From Virtual Assistant to Consultant: My 10-Year Remote Work Journey

A lot has asked what I kind of remote job I do and the short answer is, I do Amazon/Marketplace account management and consultancy. But it didn’t start that way.

Ten years ago, I was working as a virtual assistant — working the graveyard shift, experiencing location discrimination, and rebuilding my entire career from scratch.

And now, I work as a consultant with a salary that’s 20 times what I started with.

Let me be clear, this isn’t a get-rich-quick story. It took a decade of unglamorous work, painful pay cuts, and learning to say no at the right moments. But if you’re thinking about transitioning to remote work — or you’re already in it and wondering if it gets better — I want you to hear my story.

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Where do I begin?

Let’s start in 2015, the time when I quit my corporate job to travel South America. That time, I wasn’t just running away from something — I had a plan. That plan was to build a remote career.

What I didn’t fully understand at the time was how brutal that transition would be.

My master’s degree? Didn’t matter. My corporate experience? Nice to have, but not enough. Because in remote work, I wasn’t competing with other Filipinos anymore. I was competing with the entire global labor market. And I was starting at the bottom.

My first remote job was a virtual assistant managing social media marketing. I was posting content on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest, and answering messages from followers. This was 2015, so TikTok and Instagram Reels didn’t exist yet.

Coming from my corporate job, I had to take huge pay cut just so I could land a remote job. And was able to live on that salary while traveling because I was also volunteering in exchange for food and accommodation, and South America was affordable to travel to. This continued on long after I went home from my backpacking trip. And make no mistake — it was hard. I was working US time zones, which meant my shift ran from 9pm to 5am Philippine time. We call it the graveyard shift. I was also using time trackers which I hate. And merely following orders. I was in no position to complain because I was rebuilding from zero.

I stayed in social media marketing from 2015 to 2017. By then, my salary had increased minimally. I was lucky because I was house-sitting for my sister, so rent wasn’t an issue. But I was also slowly realising something important: I didn’t actually like social media marketing.

So in 2018, I started teaching myself new skills on the side. Blogging. WordPress. Shopify. Dropshipping. Honestly? The blog and the dropshipping store I created were a failure. Worse, I spent money on ads and never made a single sale. But I came away with something more valuable: I now knew how to build and manage websites, and that skill opened doors for me.

That same year, I got a job with a US subscription snack company. I was managing their website and handling email marketing campaigns. It was also my first real exposure to e-commerce and Amazon — though at that stage, I was mostly doing customer service. My salary increased slightly, not significantly.

I’ll be honest: it took me two to three years to fully accept that customer service and social media weren’t for me. But those roles gave me the entry point I needed. I’m grateful for that.

In 2019, I made a move that changed everything.

I joined a company that needed someone to manage their Shopify store and email marketing, which included a 33% salary increase from my last job. Six months in, the owner — who was also my manager — started sending me videos and resources about selling on Amazon. He encouraged me to go deep on it and learn everything I can.

So I did. I spent hundreds of hours watching videos about launching products and selling on Amazon. I fell completely down the rabbit hole. And I enjoyed every minute of it.

Some people hear “Amazon account management” and they get overwhelmed. For me, it was the opposite. It reminded me of my old job as a buyer for SM — researching products, analysing what would sell, making decisions. It got me hooked.

Now, I also want to mention 2 things that happened at this job, because I think it matters.

First, the owner’s wife asked me to take on customer service as well. I said no.

She wasn’t happy about it. But I knew myself well enough by then to know that if I took a role I disliked, I would eventually fail at it. And I told her directly: if customer service had been in the job description, I wouldn’t have applied.

Setting that boundary wasn’t easy. But it was the right call, for me at least.

2nd thing happened in September 2020 when I asked for a 60% salary increase mainly because my workload had grown significantly—Amazon product launching was added to my list of responsibilities. My manager’s response, while never stated explicitly, made it clear: he didn’t think I should earn that much because of where I lived.

After all the discussion, he approved a 40% salary increase. I know what you’re thinking, 40% already seemed great but you should know that what the company was paying me was way below the market rate. They were hiring specifically from the Philippines because they knew that they can get cheap labor.

I was disappointed of course and to protect myself, I started looking for a new job that same month. Because in reality, there is no security with remote work. If the company decides to hire someone else, someone cheaper, to replace you, there’s really nothing you can do. But it goes both ways—if the remote worker decides to quit without any notice or go AWOL, the company cannot do anything as well.

