The Virtual Success Show

Want the transcript? Download it here.

Some of the areas covered are:

In this episode:

02:30 – Unpacking and creating your Stop Doing list

03:55 – Understanding your genius zone

08:00 – Calculating your hourly rate

10:25 – Determining your opportunity cost

12:35 – Wrapping things up

Let us know what your key takeout has been from this episode and join the continuing conversation over in the Virtual Success Facebook Group.

Resources mentioned in this show:

The Stop Doing List – www.stopdoing.com.au

Barbara:  Hey everyone and welcome back to the Virtual Success Show where I’m joined by my co-host, Matt Malouf. How’s it going Matt?

Matt:  It’s going well Barb, and yourself?

Barbara:  Really good, I’m very excited about today’s show, and to delve into part two of our three part series on your The Stop Doing List book, which has just been a pivotal book for me to read recently. All the things that- I thought I knew lots about this but I’ve just learned so many things from delving into your book again.

So guys, last show we did was part one of The Stop Doing List, where we talked about the mindset- and it’s such a detailed show on the specific steps and the specific mindsets that you need to get into in order to actually stop doing, and then in today’s show we’re going to talk about actually unpacking and creating your stop doing list, which- one of the key questions we get at Virtual Angel Hub is “how do I know what to put on my list to give a VA?” So it’s a really big question that we get asked, and I’m sure Matt, you get asked this question all the time as well.

Matt:  Absolutely and also those that are wanting to grow their companies, this is the starting point. Everyone’s looking for what I need to do, I need to do more, do more, but unless you let go of some of these things first, and utilise a virtual assistant, or even employing technology and the like to help you with this, it’ll just burn you out.

Barbara:  Yeah, and you don’t have the space and time to strategise and move forward. You actually need to free up your time effectively first, it’s like the number one thing you need to do, I think, before you start trying to grow and scale.

So, now, we did a show- a couple of shows back we did a show that we delved into quite a lot of what this second part of the book talks about so Matt, can you just run through- I think it was the show called, “Think You’ve Only Got Five Hours to Delegate? Think Again.” So it’s a great show on how to figure out how much you’re actually doing that you need to stop doing.

So Matt, can you give us- just kind of run through the key steps in this part of the book.

Unpacking and Creating Your Stop Doing List

Matt: Absolutely. So, this part of the book is really about you’re starting to understand where you’re spending your time, and then how to categorise those tasks to get clear on where you should be spending more time. And so, the only way to start that process is to get absolutely clear on your hourly rate, getting clear on the value of your time. If you actually go to the StopDoing.com.au website, you can download the ultimate stop doing list tool, and it actually steps you through this.

So what we recommend is that you do a time log for a minimum of two weeks to get clarity on where you’re spending your time. You then calculate your hourly rate, so you’ve got a yardstick against which to measure where you should or shouldn’t be spending your time. And then this section of the book talks about the- getting into what we call your genius zone, and your genius zone are those tasks and activities that you love doing, that you do really, really well and have a positive financial return to you and the company.

And, it steps through and says the more time you spend there, number one the more you’ll love your business, number two the more profitable your business will be, and number three the more freedom you will have long-term.

Understanding your Genius Zone

And so, section two of the book or part two of the book helps you start to understand what your genius is and there’s four levels there. There’s the genius, the excellence, the competence, and the incompetence and I won’t go through it in detail, it’s all in the book I want you to go through it. What it then helps you do is- it’s all well and good to sit there and go “okay well, here’s a list of tasks and here’s what my time is worth, what do I do now?” And then, in the last show we talked about the focus funnel, we talked about putting your tasks through the focus funnel, which is a methodology from Rory Vaden’s book, Procrastinate On Purpose. And he talks about if a task comes in, you ask yourself, “Can we eliminate this? Can we automate this? Or can we delegate this?” And if it gets through those three layers then the choice is am I going to focus on it, or am I going to procrastinate and do it later?

And so in order to get clear on what you need to stop doing, you need to filter your tasks through the focus funnel and then I think it gets really, really interesting, because again I think that up to that point is very straightforward and very logical, but this is where I think a lot of stop doing falls over, and on the tool we talk about, and ask you the question, ” are there special skills required for the task?” And I think Barb, you probably find this with assigning virtual assistants to people is that, people aren’t clear on the special skills required so they- that whole myth of the super VA comes back again. My VA can do everything, yet they don’t necessarily have the special skills required to do the task that you’re asking of them.

Barbara:  Yeah, and sometimes, it’s very interesting- sometimes people say to us- we highlight that in the interview process and through the thing, and clients will say to us, “oh that’s fine, yeah, I know they’re not trained in that, that’s okay, I’ll do some work with them.” And then they come back a month later and complain bitterly that the VA’s not able to execute on the thing that we just discussed. And we’re like, “That’s because you need an expert. You need a graphic designer.”

Okay, our VA’s can do some Canva images for social media and all that stuff, but they can’t design a brochure, because that’s actually a graphic designer job, or they can’t build a website, that’s another one we get quite a lot. Like, you know, build a website in WordPress, yeah, you could just get a template and sort of drag a few pieces in there, but you’re not going to get a quality piece of work- and if you’re happy with that that’s fine, but you can’t blame the VA for that, or us because we didn’t train on it. So we see that all the time.

The other one I see a lot, Matt- it’s funny I loved that you said, “your genius zone is the stuff that you love doing, your very good at, and it has a good financial return for the company.” Because what we see a lot of people doing is maybe they love doing engagement, they are very good at it, but does it bring a financial return to the company if they’re spending all their time just creating Canva images with tips and quotes on it?

So this is this whole running back- we talked about the comfort zone in the last show, part one of the book, and I sometimes feel that’s people saying, “well my genius zone is X” but they’re not considering the financial return piece. So, just because you’re good at it and you love to do it you’ve got to ask yourself though is it a good use of your time from a business perspective.

Matt:  Absolutely, absolutely. Until you get your company to a point where … Others can do maybe the most positively financially returning tasks and you can do whatever you choose to do- but I mean really until a company’s probably turning over somewhere between five and ten million dollars a year you can’t afford the luxury of that often.

Barbara:  Yeah, you’re working.

Matt:  That’s right.

Calculating your Hourly Rate

Barbara:  So what I love about your tool is that it actually- so it helps you to identify what is your genius zone, but also it helps you to identify another question I get all the time is, “How do I know what my hourly rate is?” So your tool helps you to get to that realisation of what your hourly rate is and therefore what is the financial return of you spending your time on X, Y, or Z.

Matt:  Absolutely.

Barbara:  Even if you love it.

Matt:  And what the tool will do, too, is if a task can be done for an hourly rate of 75% or less of your hourly rate, then it recommends that you stop doing that task because the financial gain is not there, your time is better spent in your genius zone doing tasks that return your hourly rate or above.

Barbara:  And you know I love that this ties us back to the mindset piece because I can imagine so many people will avoid delegating that even though they’ll know that their hourly rate is higher and they should because it means that they themselves have to go out and sell more, or have to go out and actually see their own value. Because obviously I think that’s the running back to the comfort zone thing that we talked about in part one of this series. There’s an up-levelling involved in saying. “Well I’m not going to do this stuff anymore, and therefore what am I going to do with my time?” Would you find that in your coaching?

Matt:  All the time. People have the desire to either make more money, or spend more time with their partner, their loved ones, etc. and then when you create that time for them they’re like, “Well, I don’t really know what to do. I’ve not done that.” So it’s actually really, really interesting.

Barbara:  Yeah, I can imagine people would fall into that, and like I said because it usually involves you should be spending your time on scaling, growing, out doing marketing, sales, talking, whatever it is that your- the face of the business or whatever’s going to be doing, but that can push you out of your comfort zone. So, you’ve got to go back to stage one again and think about how far outside of my comfort zone am I willing to go right now in order to grow my business?

 There’s a whole- we’ve circled back to part one of this again.

Determining your Opportunity Cost

Matt:  Absolutely. And again as you step through as well it calculates an opportunity cost. If you keep doing the task, it will show you a per annum calculation of what you’re actually losing or potential loss as opposed to getting someone else to do that task at a lower hourly rate. And again, this is to reiterate the investment versus cost mindset as well.

Barbara:  You know, a client of ours did this exercise- just separate from this I recall a conversation I had about a year ago, and he had calculated if- he’d never actually done that exercise before and then he got a VA through us and he calculate that actually it was $247,000 per year that he was- the opportunity cost of him running himself into the ground trying to do everything. Now, he had tried to get a VA before and it hadn’t worked, and failed, and he came to us and we taught him how to do it properly, and we got him a great person, and put all the support systems in places, and his business just totally took off after he did this exercise. Because it gave him the hunger, you see, he thought, “oh my God, look at all of this money I could be making if I actually get my act together, stop doing this stuff and get after the real stuff. So transformed him completely, yeah. So it’s well worth doing this.

Matt:  And the tool will actually make that really, really clear to you. Really clear…

Barbara:  So StopDoing.com.au is where you can download that tool. Is it- obviously the resources section of that website?

Matt:  It is, yes it is. And, it’s very simple and straightforward…

Barbara:  And it’s free, sorry it’s free we should tell them it’s free!

Matt:  And the book steps you through the theory behind it as well.

Barbara:  And we’ll actually have a link- there’s a link below this show to the site where you can actually download that, and obviously the book- yeah the book’s great on this area actually because it steps you through that whole genius zone stuff as well.

So, Matt, to wrap up, anything else- before we lead into part three of the book, which is the next show, anything you just want- any concluding points on this part of the book?

Wrapping Things Up

Matt:  One thing that the tool asks as you go through is, “Is there a system for the task?” And often when I’m working with clients and they starts saying no, no, no, no, no all the time, it starts getting them down or they start thinking that they’ll never get it off their list.

Be okay with that because bringing in a strong virtual assistant that understands that’s the lay of the land and that part of their role is to help you build the systems, and as long as you’re clear on that and you’re patient with them about that, you can still move to the next stage of stop doing all of these tasks, it’s just going to take you a little bit more time.

Barbara:  Yeah, like we talked about before, sometimes people when they get a VA- we often find they want to hit the ground running on day one. And we sort of go even if we were to give you a highly- even if I was to give someone off my team, highly experienced, knows exactly what to do to get in there, it would still take two to three months because it’s a new business, all the IP is usually in the head of the business owner. So, that takes time to get through that little hump, but it just- you’ll fly after that. So again it’s just investing that time and energy in order to move forward faster later rather than tomorrow. That’s a mindset thing of course, too.

Matt:  Absolutely. So it’s taking the time- and it’s what you were saying earlier about slowing down to speed up and actually doing the work here to give you the clarity on whether you’re ready to stop doing or not and also preparing to be able to then work with a virtual assistant from Virtual Angel Hub or someone from within your existing team to start to delegate and move these tasks to them.

Barbara:  Absolutely. And that brings us on to the next show that we’re going to do which is probably- well all of these parts are really critical, but the interesting one about the next part of this series is actually how to stop doing, because so many people- and I see this all the time, you know, clients will come in and be like, “But I did everything you told me to do and we built the systems, we’ve got the processes, we’ve put everything down.” And they’re still struggling, and it’s because they haven’t figured out this final piece, which is so important, is the how to stop doing, because there actually is a whole process for that as well.

So we’re going to delve into that in the next show as the final piece of the book.

Matt:  Absolutely and I’m going to step you all through exactly how to stop doing and what’s holding you back from getting others to do these tasks for you. So please be sure to tune into the next show.

But also, please feel free to give us- we’d love your ratings and comments about the show. We’ve also got a private Facebook group. So, join the conversation with us and we’d love to hear more about what would you like us to talk about on this show? This show is about you, we want to give real life experiences and help you succeed with your virtual team. So, we’d love your input, love your feedback, and until next time, Barb thank you so much I’m really enjoying this three part series and looking forward to the next part.

Barbara:  Yeah thanks Matt, me too. See you guys.

Matt:  See you.

Matt Malouf is a passionate business coach, speaker, author and entrepreneur on a mission to help entrepreneurs around the world break the shackles of mediocrity and reach new levels of personal and business success.

Barbara Turley is the Founder & CEO of The Virtual Hub, a company that specializes in recruiting, training and managing superstar ‘Virtual Assistants’ in the social media, digital marketing and systems automation space.

Want the transcript? Download it here.

Some of the areas covered are:

In this episode:

01:51 – The Stop Doing List book

03:25 – Mindset, before strategy, before tactics

05:00 – Three key areas of mindset

07:00 – Signs you’ve stepped too far out of your comfort zone

09:30 – Four most common negative mindsets

10:47 – Essential mindset #1 – Learn to say ‘no’

12:05 – Essential mindset #2 – Less is more

13:48 – Essential mindset #3 – Investment vs expense

17:18 – Essential mindset #4 – Adopting the 80/20 rule

19:30 – Essential mindset #5 – Don’t sweat the small stuff

21:50 – Wrapping things up

Let us know what your key takeout has been from this episode and join the continuing conversation over in the Virtual Success Facebook Group.

Resources mentioned in this show:

The Stop Doing List – www.stopdoing.com.au

Barbara:  Hey, everyone, and welcome to yet another episode of The Virtual Success Show, where I’m joined by my co-host Matt Malouf. Hi, Matt, how are you?

Matt:  I’m well, Barb, how are you?

Barbara:  I’m good, thanks. I’m good. What’s been your week like, biggest learning this week for you?

Matt:  Yeah, biggest learning. It’s a really interesting week, and I think the biggest learning is that as business owners and entrepreneurs, sometimes we need to have a recovery week to allow our energy to come back up. I had a big week, three weeks on the road and presenting and the like. I came into the week feeling a little bit low, and I’ve had a really great week. I’ve just allowed myself to recover. Energy’s now flying again.

Barbara:   Yeah, that’s so true. Actually, for me, it’s interesting, the show we’re going to do today on your book, The Stop Doing List, I’ve had a week where … Or probably a month, really, where I’ve been pushing very far outside my comfort zone, because there’s some business decisions that I’ve had to make. I’ve been really grappling with the emotional turmoil that that can often bring. It’s just interesting that today’s show, we’re going to talk quite deeply about that, because we’re going to discuss your book.

Matt:  Yes, absolutely. It can actually be detrimental to be too far out of our comfort zones for too long, because it’s very draining.

The Stop Doing List book

Barbara:  Just for the listeners, Matt has written an amazing book, The Stop Doing List, which I would encourage anyone … I’ve been diving into it. I’ve read it about twice already, because there’s still so many nuggets of things to learn inside. What I wanted to do was actually interview Matt on the three very distinct sections that are in the book. What we’re going to do is we’re doing a three-part series on The Stop Doing List. Show one today, we’re going to talk about the mindset that you need to get into and the challengesyou’re going to face mindset-wise when you start this stop doing list exercise. Part two, then, we’re going to get into in the next show: how to actually create your stop doing list and unpack all those tasks that you really need to stop doing. Then, part three, which is the gold, which is actually how do you stop doing. Often, we create lists of things, and then we don’t know how to actually delegate them effectively or let go of the control. So, Matt, stopdoing.com.au, that’s the website.

Matt:  Correct, it is.

Barbara:  So jump on there. There are lots of resources and things going up there. Just to start with today, Matt, this mindset thing, I’m just always so fascinated by this, and I really enjoyed the beginning of the book. Even though I’ve done a lot of work on mindset myself before, there were some key things in here for me that were things I hadn’t actually learnt before, particularly about comfort zone. Talk to me first about why did you break it into these three sections? How significant is mindset as the beginning for this stop doing exercise?

