where we should give love and support, why do we judge and shame instead? Why do we think we can decide which mama is brave and which one isn’t?

Most of us didn’t walk into the hospital and sign up for a csection. And even if we had, does it really matter? 

Don’t get me wrong. I still believe that natural birth is wonderful. If I could have had it, I would have. But at the end of the day, things don’t always go as planned.  At the end of the day, we make the best choices we can. There is no shame in that. There is no one way of giving birth that can claim exclusive rights to being the real thing.

Natural birth without any pain medicine. Birth with epidurals. Birth by cesarean.  Birth by adoption. Whatever process you took to becoming a mama.

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Because in the words of a sweet friend, all birth is brave. 

All.

It’s Cesarean Awareness Month. Be kind. And remember, no matter how you became a mama, you are brave.

Find a Way or Make a Way {My Virtual Assistant Journey}

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In January 2015, I checked off an exciting milestone: two solid years since I officially began my journey as a Virtual Assistant. I have never been so proud, or excited about a profession as I am about my Virtual Assistant job. But getting here has been a long journey. Today, in honor of the book that changed everything for me and my work-at-home dream, I want to tell you my story.

Note that this post contains affiliate links to one of my favorite work at home books. Your clicks and purchases help support this site at no extra cost to you.

The Impossible Dream

I think my journey to working from home started a long time ago when I was a child. But adversity forced my hand to take it from dream to reality. Right after Christmas, in 2009, Scott and I both found ourselves suddenly jobless. The aircraft company he’d worked at for the last few years and that I was now officially working for, hit some huge financial bumps as the economy wavered. We, along with over a hundred others in our small community, were suddenly without work, and prospects in a little town in Northern Idaho were naturally pretty scarce.

Scott and I had been married for just six months. We were just getting started in life, and the job loss knocked us down flat. For the next six months, we struggled and searched for anything regionally that we could do. But Sandpoint is small. Spokane didn’t have much economy going for it.  And with the job market suddenly flooded with unemployed families looking for work, finding anything decent was even harder. There just wasn’t anything for us there anymore.

With nothing to lose, and with the hope of a better working future we loaded our few possessions in a small moving truck. On our first anniversary, we locked up our first home and headed east and south to Tennessee.

And that was the beginning of two and a half years of one of the biggest lessons of trust I’ve ever experienced. With nothing to lose by failing, “find a way or make a way” became my motto.

Chasing an idea

I’d worked from home before as an inbound customer service specialist for some big companies. I’d even tried my hand at web design. I’d known for 10 years that my dream job was a job I could do from my living room. After working odd jobs or underpaid jobs that made us both miserable just to keep a roof over our head, I was determined that it was now or never. I bumped into the idea of “Virtual Assistant” online. I knew that this was it. Virtual Assisting was exactly what I wanted to do and what would best use the skills I had developed.  But I had no idea how to get started, and the more I read about it online the more confusing and impossible it sounded.

Half of the information was vague and unhelpful, and half of it was a scam. I felt lost and confused. I began to think that my dream of working from home was actually the impossible dream. I just wasn’t quite willing to let it go.

And then I found a book

About the time when I was at the depth of my discouragement, I was introduced to Lisa Morosky and her soon-to-be-released book, The Bootstrap VA. That book changed everything for me. I’m not trying to be dramatic when I say that it changed my life. Because it really did.

I went from feeling absolutely hopeless and confused to feeling more and more excited with each page I read. For the very first time, I believed I could do this. I could be a Virtual Assistant. For the first time, I believed that I could work from home to bring in a viable income, and love what I did. 

Lisa explained everything simply and concisely. She told me exactly what I needed to know without making it feel like it was too overwhelming to attempt. She told me:

  • What to expect.
  • How to get started.
  • How to identify skills I already had.
  • The importance of networking.
  • How to find clients.
  • How to set up the foundation of your business for success, and how to keep it going.

Her book, The Bootstrap VA,  helped me to get a realistic plan together and know how to execute it properly. It helped me to pinpoint my ideal client and play to my strengths from the start.

It was all so simply written. There were no vague references, no scammy tricks. It was down to earth, honest-to-goodness facts and inspiration. I felt so inspired and so encouraged and so very grateful. Hands down, The Bootstrap VA is the best book I’ve read on how to work from home successfully as a virtual assistant, and I cannot recommend it enough. 

I literally devoured the book in one sitting, and then read it again. And again.  I might have cried a few times from relief and happiness. In fact, when I think about how much The Bootstrap VA helped me, I sometimes still choke up a little. I am incredibly grateful to Lisa for writing it, and to God for allowing me to find it when I needed it the most.

A few months later, I launched my own site and business as a Virtual Assistant. I was terrified, but I was determined to give it everything I had. I got my first client a few months later, and I was officially a VA. And I’ve been slowly but surely growing my business ever since. I’ve worked with some great people. I’ve learned so much. And every single morning as I sit down at my desk to begin my day, I thank God for this journey.