By October 2020, I had found a new job — at my asking salary, the same salary that I asked from my current company but was denied—and it was given to me, no questions asked. For a brief stretch, I was earning two salaries. But at the end of 2020, I decided to leave the company that had discriminated against me. It just didn’t feel right to stay.

Ngl though, having 2 salaries was hard to let go not because I had a high-maintenance lifestyle but because the income I was getting allowed me to substantially increase my savings which felt good.

Anyway, in February 2021, I added a second job — a UK snack company where I handled Shopify, email marketing, and Amazon account management across the UK and EU. Between the two jobs, I was earning 10x, a month, of my first ever remote work salary.

Things were going well — until my manager at the UK company started micromanaging me. Three meetings a week just to review what I was doing. It didn’t take long for me to leave because I really have no tolerance for micromanagement.

By that point, I had already secured my next role but I had a 3-month notice to fulfill so from April to June 2022, I was juggling three remote jobs at once.

That was not sustainable at all. The money was good, but the stress was overwhelming. Once the snack company was behind me, I settled back to two jobs.

The new job I had taken was at an Amazon advertising agency, where I managed 11 client accounts simultaneously. My boss was great — he trusted me to work independently and did not micromanage. Because of that, I delivered strong results and everyone noticed.

This job also served like a crash course on Amazon selling because this is where I learned so much about Amazon account management. Also, managing 11 accounts siginificantly improved my analytical skills and strategic management skills. It helped me understand how different categories perform on Amazon, seasonality, differentiated strategies, etc.

And more importantly, this job helped with my transition from being a virtual assistant to Amazon consultant.

However, managing eleven demanding clients eventually broke me. And after 15 months, I burned out completely and decided to quit.

My boss wanted me to stay. He offered me a salary increase, said I deserved to be paid more—his words, not mine. But, I turned it down.

Because at that point, no amount of money was worth it. I needed a break.

So I took a month off. Then I started fresh with a new role at a local company here in Barcelona — purely Amazon account management, covering the US and EU. For this job, I had to take a pay cut, but it came with something I needed: stability, and help securing an apartment with my partner.

9 months after joining, in March 2024 specifically, that Barcelona company declared bankruptcy. But before I even had to worry about losing my job, a former colleague referred me to a UK company selling branded children’s furniture.

This role pulled together everything I’d built over a decade — Amazon and marketplace management including B&Q, Wayfair, Walmart TikTok Shop, and Shopify. It was the most comprehensive role I’d ever had, and the pay reflected that. My income jumped significantly.

Then the job I’d been holding since October 2020 — five years in — finally gave me a raise because I asked for it.

With these 2 jobs, my salary jumped to 20x, a month, of my first ever remote work salary.

And that doesn’t include what my partner and I earn from our own businesses — digital and physical products we sell on Amazon. But that’s a story for the next post.

So what made the difference? Here are 5 things I’d tell anyone starting out:

Pick one thing and go deep. I tried a lot of things in the early years, but once I locked onto Amazon and marketplace management, I stopped spreading myself thin and started becoming an expert at one thing.

Know what you don’t want — and protect that boundary. Recognising early that I didn’t enjoy social media marketing or customer service saved me from years of mediocre performance in roles I resented. I consciously filtered those out of every job search.

Always have a safety net. Holding two remote jobs at once gave me the freedom to leave toxic situations without financial panic. It gave me leverage — the ability to say no to lowball offers and walk away from environments that didn’t respect me.

Invest in your communication. The shift from virtual assistant to consultant didn’t happen because I worked harder. It happened because I learned to communicate strategically — to speak to business owners as an equal, to give recommendations, to frame problems and provide solutions clearly.

Stay committed to learning. Expanding your skill set doesn’t just make you better — it creates more opportunities.

And as a bonus—speaking English fluently? That has been foundational since day one. I credit a good education for that.

So there you have it.

Ten years. From a virtual assistant to a consultant with a 20x increase in income to match.

I am aware that others achieve this kind of progress in far less time. But you should know that I began working remotely for US companies while living in the Philippines, and location-based discrimination made it harder, and slower, to accelerate my income. Moving to Europe was the turning point that finally unlocked significant salary growth.

It wasn’t fast. It wasn’t always graceful. There were graveyard shifts, failed business ventures, and managers who thought my location was worth less than my work.

But I kept building. And now, the companies I work with come to me for advice on how to grow their Amazon accounts, how to understand performance metrics, how to launch successfully, etc.

That’s the journey. And honestly — it’s just getting started.

Thank you for stopping by and I hope you get something worthwhile from this post.

¡Hasta luego!