Mindset, before strategy, before tactics

Matt:  I think we all may have heard that age-old “strategy before tactics”. When it comes to productivity and growth, “in my opinion, it’s mindset before strategy before tactics”. If you go in, you can have all the skills in the world, and if you go in with the wrong mindset and the wrong energy around it, 99 out of 100 times, you’re going to fail. You can be doing the same thing, believing you’re going to get a different result, but that’s insanity. What I came to realise was the business owners that were growing fast and achieving what it was that they wanted to achieve in their businesses and their lives had a very distinct mindset. As I was working with them, realised that without these key aspects of mindset that they adopted, everything else was a lot harder and even failed.

Barbara:  You know what I love about this, actually, because there are so many coaches out there and people out there talking about mindset. It’s a bit like the word “virtual assistant”. It’s incredibly broad, and often, people don’t really delve into … This is what I loved about your book. You actually break this down into three specific steps. Honestly, the first one or two of those were things that I had not actually thought about myself before, and I would say that I’m somebody who has quite a strong mindset in terms of business growth, but I had realised I was doing some things wrong. Can you just talk us through those three key areas of mindset for this particular exercise?

Three key areas of mindset

Matt:  I sure can. So, the first one was helping you understand that in order to grow, in order to move you and your company forward, you needed to get out of your comfort zone. Now, that’s very cliché, get out of our comfort zone and the like, but what I created was a very definitive understanding of what comfort zone was. Then, the layers outside of that. If you can imagine a target with the centre of the target being your comfort zone and then there are two layers outside of that, the first layer being the learning zone and then the outer layer being what we call the panic zone. What can often happen is as we step out of our comfort zones, we step so far out that we go into the panic zone. What this does is it effectively cripples us, so it’s a bit like the age-old ‘deer in the headlights’ metaphor. It’s so far out of our comfort zone that we procrastinate. We’re overstressed, overwhelmed, and we don’t actually achieve anything. The gap between your comfort zone and the panic zone is the learning zone, or what I like to call the earning zone. That’s where you earn-

Barbara:  You know what’s funny about that? When I just think about that panic zone, I think what also happens, because I know I’ve suffered this myself, you step out of your comfort zone too far, like you say. You feel stressed out, panicked, you’re awake at night, you’ve got the sick feeling in your stomach, and then you start to beat yourself up about not being able to step outside of your comfort zone. Everyone tells you, you have to push the limits, so you start to get wrapped up in this whole down on yourself thing, as well, because you haven’t successfully stepped outside of your comfort zone or you’ve gone there and you don’t like it. I love this little thing. This learning zone thing just made so much sense to me, that I had maybe been stepping a little bit too far outside of comfort zones for myself in the past. So talk to us about how to know when you’re in the learning zone and when you’ve gone too far.

Signs you’ve stepped too far out of your comfort zone

Matt:  When you’ve gone too far, what becomes really apparent is there’s no forward movement. You’re stressing, you’re procrastinating, you’re in a state of overwhelm. You don’t seem to be able to know where to go next. If anything, you’ll probably go backwards, because you’re not focusing on anything of real productivity. The only way to get back and move forward is you’ve got to actually bring yourself from the panic zone back into your comfort zone so you can actually exit again. What that does is it actually calms our brain a little bit. We all go into that panic zone. We all do, irrespective of who you are and what successes you’ve had. What I do is if I feel myself going into that overwhelm or stressed state, I go back into my comfort zone and do something that sits within that to calm myself and then move out again.

It’s breaking it down. It’s breaking down the big task into little tasks and focusing on one step at a time. That will take you into your learning zone. It’s doing things that you haven’t done before, but you feel a sense of certainty within yourself that you’re on the right path and you can move it forward. It’s not a guarantee, but you’re focused. You’re moving it forward. You have that bit of fear coming up, but it’s a fuel. It’s not actually stopping you from moving forward.

Barbara:  I actually read this while I was on holiday, so I was lying on a beautiful beach and I was thinking about this. What I thought was the most pivotal thing for me is that I know when I read that, I went, “I have been doing that to myself probably way too much over the years.” Now that I recognise it and I know the strategy from the book, how to deal with it. If I feel that, I say to myself, “Okay, this is just I’ve pushed a bit far. I’ve gone to look over the edge, and I feel a bit uncomfortable. Next week, I’ll just come back a bit.” I know the strategy, then, to come back and then just to push not a step too far but maybe two steps before that and realise that out there may be six months away and not what I thought, which is next month. It’s more a planning thing. It has really helped me personally, I have to say, to realise the comfort zone thing, how important it is. So, what about next? What are the other two pieces of mindset that you think are key?

Four most common negative mindsets

Matt:  As I was going through, it was really apparent, working with all of the clients and businesses that I worked with, that there were four negative mindsets that kept coming up that were very apparent in holding people back. Those four were where your self-talk says, “They can’t do it as good as I can or as well as I can, I don’t want to give up control of the task or that area, I can’t afford it, or I don’t have time to implement.” Again, this is through research and working with clients and presenting to huge groups on this. You’d watch the nods of the head. I’d say, “Who’s ever said that they can’t afford to have somebody else do a task or they can’t do it as well as I can?” These are common phrases. Unless we become aware of what we’re doing “wrong”, we can’t get clear on where we need to move to. Through the book, I gave specific examples around these four negative mindsets and how they’re holding you back, which then leads into the last part of the mindset part, which is around the five essential mindsets.

Essential mindset #1 – Learn to say ‘no’

I mean, this is giving a guide and a direction forward, but the five essential mindsets really are around learning to say no. That’s a really critical one. Again, so many business owners … I think we’re brought up in a culture, as entrepreneurs, to just say yes and work it out. As we grow and as our companies grow, learning to say no and actually guard our time a little bit will make you more money and give you more freedom than anything else.

Barbara:  You know what? I can safely say that I only started doing that a few years ago, and the minute I started doing it, I made a lot more money and I was a lot less stressed and a lot happier. I look back and think, oh my god, in saying yes to all those opportunities, not only was I not making any money, because I wasn’t doing anything properly, but I actually was also very stressed out myself and not that happy. Saying no and being laser focused on what we are doing in the business and getting the core part of the business right and delivering it means, then, later you can come to say yes to a selection of things that you think will complement. So I definitely second that, that that’s a huge thing that I’ve implemented.

Essential mindset #2 – Less is more

Matt:  Time and time again, people have that realisation. Yet, it’s a bit of counter-intuitive thinking, isn’t it? Which a lot of these essential mindsets are, the second one being less is more. Do fewer things and do them really well as opposed to trying to do everything. Again, I’m not sure where we learned this as entrepreneurs, but a lot of people will attach success to doing more. I’ve got to do more. I’ve got to push more. I’ve got to get through more tasks on my list, et cetera. If you focus on leveraging, focus on getting the things off your list onto somebody else’s and you do the things that are of most value, again, you’ll make more money but you’ll have more freedom. That’s really the essence of the book, also. The book is designed to help you make more profit but also give you more freedom.

Barbara:  Yeah, it’s that whole entrepreneurial freedom thing. We all want it. Nobody goes into their own business to work 24/7, never take a holiday, and be completely stressed out all the time. Sadly, that’s what an awful lot of people end up doing in business.

Matt:  What they don’t realise is, it’s a choice.

Barbara:  Absolutely. Yes, absolutely. Also, it’s that slowing down. I’m sure that’s one of the mindsets, as well, is this thing of sometimes you have to slow down so that you can get to that Holy Grail, and it is somewhere that you can get to, but you have to implement … I can see now why you made mindset this first part. These are quite different tips to the normal mindset training that’s out there, because these are very specific in how to actually stop doing, which is the thing to unlock your entrepreneurial freedom.

Essential mindset #3 – Investment vs expense

Matt:  Absolutely. Absolutely. Essential mindset three is investment versus expense and understanding that if you have the right people and you’re paying them money, that’s an investment, because that will pay you back dividends and it will buy you freedom. It’ll buy you back your time. See, the challenge is that most entrepreneurs, initially anyway, will see their people as an expense, because they see that on their profit & loss as an expense line. They’re trying to cut costs. It’s like if I reduce this person, I’ll just take that on, and we’ll save money.

Barbara:  Yeah, it’s funny when you were saying that, I was thinking to myself I’ve been interviewed on a few podcasts recently. Often when I meet other women and I say to them, “Oh, you know, I have this business, and it’s only three years old or probably really only two and a half, and it’s just exploded. Oh, by the way, I also had a baby.” People go, “Oh my god, how do you do it?” I think, well, actually, I only work a few hours a day, and I was able to take time off. It’s because I actually had that mindset of I invested heavily in people, and because of that, I actually created freedom for myself and I created a scalable business. Definitely that is a mindset that trips so many people up, because they don’t see them as an investment. It’s not an investment straight away. Initially, it is a cost, because you’ve got to train them, so it could be six months before it’s an investment, but in the long run, it pays the biggest dividends than anything else you can invest in. In my view, anyway.

Matt:  Again, when you compare it to other line items that we spend money on in our business, all marketing, it’s not all gives us a positive return, yet we’ll continue to invest in marketing to get that return. Like what you’re saying, Barb, not all people are going to return straight away. It takes time. But with the right mindset, understanding that they are an investment, you go into it very differently. It’s like when you buy an investment property. If you buy an investment property, it’s how do I maximise the capital value together with the rental yield? If you think about I’m going to bring on this person that’s going to help me with my business and help me grow it and give me some freedom and more time and you understand that I’m investing both money and time into this person that will reap me dividends later on, how would you actually treat them? How would you on-board them? What would you invest into them? What training would you send them on, et cetera? It’s such a different …

Barbara:  You know, I was just thinking, as you were talking there, you’re right. It’s so mindset, because if you see somebody as a cost and not an investment, every day that you come into work or you come and do some work in your business, you are looking at that person and the minute they make a mistake or if your revenue drops a bit or something happens, you immediately look at them, because they’re the cost. It’s like a sabotaging behaviour, actually, because that person will feel that. They’re probably start making more mistakes. It’s just a whole energetic thing, actually, that can self-feed and cause total failure.

Matt:  Absolutely.

Barbara:  So what’s next? What other positive mindsets do we have to have?

Essential mindset #4 – Adopting the 80/20 rule

Matt:  Two more. The fourth one is the understanding and adopting the 80/20 rule, the Pareto principle. Again, I think it’s one of those concepts that a lot of people know about but don’t apply. Once you understand that 20% of your focus and what you do will reap 80% of your results and you start applying that to everything that you do and start to understand what is the 20% here that I need to focus on, you’ll find that there’s so many things that still need to get done but don’t need to get done by you that you start to create more time. Also, it’s an interesting exercise, because when we work with businesses and we get them to start to understand where they’re spending their time and then where they should be spending their time, which is the 20%, they realise they’re spending very little time in the most important. They’re spending a lot of time in the most urgent.

Barbara:  You know, actually, I want to add something to that. Again, what I see sometimes, I know you’d see the same, Matt, 80/20 also applies to delegation. What I mean by that, on a specific task, let’s say you’ve got a task list that you’ve delegated. We often see people delegating 100% of that task, so that’s abdication. They’re like, “That’s off my list. I don’t even want to look at it.” When, actually, really, 80% of the task will be done by your team, but there’s kind of a 10, 15, 20% thing that involves you in terms of oversight, reporting back, helping, asking are there any issues, maybe there’s a gap where somebody needs more training. That’s the oversight piece, and that is delegation as opposed to abdication of responsibility. Would you agree?

Matt:  Absolutely.

Barbara:  It actually applies to a simple task, as well.

Matt:  Exactly right. It’s that misconception that delegation is, “Here you go. You go and do this, and I never want to hear about it ever again.”

Barbara:  Which is just you’re going to fail, probably.

Matt:  Exactly. Well, not probably. You will.

Barbara:  Yeah, you will. You will.

Essential mindset #5 – Don’t sweat the small stuff

Matt:  Then, the last essential mindset is to not sweat the small stuff. Again, we’ve heard this before, and the reason I put that in there is because a lot of the tasks that are falling onto entrepreneurs’ to-do lists aren’t that important, or if they’re not done correctly the first time, have little if any financial significance to the business. What we forget is that when we were learning these tasks and to do these things, we made many mistakes. We kept pushing forward, and we kept learning, and we kept making more mistakes. In delegating and actually stop doing these things, we need to understand that we’re trying to minimise the mistakes that our team make so that they can learn from our mistakes, but also, a lot of what we’re going to start handing them, the impact on the business is minimal, if any. Rather than getting caught up in them not doing things right the first time or not doing it as fast as you can do it, allow them to learn. Allow them to grow. Again, it will help you to make more money and give you more freedom.

Barbara:  I was just thinking, as well … It’s funny. When you’re talking, I often think of little stories that have impacted me and my business. I was fortunate enough to be at a lunch once with an older man. He was retired, but had been a serial entrepreneur. Had sold businesses for hundreds of millions. One of these he built billion-dollar businesses, and it was very interesting talking to him. I remember one of the things he said to me, he said, “Always do business from a place of quiet.” What he meant was, he said be quiet about business, so be quiet in yourself.” This is something I struggle with. I definitely took his advice on board. It’s that whole thing of not sweating the small stuff, so don’t get caught up in the noise of all this stuff going on and sort of just focus … I guess he was saying focus on the important things and be quiet about everything else internally, in yourself, because it just causes way too much stress for you, that’s really not needed. The same applies in what we’re talking about here.

Wrapping things up

Matt:  Absolutely. Absolutely. Sorry. Just to wrap that up, the reason the book starts there is because without getting clarity that you’re going to have to step out of your comfort zone in order to stop doing, you’re going to have to let go of the negative mindsets and adopt these positive or essential mindsets, the rest of the book will be of insignificance to you. Because you can create the list, and you can understand theoretically what’s going on, but trying to implement with the wrong mindset will always lead to failure.

Barbara:  The how to stop doing part, which is part three of the book, there’s absolutely no point in going there unless you really take a good look at yourself in this first part.

Matt:  Absolutely.

Barbara:  It’s funny. When you talk about those negative mindsets, those are the top four things we ask people on the way in, in the sales calls. What’s your biggest fear about hiring a VA? I can definitely tell you that those are the four that we get all the time. It’s one of those. I really should put a tick box on those and maybe send an automated training or something based on whichever one they tick.

Matt:  Absolutely.

Barbara:  Listen, Matt, that’s been fantastic. Like I said, we’ve done a show on mindset before, but this has been much more in-depth. I personally found this part of the book … I almost skimmed past it, thinking I read about mindset all the time, but the minute I got into that comfort zone stuff, I went, “Hold on a second. This is actually really to the point and deeper stuff that I hadn’t thought about before.” Just a fantastic start to the book and to our series here. Part two of this series we’re going to do in the next show, is getting into the nitty-gritty of how to actually create and unpack your stop doing list. Another question we get all the time is how do I know what to put on the list? It’s simple in one way, but in another way, it’s actually quite difficult to do, and we’re going to give you the actual map to start creating your stop doing list. So, Matt, thanks so much for your insights, for giving us the insight on the book, for writing the book. It’s definitely needed.

Matt:  You’re welcome! Yeah. Looking forward to show two.

