Bob was being a virtual assistant.
So I actually appreciate a lot.
Nice.
What it is and because of that,
it helped me grow so much
and just having that experience
or that person that became an actual mentor.
To me, that's something that's...
They did it right.
That's awesome, man.
They did it right.
A lot of times people don't
and it's so important to do that.
So yeah, how about...
All right.
Welcome in to Vision Pros Live.
With Jackson Callum, I'm your show host.
We'll be doing interviews
for visionary entrepreneurs and guests,
guest leaders who are building fantastic visions out there.
Ultimately, I just wanna go through some of the things
that might help you with your vision.
So if you have a vision that you're pursuing,
drop a link in the comments
and let us know what that is.
If that's a business or a brand,
if it's a nonprofit that you run,
be happy to promote it, be happy to talk to you about it.
And if you'd like to apply to be on Vision Pros
and be interviewed about that vision,
by all means, feel free to reach out.
Hey, hey, hey visionaries
and welcome to Vision Pros Live.
I'm your host, Jackson Callum,
founder of First Class Business Co-Founder,
Available Health CEO of Podbooker,
and we're gonna be talking about
the art of hiring virtual assistants
and how to maximize your dollar
by hiring outstanding VAs.
There's several secrets that I'd like to share with you today.
Some of them will, for some of you, seem like common sense,
but others just haven't had the opportunity to do it.
Plus, there's a lot of misunderstandings
about what a virtual assistant is,
what they're capable of doing, where they have to live,
what's the difference between a virtual assistant
and an employee versus a contractor?
There's a lot to learn about the process.
And if you go about learning about it the right way,
then it can be a very valuable, fantastic experience.
So if you're in the process of trying to find
virtual assistants right now
and trying to hire virtual assistants,
then I'm gonna work on sharing some things
that will help speed up the process,
speed up the effectiveness of what it is you're hiring for,
by actually asking you to take a step back probably
and consider, are you ready to hire the virtual assistant?
Do you have the systems in place
in order to make their life and their role effective,
or have you made assumptions
about what they're capable of doing?
That is one of the biggest mistakes
that I see entrepreneurs make,
is they assume that somebody else is going to be able to do
whatever they're doing
because of something called the curse of knowledge.
What is the curse of knowledge?
I wish I had a water bottle with me.
The curse of knowledge is once you know how to do something,
you assume that everybody else knows
how to do that exact same thing.
And so you have this attitude of condescension.
And so when you hire a virtual assistant,
you assume, oh, well, they'll be able to write emails for me,
or they'll know how to make the phone calls,
or they'll know how to use Gmail.
No, that's not necessarily the case.
And so you have to have a humility about you
in order to train a virtual assistant and employee
or an independent contractor on how to succeed.
And again, there's ways to make sure
that you map that out in advance
so that you save yourself the hassle
of having to let somebody go,
or feeling like somebody took advantage of you,
or getting to a point where you've now got somebody on payroll,
but they're not effective at what they're doing,
it's better to get those systems lined up first.
So if you have any of your own insight
that I don't happen to catch on this show,
by all means, feel free to post it in the comments.
There are so many different elements
that need to be in place
in order to make sure that your business is successful
with any type of person that you hire.
So without further ado,
let's dive into one of the main questions.
What is a virtual assistant
according to Jackson at First Class Business?
Well, a virtual assistant is synonymous
with an employee and a contractor.
It's just somebody that you hire to assist you
with virtual means of doing business.
So if you've got a social media page to manage,
or you wanna be able to somebody to sort your emails
because you get hit by 100 emails per day,
and you wanna filter some of those out,
that's something that a virtual assistant
could potentially do.
Web developers, technically,
those contractors are all virtual assistants.
They're assisting with work that's done in the virtual world.
Now, a lot of business owners,
especially smaller local business owners,
will say, I only wanna deal locally,
and that's fine.
But if you really pull away the titles,
virtual assistant, employee, independent contractor,
business owner, there's one shared factor in common.
And that's that we're all human beings, right?
So really, for me, it doesn't matter
if the person has the job and they live in Texas,
or they happen to live in Peru or somewhere else, right?
I'm looking for the person
who's going to serve my clients best.
And I'm not going to put any type of prejudice, right?
Or pre-considered thought in terms of like,
oh, I'm not gonna work with them
because they're in this country or in this time zone,
I'm gonna look at who can provide the value that we need,
right?
And the value that my prospects or my clients need,
who's got the best capability of doing that?
And I will say that time zone is one
of the most important aspects for that
when it comes to managing virtual assistant relationships.
So whether the virtual assistant is in the Philippines,
India, Pakistan, another country on the,
or is that the eastern side of the world,
or they're in Central or South America or Mexico,
there are so many opportunities
that can be very overwhelming.
There's also different programs you can use to highlight,
to hire them, such as the more common ones being Upwork,
Upwork or Fiverr, and that's with two Rs.
