One to a Thousand: Bobbie Racette

Virtual Gurus works to connect Virtual Assistants with businesses who need the help. Their strength is their ability to get those who have traditionally been blocked from getting work into flexible and remote opportunities. They work to get First Nation, Métis and Inuit peoples, members of 2SLGBTQIA+ communities, racialized people, individuals of alternate abilities and those living in remote communities work, And they do a beautiful job of it. Find out more here.

Find Bobbie on LinkedIn, the Virtual Gurus website, and their LinkedIn.

Who is Bobbie Racette?

I am a Cree-Metis Woman from Saskatchewan. I moved here to Calgary about eleven years ago and founded Virtual Gurus six and a half years ago, I'm the CEO and Founder.

I actually started this to create a job for myself. I had no idea it was gonna get this big. I worked in Oil and Gas before, I worked my way up to an High Angle Safety Foreman, I was in charge of 200-400 people at a time and had to make sure everyone was safe. And I really liked it, but then I got laid off. I couldn’t find work anywhere in the city cause of who I am, tattoos and all. So, I really created Virtual Gurus as a kind of freelancing position for myself because I couldn’t find work.

I took a part-time job at a coffee shop, and I started being a Virtual Assistant part-time. I threw up a splash page, ran it all on Excel sheets, and within the first year I made like $265,000 in sales just by myself. I was the sales, the CEO, the CTO, I did everything. Two years later I realized I could build into a platform.

What does Virtual Gurus mean to you now?

Now it's a platform that provides jobs to those who have been told no like me. Now it’s a job for thousands of others.

You’ve said that you’ve traveled for around 10 years… Why did you choose to end up in Calgary?

I came to Calgary for my 18th birthday with my best friend, all the way from Regina, cause you only had to be 18 to go to the bars, hah. We got her little K-car, packed up the back, and drove here. I met my partner of 10 years here. After that, I traveled.

I went over to Mexico a couple of times, I hitchhiked all across Canada. Penticton, Osoyoos, Summerland. I planted trees, I was a housekeeper down in Mexico, and I worked in the UK at nightclubs, bussing tables and hanging out. I hitchhiked across the U.S. I was in Montreal for about 10 years too. Then I came back to Calgary.

I knew that I wanted a job in Oil and Gas, I had no idea I would be a tech founder at the time. I mean, it turns out it was by far the best place for me to have a tech company. You wouldn’t get what you get here in Montreal. And the tech community is amazing.

I’ve heard you say everyone has their own story; how do you think about bringing the individual into the workplace?

I think for a long time a lot of people thought the success of Virtual Gurus was because of my story, everyone likes the rags-to-riches story. But what I really wanted my team to focus on and everyone on the platform is that this is so much more than my story.

A few years ago, and we had an advertisement that said, “If you’re not accepted at your workplace come here”. A transgender person heard our ad and came to our office and just said thank you. That person ended up working on our platform for three or four years.

We have people who have disabilities and can't find work because they can't leave their homes. We have people with social anxiety and neurodiversity. We have single moms who can't afford daycare due to inflation, cost of living, and cost of supplies right now so the only thing they can do is stay at home with the kids and work. Everybody has a story.

That’s actually our “why?” now. I’m tired, it's a lot of work to run this, but that's what makes me tick every day, those stories.

Why do you think you've managed to scale so well?

We completely automated our system, it took us a long time. I didn’t get to post our first funding round till 2020 to pay for all this – we bootstrapped up until $1.8M in revenue. Once we had the money and the high revenue, we were able to build it. Then we built the platform, we call it our single source of truth. The VA’s have a hub to live in, the clients can communicate, it houses the billing, friends can be referred through it. It took us two years to build. We’re the only Virtual Assistant business in North America that has built a platform to that magnitude. The operations you see in the office here are the client support, inhouse marketing, tech and sales team, all these people sustain the operations. But a company of our scale should have about 200 operations people, we don’t need that because it’s automated. We’re only about 48 employees.

We still build lean and mean but also grow fast. We’re focusing on major scaling; we have strategy, processes, and tech, it’s now an organized chaos.

How do you approach your balance between work and life? How do you turn it off? Especially with the speed y’all are moving at and all the travelling.

I would like to say that I have perfected the science behind work-life balance. It’s another reason why I prefer that we work in the office. We are hybrid now, but when we were online, I would see people online working at 11 or 12 at night. And sure enough, we ran into this bad case where my entire leadership team burned out. So, I pulled us all back in and said when you're here, you’re here. But when you’re home, you’re home.

For me, I'm working 24/7, but I do take that time to shut down, I go on vacations. I don't work evenings unless we’re focusing on funding rounds - which happens to be pretty much 90% of the time.

I do travel a lot to speak, I spoke at the Super Bowl for the business conference, and we were at SXSW. I'm gone a lot to speak, but the leadership team always kills it while I’m gone.

What are you proud of?

I'm proud mostly of the fact that not a lot of people thought I could do it, and now we’re showing them that we could. Nobody invested in me earlier on, and now we’ve raised over $15 million. Now people are seeing that we’re here, we’re strong, and we’re growing fast. I’m proud of the work. I’m proud of the jobs we’ve created

And you as an individual, you’re killing it.

Yeah, the awards and recognition are great, but my goal was always ‘If I can inspire one other person then I’m inspiring a nation’. So, I think of the awards as a way to reach that goal of inspiring young people with struggles; the more my story gets out there, the more people will see it’s possible

What have you been reading lately?

I’m a two-or-three books at once reader. Right now, I’m reading Atomic Actions, it's like Atomic Habits but more about the actions that build those habits. And I’m really, really, really loving it. Also, Amp It Up, it’s really about amping up your culture, your employees and your team, and getting them on board with the idea of 'the more amped we are, the more traction we get. It’s also a good book.

What’s coming up?

I think it's just this year as a whole, we've got a lot of really big things on the plate and I think this year is going to be our time to shine. We're slated for the best year yet. I’m just so excited for a really jacked year. Especially in the U.S., we’re trying to explode out there. We’re now number 1 for VAs in the U.S., we’re all over. We’re speaking a lot to Bloomberg, Forbes, Times, and it’s all really helping.

Thank you Bobbie. 

Writer and Photographer | Sam Doty