Barbara: Listen, guys, stopdoing.com.au is where you can grab that. Also, we’d love you subscribe to the show on iTunes and maybe give us a rating over there on iTunes. We’re also now on Stitcher. You can actually listen to us over there on Android. Of course, you can also jump on the site, so virtualsuccessshow.com, and we have a Facebook group that you can join there. Give us ideas about what you’d like us to talk about. We’re always looking for new concepts and new things to talk about on the show. Until the next show, thanks, Matt.

Matt:  Thanks, Barb.

Barbara:  We’ll see you next time.

Matt:  See you then.

Matt Malouf is a passionate business coach, speaker, author and entrepreneur on a mission to help entrepreneurs around the world break the shackles of mediocrity and reach new levels of personal and business success.

Barbara Turley is the Founder & CEO of The Virtual Hub, a company that specializes in recruiting, training and managing superstar ‘Virtual Assistants’ in the social media, digital marketing and systems automation space.

Want the transcript? Download it here.

Some of the areas covered include:

Let us know what your key takeout has been from this episode and join the continuing conversation over in the Virtual Success Facebook Group.

Resources mentioned in this show:

The Visible Guy

30 Different Ways to Network

20 Different Ways to Differentiate Yourself

In this episode:

01:45 – The Visible Guy…Gordon Jenkins

02:59 – Surveying clients of VAs to find out what they really want

06:40 – Stand out results from the survey

08:06 – The importance of verbal communication

13:51 – Just because your VA is virtual, doesn’t mean they aren’t  part of your team

16:26 – Email shouldn’t be your only form of communication with your VA

18:15 – Top 3 tips to gain success as a client or VA

20:50 – As the client, be clear on what your expectations are of your VA

25:31 – Wrapping things up

Barbara:  Hey everyone, and welcome back again to the Virtual Success Show where I’m joined by my co-host, Matt Malouf. Matt, how’s it going?

Matt:  Excellent, Barb. How are you?

Barbara:  I’m very good, thank you. How’s your week been?

Matt:  The week’s been great. It’s been busy but it’s been really, really good, and having great conversations with many entrepreneurs out there at the moment. It’s a really exciting time for business owners and entrepreneurs at the moment.

Barbara:  Yeah, and how about your book? Is it starting to fly off the shelves, The Stop Doing List?

Matt:  It is, it is, and we’ve recorded the audible version so that should be coming out in the next little bit, so very, very exciting.

Barbara:  Brilliant. Brilliant. Well, listen, on today’s show we’ve got a very interesting guest to talk about client feedback and a survey that he did with clients that are using, or have used, Virtual Assistants in the past. So my guest today, or our guest today, is Gordon Jenkins, who’s actually called The Visible Guy.

Gordon, welcome to the show.

Gordon:  Welcome. Good morning, Barbara. Good morning, Matt. How are you?

Matt:  Good thank you.

Barbara:  Good. So, Gordon, just to kick off, can you just give us…you know, who The Visible Guy? Talk to us about who is the The Visible Guy and what does The Visible Guy do?

The Visible Guy…Gordon Jenkins

Gordon:  Sure, so a quick snapshot … The Visible Guy, in simple terms: we look at people and organisations and we look at what they are and then simply we go and tell the world what they actually do and the world is simply their marketplace, so it could be just the people in Melbourne or it could be we’re going to take people globally and tell the world about exactly what they’re doing. We do it in a way that is not talking about what’s unique about the person or the organisation, but we look at what’s the clear differentiations, and it’s as simple as that.

Barbara:  That’s very interesting. When you recently, just for the listeners, Gordon was asked … he was a speaker at the Virtual Assistant … is it at the Virtual Assistant’s Association Conference here in Australia?

Gordon:  Yeah, here in Australia, yeah.

Barbara:  Yeah, and you took a very unique approach which demonstrates, I guess, exactly what you do. You were speaking to a room full of virtual assistants, but you developed your talk and your session from feedback from the other side, which would be their clients or the client of the Virtual Assistant.  So talk us through…you started out with an amazing survey actually, which I also participated in. Talk us through the survey.

Surveying clients of VAs to find out what they really want

Gordon:  Sure, I’d love to do that. What I do, what The Visible Guy actually goes about and does is we look at client perception because at the end of the day, client perception is your reality whether you like it or not.  The client’s perception of who you are and what you are really determines the ambassadors, whether you’ve got positive or negative ambassadors, and also the influencers.

So, what I did is I put out a global survey to my networks, and to people’s networks, and asked for people that have either used or are using Virtual Assistants and to get their feedback, exactly what they looked for. The response was amazing. I think one of the key factors that came out is … I know it sounds a bit strange but what clients want from Virtual Assistants, no matter where they are in the world or whatever sector they’re in, is virtually the same, and I’ll give you a couple of examples on that.

We asked the clients about how do they communicate, and not surprisingly 77% came back and said they want to use email to communicate. We started asking questions about how are they charged. Whilst a lot of the clients came back and said they’re charged by the hour, what they much prefer to do is actually be charged on a retainer, and when I actually worked out the numbers between being charged on a retainer or being charged by an hour, the Virtual Assistant would actually make more money being charged at the client on a retainer. So when you think about what the client wants then that’s what you should give them.

Then we asked the clients about how likely would they be to recommend their Virtual Assistant to their network? Not surprisingly, the score came out around about 8 out of 10, which you would expect. But the beauty of the survey was that we actually got some clients who said that their assistant is only 2 out of 10, or 3 out of 10, which is really interesting because that gave me the robustness of the survey. But then I went-

Barbara:  So, sorry, I just want to cut in for a second. So they rated their VA only 2 or 3 out of 10, but most of them said they would recommend that VA to others? Have I got that right?

Gordon:  The question was: how likely are you to recommend your VA? They put 2 out of 10, or 3 out of 10 …

Barbara:  Oh, I see.

Gordon:  … on a rating, and then when I went back and then we asked another question … it’s really important the way that these questions are asked so we don’t get any emotional responses … we asked them a question that was: what are the three top questions you want to know from your VA or your prospective VA? And the number one question that came back was: how do I integrate my Virtual Assistant into my business? And I thought that was a really powerful and extreme question, and when I presented at the Virtual Assistants Conference, I asked the audience, and I said “What is the reason for people to use your services?” And they said because of our pricing, because we’re professional, because we’re dedicated … the usual type of wording. I turned around to them and I said, “Look, the number one question that’s come back globally is: how do I integrate a Virtual Assistant into my business?” And I asked them how do you do it? And the room went quiet. I said, “Now, just think about the power of that if your first page on your website was the question: how do I integrate into your business? Can you answer that? Just think about how powerful and differential that question is.”

Stand out results from the survey

Barbara:  Now, there’s three things that stand out for me from this survey. The very interesting one is when you say, “how likely are they to refer their VA or recommend their VA?”, a 2 out of 10 or a 3 out of 10 is very low. The essence of this show, the Virtual Success Show, is because there are lots of VAs globally and there are lots of clients using VAs, but there’s a small number of people actually getting success with a VA and in turn probably VAs getting success therefore with clients. A few things that I would pick in here, and I know Matt’s going to step in and probably back me up or have some more to add here, but we go back to the first question: how do you prefer to communicate with a VA? Email. I think that’s a major, major problem, so that can cause like a great VA, with a client who really wants to get success, this can all fall down because there’s no… emails challenging in terms of VA client relationship.

Number two, as you say, this integration thing. So the client doesn’t actually know how to integrate someone themselves and they’re hoping that a VA can teach them how to integrate or can come in and fix that problem, but neither side actually really knows how to do it. So, therefore, I think that’s probably why the success rates are actually low.

Matt, I’m interested to hear your thoughts here.