I love what I do as a Virtual Assistant.

I love being able to work from home. I love that it lets me be the boss of my time and that I still get to enjoy being a Wife and Mama. And I love helping other women find their way to their dream of working from home. I’ve told so many people about Lisa’s book. I get asked about what I do, and how I started working from home all the time, and it’s become a passion of mine to help others find the resources they need to pursue their own dream. I get so excited to share The Bootstrap VA with them because of how much it’s meant to me. I even started a group on Facebook for women who are self-employed or work from home!

I’m super excited to share my story. I hope it inspires you that you can do this. Because you absolutely can work from home, too.

Note that this post contains affiliate links to one of my favorite work at home books. Your clicks and purchases help support this site at no extra cost to you.

It’s not always easy, but it is possible to make your own way in the work from home field. Working from home is not something that only a lucky few can do. I truly believe that with creativity and determination and some good information, anyone can build their work at home dream.

As the years have passed, I’ve learned countless things about working from home, being a VA and what works for me. I’m excited about new opportunities, new goals and about what the future holds for Scott and I and our independence from the traditional 9-5 lifestyle.

Finding your footing and working from home won’t be easy. But it will be worth it. That much I can vouch for!

to a new year

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Twelve years ago, I wrote my first blog post.  Blogspot was brand new, and I’d never heard of wordpress. Or blogging.

I opened a new draft and wrote “Let’s see what this does.” For these 12 years, that’s pretty much been what’s happened here.

I’ve written, and learned. I’ve shared a lot of crazy words, a few good ones, and a lot of living with the web. And it scared me sometimes. Writing is an art. It’s one I’m very much still attempting to master. But I’ve learned a lot in 12 years. Enough to know that what “blogging” meant 12 years ago is not what “blogging” means today.  And enough to know that in 12 years, it’ll have changed all over again.

A part of my heart resists the changes. I miss the old days of long newsy posts. Of comments instead of likes. I miss the days when blogging wasn’t about all the rules, or about trying to make a living, but about making connections.

And as time went on, I found that I didn’t think I could do it. I couldn’t follow all the rules. I couldn’t keep up with all the latest trends.  I just wanted to write, but words started to trickle instead of flow. It was all fog and fragments.

Life got hard and personal. I lost people I cared about. The things I wanted to say couldn’t be said in public places. And I was so tired of always trying to find the balance between sharing too little or too much. Tired of the fog and the fragments. Tired of trying to figure it all out when it came to directions and this bloggy space.

The thought of walking away from writing was a crazy one. But I considered it. I stopped opening up pages only to spend hours late at night staring at the empty spaces with everything to say but nothing to write.

I stopped because I realized that my blogging journey had been good, but that in order to continue, I had to reinvent my blog. I had to take a step back and stop trying to force myself and my blog into the mold without accounting for the fact that along with blogging, I’ve grown and changed too. And that is how it should be.

I needed to figure out where I wanted to go from here, and what I wanted now from my blog. I needed to figure out how to make writing a part of my new life and to align with my current seasons and focuses instead of it just being one more thing that I thought I needed to do.

Words–they have and always will be a part of my life.  But how blogging works, and how it looks for me can’t always stay the same.

So in January, I did something a little crazy. I took the last 12 years of me “seeing what this did” away.

Not because I’m ashamed of my journey. I’m proud of how I’ve grown, and unspeakably grateful for the people who have been a part of my life for so long, and the opportunities God has given me along the way.

I took it away because for me, after 12 years very little is the same in my life. And because now I know more about blogging, there are some things that I would do differently–that needs to be different than it was back when I started. And I needed a fresh start.

I was a bit scared and sad to remove so many pages of the history of my blogging journey, but I felt instantly relief.  I could finally start figuring out what I needed to do and not be held back by what my blog use to be like. I knew I’d done the right thing.

That was January 1.

Since then, I’ve let the dust settle. It’s done a lot of good. As I continue to work hard on growing as a Virtual Assistant, and to reach the place that our little family needs so much right now, I needed blogging to work with me and not be just one more thing going in a completely different direction. I needed a place for an outlet, but I needed to be able to focus my energy a little more, too.

And finally, I think I’ve started to get some of the clarity I’ve been waiting for. I think I know what I need to do and what my blog will be like for this season.  I’m excited about it. It’s been far too long since I’ve had a direction for this blog.

So what’s changing? Well, maybe not a lot of obvious stuff.

But I’m excited to write more about books (because I’m not going to stop reading, anytime soon!), and sharing more about some of the things I’m excited about and about some of the journeys we’re taking right now towards our dream of living more self sustainable lives, and of my work at home dreams. Because really, all I ever wanted to be was a farming family. And I’m willing to do what it takes to get closer to that dream. Because we really need it.

So…12 years after my first post, I’m hitting publish again and thinking, “Let’s see what this does… Again.”

 

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