Virtually Unlimited by Virtual Gurus

Virtual Gurus, a fast-growing Canadian staffing platform for virtual workers, is establishing a social enterprise focused on empowering Indigenous peoples, persons with disabilities, and other marginalized populations with online work opportunities.

The “future of work” is increasingly online, remote, and niche, and is especially well-suited for people in rural areas, with mobility challenges, or lacking basic training/matchmaking for virtual work opportunities. Our platform is already a powerful enabler for women and there exists an extraordinary opportunity to intentionally extend it. 

Our solution will consist of Virtual Gurus Academy and Virtually Unlimited. The former is a portal with e-training in how best to work virtually, and the latter is a marketing layer embedded within the existing Virtual Gurus marketplace featuring Indigenous and Disabled VAs as a premium option. We can make possible a respectable, sustainable, and flexible living for those who are an ideal yet overlooked fit in the digital workforce.

According to Statistics Canada, “the Aboriginal population in Canada has historically had lower labour force participation and employment rates [-13.3%], and a higher unemployment rate, than the non-Aboriginal population.” Indigenous people are more severely affected by economic downturns, earn less on average, and are underrepresented in most "knowledge occupations".  

The employment rate gap is especially pronounced in remote/rural areas – such as the Northwest Territories where in 2017 52.5 percent of Indigenous residents had a job, compared to 81.3 per cent for non-Indigenous persons – and amongst women, who often struggle to find adequate transportation or childcare.

The 2019 Indigenous Economic Progress Report claims that addressing the employment gap would boost Canada’s economy by $27.7B annually. “A young and growing Indigenous population [forecast to exceed 2.5M in the next 20 years] ... is a powerful untapped resource to drive Canada’s future economic growth.” 

Similarly, the employment rate of 2.1 million Canadians aged 25 to 64 with disabilities was 49%, compared with 79% for Canadians without a disability. Persons with disabilities remain less likely than others to be employed, both in Canada and other parts of the world.

Virtual Gurus prides itself on inclusion and diversity in the workplace, and its social purpose is to make “the future of work” possible for those who might otherwise have a hard time finding work. 

Many of its staff and Virtual Assistants (VAs) are women and mothers, and individuals who self-identify across a rich intersectional mix. We believe that embracing this – both as best practice and for promotion – is an amazing ingredient for continued growth.

We intend to bring extra focus to at least two often-overlooked communities – Indigenous and Disabled – that have extraordinary potential to benefit from the burgeoning field of virtual work.

Virtual Gurus has a pool of thousands of VAs, who we actively consult to better understand their expertise, availability, and challenges. The management team, with an Indigenous founder and Disabled family members, has direct connections to these populations.

A survey by GlobalWorkplaceAnalytics and FlexJobs found that remote work has grown 91% over the last 10 years, and various research has concluded that by 2020 half of us will be working remotely in some form. Virtual Gurus recognizes there’s a huge business opportunity to actively recruit and train traditionally marginalized populations into the digital workforce.

Virtual Gurus is an online B2B staffing platform for sourcing freelancers and remote workers – virtual assistants (VAs), marketers, social media managers, sales reps, real estate agents, web designers, bookkeepers, and more. Our mission is to serve changing workplace needs, and provide meaningful, flexible, gainful work for stay-at-home moms, physically disabled individuals, Indigenous peoples, and rural residents, among others.

Virtual Gurus' four-step pre-vetting process and first-of-its-kind online freelancing education program (the Virtual Gurus Academy) finds the top 3% of freelancers. They are then matched with clients by an algorithm – and increasingly via AI-enabled “Smart Matchmaking” – to connect them with the best person based on skills, geographic location, and personality. This enhancement provides the backbone to scaling our platform and a wonderful opportunity to collaborate with ServiceNow. 

Building on the technology base, we are now enhancing our marketing by establishing a premium “Virtually Unlimited” tier of Indigenous and Disabled virtual assistants. Virtually Unlimited will position VAs from these often overlooked groups more positively and equitably on the existing Virtual Gurus online marketplace. Not only does it offer clients a “social good” value-add but, more substantially, it opens up projects that benefit from these populations’ unique perspectives and lived experience (eg. Indigenous ways of knowing / systems thinking, languages, mobility accessibility, user experience, niche customer service, rural insight, etc.). This provides clients with valuable and otherwise hard-to-find services and it gives Virtual Gurus a real differentiator versus competitors.

Concurrently, we are also expanding our Virtual Gurus Academy to deliver skills development, work-task training, and remote work tips that the students can use at Virtual Gurus and elsewhere. Part of growing a capable digital workforce is preparing it for digital work (and work-life balance) – something that seems obvious but is often overlooked. The Academy will help onboard people who may be new to virtual workflow.

