WorxBee began when a retiring executive lost access to the assistant support she had relied on. Kenzie Biggins was helping her with social media when the executive realized she did not know where her next meeting was. That practical problem became an opening for a virtual executive assistant business.
In this Founder Factor conversation, Biggins traces the company’s development from that first client to a broader administrative service. She also discusses fundraising barriers, the financial discipline of running a service business, and the personal boundaries required to keep leading one.
What you'll learn.
- A specific customer’s scheduling problem helped Biggins identify demand for executive assistant support.
- WorxBee adapted its service to how clients actually worked, including paper calendars.
- Break-even analysis helped Biggins account for the variable costs that rise with each customer.
- Learning, clear boundaries, and reciprocal support became recurring parts of her leadership.
A customer problem revealed the first service.
Biggins did not start WorxBee after a career as an executive assistant. She had studied luxury and fashion management and then started a social media agency. People repeatedly asked whether she could help them find virtual assistants, even though that was outside the agency’s work.
The retiring Coca-Cola executive made the need concrete. She had gone from having extensive support to being treated as a contractor, with no assistant managing her calendar. When Biggins mentioned the idea she had been considering, the executive offered to become the first client.
About two months later, the business brought on its first executive assistant and matched them. Biggins says that client and assistant were still working together at the time of the interview. The example shows how a recurring inquiry became a service once it was attached to an urgent, specific need.
Remote support had to fit the person using it.
The first clients included retired executives from major corporations, and they brought established habits. Some used a paper planner, did not check email regularly, or had little interest in adopting new digital tools. A remote service still had to work for them.
One solution was simple. A client photographed her calendar and sent it to the assistant. The assistant entered the information digitally and returned a PDF the client could print. Biggins describes this as finding the meeting point between two people’s ways of working.
That experience also clarified the difference between general assistance and executive assistance. WorxBee needed to match people who could meet the expectations of senior executives. In the interview, Biggins describes the service as combining matching with community, training, and developing certifications for administrative professionals. The relationship remained central even as the offerings expanded.
The service model emerged through difficult fundraising.
Biggins recalls pressure in Atlanta’s startup environment to build a technology company. She encountered the idea that a service business would struggle to scale, while a technology product would make growth and investment more plausible.
Her experience trying to raise money as a Black woman was frustrating. She describes being pressed to choose between the labels of technology company and service business while seeing others operating between those categories receive investment. These are her observations about the fundraising encounters she experienced, rather than a quantified comparison of funding outcomes.
Eventually, she focused on operating as a service business and understanding what it needed to sustain itself. Later in the conversation, she acknowledges money spent trying to build a platform before the team knew enough about its requirements. For founders considering software, that is a useful distinction: customer demand for a service does not by itself specify the product that should support it.
Break-even analysis made the economics visible.
Biggins credits a lesson in break-even analysis from the Greenville Chamber’s minority business accelerator with changing how she understood the business. She says it also helped during the pandemic. The analysis brought together fixed monthly expenses and costs that varied with customer activity.
For WorxBee, those variable costs included payments to executive assistants and payment-processing costs. Looking only at fixed overhead would leave out part of what it cost to serve each additional customer. Small differences become consequential when they repeat across a business.
She also makes the personal finances behind the company visible. Living in her parents’ basement gave her room to keep building. She recognizes that many founders lack that option. Later, she and her husband lived on less than outsiders might assume, and she discusses how readily her own pay became the first cost she cut when conditions worsened.
The pandemic changed what customers needed.
WorxBee had operated virtually since 2015, but that did not make the beginning of the pandemic easy. Customers were trying to remain in business, and Biggins describes the uncertainty and pressure of seeking assistance through the Paycheck Protection Program.
The company’s response included helping its assistants support clients through the shift to remote operations. The immediate question was how customers could continue working and earning revenue when their normal arrangements stopped functioning.
By the third quarter, Biggins says demand had turned. Prospects needed support from people who already understood virtual work. The experience illustrates two separate facts that can coexist: a company can have relevant capabilities for a major change and still experience a severe disruption before demand catches up.
Leadership required learning the same lesson more than once.
Biggins describes being a student of one’s craft as a company value. For her, learning means returning to subjects repeatedly, with more context each time. Finance, leadership, and running a business were not topics she expected to master after a single course.
She mentions the minority business accelerator, Goldman Sachs’ 10,000 Small Businesses program, and executive education through Dartmouth. Moving to Greenville for the accelerator itself required a quick decision: she describes deciding in late December and relocating in January 2017.
Her motivation includes responsibility for the people earning income through the business. At the time of the interview, she describes being accountable for payments supporting nearly 100 people. Continued learning was tied to sustaining those households and making the company capable of supporting more of them.
Boundaries made support more sustainable.
Biggins talks openly about the people and habits that help her keep working. Her mother provides both personal support and business perspective. At home, she and her husband allow each other to say when they need to vent without receiving advice. Friday conversations with neighbors offer time with people outside the company.
She also rejects the assumption that a founder’s entire life can arrange itself around an ideal productivity routine. Household work still needs to happen. Giving herself room for that reality is part of setting expectations she can actually meet.
An executive coach challenged her plan to check in every morning while on vacation by asking who else could handle the work. That question connected time off to delegation. Within the company, the Entrepreneurial Operating System helped structure meetings and measurement, although Biggins cautions that a process does not automatically teach people to do their jobs.
A growing company still depends on human relationships.
Asked what makes an impactful entrepreneur, Biggins returns to liking people. The business needs customers, colleagues, and others willing to help. She describes sharing what she has learned as one reason people have been willing to share with her.
That commitment also shapes her expectations of customer behavior. People providing a service deserve time off and reasonable treatment. She describes the difficulty of being expected to make herself available for everyone, especially as a woman running a business.
Her answer holds service quality and personal limits together. A founder can care deeply about the people they serve while building a company that allows its own team to work sustainably. In Biggins’ account, those relationships require attention throughout growth, rather than becoming easier automatically as revenue rises.
Biggins built WorxBee by responding to an actual customer problem and learning what the service cost to deliver. Her experience gives other founders several concrete questions: whose routine must the service fit, what costs grow with each customer, and which responsibilities can someone else carry so the founder can step away?
