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ABOUT US
Who
are Chris
& Mike - Our Professional
Bios (click
here for our Personal bios)
-
Chris’
"Professional" Bio -
 Christine
Durst, founder
of
the Virtual Assistance industry, is co-founder and partner of Staffcentrix,
a
leading training and development firm providing virtual-careers
training and
resources to the US Department of State and the Armed Forces.
Chris appears regularly on CNN as an Internet fraud and safety expert,
and has had guest expert appearances on ABC News 20/20 and The Dr. Oz
Show.
Before founding
Staffcentrix, Chris was the CEO of the Internet's first denominated
“Virtual
Assistant” practice, MyStaff, which was launched in 1995 from
the
basement of
her home in rural Connecticut.
The result of Chris’s earlier role (1993-94) as Virtual
Assistant to a
Priority
Management franchisee, MyStaff grew quickly to international
dimensions, with clients
drawn from the first wave of businesses in North America, Europe, and Australia
migrating to the Web.
Chris’s
experience also
includes independent management consulting in the Boston
region, advising such Fortune
100
companies as Data General Corp., Kraft Foods, and 3M.
Chris has also
consulted
extensively on corporate training programs, and has advised and
mentored
thousands of successful "eEntrepreneurs" internationally. At ease at
the “macro” level as well, she has negotiated
strong relationships with
such
companies and organizations as Microsoft, Ernst & Young, and
the
United
Nations Development Programme.
With
Staffcentrix
president
Michael Haaren, Chris developed groundbreaking virtual-career training
programs
for the US Armed Forces and the US Department of State: the Portable
Career
& Virtual Assistant Training Program for Military
Spouses™, and the
e-Entrepreneur Training Program for Foreign Service Spouses™.
These
popular programs, in which participants are trained to leverage their
existing expertise (administrative, customer service, foreign
languages, etc.) to develop their own client base, have been
instrumental in helping their graduates generate collectively over $30M
in revenues.
In addition to
Staffcentrix’ training programs, Chris has played a key role
in the
development
of the company’s related products, including its Home-Based
Job Power
Search™ CD
and its weekly lifestyle and telework bulletin, the “Rat Race
Rebellion,” which
are now carried elsewhere, in evolved form, on this website.
As
an authority on
pro-family
entrepreneurship and how to “de-rat-race” your
life, Chris appears
often in the
media, including Forbes, Good Morning
America, the Wall Street Journal,
and BusinessWeek,
as well as on numerous
radio shows. She has been honored for her entrepreneurial leadership by
Ernst
& Young (nominated for Entrepreneur
of the Year Award 2000) and Working Woman
Magazine, and is co-author of the popular
“how-to” for Virtual
Assistants
and other freelancers, The 2-Second
Commute (Career Press, 2005) and Work at Home Now (Career Press, 2009) -- the definitive book on finding a home-based job and avoiding scams.
Chris
has appeared as a
keynote,
panelist or guest speaker at such venues as the DoD Spouse Employment
Conference, the National Association of Realtors© National
Convention, the US Dept.
of Labor Workforce Innovations Conference, and the United Nations, and
before
several Presidential committees on the employment of people with
disabilities.
In charge of
Staffcentrix’
New England office, Chris continues to make her home in rural Woodstock,
CT.
-
Mike’s
"Professional" Bio -
 Raised
in a log cabin in
rural Virginia,
Mike went on to become an attorney with a leading Wall Street firm,
practicing corporate
and securities law in the 1980s. (“He has also witnessed the
destructive
effects of the ‘rat race’ firsthand,”
Chris Durst adds. “He’s seen his
rural
homeland of Loudoun County
change from
hundreds of years of agriculture and a steady population of 20,000 into
a
gridlocked mess of tract houses, malls, and 200,000 commuters.
There’s
not a
single dairy farm left.”)
Mike
has a diverse
international and family background. An Army vet (1968-69), he has many
Marines
in his family, including his mother(!), his grandfather, several uncles
and
cousins, and his great-grandfather, who was the Corps’
Fifteenth
Commandant.
After a teaching sojourn in Milan, Mike resided for seven years in
Paris, where
he consulted to such French firms as Dassault Aviation and Credit
Lyonnais (and
published short stories and worked on a novel), and lectured at the
University
of Paris.
A
“rebellious and dismal”
high school student, on his discharge from the Army Mike
persuaded Virginia
Commonwealth
University
to take a chance on him as a freshman, and he did so well that he later
transferred to Georgetown University,
graduating summa cum laude and Phi
Beta Kappa. He
earned his law degree at the University of Virginia,
and practiced
with the Wall Street firm of Rogers & Wells.
Returning
from France
in the
early 1990s, Mike became
an
independent corporate growth advisor in Northern
Virginia,
and co-founded Staffcentrix with Chris in 1999. He has since advised,
trained
and mentored hundreds of successful self-employed “trailing
spouses”
and other
microentrepreneurs internationally, and from its launch in 2004 has
been the
editor-in-chief of Staffcentrix’ popular weekly lifestyle and
telework
bulletin, the “Rat Race Rebellion,” which served as
one of the primary
“conceptual
kernels” for this website.
Often
featured in the
media,
including BusinessWeek, Fortune, Inc.
Magazine, and the Wall
Street Journal, and on numerous radio programs, Mike has also
presented at
such venues as the UN and several Presidential employment committees
for people
with disabilities, and to various SBA, DoD and DoL roundtables and
working
groups on virtual entrepreneurship and related issues. He is co-author
of
numerous articles on virtual careers and
“de-rat-racing” your
lifestyle, as
well as the popular “how-to” for Virtual Assistants
and other
freelancers, The 2-Second Commute
(Career Press,
2005).
A
nominee for Ernst &
Young's prestigious Entrepreneur of the Year Award,
Mike has two children, Travis (a Clear Channel Communications
executive) and
Jazz, and is an active member of the PTA. He reads to Jazz’s
elementary
school
class as “Mr. Mike,” chaperones on class trips, and
makes his home in Northern Virginia.
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