Amber L. Gray's Linkedin Analytics

I was 15 years old when I took my first job on an exotic animal ranch in west Texas. It was intense manual labor, usually in the hot summer sun, and somehow I loved every minute of it. I worked various other jobs all through high school, and by age 18, I was working as a pharmacy technician and server to make ends meet while living independently. Life threw me circumstances that prevented me from attending college after high school, and I was ashamed of that for years, but I have stayed committed to growth and asked for help, so doors kept opening for me to end up in roles where I had a lot to learn on the job. I have always viewed hard work as part of my personality. I love putting my hands, head, and heart into getting things done. In 2010, I bought a book on WordPress and another on website project management from Half Price Books and read them cover to cover. While working in the pharmacy, I freelanced as a webmaster for a few months before a door opened for me to leave healthcare and join a startup marketing and PR firm as a web project manager. I taught myself how to use BaseCamp, listened to my CEO on client calls, copied how he wrote emails, and didn’t let my lack of experience or fear keep me from doing new and hard things. In my fifth and final year at the firm, I served as VP of Operations for one of the fastest-growing companies in Austin in 2015. In August 2015, I took an even bigger leap to start Trusty Oak, a virtual assistant platform serving the country’s best, self-motivated freelancers seeking community and meaningful work serving high-achievers and business leaders with fractional administrative and marketing support. Now more than eight years into this journey, I am proud to lead a phenomenal team committed to giving driven small business owners and non-profit leaders their lives back. Trusty Oak is more than just another VA agency – we’re here to contribute to the sustainable growth of every small business through education and connection. And we’re just getting started! I started as the first virtual assistant in 2015 and built a million-dollar business by delegating to US-based virtual assistants! If you want to scale your business but are overworked, overwhelmed, and powering through another day, it doesn’t have to be that way. You can do hard things, and you can do even more with a Trusty Oak VA. Learn more about our team and services at trustyoak.com.