The Support Behind Better-Run Practices.

Brenda is the founder of Howe Virtual Ltd. and an Administrative Operations Consultant with more than 20 years of administrative experience across healthcare, legal, clinical, disability services, and professional service environments. Her career has taken several different paths, but there has always been a common thread: helping people, solving problems, and creating order when things become complicated.

A Career That Started With Healthcare

From a young age, Brenda wanted to be a nurse. She was naturally drawn to work that involved caring for people and making a practical difference in their lives. Although her career ultimately developed in a different direction, that early interest in healthcare became an important foundation for much of the work she would later do.

Brenda worked as a Nursing Assistant in hospital and clinical settings, gaining firsthand experience with patient care and the realities of working within healthcare environments. She later trained and worked as a Medical Office Assistant, which provided experience on both the clinical and administrative sides of healthcare.

Together, these roles gave her an understanding of healthcare that extends beyond office administration. She understands that behind every appointment, chart, referral, insurance claim, or administrative task is a person—and that good administration can have a meaningful impact on both the client experience and the professionals providing their care.

Supporting People With Disabilities

Brenda's experience also extends into community and disability services. As a Community Services Disability Practitioner, she worked directly with people with disabilities in both home and facility-based settings.

This work strengthened her understanding of person-centred support, dignity, accessibility, advocacy, communication, and adaptability. It also reinforced something that continues to influence her approach today: systems should adapt to people rather than expecting every person to adapt to the system.

Building a Broad Administrative Foundation

Over the course of more than two decades, Brenda's career increasingly moved toward administration and operations.

In 2021, she earned her Legal Assistant Certificate, adding legal administration, documentation, research, confidentiality, and detailed file management to her professional background.

For more than five years, Brenda has worked as a Virtual Administrative Assistant, supporting organizations remotely while developing increasingly specialized expertise in administrative operations. What began as virtual administrative support has evolved into comprehensive operational consulting, particularly within healthcare and mental health practices.

Her experience includes patient and client administration, appointment and intake processes, billing and insurance administration, provider onboarding and offboarding, EMR/EHR and practice-management systems, records and referral coordination, workflow development, administrative correspondence, documentation, training, policy and SOP development, reconciliation, and operational problem-solving.

Discovering Neurodiversity Later in Life

Brenda is also neurodiverse, although this was something she did not discover about herself until her late 30s.

At the time, Brenda had returned to school to complete academic upgrading with the possibility of pursuing another helping profession—Social Work. During that process, she began to better understand the way she learns, processes information, organizes thoughts, and approaches problems.

Discovering her neurodiversity later in life provided a new perspective on experiences that had followed her through school, work, and adulthood. Things that may once have simply seemed like a different way of thinking began to make considerably more sense.

Rather than changing who she was, that understanding gave Brenda better language for something that had always been there.

Today, it is also part of what makes her particularly effective at operational work. Brenda naturally notices patterns, inconsistencies, missing information, inefficiencies, and connections between processes. Where someone may see a collection of individual administrative tasks, she tends to see the larger system—and how changing one piece can create consequences elsewhere.

Her own experience of discovering neurodiversity later in life, combined with years spent supporting people with disabilities, has also influenced how she thinks about workplace systems. She understands firsthand that people do not all learn, communicate, organize, or process information in the same way.

As a result, she values administrative systems that are clear, accessible, adaptable, practical, and designed around the people who actually use them.

Her philosophy is simple:

Administration should make work easier, not create more work.

Brenda particularly enjoys taking something that has become complicated, scattered, inefficient, or overwhelming and turning it into a structured process with clear expectations and practical workflows. She has a knack for identifying the seemingly small administrative gaps that can eventually become much larger operational problems.

Professional Standards

Brenda believes virtual administrative support should carry the same expectations for professionalism, confidentiality, accountability, and continuing development as any other professional service.

She is a member of the Canadian Association of Virtual Assistants (CAVA) and the International Association of Administrative Professionals (IAAP).

Howe Virtual Ltd. is also insured, providing an additional level of professional accountability and protection for both the business and the organizations Brenda supports.

Rooted in Alberta

While technology allows Brenda to work virtually, the philosophy behind Howe Virtual is firmly grounded in her Alberta ranching roots and family history.

Hard work, resourcefulness, resilience, accountability, and doing a job properly are values that have been passed through generations of her family and continue to influence the way she works today.

Technology may have changed how administrative support is delivered, but Brenda believes reliability, common sense, integrity, and a strong work ethic never go out of style.

Outside of her professional work, she has a deep interest in Alberta and family history, genealogy, historical research, and writing. Preserving the stories of her family's ranching history has strengthened her appreciation for where people come from, what they build, and what they leave behind.

The little girl who once imagined becoming a nurse ultimately followed a different path. Years later, even her consideration of Social Work reflected the same instinct that had been there from the beginning—a desire to help people.

She eventually discovered that helping people didn't necessarily require being the person providing their direct care.

Sometimes it means making sure the people who do provide that care have strong systems behind them.

Through Howe Virtual Ltd., Brenda brings together more than 20 years of experience in administration, healthcare, disability services, legal administration, and virtual operations to help organizations strengthen their administrative foundations and build systems that work in the real world.

Different path. Same backbone.