Another common place to hire virtual assistants
is remote.co.
And that's specifically a great one
for if you're looking for people
in Central, South America or Mexico.
And I really, really like working with people
on my own time zone.
It just makes things a lot easier to move forward.
I also speak Spanish fluently.
So while I know that a lot of people in Pakistan
and especially in India and the Philippines,
they speak English as their predominant language,
there's still cultural barriers to what you can understand
and how you understand each other,
whether it's because you don't understand sports
or you have different holidays that you appreciate,
the depth goes far and wide.
You take a New Yorker and a Texan and put them together,
you're going to run into communication issues,
even though our dialects of English are far more similar
than my dialect is with those who live in India.
So you wanna be patient on that process too,
as you understand, well, same thing is true in Spanish,
there are a little bit of hiccups there
where my Peruvian team members
and Colombian team members, Mexico team members,
they all speak slightly different,
but there's still a bond that exists
because of the depth of language
that we all understand with each other.
And I can't stress enough how important it is
to also build that relationship,
just because they're virtual,
doesn't mean they don't value relationships, right?
I often refer to virtual assistants.
When I see it done wrong,
I call it virtual abuse, right?
When you're putting somebody into a job
and you treat them like a pair of shoes
that you bought at Payless,
that's not a, you treat it like a transaction.
And instead of worrying about who they are as a person
and caring about them,
if you treat it like a transaction,
your relationship's not going to go very far
and they're probably not gonna do a great job
of representing you or building your brand.
So it's very important that you begin
the process of scaling and the process of hiring,
thinking about how do I care about this person?
Because my favorite quote,
"'People don't care how much you know
"'about your own business, about your own life,
"'or anything else, until they know how much you care.'"
Right, so while that person might want to paycheck from you,
just because they want to paycheck
doesn't mean they're ready to provide extreme value
for you and your customers, right?
You have to first care about them as an individual.
And when you care about them and show them
that they matter to your operation,
that they matter, like what they're going to do matters,
then they show up with a whole lot more appreciation
for the work that you've provided.
So what are the key advantages
of hiring virtual assistants for businesses
looking to scale their growth?
One of the greatest advantages
when it comes to hiring a virtual assistant is,
let's just be frank, the pay,
the amount that you are committed to paying
to an individual who has a much different economy
that they face than we face in the United States.
In the United States, you also have to worry a whole lot more
about wage claims and worker compensations
and lawsuits and things like that.
When you're working with virtual assistants,
you don't have that level of threat that you're facing
and allows you to show up with a lot less hesitation
in the relationship.
I feel that it empowers me to have a safer relationship
with those that I work with.
Granted, it does give me more control in the equation.
And if you think about the word control
and you think about the word power,
I think about what is his name, Uncle Ben,
in Spider-Man, where he says,
with great power comes great responsibility.
And I feel very responsible to provide a great path
for my team members to level up.
So if you got here thinking, oh man,
he's going to teach me all the secrets
to just hiring VA's fast and taking advantage of the market
and all that, no, we're actually going to do the opposite.
We're going to talk about how to bless the market
and how to create a mutually beneficial,
healthy relationship with that virtual assistant
who is there to assist you in serving those you're supposed
to be caring for most, right?
The people that your clients,
which empowers you to then raise your income
and raise your ability to be there for those who you probably
love the most, your family members, your friends,
those who you want to spend your off hours with.
So when it comes to key advantages,
yeah, that pays a big factor on that.
For instance, let's look at what you can hire
a virtual assistant for, like what type of price range,
then we might get into some of the activities
you might hire somebody for,
such as lead generation, setting appointments,
managing email, et cetera.
Well, if I want good quality work out of India,
I'm probably going to pay close to $20 to $30 an hour
for a lot of the types of things that I want to hire for,
whether that's design work or web development,
search engine optimization, Facebook ads management,
again, some type of marketing component
or operations component,
that's more or less what I'm going to find
on sites like Upwork and even Fiverr.
I know Fiverr's got the $5 claim,
but as a business owner, you get in there,
you purchase a service for $5 you're about to,
and you realize all the things you really need
are baked into the upgraded packages.
And so if you're at a business owner,
if you're a business owner that's scaling,
you're going to be paying quite a bit more money
than what you see on the site when you first look at it.
Now, on the Philippine side, same thing,
you're going to see a cost per hour of between $20
and $30 an hour.
Now, again, you can find people who are at far less
of a cost, you know, I'm talking $5 an hour, $3 an hour.
My first virtual assistant that I hired
was $3 and 33 cents an hour,
and he was based out of India.
And so if you are hiring people at a much lower cost,
then just know that you're taking a far greater risk
as well, that's something to consider, right?
The less you pay somebody,
the more likely they are to leave,
the more likely they are to be disgruntled
with the situation, the more likely they're going to,
and they might even have agreed to it.
I don't know about you,
but if you've ever agreed to provide a service
to somebody that you then regret later
and are like, oh man, I shouldn't have done that,
it leaves you in a situation
where that relationship can become hostile and toxic.
And sometimes, you know,
you are the greater contributing factor to that,
but in all reality, doesn't it take two to tango?
Right, aren't there two people involved in the process?
So as a business owner, you have a responsibility
to think through, okay, did I put somebody in a position
to where they want to take advantage of my business?
Right, did I put somebody in a position
where they do not trust me,
and do they not think,
they don't think that I have their best interest in mind?
So again, it's so important to build your relationship
with virtual assistants,
no matter where on the planet they're from,
even if they agree that they'll work different hours
and they'll be just fine,
like if you don't have that relationship,
then I can almost guarantee you,
they're not gonna show up the same way for the work
and the job, the same dedication
that a team member would who knows
that you have their best interest at heart,
you know who they are, you know when their birthday is,
and you care about the successes that they have in life.
It's amazing what people will do
when they know that you have their back.
So when you look at Central and South America,
where I typically hire out of,
the wage discrepancy goes down another level.
My ex sister-in-law, for instance,
she worked for Walmart and for Sam's Club,
and working at both of those entities,
I mean, those are great brands,
especially in Central or South America, right?
They really are, it's amazing that they're there.
You can go and get a job there
and choose a data analyst,
or I'm sorry, a data entry specialist,
and she made $1.33 an hour,
a $1.33, can you imagine making that?
You know, so you make $1.33 an hour
at one of the top companies to work for in the country.
I say one of, I take the top 1,000 companies probably,
but unless you're working for Samsung or,
I don't know, Exxon, I don't know what else exists
down there, but that is mind blowing
that one of the best jobs there only provides
a salary of $1.33 an hour.
And by the way, the more security an individual has
in their workplace, the less the workplace has to pay, right?
So when you've got so many people who want to work
at your establishment, you don't have to pay a whole lot.
So there's all these individuals out there
who would love to have that type of a job,
and you could get them hired as a virtual assistant
making $3, $4, $5 an hour,
and two, three Exx there, livelihood,
while earning somebody who's got a phenomenal skillset
to be able to help you.
And again, you still have to know,
how do I bring that person on board?
How do I train them?
How do I recognize people who are going to be consistent
and reliable?
What am I gonna do if they don't have the tools?
They don't have the right internet speed, for instance,
or they don't have the right computer.
Well, is it worth investing and getting them the right camera
and helping them buy them on Amazon
or the right microphone or the right laptop
or investing in the right virtual office?
They have those down there too,
where they can go and work.
There's so many things that we can do
to solve the problem of empowering the rest of the world
to increase their ability to provide professional services
to those of us who are fortunate to live
in a first world country.
So there's again, there's a lot of advantages there.
Let's keep going to the next question.
So what specific, and if you, again,
if you think of an advantage on your end,
you know, we'd love to hear it and feel free to again,
provide your own answers on this,
provide your own questions too.
If you're considering the idea of bringing on
a virtual assistant, what are you considering
bringing them on for?
You know, what are some of the types of tasks
that you might want them to achieve?
Most entrepreneurs I know of really only thought through
some of the web development stuff,
some of the data entry aspects,
and some of the lead generation tactics that exist out there.
I can tell you right now, that's one of the worst things.
You can bring a virtual assistant on for.
There's so much training that they need to go through
in order to connect you with another human being
and do that on your behalf.
You know, the people, leaders in the world,
you know, famous actors, presidents of countries,
et cetera, that have somebody right speech
or coach them on what they're doing,
they don't hire some random virtual assistant
to do that for them.
They hire somebody with extreme accolades
and fantastic communication skills
that probably communicates in their own language,
the language they want to communicate in,
better than that leader is able to do.
So if you're trying to outsource your voice
to a virtual assistant with virtually no training,
you are doing what a lot of people are doing out there,
but I see 96% of people failing in business.
So why are you following the trend?
You know, that's a very dangerous game to do.
So what specific qualities or skills
should businesses look for when hiring virtual assistants?
I'll share with you.
In fact, I'll go to my screen.
Hi, May, do you mind pulling up some of the,
probably one of the presentations,
the new client presentations,
where we showcase when we're hiring,
what do we look for in team members?
There's several different images
that I'd like for you guys to see,
but I'll start with the virtues while he's pulling it up.
So one, we build on a foundation of love.
I mean, is that the people that I'm interviewing,
I gotta have a way to detect
that they also care about love in their life.
I know that sounds kind of silly, but it really doesn't
because there's the ability to receive love,
but there's also the ability to provide and give love.
And if they don't know how to provide and give love,
then it's probably not a good idea
that they represent our brand.
Now, the four pillars are persistence, patience,
reliability and consistency.
And not necessarily in any given order,
but there are easier ways to test somebody's patience.
It's easier to test patients
than it is to test somebody's reliability.
Reliability and consistency tend to take place over time.
Oh man, that looks freaking awesome.
This is the latest design, I haven't even seen it yet.
So this is something that Gabriela
has been building with me to get this dynamic showcase of
what we do to help businesses with growth.
Oh my gosh, that's exciting.
So we're gonna shift gears though
over to the pillars of team building.
So here they are.
So number one, how can I test to see if somebody's patient?
So there's lots of ways you can do this.
One of the ways I used to do this, I don't now,
but one of the ways I used to do this is
for our interviews, for our sales team,
we would literally on purpose miss the first interview.
And I know people are like,
well, I would never work for a company like that.
That's the point.
We don't want you.
If you're not willing to be patient with brands,
you're gonna have to be patient with prospects all the time.
People who know shows.
Some people call it ghosting.
That's a very victim word, by the way.
If you feel like people ghost you,
you're more worried about yourself
than you are about the person you're serving.
So you might heat check yourself
and pull that from your vocabulary.
So there's that patience aspect.
It's a virtue.
We need to be patient, but the other virtue
that goes hand in hand with that,
which is kind of the opposite, is persistent.
So if somebody, how can I be patient and persistent?
Well, if I wanna work for a company,
and this company's got a lot of things in their plate,
and I'm one of a million people
that's in the process of possibly being hired,
then I gotta be persistent enough to reach out
and say, hey, I hope you're doing well.
I hope everything's okay.
Could we get back on track with our interview?
Later this afternoon, I can do it four,
but I've got another interview at 5 p.m.,
so I could also do tomorrow at this time.
And this is, by the way, a great interview strategy
for looking for a job, because what I've done
is I've planted a seed that I also am valuable on the market,
and there's other places I might work,
and I'm probably one of the few people
who decided to persistently reach back out
and say, hey, you know what,
I really do wanna work with your company,
and this means a lot to me.
Now, what I'm not doing is I'm not giving them
full control over my life, and saying, hey,
I'm gonna work for you no matter what,
I'm gonna bend over backwards and do everything you say,
that's also not healthy, there's a balance there.
But patience and persistence are two virtues
that are incredibly important,
and we do have other ways where we test that.
Part of it is making sure that we have multiple interviews
in the process, and we usually have at least three interviews
in the process of moving somebody forward in our pipeline.
If you're familiar with executive roles,
then you know that that's something that's super necessary.
Go back and watch the good old funny movie,
What About Bob?
And in What About Bob, you'll see that the interviews
that the psychiatric guy, I don't know, psychiatrist had,
they actually came to his house,
wanted to get to his family before they did
whatever interview they were doing.
That's not an uncommon process,
it's a very common process.
The higher you get up on the totem pole
of working in America or corporate America rather,
and moving into positions of leadership,
the more intense the interview process has become.
It's not the same as being accepted to work
at a snow cone stand, or trying to get involved
at some entrance brokerage,
where they'll pretty much take anybody
who's willing, who's able to pass
whatever criminal background check that they're doing.
So patience and persistence, very important keys
to test for with your virtual assistants.
Consistency and reliability,
how do you gauge for somebody
who's consistent and reliable?
Well, you can't do that perfectly upfront.
What you can look at is, did they show up
for the meeting on time?
If they didn't, how do they handle that?
Are they overly apologetic
and they seem kind of superficial?
Or do they seem on point?
You can send them the interview information,
but maybe send the Zoom link after the fact, right?
To find out, are they diligent and do they come in,
stressed and overwhelmed,
or do they come in, prepared and centered?
Right, that also has a lot to do with reliability.
People who are solution oriented, not problem oriented,
they'll find a solution to those problems, right?
Whether that's reaching out,
trying to find you on Facebook or on Skype,
there's a lot of things that we can do
as solution seekers to connect with somebody
that may or may not have missed an appointment
or experienced a hiccup and a hiring process.
It's very important to assess how do your virtual assistants
handle those types of scenarios
because it will help you know
if they are starting from scratch
or if they're tier one, tier two, tier three,
there's all sorts of different levels you can put on that,
but ultimately your high end virtual assistants,
they're gonna walk circles
around other types of virtual assistants
because they're prepared for engagements like that.
They understand that it's a fight to get the job.
I have to show up and present myself as a very strong worker
in order to influence this hire,
you know, this company that I'm working with.
So let's go on and go to the next one, Jaime.
We'll continue to look at these qualities and these skillsets.
So the next slide in this sequence talks about
the management game plan.
You yourself have to be able to manage a team, right?
And this is one of the easiest concepts.
This comes from a book called
The One-Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard.
He's a phenomenal teacher.
And ultimately the success of the One-Minute Manager plan
is built on establishing clear goals,
being accountable for the goals that you've established,
right, and holding your team accountable for them.
And it comprises both healthy praises and healthy reprimands.
One request, Jaime, if you can make a note,
I want to flip the order of that on this slide
because praise is really where you start.
When you have somebody who joins a company,
there's really no reason to provide any reprimands,
you know, until the relationship gets to a point
where somebody has refused to do the work
or they've had an attitude problem.
