Virtual Assistants, or VA's are changing the way we do business. Not only is this field growing tremendously, but it's offering employers and business owners alike an attractive new alternative to hiring employees.

Perhaps because this is a relatively new industry, it's hard to pin down exactly how many Virtual Assistants there are out there.

Susan Valeri was a VA before she even knew she was a VA.

"I started [doing this work] and then I came across the term Virtual Assistant on the Internet and I thought, '...that's me!'. I didn't really know that there were other people doing it," Valeri comments.

So is there an easy way to define a Virtual Assistant? Not according to Stacy Brice, President and Chief Visionary Officer of AssistU, an organization that provides training and coaching to virtual assistants.

"The definition of what a VA will vary, depending on who you ask," Brice contends. "I have a very much branded definition [and that] is that a VA is a person who owns her own business, works from her home office, provides administrative and personal support across the board to clients who can be down the street or around the world...but in collaborative, long-term relationships."

Some define a VA as anyone who works from home and provides any sort of support virtually.

Stacy disagrees. "If you're a Marketing Consultant, and you do that from home, that doesn't make you a Virtual Assistant, that makes you a Marketing Consultant who works from home. So, I think that using the term Virtual Assistant as a catch-all for anything a person can do from home, that is supportive of other businesses, is a false definition."

The International Virtual Assistant's Association (IVAA) defines a VA as: