SouptikGuha Roy
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WhatsApp me sentu1993@gmail.com
B2B Lead Generation Remote · Alabama, USA Jan 2019 – Jun 2020

Founder support VA

Where the admin work started turning technical

Personal assistant to the founder of a B2B lead generation company, and the engagement where the work moved past scheduling into testing, CRM and the first real automations.

Engagement
18 mths
Started as
PA
Ended as
Technical
First
Automations

The brief

What the situation actually was

A founder running a lead generation company, needing the ordinary things: calendar, scheduling, follow-up, the administrative support that keeps a founder’s week from fragmenting.

What made it different was that the company’s product was pipeline, so the founder’s operational problems and the company’s delivery problems were the same problems. Getting close to one meant getting close to the other.

The work

What came off their desk

In the order it was handed over, which matters more than the list.

  1. 01

    Calendar and founder support

    The ordinary spine of a PA engagement, and the part that earned the rest of it.

  2. 02

    Website testing and QA

    Going through the site and the funnels methodically, finding what was broken before a prospect did.

  3. 03

    CRM integration and data hygiene

    Records that matched reality, which is most of what a CRM is for and the part most teams neglect.

  4. 04

    IVR and chatbot setup

    First-contact routing, so inbound did not depend on somebody being free.

  5. 05

    First workflow automations

    Small, specific, and built because I had done the manual version enough times to know exactly what to remove.

How it ran

The order of operations

This engagement ran in the order I have used on every one since, though I did not know it at the time: do the work by hand, notice what repeats, remove the repeated part, keep the judgement.

The automations that came out of it were unremarkable individually. Collectively they were the first evidence that an assistant who understands the process can build better systems for it than a developer who has only been briefed on it.

The data hygiene work mattered more than it sounds. A CRM full of records nobody trusts is worse than a spreadsheet, because it carries the authority of a system.

The outcome

What had changed by the end

Stated plainly. Where there is no number, there is no number.

  • Founder calendar and follow-up handled, which was the original brief.
  • A CRM whose records matched reality, maintained rather than migrated once.
  • First-contact routing in place via IVR and chatbot.
  • The template for how every later engagement has run: manual first, automate second.

What it taught The route into technical work was not a course. It was doing enough administration to see exactly which parts of it should not have been done by a person.

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You will get an instant confirmation by email. I read every enquiry myself and reply within one business day. The reply comes from my personal address, sentu1993@gmail.com or souptikgr@gmail.com, so add those to your contacts if your filters are strict. Prefer to skip the form? WhatsApp me or email directly.