And so when you study books like this,
you know, The One-Minute Manager,
and then you dedicate like we have, you know,
this, we've designed our own view of how this process
and workflow works, it allows you to be more centered
as a leader and helping people level up.
The point is not to crush people.
The point is to help them know what's acceptable
in the job environment, what's not, how to improve,
and go back to re-establishing the goal
or recommitting to the goal however is necessary.
And if they win, celebrate with them, you know,
like that's a big one, you know, you've got to be willing
to celebrate with these virtual assistants.
So those are some of the qualities again,
some of the skill sets that you should develop
on your end, the virtual assistant,
if they're managing something like an email marketing campaign,
then, you know, they're gonna need to send you
some proof of that.
And if you just take somebody's word for their proof,
I'm so sorry, you're gonna get taken advantage
of on occasion in life, you do have to be a wise steward
of what you do.
So keep in mind, they can go find any case study
on the internet, adjust and change and manipulate it
to look like it's work that they've done, by the way,
employees do this too, you know, even people who look,
you face to the face, shake your hand,
they do the same types of things.
You've got to have the discipline to know how to,
and what it's, what was called in school was
comprehensive reading, right?
The better comprehensive reader you were,
the more likely you're going to be great at hiring.
If you were not good at comprehensive reading,
it's very important to work with somebody who is,
who can catch the little details that are overlooked
and often consider nuances and annoying,
but they're really the critical components
that help you understand the character,
the mindset, the strategy,
and the way somebody presents themselves.
So what you wanna do is on the beginning,
you wanna provide some type of assessment or test
that they have to pass, they have to do something
in order to prove that, and by the way,
if you want the secrets, like the full on secrets
of how we utilize this, go to firstclassbusiness.io.
We got a big old button, this is join our team,
and go look at our pages for what we're hiring for,
and go through the process, like submit an application,
submit a fake one, er, all right,
you submit a fake application, that's fine,
it's not gonna waste their time, we'll see it,
we'll let it go by, and then you'll be able to see,
okay, now that I've applied,
what's the next step it's asking me to go through?
Well, if we're asking for those steps,
it's because we're modeling companies like Home Depot,
and Disney, and Google, and others who are doing
the same thing, your business should probably be setting up
the same type of funnel and ecosystem
to attract who you want to work for you.
If you were to go through our sales process,
you'd see that we actually have ourselves people
do two different types of loom videos,
that's just a recording video,
kind of like the software you're seeing me on now,
and they have to present themselves in video fashion, right,
and the next level is they have to sell our services
in video form without having a prospect in front of them,
it's not a role play that's live with somebody to help,
you have to pretend to sell to somebody,
it's one of the most genius things I'd ever seen,
and I saw it over at Flow Research Collective,
and I was like, wow, that was a brilliant move,
that was back when they were hiring me
to come on and represent their company,
I had to do that, I had to sell to the camera,
and imagine what would the questions be like,
the prospect would ask me as I was doing that,
it was super awesome, I was like,
wow, that's elite level sales training experience right there,
and they were able to learn a lot about me in the process,
I recommend that everybody who's hiring for sales
has a similar process in place,
because what's also gonna happen
is your less diligent workers,
those who don't really want it, they're gonna disappear,
they're gonna go away,
they don't want to go through that process,
so secrets and strategies for finding
and attracting top-notch virtual assistants,
one of the greatest obvious secrets in this is,
be an attractive company, right, build your team,
care about your team, you know,
your team's gonna be a reflection of the environment
that that person's gonna be coming into, right,
and so you don't want them coming into,
I think of that movie, Matilda, right,
the school she goes to, and there's that awful principle,
and all the kids feel like they're in jail,
if that's the feeling that that's the person gets
when they're coming into your work environment,
how's that gonna go?
How inspired are they gonna feel to perform super well,
they might perform because they're scared,
but I find that people who perform based on love
and desire to build to do a lot better jobs,
so when people come in and they're able to get to know
what you stand for and who's working for your company,
and they see you posting about people's birthdays
or their anniversaries and things like that,
it allows people to feel safe, and when people feel safe,
like I said, they tend to unlock a new level of performance
that they wouldn't have otherwise,
so finding and attracting, encouraging team members
to bring other team members on,
I'm not encouraging nepotism,
that's different, right,
but can you have family members work in the same company?
Absolutely, and can they even manage with each other?
I mean, I guess you can go down the nepotism path
a little bit, there's plenty of good companies out there
who have familial relationships running things,
but I'm talking about inspiring people
who they used to work with at past companies too,
or inviting people into, like we have a Facebook group
called Operatelinais de Trabajo, part of Latinos,
and what that is, opportunities for work for Latinos,
and it's absolutely free, we bring people into that,
they then go through the process of,
they either exist in there, don't do anything,
which is fine, or they go through,
they start asking questions and getting involved
in English learning classes that are free,
or they want help on their resume,
or they want to learn about job interviews,
all of them are constantly pre-qualifying
for working with our brand or our clients' brands,
they're all going through the nurture process
of building up their skill sets,
in order to qualify to work with us and others.
So it's a really cool pool of individuals
that ultimately will allow first-class business
as we get ready to launch that,
to diversify our own income,
and ultimately provide that pool of networking
as a recruiting agency, so to speak, for others,
be a virtual agency for businesses who want to hire,
and I've worked with a lot of great virtual agencies,
I can't remember the names,
so one of the questions on here was what entities,
the safest ones, again, remote.co, Upwork, and Fiverr,
those are the three that I'd recommend
getting your feet wet with and learning about,
and if you want some advice from us, of course,
we're happy to give further advice,
so that attracting component,
you have to be attractive to, attract, finding,
again, encourage your team members to spread the word,
and make sure that you have pages like we also shared,
go to first-class business, you gotta join our team,
you'll see the most common positions that we're hiring for,
and we can promote those on LinkedIn,
we can post about those out there and say,
hey, we're looking for more alignment specialists,
or hey, we're looking for more web developers and designers.
Another key factor is you don't have to hire right away,
right, when I went to Lifetime Fitness,
I was hired right away because I'm tenacious,
and I'm like persistent as a, yes,
but most of the people who were hired,
I asked them, how long did it take you to get hired?
Most people, it took six months
before they got a callback to get work,
and I was like, oh man,
I would have had like five jobs by then,
or 50 job offers by then if I just stayed in that process
because of my nature being so persistent,
but the reality is, you're not doing somebody a disservice
by giving them an opportunity, saying, hey, you know what,
we really appreciate talking to you,
this is not the time for us,
but you mind if we reach back out in the future,
if we have anything, if we have anything come up,
you want to have supply and demand in your favor
as a business, especially in terms of hiring,
what if something happens to one of your coworkers
who does something imperative for the company?
You know, what if you have somebody who wants to just go
on vacation for two weeks, right,
and you've got somebody on deck who you trust
to fill in some of those gaps perhaps,
and maybe you do only hire them
for the contracted work for those two weeks, right,
and that's okay, you've got to realize
that you can't give more than you have to give,
but that even giving a little bit can be a blessing
just because somebody else is like,
no, how rude and disrespectful,
I don't want to work for you part, well, you know,
I get that, especially again,
I'm going to pick on my own country,
in America, a lot of people have that attitude,
you know, where it's like, you know what,
I better not even try to hire from this pool
because people are so rude sometimes
when things don't go their way, I'll be honest,
you entrepreneurs out there,
you have a very, very hard uphill battle
if you're limited to only working with people
who are local, your pool of performance is much smaller,
you don't have access to billions,
you have access to more like thousands
or hundreds of people, so that said,
it's also important as an American employee, right,
somebody who wants to be on a team
and doesn't want to create their own vision,
we have to have the disciplines
to be willing to be humble enough to get the job, right,
and I can speak from experience on that,
yes, I'm an entrepreneur,
but I have to attract my clients as do my team members,
we are constantly in the position of being hired,
you know, and being in the interview process,
and if I can't show them that I'm willing to go to work
and then I'm willing to do what others aren't willing
to do, then we also won't win our clients,
so some entrepreneurs face the reality
of constantly being in the job market
based on what it is we do for work,
so any thoughts or comments,
I'm gonna slow down a little bit
for another opportunity for you guys to contribute,
you know, if this is helpful,
give us a thumbs up or a like as well,
I mean, if you've got challenging questions
that you're facing in terms of growth
or you're looking for a connection
to somebody with a specific skill set,
don't hesitate to ask, right,
I'm a big fan of the scripture that says,
ask and you shall receive, right,
knock and shall be open to you,
well, that doesn't just apply to God,
that applies to everybody, right,
if you're willing to ask others for help,
it's amazing what type of help you can get,
so don't hesitate, again, in the comments,
to take me down a different direction
for what you might wanna hear
about maximizing your dollar
by hiring outstanding virtual assistants
and what secrets you want me to unveil,
I'm just gonna keep going though,
based on the secrets I have discovered
from my years of experience
and hiring virtual assistants
and working with different companies for growth,
so what are some of the best practices
or tools for maintaining effective
and efficient communication?
One thing I would adjust,
what are the hundreds of best practices?
Let's not mince words here,
you have a lot to learn
when you're bringing somebody on and hiring
and so some of the best practices are knowing,
who do you trust for that guidance?
So one, the books that I wish I had read
in this particular order
and I regret not reading some of them,
I wish I had read,
well, I read Rich Dad at Port Ad early on,
that was a phenomenal important book for me,
One Minute Manager, easy book to consume,
super valuable, raving fans,
also by Kim Blanchard,
those are stepping stones
that would unlock secrets for you,
moving on to the EMIF.