The importance of verbal communication

Matt:  Hundred percent. I mean, we talked about … I think it was one of the earlier shows that we did, Barb … around communication, and the beauty with technology these days is you can replicate an office environment in a virtual environment, and so I just think would you prefer your staff, if they were in your office, to be emailing one another, or would you prefer them to have a short conversation to understand what’s expected and how to get something done? Would you call somebody into your office and go through something with them, or would you send them an email?

In fact I was presenting last week and a gentleman wants to get started with a Virtual Assistant, but he’s like, “Oh, you know, ideally, I’d only like to speak to them once every one to two weeks and I’ll communicate via email.” And I’m like, “You will fail. It will fail.”

Barbara:  Yeah, a hundred percent, you’ll fail.

Matt:  Yeah. Because they’re virtual, virtual meaning they’re environment is not in your environment, they’re somewhere else, doesn’t mean the communication for effectiveness changes. So I find that quite amazing, that statistic.

Gordon:  That’s absolutely fine. We’ve all come from global organisations and what I try to explain to the Virtual Assistant, you’re either virtual … It’s no different to having a team based in Hong Kong, Manila, London, New York, Los Angeles, that’s virtual, and you would get on the phone and you’d have a weekly conference call. These questions where people are saying I’ll only talk to them every couple of weeks, well, you wouldn’t do that with an employee. An employee, you would make them part of the team.

The technology today enables us … it’s not the driver … it enables the communication, it enables the integration. So you think when these people are giving themselves 2 out of 10 for the Virtual Assistant, is the problem the Virtual Assistant? The person who has the problem, the manager, the person themselves, because they’ve not actually thought about what they want this person for. They’re not actually thinking about integrating into the team.

Matt:  It’s so interesting, Gordon, because I interpret that as they’re giving themselves a 2 out of 10 with regards to their effectiveness to integrate and manage a Virtual Assistant.

Gordon:  If I want my car fixed, I go to the car mechanic. If I want my teeth fixied, I go to the dentist. It seems to be that when we employ people, and this is what it is, we are actually employing people, we seem to be able to think we can do it all ourselves. Well, you know, I’m a great public speaker and I’m a great coach, I’m not that good at … When I want to employ people, I bring in the experts to help me and if I want to bring in a Virtual Assistant, I look at their skill base but I go to the experts to help me bring them on board and they are part of my team, no matter what organisation I’ve worked on, whether I’ve had contractors, part-time people, volunteer people … The moment they step into my business, they’re part of my team.

Barbara:  Absolutely. As you say, even if they’re a volunteer or a student coming in for some work experience, they’re still part of your team for that duration.

Gordon:  And there seems to be that missing point. I don’t think we can put all the blame on the employer, but we don’t put all the blame on the employee either. But what we can tell when we get the great results, and definitely when we look at the results of those being on the retainer, those Virtual Assistants being on the retainer, is when the businesses have actually integrated them into the business.

Barbara:  Effectively, yeah. Now, I’m interested to know, was there any feedback from the Virtual Assistants at the event, how they would like to communicate? So they’re probably just doing email because the client wants that, but did you get any insights from that? You may not have, I’m not sure.

Gordon:  I think it tends to be the status quo in terms of email … There’s very few of them that said we have a weekly conference, and I think this is the size of the organisations as well. If it tends to be a one or two person business, there tends to be a lot more organisation than in a larger business. I was really interested to see that everything is technology driven and my biggest concern from that is there isn’t that interaction and we all know how email can have no emotion attached to it. For me, it takes me longer to write an email than it does to pick up the phone and have a conversation, so I think from an efficiency perspective, I’d rather have the conversation.

Barbara:  Yeah. Just for the listeners, Gordon and I worked in the financial services sector in investment banks and this sort of area where every day we’re interacting with global teams, so although Gordon and I were both in Australia, we were interacting with people in Hong Kong, New York, London, all the time, every day, and as you would know, Gordon … You know the morning meeting? It’s like a massive huddle where basically there’s TV screens in the room, there might be 30 or 40 people in a room, maybe 50 sometimes, there would be several TV screens on the wall with all the different offices dialing in. It’s like a big stand-up huddle. All the analysts get up and give their key points for the day, the traders give their points and everybody’s part of this whole communication thing. The meeting in the morning is like the most important … if you’re late for that meeting, it’s really bad, isn’t it? Because the communication is so vital to get the day started properly and there’s no way that we could just meet once a week, and that’s with hundreds of people would go to these meetings and yet it was quite effective.

Gordon:  It was just the way we do business. In fact, we had a virtual team without actually even putting a label on it. For us it was just a team.

Barbara:  Yeah, we were all part of the one team.

Just because your VA is virtual, doesn’t mean they aren’t  part of your team

Gordon:  We don’t put labels on it. I know we talk about big banks and big financial institutions where they have all these buzz words, but really it was just I’m just speaking to the New York team today or the Hong Kong team or the Perth team or the Sydney team. It’s just the way you did business and we use technology to be in any market and I think we put this thing about being virtual that, we’ve got this impression that they’re not part of the team. Well, they actually are part of the team. The reason why they’re part of the team is because they’re doing a job that they’re skilled at where you don’t have that skill in the team already.

Barbara:  I think as well, if I think back, I don’t know about you, but I know I worked on a trading floor. I mean, gosh, there’s no way you could communicate by email. That’s like you may as well send a letter by mail. I mean, it’s too slow, so we did have chat forums, we had video conferencing, we were doing it all the time, so I think in a fast environment like that, if I think about it, it’s actually kind of similar as a small business owner running around the place, mad busy with a VA in the Philippines. I mean really you’re so busy that, email… things get lost in translation. It takes too long to get back, to read … You’re better off having project management tools and then having good communication flow, either using … Matt, I know you use … what’s that Dropbox … ?

Matt:  Dropbox or … yeah-

Barbara:  Dropbox.

Matt:  – we use Slack.

Barbara:  Slack, Dropbox, all these tools that you can get quick communication to your team and make sure things are not lost in translation.

Gordon:  I think so. You know, apparently one other thing when I did the survey, there’s just over a hundred different categories that are classified as Virtual Assistants, that’s everything from custom web page design to marketing to cold calling, the whole scheme, so the whole world of Virtual Assistant is quite wide. When you ask the Virtual Assistants how they differentiate themselves, they’re talking about price. It all comes down to we’re cheap, we’re cheap, we’re cheap. And I keep on saying, it doesn’t matter what business you are, a Virtual Assistant is there to compliment your business, it’s there to integrate in your business. When you go and hire a person, you don’t hire a person because they’re cheap, you hire a person because they’ve got the skills, not only to do the job, but hopefully they can add some innovation, some creativity, and so they have the same values associated with your business. I think that’s really, really important that we don’t lose sight again. The Virtual Assistant, the virtual is just the office. The assistant is part of your team and you want to employ a Virtual Assistant, it’s exactly the same as if you employed a person who’s actually sat in your office …

Matt:  Absolutely.

Barbara:  Yeah.

Gordon:  … with the right skill set, and you need the right people behind you in order to employ those people.

Email shouldn’t be your only form of communication with your VA

Matt:  And just to add to the conversation, I just want to make a point that I don’t think any of us here are saying that email shouldn’t be used, but I think we’re all in agreeance that email, as the primary form of communication with a virtual team member, is probably not effective or appropriate, and it’s certainly not the recipe for success with your virtual team. It has its place and I know that I communicate via email on certain things with my team, particularly when it involves potentially copying them in on correspondence with clients or other suppliers and the like, however as a primary form of communication, it’s very impersonal.

Emails are read in … they’ve not always got the right tonality and they’re read in somebody else’s voice, not in the voice of the person who’s writing the email. We think it’s more efficient, but it’s actually very inefficient over the long-run.

