Nowadays it’s as if Gabriela Bell needs her own virtual assistant.
In 2016, the Alexandria-based mother of four kids was getting divorced from a 20-year marriage and needed extra income. As a military spouse, she tapped into her experience working as a virtual assistant and marketed herself as a cost-saving option for small businesses. The following year, she founded Organized Q virtual assistant services, scaling up incrementally until the pandemic in 2020 brought a wave of unexpected business.
Bell was considering going back to teaching when she met a small business owner from Boston, who asked if she could help virtually from the D.C. area.
“I was like, ‘I can do that,'” Bell told ALXnow. “And I realized that this was doable. Then, really, the power of networking and talking about things that I could do in a professional setting kicked in, and then more and more people asked if I could help them.”
Bell worked solo until she couldn’t handle any more clients, then “took a leap of faith” and hired her first employee.
“There just wasn’t enough time in the day,” Bell said. “Then Covid happened, and business exploded in a very good way, and we just ramped it up.”
In 2021, Forbes listed Bell in their Next 1000 list of entrepreneurial heroes. Now with 20 employees, her firm manages schedules, provides customer support, and all of the behind-the-counter work that you’d find at a brick and mortar business. Her company is based out of the ALX Community coworking office (201 N. Union Street) on the waterfront in Old Town.
“We go through a process to really understand what types of services clients need,” Bell said. “What we’re doing is trying to understand what the client’s biggest pain points are when it comes to staying organized, staying on task, taking care of the minutia that sometimes piles up and sometimes doesn’t get attended to.”
Bell has a Bachelor’s in education from Baylor University and started her career as a high school math teacher. In addition to her work at Organized Q, she’s a part-time instructor at New York University’s Tandon Future Labs.
Organized Q offers packages starting at $1,000 a month, providing 20 hours of service per month.
“We’ve worked with nonprofit farmers to private equity investors to international healthcare organizations and nonprofits,” she said. “We have found a lot of traction with different nonprofit organizations.”
Bell said that bookkeeping can be outsourced, and has advice for entrepreneurs.
“I’m usually like in the thick of it, but there are times where I do try to have some self-care, because it’s not easy running a business at all,” she said. “I strongly suggest finding mentors, finding other small business owners or people that are in a similar space to even sit side-by-side and do coworking sessions together, because that kind of support has been one of the most helpful things for me to push through the hard days.”