The EMIF is like one of the biggest books
that I'm so disappointed in myself
for not reading eight years ago
when it first came across my desk,
it would have saved me so much hassle,
I highly recommend learning about the EMIF
and why?
Because he talks about prototyping,
he talks about building out the descriptions
of the tasks that you don't wanna do
or that you need somebody else to do
so that it's pretty easy for anybody to come in
and fulfill those roles.
So that also leads to watching the movie,
the movie's kinda gritty, but founder,
about McDonald's,
I'm not condoning the lifestyle,
I'm also not judging him,
but there's certain things that irk me about that story
and that rub me wrong at the same time,
it's so phenomenal, it's so ingenious
to see how the McDonald brothers and how Ray Kroc
both contributed to creating systems and processes
and pivoting that business model
in order to become the McDonald's
that we know it is today.
Again, good or bad doesn't matter, they scaled.
And that's what we're talking about is scaling
and maximizing growth.
So another book goes right behind that,
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
by Patrick Lincione, phenomenal book.
Read, listen to that one, that one's got like
17 different personalities in it,
it's built more like a story with a lot of moving parts.
I highly recommend listening through it.
My business partner Dean has now listened to it three times,
he said he's on his third time right now,
listening to it, it's so valuable one.
I don't know how he does that, I read slow,
I listen slow, I take a lot of notes.
So I have a feeling when I do read a book,
I read it far more thoroughly than most people do,
but like I said, I take a long time
to read any particular book because of it.
So yeah, maintaining your knowledge,
leveling up, asking other entrepreneurs
to what they're doing, going and looking
and seeing how they're hiring.
If you see a company that has employees,
that you're impressed with,
find out about their hiring processes, that's key.
Find out what they do.
Topgolf is one where I made sure
to ask a lot about that.
I was like, guys, how do you do this?
Like what are you doing?
That everything I learned all about the process
of the interviews they go through
and they experience what they do, this thing called the X factor.
They give you like 30 minutes to do it.
And granted they're an entertainment company,
they need people who are far more entertaining,
willing to contribute to the positive vibe
and environment in order to work this,
really brilliant how they do that.
But those same types of principles,
they apply to the online world too.
So if you know of companies
that are working successfully with virtual assistants,
then start going through their hiring process and seeing
what does it look like, what can you learn from that?
Or hire somebody who's crazy enough to do that.
Yours truly.
I love doing it.
I love learning about what people are putting out there.
So how can businesses effectively delegate
and empower virtual assistants to contribute
to growth and success?
A lot of that goes down to, again, back to training, right?
So one of my clients months ago asked me,
Jackson, you just mesmerized by our team.
We have a phenomenal team.
Our team shows up and they produce super well.
I absolutely love working with each person
that's on our team.
They all contribute to the cultivating our culture
and moving our leadership forward.
Jaime is a fantastic representation of that.
He's the one who helps me with the dynamics
of this streaming of this program.
And when he asked me, when Dr. Seth Yates of Able Health
asked me, said, Jackson, how do you find
VAs like this, like this incredible?
And I couldn't help but laugh and I was like, you know,
they are great people.
And that is a big part of it is you've got to find
the great people, but what you're referencing
in terms of what they're capable of doing,
Seth, I train for two to four hours per day
with my virtual assistant teams.
I work, we're in the trenches working together
and I'm training them how to train each other constantly
and I'm creating videos for them.
I'm highly invested in the success of our team
and building out those prototypes.
So it's not a matter of finding, only finding
the type of person, it's also a matter
of knowing how to support them
and knowing how to teach them what you do.
And when they fail at that, taking a step back,
remembering that as I'm pointing my finger
at them for failing, there are three giant fingers
pointing right back at me.
And so I have to take the personal assessment of
what did I do wrong to get them off to a poor start?
Right, what is it that I can do better?
What clarity did I lack?
But then I need to go to them and find out.
You know, they're worried.
Every virtual assistant when they're brand new
to this company, they know the ax is coming.
They know they're gonna get fired, not here.
That's not how it works, right?
Because we're not looking for instant results.
We're looking for long-term growth
and people who know how to provide tremendous value
and that's what leads to creating a team
where the long-term results get faster and faster
to produce, right?
So now I go in and I say, you know, all right, what happened?
You know, what did we not provide
in order to help you be successful?
Right, what elements can we improve about this?
What can we change?
And they're gonna be wrong.
Jaime knows, I'm the first to also get upset sometimes
and really go into people and be like,
yo, you really messed this up.
How did this happen?
You have the instructions over here.
Like, what's the problem, man?
Why can't you do this?
We need to move your roles or not.
So we will have hard conversations,
but those hard conversations also come
after having built an incredible foundation of trust,
which is developed by vulnerability
and me being willing to say, guys,
I know our systems aren't perfect, right?
We need to do our part on our end.
So what can I do?
What do I need to be doing to improve?
And what on your end do you need to be doing to improve?
I don't know if Jaime can come on right now.