Gordon:  The other thing for that matter, because the person is part of the team, when you’re talking about where your business is going and where they’re developing, those Virtual Assistants in Manila will have their own network and they’ll go, “You know what? We might have someone who can help here. Or actually, I know someone who’s got a client in New York or a client in Sydney that can help you with here.” So, it’s a way of networking.

I talk about there’s different pathways, there’s over 30 pathways to networking and ways to differentiate yourself, and I think it’s really about allowing that person … and it comes back that person must be part of your team. You must share everything with them because we don’t know how wide their network is either, and that’s where I think we see the real difference.

Matt:  Absolutely.

Top 3 tips to gain success as a client or VA

Barbara:  Yeah. Gordon, what would you say from doing the survey, doing the conference, could you sort of summarise for us, like what would be your top three tips or action steps in order to get success, be it as a client or a VAs? Because you were talking to the VAs about how to market themselves, basically, how to become more visible to differentiate themselves, but also for clients looking to hire a VA, what should they be looking for? What are the top three action steps you could give to our listeners?

Gordon:  I think one of the things I … I talked a lot about it at the beginning is one of them is about client perception is your reality, so really understand what your client is looking for and I’ve used the question of ‘how do I integrate into your business?’, not just with VAs, but I’ve taken that into other businesses, physical businesses, and that’s a question I ask all the time now and it’s quite a powerful question. So, the top tip is to understand your differentiation and how do you integrate, I think is one thing.

The second way is looking at what works for you and when I look at some of the low scores that’s come through, and it happens to someone who’s been referred but you’ve got an individual need for a VA, so make sure that how you’re going to look for that VA or what you want that VA to do is very specific to you. So what I say: don’t go down a path because other people have chosen a path. Make sure you’ve got the right person for the right skillset on that side.

And for VAs, the other thing I would say about VAs is don’t treat them like an expert in a vacuum. And what I mean, these VAs are extremely skilled, but they’re extremely knowledgeable just like another employee, and don’t just keep them in a huddle.

When I look at the business of a VA, the VA’s exactly the same as any other business I look at, so I think client perception is key. I think when I look at the VAs in terms of going out and seeking business and clients seeking business, they’re trying to do everything themselves and I’m saying no, you can’t do it yourself. You’ve really got to get the assistants and go and get assistants, and the other one I put down is I find excuses because they don’t do things because of this, because of that … and I turn round to them and say, “Don’t stop believing because others make excuses for doing something.”

I think those are the three business tips I give to people that are asking, if that’s clear enough for you, to go out … There’s a massive world out there, there’s a massive world out there for VAs, people are crying out for VAs, you just need to know how you can integrate into the business.

As the client, be clear on what your expectations are of your VA

Matt:  Absolutely, and I think in those three points when we talk about client perception there, I think if you’re employing a VA or inviting a VA to become part of your team, as the client, you need to be clear on what your expectations are as well. As much as it’s about the VA working out how they can integrate into the business, I think it’s really important for you as the employer to get clear on what does success look like for this person? And actually communicating that with them so you set them up to win, otherwise there’s this unspoken expectation. You can’t hit something that you can’t see, so I think that’s invaluable information there and knowledge.

Gordon, is there anything else, just in wrapping up, anything else that you’d love for the listeners…Any other particular insights from the survey that you’d love to share just in closing?

Gordon:  Sure, so from a VA perspective, my common segment, my presentation of the speaking about it I did wasn’t about networking with a purpose and how to be visible. What I talked about was there’s 30 different ways to network and there’s 20 different ways to differentiate yourself and when I went through how do people find the VA, finding it through a referral was only 30%, so people did search on social media and they did things through the web and they were searching elsewhere. One of the questions was, how do we differentiate yourself? I said, “Well, I became a speaker and a coach because I made myself visible, because I’m not a good writer, but one of the things was I got published in CEO Magazine as a person of expertise, so there’s different ways to publish yourself.

What I’m finding through the surveys I do is people have been sought, not because they’re turning up to networking events, but because they’re providing information, providing thought leadership into the marketplace, so that’s one thing I told the VAs to get out there and start doing. Don’t start selling your services, start selling your thought leadership and your integration, and there’s different ways to differentiate yourself. There are a 101 different ways to be a VA. If you are a web marketing VA specialist, don’t call yourself a Virtual Assistant, just call yourself a web marketing person.

Barbara:  Yeah, that’s very true, because everyone calls themselves a VA. As you say, it’s a very broad term. What is a VA? Yeah.

Gordon:  The VA is just the office we sit in.

Matt:  Exactly.

Barbara:  That’s true, yeah.

Gordon:  It’s not that you have an employee of the business to do that, and any perspective employers listening now on this podcast, what I’d say to you is your advice is when you bring in a VA, make them part of your team and treat them like an employee and you’ll get the maximum out of them that way.

Barbara:  Yeah. I know, that’s so true. It’s like any person, really. Gordon, we’ll put links to those downloads … what is it? The 30 ways to network and …

Gordon:  Yeah, 20 different ways to differentiate.

Barbara:  Yeah, because that can apply to any business. That’s not just for VAs. Any business at all can use those.

Gordon:  You know what? I’ll tell you, you can go on the web and look at networking and everything else, and it’s not about identifying the pathway, it’s identifying how you actually go on that pathway and what you actually do on that pathway. It’s a bit like when we use the word for the investment banks, we can give people 20 tips on what stocks to buy, but actually when you go and buy and how you actually go and buy the stock is completely different.

Barbara:  Absolutely, yeah.

Gordon:  To me, it’s like we’ve got the ingredients, but the real skillset is how you actually mix the ingredients together to get the right product on the outside.

Barbara:  I think I might use that terminology for how Virtual Angel Hub was born, because the ingredients are all there. Our business has been built out of showing people actually how to integrate and doing them properly, so that’s …

Gordon:  And your real IP and your real differentiation is that formula, and like any good food producer, you’re not going to give away your formula.

Barbara:  Well, yeah. Anyone can have one, because I always say I challenge anyone to try it by themselves because it is an extraordinarily difficult business to get right, when you’re dealing with people. People businesses are very rewarding but it’s a tough gig, yeah. Tough to get the formula right. It’s like a Master Chef recipe

Gordon:  It is, that’s exactly what it is.

Barbara:  The Master Chef of VA. Maybe we’ll call ourselves that.

Wrapping things up

Matt:  Well, Gordon, thanks for your time today and your insights.

Gordon:  It’s a pleasure.

Matt:  It’s been absolutely invaluable. And for the listeners, we’ve got the links below and on the website – virtualsuccessshow.com – that you can download those downloads that Gordon was talking about. Please share the show with others and we’d love you to write a review, also. But also write into us and let us know if there’s any other specific topics you’d like us to talk about on this show because the show is built about helping you achieve and succeed with Virtual Assistants.

So, thanks Gordon. Thanks Barbara.

Gordon:  Pleasure.

Barbara:  Thanks everyone.

Matt:  We’ll see you all on the next show. Have a beautiful week and we’ll speak to you all soon.

Barbara:  Thanks.

Gordon:  Thank you.

Matt Malouf is a passionate business coach, speaker, author and entrepreneur on a mission to help entrepreneurs around the world break the shackles of mediocrity and reach new levels of personal and business success.

Barbara Turley is the Founder & CEO of The Virtual Hub, a company that specializes in recruiting, training and managing superstar ‘Virtual Assistants’ in the social media, digital marketing and systems automation space.

Want the transcript? Download it here.

Some of the areas covered include:

Let us know what your key takeout has been from this episode and join the continuing conversation over in the Virtual Success Facebook Group.

Resources mentioned in this show:

The Stop Doing List – www.stopdoing.com.au

In this episode:

00:55 – So I ‘think’ I only need 5 hours a week from my VA

03:28 – If you think you’ve only got 5 hours, you’re not committed enough

04:32 – Changing your mindset to ‘stop doing’

06:59 – Are you in business, or have you just created a job for yourself?