Virtual Gurus’ competitors include Zirtual, TopTal, Red Butler, Fancy Hands, and Upwork. Our advantages are: no offshoring, high quality, smart matchmaking, competitive pricing, the cost advantages of lower overhead / higher on-demand flexibility, and a more diverse taskforce. This last point is what makes our solution particularly innovative and “creates a new dimension of performance”.

While we’re making great strides to enhance our talent-matching algorithm and AI, we recognize that we’re ultimately in a human business – offering personal services to complement technical or operational processes. The diversity of our workforce is an advantage – a differentiator, a talent magnet, a business multiplier, and a hedge against race-to-the-bottom, exploitative pricing. 

The solution is innovative not only in recruiting Indigenous and Disabled workers (the extent of many firms’ diversity efforts) and training them in the nuanced ways of virtual work, but in explicitly highlighting them. It helps break down derogatory stigmas and flip harmful stereotypes into desirable strengths. 

For example, Indigenous ways of knowing are highly aligned with systems thinking, which is an increasingly sought after skill in a complex, networked, and workflow-enabled world. Similarly, both lived experience and empathy make people who have mild or moderate disabilities especially valuable to user experience design and customer service. 

We also see in our current VAs an above-average enthusiasm for their work exactly because of its flexibility and opportunity, and this goodwill carries through to our clients. It will be hard for cheap shops and robots to compete with that.

By raising both the number and profile of Indigenous virtual workers through Virtually Unlimited, we expect to fill more client contract-projects. This will create paid work as a short-term outcome, raise the employment rate as a medium-term outcome, and increase the self-worth of those individuals and in turn the stability of their families over the long-term. Work in rural Indigenous communities often tends to be limited to manual labour. Virtual Gurus Academy and Virtually Unlimited makes possible a new type of work – online work – which takes advantage of high school and college education and diversifies small or dispersed mono-industry communities.

By creating more gigs for Persons with Disabilities, we can likewise lift relatively low employment rates amongst perfectly capable individuals. This new work will help decrease isolation and increase self-sufficiency. The longer-term effects of this, we hope, are improved financial independence and higher self-confidence, which could potentially spur other entrepreneurial activity. We see this with single moms and LGBTQ-identifying VAs who work with us. 

The employment rate of people with disabilities – a mark of self-sufficiency and inclusion – is 9th in Canada, and 11th in the United States, of the 16 peer countries for which data are available. So there is room for improvement.

Virtual Gurus targets small, medium, and large sized North American companies. It currently has over 149 Canadian and 25 US clients (including Shopify, Waste Management, and Videotron), and a run-rate of C$1 million.

We anticipate serving over 1700 client-projects per year within one year and over 10,000 in five years. 

We have a database of thousands of VAs, with over 100 currently active on client projects. We’re aiming to 10x this roster in the next few years.

Our goal is for at least a quarter of our VA workforce to self-identify with a marginalized group.

We anticipate serving over 1700 client-projects per year within one year and over 10,000 in five years. Our revenue goal for FY2025 is C$40M (~$30M USD), maintaining at least C$4000 average revenue per client.

The majority of our current VAs are women, and with intentional focus on Virtually Unlimited we hope to provide an equitable employment option to other marginalized or disadvantaged groups – namely First Nations individuals and Persons with Disabilities. We’re aiming for over 20% of our thousands of VAs to self-identify as Indigenous or Disabled within two years of launching Virtually Unlimited.

With regards to technology, we wish to continue to optimize our matching – both for speed and for fit. In 2019, when we introduced automated self-serve VA-task matching, our performance jumped 30x. With optimized AI and better workflows, we can further improve our customer experience.

We intend to scale Virtual Gurus Academy in lock-step with VA recruitment. All new VAs will be expected to take introductory e-learning, and new skill development will be offered to all VAs in our roster.

Within the next five years, our goal is to be operating in at least three countries

Financial barriers include the normal startup dilemma of scaleup growth capital (the distraction of fundraising, fundraise timeframe, etc.). Canada has traditionally been a much smaller market for venture capital (especially for social impact projects), but this is changing.

Technical barriers include the usual concerns many companies face – in particular, the search for development talent (competitive), the pace of technical change (fast), and the importance of cyber-security (high). 

Legal barriers include jurisdictional regulations (particularly tax related) pertaining to freelance and remote personnel, and gig workers. There will also be legal considerations (not barriers per se) involved with expanding to new countries. 

Cultural barriers include a few different challenges: fast company growth, dispersed workforce management, and mitigation around racism and ableism (or any other -ism). Culturally, we also still see some pushback from people who view virtual work (especially offshoring) as a threat or as sub-standard. 

Market barriers mainly include competitors. Over the next five years we expect competition to pick up – both from large entrants and from automation/AI.

