To be a business owner, you have to be resilient. Times are going to be tough whether you like it or not. You're going to work long hours for little pay, have nightmare clients, demanding customers, staff that cause you headaches and complaints to deal with. But all that is par for the course and you learn to accept it. What's never easy to accept, is when somebody deliberately shits on you for no good reason other than they can.

I own a virtual assistant agency called L.T. VA Services. I always intended it to be an agency rather than work solo, and very quickly I started to take on associates. I was very lucky in that the first two associates I worked with were amazing. Like me, they had integrity and I saw that in them right away.

I then took on my fabulous assistant Kirsty, who is way more than an assistant. She works as our account manager, taking care of our associates and clients, and has been an absolute rock to me. I honestly could not have done it without her. Finding someone who wants your business and you to be a success and who will move heaven and earth to make that happen, is like finding a diamond in the middle of the ocean. It's rare and I was lucky enough for it to happen to me. (Thank you Kirsty). In my line of business, where I'm trusting sub-contractors to work with clients and not try to steal them from me, trust is a big thing.

I'm the sort of person that allows my vulnerabilities to show, I think it's important to wear your heart on your sleeve and keep your guard down. But when people screw you over, it's one of the first things that can change. The first time someone shit on me, was when an associate started talking to a potential client of ours about money. She told him that we were making a huge profit on his fee (he hadn't signed with us at this point) and that she would be able to deliver a much better quality of service if he increased the hourly rate which basically meant; "come work with me direct".

Whilst we don't pass on 100% of the fee we charge clients to associates, that's to cover costs like the marketing we spent to get that client in the first place. For subscriptions, payment providers and all the usual overheads when running a business. I wish I was making half the profit on a clients fee but that's not the case at all. Needless to say we lost the client and we got rid of the associate.

It was a kick in the teeth and it upset me. I was more upset that the client had been left with such an awful impression of me. But I quickly realised that you can't take these things too personally. So here's what I did:

• I reflected: What was wrong with my processes that had allowed my associate to have such open conversations with this client in the first place?

• I recovered: I sent a polite email explaining the facts to the client and left it at that. There's no point begging or debating. At the end of the day, a client that was not able to understand business, costs, and see through what the associate was doing, wasn't a client I wanted to work with anyway

Not long after that a new associate who said she could do loads of amazing tech stuff turned out to be a liar. She lost me two brand new clients at a cost of £1,000 per month. That was a lot of money to lose for fledgling new business. This time I:

• Reflected longer: How had I come to take this associates word that she had the skills she said she had, and so readily accepted it? I needed to change tact.

• I chalked it up to experience: It hurt that the clients placed blame on me because I am a person of integrity and I hate to have that questioned, I did what I could in terms of damage control and then I let it go.

• I changed my vetting process: I realised that I had made fundamental mistakes in my vetting process. I introduced a more stringent process to weed out the people who didn't have the skills they say they did. And I changed my pricing structure to match the right VAs to the right level of expertise the clients needed.

One of the things you have to do, even when you're adamant that it's not your fault, is to ask yourself what YOU could have done differently. I know, it sounds weird, right? If it's their fault, why do you need any self-reflection? Well, the truth is, some portion of blame will lie with you too. Even if it's just that you were too trusting.

Finally, there will be the absolute monsters shitters. The ones that really try to break you. This was mine...

I'm a big believer that you shouldn't take on family and friends in business, it's something I've even written about in blogs and posts but...

I made the fatal mistake. A very close relative of mine was going through a difficult time and, well, they tugged at my heartstrings. So, I gave them a job doing some accounting work in my business. It's not a role I would have offered to a fellow associate because of the conflict of interest, I didn't want associates who all have their own VA businesses, to have access to my client database, which they would need doing things like invoicing. So, I gave the role to this person instead.

Within the first month everything inside me told me this was a big mistake, but, I carried on regardless. This person came from a professional background and had a specific skill-set. In fact, they went on to help one of our clients that needed this particular set of skills. One day, I suggested to them that as they were doing so well that they ought to consider starting their own VA business in this niche. They told me no, they had no interest and didn't have the time to find clients of their own. So, imagine my shock when two days later another close relative tells me this person has started their own VA business, doing exactly the same as me. They hadn't even out of courtesy, dropped me a message just to say "hey, after our chat two days ago you're right, I'm going to go for it".

I was forced to take them off the invoicing job because of the new conflict of interest but they were still working for our client. When I called the relative about what they had done, they had little to say. The two things I eventually got out of them when I questioned why they had started their business without telling me was; "I just didn't think" and "business is business". Wow.

Two weeks later this person tells me that they and my client are going into a "brand partnership" together. I think that's code for, you're stealing my client. I'm not sure the client ever found out the true nature of our relationship. Here we are a year later and our family has been torn apart by this situation. We no longer speak and the relative is still working with the client they didn't steal.

This betrayal hit me a lot harder. The emotions were multi-faceted because it brought a lot of other people into the equation and a lot more questions that needed to be answered. Such as; "why"? Why on earth did they have such a level of disrespect for me when all I had tried to do was help them? Sadly, those questions remain unanswered as the person involved won't meet me face to face to discuss it.

After that situation, I took a break from working with associates. It knocked my confidence and I struggled to bounce back. I felt I couldn't trust anyone. But after a few months reflecting, and again, asking myself what I did wrong, I felt ready to let people in again. This time, I have a much more hands on approach with my associates, I don't leave them all to Kirsty to deal with, I'm there for them. My biggest lesson? NEVER work with family.

Because whilst my business has since recovered and gone from strength to strength, our family remains broken and always will.

So, be prepared. You will need huge amounts of resilience in business. Learn from every occasion someone shits on you (hopefully they never will), self-reflect and don't be a victim but above all else, remain true to you. I haven't put up defenses. I'm still the same person who wears their heart on their sleeve and who will help anyone. Don't let someone else's nastiness be the thing that changes you.

Good luck.