In 2012, Allison Madrigal was a 32-year-old property and casualty insurance broker in Houston. Led by the Holy Spirit, Allison quit her corporate job to spearhead Rescue Houston – which would later expand into Rescue America – a nonprofit organization created to provide immediate rescue and stabilization to victims of sex trafficking and sexual exploitation.
Over the course of five years, Rescue America has received over 1,000 hotline calls and has rescued over 330 victims of sexual exploitation.
The Challenge
For the first five years of its existence, Rescue America had six employees.
Now, they’ve nearly tripled their employees as their organization has grown tremendously over the last nine months, thanks in large part to going from their flagship location to a nationwide expansion.
And while going through the process of building the infrastructure for the Rescue America model to be replicated across the U.S., Allison found their organization at a pivotal point of going into a major growth strategy.
As a leader, Allison found herself needing to be more visionary – which meant she could no longer afford to be bogged down with administrative tasks of growing an organization, from donor development to volunteers to operations.
And despite never having had a virtual assistant, Allison took a leap of faith.
The Solution
And that leap of faith – and BELAY – matched her with Katie Carroll.
For Allison, it was important to find the right person who was equipped and trained to step into the position at a certain level – and Katie fit the bill.
In no time, Katie was handling Allison’s calendaring, scheduling and appointments. She has also assumed responsibility for all of their HR employee onboarding and exiting processes, as well as payroll, expenses reports, and receipt coding, making sure all of their systems are updated.
But wait – there’s more!
Katie also inputs all of the people Allison meets – donors, strategic partners – into Salesforce, as well as handling all of their applications, such as tax exemptions, address changes, and insurance forms.
In other words, Katie does all the things.
The Results
Allison can actually see the light at the end of her (email) tunnel.
“Huge news: I got down to three emails yesterday,” Allison says. “I cannot remember that I’ve [ever] been down to three emails!”
But her relationship with Katie has benefited far more than her inbox.
“I just didn’t realize how much time the small tasks were taking up of my day that I thought, ‘Oh, well it’s not a big deal for me to do. This only takes me 10 minutes.’ But when you have 20 of those a day, it adds up.”
“It’s just taken off a lot of the things you think only you can do off my plate so I can focus on the big visionary projects as well as things that I need to pour into,” Allison shares.
“Katie and I hit it off right away, so [she] took a huge weight off of me,” Allison adds. “And it’s been very, very smooth sailing.”