How TimeSaver grew from virtual assistance to marketing strategy
Gabriella Tímea Sinka is the founder of TimeSaver, a consultancy helping small and mid-sized businesses with marketing, SEO and AI search visibility. The conversation traces the business’s shift from virtual assistance to strategy, how referrals brought in customers, and why Sinka recommends building visibility on channels a business owns.
Build a clear, useful website that answers customers’ real questions, and make sure inquiries can reach you. Chasing every new platform matters less than creating visibility on channels your business controls.
What’s the short story of how your business started, and what makes it genuinely different from the other options your customers have?
I started TimeSaver as a virtual assistance service: taking the repetitive work off busy owners’ plates. Over the years clients kept asking the bigger question: “why aren’t customers finding us?” So the business grew from doing tasks to building strategy, and today it’s a marketing, SEO and AI-visibility consultancy for small and mid-sized businesses. What makes us different: strategy, execution and measurement stay in one hand, for companies that have no in-house marketing team. And I explain everything without jargon. Owners don’t get a 40-page technical report, they get a clear list of what to fix, in what order, and what kind of specialist they need for it.
How did you win your first customers, and where does most of your new business come from today?
Step by step, through referrals. My first clients came from people who had worked with me or seen my work up close, and each one passed my name on to the next. I didn’t run ads or do cold outreach in the beginning. I focused on doing the job so well that clients wanted to recommend me. To this day referrals bring in a large share of my new business, and I think that’s the most honest test of quality: someone puts their own name on the line when they recommend you.
What’s one decision that changed the direction of your business, and one mistake that taught you the most?
The decision: in early 2025 I started building my clients’ visibility for AI search, before there was any reliable way to measure it. We documented the first results with dated screenshots. For a luxury real estate client, that work became part of a strategy that won two Marketing Diamond Awards, and today AI citations can be measured properly. The mistake: my own contact form showed “message sent” while the notification emails silently never arrived. A real inquiry sat unseen for about a month. Now I test every form end to end, on my site and my clients’ sites, and I check the submissions log, not just the inbox.
What has changed in your industry or in what your customers expect over the last couple of years, and how have you adapted?
Search is splitting in two. People still google, but more and more they ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google’s AI answers first, and those systems quote sources instead of listing links. At the same time social platforms keep tightening the rules: Meta now limits business pages to two free external links a month in Hungary. I adapted by shifting the focus to owned visibility: websites that answer real customer questions clearly, structured so both Google and AI systems can quote them, and measuring AI citations alongside classic traffic.
If you were advising someone starting out in your industry today, what would you tell them to do first, and what would you tell them to ignore?
Do first: build on land you own. Get your website clear, fast and honest, write answers to the questions your customers actually ask, and keep your business details consistent everywhere. Ignore: chasing every new platform and every viral trick. Follower counts and the latest hack feel like progress, but if they don’t lead people back to something you own, you’re building on rented land.
Thank you to Gabriella Tímea Sinka and the team at TimeSaver for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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