Carrie Fabris is the founder and chief reframer of CareerFrame, offering world-class career coaching and consulting to individuals and businesses.
CareerFrame works with company leaders and teams to reframe for the ideal and drive team dynamics through a human connection in the workplace — focusing on leadership, success, engagement and alignment to drive productivity.
CareerFrame allows its clients to develop confident and optimistic leaders who greatly contribute to a thriving organization.
The Challenge
Before a BELAY contractor, Carrie was operating as a one-woman show with a marketing team. When her marketing director — who also happened to be a BELAY client — told her she needed assistance to get everything done, Carrie reached out immediately and was paired with a Client Success Consultant (CSC) and a Virtual Assistant.
Soon after, she serendipitously found herself on a call with BELAY’s CEO Tricia Sciortino where Carrie mentioned her CSC and VA were 'good.’
“Tricia doesn't do ‘good’ or ‘good enough,’ Carrie says with a laugh. “So she reached out to me personally and the next thing I know, I'm getting a great [CSC] – just a better personality fit and found me the best VA.
“It’s been a little bit of a journey with BELAY where we tweaked and corrected things. The assistant that I had before was lovely; we had a great relationship.
“But I think what I needed was more proactiveness and helping me pry my fingers off of things since I’m used to controlling everything and doing everything. I need someone to tough love the tough-love coach.”
Enter BELAY Virtual Assistant, Ashley Quinones.
“She's fantastic,’ Carrie adds. “I was really grateful that Tricia was like, ‘Good is not good enough. Let's get this to where it's great.’
“And it absolutely has been.”
The Solution
“Turning over my calendar was a huge thing for me to do because my calendar is my to-do list,” Carrie says. “Another big relief was me getting in the habit of CCing her on stuff. And so she would then just take it and run with it.
“What I love about Ashley specifically is how detail-oriented she is — and I'm not. I'm a Strengths Coach, and I do a lot of strength workshops with companies and teams. We create a grid with everyone's strengths, and [Ashley] has become the master of creating these grids, and that right there is a huge time save for me. I wake up and there it is in my inbox.
“Time is absolutely my most prized possession. And so when she saves me a lot of time, it's just like, ‘You're the best. You're predicting my needs. Thank you.’”
As far as her day-to-day tasks lists, Ashley is focused on keeping Carrie organized and focused on helping her ever-evolving needs.
“She stepped in to help on some personal stuff too, which has been awesome,” Carrie remembers. “My husband turned 50 last summer, and we did this trip to the British Virgin Islands with 35 people. We had four catamarans, and it was the most ridiculous, awesome trip.
“Ashley is open to anything. She's this jack of all trades, if you will. She's managed a social campaign on LinkedIn for me where she's created a ton of Google Docs. She's just so organized and it keeps me organized.
“She's also created a coaching dashboard for my biggest client that four of us are coaching across seven divisions of this global company. Everyone's got a tab and everyone's got their list of people and the cadence and the frequency. She's just put this amazing infrastructure in place for the business to keep us all organized and delivering to the client.”
The Result
“[Ashley is] predicting my needs, predicting a question that I'm going to ask proactively going, ‘Oh, by the way, I did this for you.’ And I'm like, ‘How did you even know I was going to ask for that?’
“It's that kind of delight and dazzle that she brings that I have appreciated. She's great at coming up with other things to take off my plate.”
By getting the right support from a BELAY contractor, Carrie has gained back her time — the most important thing.
“I am a mom of two,” Carrie explains. “I've got a 12 year old and 11 year old, so they're going in different directions. I have a CEO husband who's very busy and doing his thing for his company with his board, and so time — finding time to breathe.
“Sometimes it's like, ‘Wow, I could sit here and spend an hour working on this strengths grid, or I could actually go eat lunch and I can punt this to Ashley and know it'll get taken in probably half the time.’ So that ROI on not only money, but time is huge.
“When it comes to the support of an assistant and the infrastructure of the business and processes and organization, I have the best team with BELAY. I know that if I need something or something is not right, I go to [my CSC] and it is taken care of. Looking across the partners that are part of my CareerFrame team to help the business be successful, BELAY is a part of that success.”
Meet the Specialist
ASHLEY QUINONES
Virtual Assistant