Meet Karen van Zyl
17 years of experience.
A founder's vision.
Karen van Zyl didn't start VAConnect from a boardroom. She built it from 17 years of placing virtual assistants across four continents — and watching the same cycle repeat: founders burned by unreliable support, brilliant South African professionals overlooked by the global market, and agencies that treated both sides as transactions.
Her passion for systems and processes that actually work, combined with an absolute love for sales and marketing, gave her something most agency founders lack — a systematic approach to operations where "good enough" doesn't exist. That discipline became the foundation of everything VAConnect is today.
What started as Lime Tree Consulting in 2008 became VA Connect in 2014 when Karen saw the managed virtual assistant model was the future. Not a marketplace. Not a freelancer pool. A fully managed service where every VA is recruited, trained, monitored, and supported — so the client never has to manage the manager.
She didn't want to be the biggest. She wanted to be the one where nobody leaves.
That conviction led her to build four proprietary platforms that no other VA agency has — each solving a different part of the retention puzzle. The result: 98% client retention, 40+ team members, and a company that clients describe as feeling like an extension of their own team.