We have recently overcome a major financial hurdle by raising our first round. And not only were we able to raise C$1.2M, we did so from very well-aligned sources: Raven Indigenous Capital Partners, The51 (women-focused fund), and Ryan Lailey (technical expertise). This round and future barrier-jumping is made possible by working with an experienced venture finance expert.

A long-time strategic advisor and investor is currently leading the build-out of our technical stack. Over the longer term, we expect to overcome technical barriers by attracting and retaining excellent talent, which is of course our core skill. We have already begun forging powerful partnerships in banking and marketing, and intend to do likewise with tech.

With regards to cultural barriers… From a management perspective, we’ve been working with an HR/recruitment industry veteran to guide our internal growth. From a digital workforce perspective, we intend to grow the nascent Academy as part of this proposal. And from a behaviour perspective, we recently hired a top COO to design and implement key policies. Our biggest advantage is that founder and CEO Bobbie Racette has embedded a culture of diversity and inclusion in the company from the outset.

In addition to growing fast and solidifying our headstart in this space, we see the contents of this application – Virtual Gurus Academy and, in particular, Virtually Unlimited – as powerful plans to capture market share. The market itself is undoubtedly growing; our balance of workforce and workflows will set us apart.

Virtual Gurus is headquartered in Canada, and its primary focus to date has been selling Canada-based VAs to Canadian clients. That said, already 15% of clients are in the United States and we see the American market as our biggest opportunity.

Our current activities are simply matching clients with tasks (short-term or ongoing) with VAs best suited to perform those tasks, and providing an online base through which communication, project management, and billing can be facilitated. 

We also have a nascent online training program (Virtual Gurus Academy) that we intend to grow through this Challenge. It is a recruitment tool, not a revenue centre.

We have good connections in Ireland, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand and are exploring expansion paths to those English-speaking markets. Canadian export development officials are actively encouraging this growth.

Virtually Unlimited will be a nonprofit sister organization to Virtual Gurus.

Virtual Gurus is led by Bobbie Racette, a First Nations professional and well-regarded entrepreneur in the Calgary startup community. She is Startup Canada’s Indigenous Entrepreneur of the Year for 2019 and Start Alberta’s Most Promising Startup Entrepreneur of the Year for 2018. 

Racette is supported by Chief Operating Officer Margaret Glover-Campbell, a scaleup expert with executive experience at the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, STEM Learning Lab, MindFuel, Benevity, and Poynt.

Company management benefits from the advice of subject matter experts in HR/recruiting, finance, and software development.

Virtual Gurus boasts a roster of thousands of virtual assistants, making it one of the largest Canada-based teams of vetted virtual workers.

Virtual Gurus is currently a team of six people, with an extended team of over 105 regular contractors.

Virtual Gurus attracts all sorts of positive attention. 

Founder Bobbie Racette won Start Alberta’s Most Promising Entrepreneur award, Startup Canada’s Woman Entrepreneur of the Year and Indigenous Entrepreneur of the Year, and was part of Canada’s first-ever LGBTQ2 trade mission in 2018. 

Virtual Gurus won the BDC Emerging Growth award in 2018, was named to the Forbes Tech Top 19 Innovative Tech Startups list at the 2019 Startup Grind Global Conference in Silicon Valley, and was the “Best of the Fest” runner-up at the 2019 Startup Festival in Montreal. It was a finalist for the TD Inclusion and Diversity distinction at the Calgary Chamber awards last fall.

The company has been profiled nationally in The Globe & Mail, CBC, and Betakit, among others.

Virtually Unlimited will very proudly plant a stake in the ground about the opportunity for, and importance of, diversity, inclusion, and equity not only in traditional office workplaces but in the new and rapidly growing virtual/gig economy. Virtual Gurus is exceptionally well-positioned to launch such a social purpose organization and to integrate it into a leading work-matchmaking platform. We expect it will attract new talent as VAs, new clients and project types, and more aligned social impact funding over the long-term.

We plan to work with several service providers to set up Virtually Unlimited – for research, administrative, and program/community development phases.

The first (and ongoing) phase will involve consulting with two of the national Expert Service Providers – Raven Indigenous Capital Partners (also investors) and LIFT Philanthropy Partners – to get their strategic insights about serving Indigenous and Disabled communities respectively.

The second phase will engage Virtual Gurus’ legal and accounting firms to formally incorporate Virtually Unlimited as a national nonprofit and to ensure that its back-office is properly set up.

The third phase will have three individual contractors (hopefully future employees) each develop programming and marketing – one focused on the Academy, one focused in Indigenous communities, and one focused on persons with disabilities (particularly mobility limitations).

Project coordination – between the contractors and with Virtual Gurus – will be handled by Warm Ventures, an innovation scaling advisory. 

