ONCE Catherine Lee was a real-life personal assistant at Northern Rail.

Now she is making a big success at being “virtual”.

Catherine, of Oak Street, York, is managing director of Kaleidoscope Business Services Ltd and such are her skills providing outsourced administrative support that she has doubled turnover in the past year and even had to hire a virtual assistant of her own.

Now Catherine is pitching for the Women In Enterprise title of the Press Business Awards 2010.

With her growth fully self-funded, she has invested heavily in her website, kaleidoscopeservices.co.uk, using a series of videos as well as images and words to make it a rich source of information useful to all virtual assistants and their clients.

It is all part of a Kaleidoscope mentoring programme to help other virtual assistants to start their own businesses.

Her ultimate goal is to launch a Kaleidoscope Academy, where budding virtual assistants will train in providing the highest possible level of service to business leaders – then set up for themselves under the Kaleidoscope banner. Watch out for the launch of a client and associate portal, which is under construction.