His picture just came off.
Jaime, if you can come on and expose
even further transparency regarding that,
I'd be perfectly happy to see that and hear that.
So what else, man?
What else would you like to contribute so far
just based on what we've talked about?
I mean, everything that you said is pretty much on point.
I was actually ashamed before we came on my experience
as my big first employment or that I considered to be
in line with everything that I had done in my life,
meaning like studying and moving forward
was being a virtual assistant.
And getting here, it's a little bit different
because of the culture.
It's so important to always have that
where you have that open conflict.
You're basically in the company
and you don't feel like you're remote at all
because you are engaged constantly by your peers
and by also your superiors.
And you're being challenged and you're being taught
and it's a great working environment.
And that's how people should always look
at having that virtual office or that virtual space
where they have people.
It's having that same atmosphere
where you are in the same place
and you have to create that conflict.
You have to create that feeling of that
that you're always being pushed to be better
and that you're constantly learning,
you're gathering new skills, new abilities
and you yourself as let's say that virtual assistant
or that virtual remote position,
you're moving the company forward.
It doesn't even matter if you're remote
or if you're from that certain place.
It's you're moving with that company,
you're trying to get it to move forward
and get the results that are needed.
So that's as much as I want to.
That's like basically it as far as like being challenged
in this specific space.
And you're living legend
in the virtual assistant space by the way.
And when I was working at my first startup,
I was also technically a virtual assistant.
My job was as sales, right?
And then later it was as executive,
but I was still a virtual assistant
in many regards in what I did.
So there's far less limitations on it than people realize.
Some of the top tier companies
and I don't know many top tier companies in the world
that aren't working with virtual assistants.
That's another good indication
of the power and value that exists.
And as a business owner,
you're not doing yourself any favors
by hiring expensive talent locally,
throttling your ability to grow,
while you're in early growth stages
and basically cutting off other people
who could help you scale
with a better return on your investment.
If you create a better return on your investment
and you scale your revenues,
what that does is it positions you
to be able to have the revenues necessary
to then hire more people locally too, right?
You can have your cake and eat it too.
You're not limited to one or the other.
So some of the challenges
or pitfalls that businesses may encounter,
we've talked about quite a few of those,
I'll reiterate, not taking your time
and building the process out the right way,
but it's not just about time,
not knowing the strategy either
and being too prideful,
where you feel like you have to figure that out
on your own, you do not.
That's the hard way to figure it out.
You can work with companies, get advice,
then turn down the company,
meet with a recruiter and talk to them about their processes
and they say, well, are you ready to get started?
Tell them, no, thank you.
And I have more research to do
and then go and do your more research.
You're not stuck with making a decision
just because you explore the options
of bringing somebody in.
So with that said,
if you have any final questions,
throw them in the comments about virtual assistants.
We'll be happy to address them after the show.
We do have materials that we can give away with this.
In fact, Jaime, we have a book coming out
and I have the manuscript,
the first version of it done.
I will say that in my manuscript called
Breaking the Business Law by Jackson Callum,
it's got quite a bit of condescension in this book.
I wrote from a very passionate standpoint
of like, I just really want people to get this
and understand it.
But, and so I didn't write with a very soft voice,
but I highly recommend reading it
and going through that and understanding, okay,
what does it talk about?
It talks about determining your business budget
with confidence.
And while that's slightly different,
your budget is something that you should have prepared
before you're hiring, by the way.
Like it goes hand in hand.
You want to have the budget there,
that way you can hire effectively and appropriately.
We also have other resources like the,
I think it's called the 10 hiring truths.
That might be in the book.
I can't remember at this point.
They're both very big resources
that were right next to each other in my past.
And I recently recurated them
so we could get them out
as part of the first class business brand.
So feel free to download those aspects.
And we'd also be happy, Jaime, why not?
For this episode,
we'll go out and throw out another bonus.
We have the Revenue Growth Workbook, intensive.
It's a $99 package that includes a video
for me walking you through your irresistible offers.
You can also utilize that
to build your irresistible offer as an employer, right?
How is working for your company affect people?
Because again, the more demand you create
on people wanting to work for you,
the more likely you're going to attract top tier clients.
It's not an accident that the top people in basketball
want to play for the Lakers.
And the top professionals in baseball
want to play for the Yankees.
There's a reason why people are attracted to that.
You need to have a reason for top tier talent
to want to be attracted to working with you too.
And the Revenue Growth Workbook can help on that.
So it's $99, but we're going to go ahead
and send out the VIP link.
And the VIP link will allow you to download that
and go through that video training for $0.
It'll be completely discounted so you can use it.
So anyway, Vision Pros, we love having you.
We're happy to have hosted you.
If you need anything for your growth, don't hesitate to reach out.
And we will see you in tomorrow's episode.
Everybody have a good day.
Thanks, Jaime.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes
continue to move forward.
We optimize them as the months go by.
This is going to get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show.
And thank you for...