Altogether, we will develop and re-launch the Virtual Gurus Academy for aspiring VAs, and launch and pilot Virtually Unlimited as a premium tier on the Virtual Gurus online staffing platform. Clients needing help with tasks will be offered the option of working with Indigenous and Disabled VAs for an extra fee.

North American staffing is a $140B+ market; $9.2B in Canada, growing 3% per year. Virtual Gurus targets small, medium, and large sized Canadian and US companies that have a need for short-term, part-time, ongoing, niche, special project, peak workflow, overflow, or location-specific remote work; the needs vary. We have over 175 clients (including Shopify, Waste Management, and Videotron), and a run-rate of C$1M.

Our pricing – $22-$35 per hour per VA – is North American market based and representative of the local/regional marketplaces. Average gross margin is 37%. 

The sales sign-up and provisioning process is straightforward and simple. It takes approximately 20 minutes for a client-prospect to sign up and be assigned a Virtual Assistant for their project or task. The goal is to reduce this onboarding time to just three minutes through new self-service Smart Matchmaking technology.

Our market approach is based on three years of actual in-market experience combined with learnings from competitors. We focus on providing quality talent, on demand, with flexible contracts, at fair market prices. We provide strong customer service through a simple user-friendly project and performance management system. 

Virtually Unlimited will generate revenue in the same way that Virtual Gurus does now: by matching paying clients with task-completing VAs. Our hope is that the Virtually Unlimited tier of VAs may even be offered at a premium price, attract new clients with sector-specific projects to the platform, and potentially garner sponsorship by equity-oriented brands.

Virtual Gurus surpassed $1M in 2019, with forecasts for $5M by the end of 2020 and $16M by the end of 2022 – growing the client base 10x from approximately 300 to 3000 over this period. Break-even is expected Q4-2020.

Operationally, we’ve recently hired an experienced COO and, technically, our tech team is actively enhancing the platform’s matching efficacy with AI. For service delivery, we have a roster of over 1000 VAs and a nascent Academy to train them in the ways of virtual work – which will further increase client satisfaction and attract other high-quality candidates. We just closed a C$1.2M seed round and this Challenge is well-time to set us up for subsequent investment.

Since its founding, Virtual Gurus has re-invested its revenue into developing its technology and marketing. As it grows, the for-profit company will invest in Virtually Unlimited, a sister nonprofit this Challenge’s funding will catalyze, through a preferential license agreement of the existing Virtual Gurus technology platform. Virtually Unlimited will benefit from the delta between the at-cost technology and the price offered to clients. It will also enjoy crossover exposure from Virtual Gurus’ marketing activities and regular site traffic.

Virtual Gurus was founded on principles of diversity and inclusion. Many of its staff and VAs are women and mothers, and individuals who self-identify across a rich intersectional mix. We believe that embracing this – both as best practice and for promotion – is an amazing ingredient for continued growth.

There are a few reasons why we are applying to the Digital Workforce Challenge.

The one that first caught our attention was of course the prize. $100,000 would provide a significant boost to our growth – especially the social purpose initiatives outlined in this application. The opportunity for our founder Bobbie Racette to attend and present at Knowledge 2020 is also special.

A second reason is expansion. Although we are based in Canada, and our sales efforts to date have focused on Canada, already 15% of our clients are American. We’re poised for substantial growth more broadly across North America, and winning a challenge organized by reputable organizations like MIT and ServiceNow would provide an incredible collaborative and PR boost for Virtual Gurus and its innovative blend of tech and talent.

Thirdly, we’re also intrigued by the possibility of partnering with a workflow-oriented company like ServiceNow – on multiple levels. As we build out our tech stack, we’d like to explore how Now (or other products) could be harnessed (eg. cross-marketing, implementation, maintenance, customer service, etc.). Virtual Gurus’ automated talent marketplace/matching may also be an ideal human complement to ServiceNow’s IT wheelhouse (some automation and workflows uncover a need for specific tasks; a gap we could help fill). And by supporting Virtually Unlimited, ServiceNow could join us in championing Indigenous and Disabled workers in the broader digital workforce.

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Virtual Gurus is passionate about building relationships with other companies in order to grow awareness of our business, and also to increase your sales opportunities. Line One, District Ventures, A2Z Digital Web Solutions, and Women on the Move.

We are actively seeking mutually beneficial alliances. In July 2019, we began working with OWNR, a business registration branch of RBC Ventures Company (one of Canada’s major banks). In February 2020, we announced a collaboration with Communo, a marketing services collective.

In addition to ServiceNow, we are keen to partner with organizations with whom we can cross-sell into the small and mid-sized business marketplace (eg. accounting firms, IT service providers, human resources firms, etc.).