09:30 – How to ‘Time Log’

11:35 – Ask yourself – “How can I stop doing?”

14:30 – Positive stress

16:43 – Shifting your focus

17:45 – Pros of committing to a full-time VA

18:47 – Bringing in specialists for ad hoc tasks

22:51 – Wrapping things up

Barbara:  Hi, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the Virtual Success Show. I’m joined again, as always, by my co-host, Matt Malouf. Matt, how are you?

Matt:  I’m well, Barb. How are you?

Barbara:  I’m great, thank you. Great. Enjoying this a little cooler weather we’re having in Sydney now, which is very nice. I love this time of year.

Matt:  I know. But its beautiful blue skies today. We’ve had a lot of rain over the last few weeks …

Barbara:  I know.

Matt:  … and so very interesting.

Barbara:  Very enjoyable.

So I ‘think’ I only need 5 hours a week from my VA

Listen, on today’s show, everyone, we thought a really interesting thing that I’ve wanted to delve into on the show for a quite a while, actually, because we get quite a lot of customers coming to Virtual Angel Hub with this exact question. They’ll sort of hit up our Facebook page, or our live chat, asking, “Look, I only need five hours or so a week with a VA. You have a minimum of 20 hours a week. Is there anything you could do for me?”

What I find interesting about this question is that, for me, five hours a week, having worked with a lot of virtual teams and in various different businesses, five hours is actually not very much and, obviously, some smaller businesses will think, “I only need that much time.” My feeling is that well, I know that within a few weeks of joining Virtual Angel Hub, so many people who thought they would never fill 20 hours can’t believe how quickly it got filled up when we actually helped them to sort of see what else they could be doing.

Matt:  Yeah, and I think I’m just going to be real direct to our listeners straight upfront, is if you only think you’ve got five hours to delegate, you’re not trying hard enough. You really aren’t. Because I think too often these days, we get caught up in being busy and, so, we think that the busyness is important. Yet, in actual fact, a lot of the tasks that are causing the busyness are either not necessary, or not of high priority and can be done by somebody else. They need to get done, but they can easily be done by somebody else. In our shows around Mindset that we did early on, I think that it explains a lot around this.

But I think, honestly, if you only believe you’ve got five hours a week, and that’s at any phase of business, and I’ve coached businesses from start-up to $55 million turnover businesses, so I’ve seen the whole gamut. The reality is, even in start-up mode, you can easily delegate a minimum of 20 hours, which gives you time to focus on the most important. Also, it’s what I phrase as the genius tasks. The genius tasks being those that you love doing, that you’re really good at, but have a positive financial return to you in the business.

If you think you’ve only got 5 hours, you’re not committed enough

Barbara:  Well, you know, Matt, because this is interesting. Because when this question comes into us, I’m glad you said it because I often feel like, well, really, you know, I just don’t think you’re committing enough to the business, if you’re thinking that you only have five hours a week, and I’ll tell you why.

When I first started my first business, like from day one, I hired a full-time VA, because I knew that I wanted to be out speaking, networking, talking to people. I needed somebody there all the time to be managing my website, getting my content up, like all I was doing was producing content, a bit like what we do here. My VA was doing a full-time job in the backend, keeping the social media alive, keeping the whole presence alive. I definitely got business out of that because my online presence was so heavy and it was so good, so I do find that difficult to understand if you’re … We have plenty of start-ups that come to Virtual Angel Hub and hire VAs fulltime straight away because they’re focusing on scaling their start-up from day one.

So this is my big mindset issue there. I mean how do you get people around that?

Changing your mindset to ‘stop doing’

Matt:  Well, I think, first and foremost, it’s starting to get clear on what you’re doing, and we’re going to do a show on this, which is the book that I’ve just released, the Stop Doing List. But if you go to stopdoing.com.au, there’s a free tool that associates with the book that helps you actually step through this.

The only way to really start to understand what to delegate is you need to know where you’re spending your time and, so, what I recommend is that you, firstly, start with doing a two-week time audit, which is, literally, just writing down what you do in a day. What you’ll find straightaway is there is, number one, a whole lot of distraction in your days often and, secondly, is there’s plenty of things you could get a virtual assistant to do. From there, you need to start to work through that process of getting clarity on the task, understanding whether there’s a system for the task, but also how long the task takes.

I think that’s a really interesting piece there, how long the task takes and the frequency because a lot of daily tasks, repetitive tasks can be delegated to a virtual assistant. If you think about it, you only need to have four 15-minute daily tasks, then all of a sudden, there’s your five hours. If you can’t find four 15-minute daily tasks or eight or 10 or 20 of those, again, like we said earlier, I don’t think you’re trying hard enough. But, it’s also understanding that your time is valuable, your time is worth money, your return on your time is better spent in other areas, and having a virtual assistant doing these things for you is going to be way more profitable for you in the long run.

Barbara:  I just thought of something as you were talking there, Matt. It’s almost like, you mentioned all the things that we talk about on this show, which is systems and processes and sitting down for two weeks and doing a time audit on yourself. So I’m thinking to myself – I think what happens to a lot of people is that they immediately think, I don’t have time for that. I just need the VAs to take this five hours off me because if … the stuff you were talking about requires somebody to take a little bit of responsibility and accountability for creating processes and moving to the next level, whatever that level might be, in the business.

Are you in business, or have you just created a job for yourself?

I think what I would say to listeners out there is if you are feeling this right now, then you really need to think about are you in business, or have you just created a bit of a job for yourself that you think is a hobby? That you think is a passion thing, but you’re really driving yourself into the ground if you’re doing it that way.

Matt:  And to add to that, this is part of strategic thinking, that in order to grow companies, more time needs to be spent in strategic thinking. It’s that quadrant that Stephen Covey calls the “Important, Not Urgent”. I think it’s Quadrant Two in his Time Targets.

A time log is never urgent, it really isn’t. However, it is such an amazingly simple tool that gives you such clarity. I actually did it for an entire year, every day, every week of an entire year, and my productivity and efficiency went through the roof. Because it’s all the little things that you start to realise, I could get this person to do that, I could get that person to do that, and it’s just amazing. It really is.

Barbara:  It actually happened to me recently because, as a lot of the listeners would know, I had a baby last year, so my lovely little Ruby is now seven-and-a-half months old, and I was tying myself in knots with a new lead gen project that we have running. I really thought to myself, but really, I’m the only person who can do that. I was talking to a team member who is really keen to step up and do more with us and I said to him, “The only problem is I kind of have to do that job and I kind of have to do that.”

Then, I thought to myself, a few days later, I thought, do I really? I have to ask myself this question. I’m in this little small lead gen programme at the moment that is actually taking me step-by-step through some stuff that we need to do. I thought, well, why couldn’t I have him do the programme and get him to step up into this programme and actually, if he wants to do more with us, let go of the reins and maybe just guide and mentor him through that process, rather me actually do it? So it is a mindset thing and it’s that, you know, just thinking, do I really need to be doing all this stuff, or is it a mindset problem that I need to get over?

But what I’m interested to ask you, Matt, so the time log thing, can you talk to me about the tool you have, and how do you actually do this? Because I did that sort of mentally, I didn’t actually do a time log. Is there a thing that you need to do in order to do a time log?

How to ‘Time Log’

Matt:  Yes. In the download that’s on the site, I’ve created a tool where you can … it’s in Excel form and you need just literally keep the … from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep, in 15-minute increments, what are you doing. It’s just sort of high level, so I was doing emails, I was on a phone call, I was surfing the net, looking at Facebook, I was writing an article, I was in a meeting, whatever it might be, and you’ll start to actually see …

The thing I see when I’m sent these is two things. Number one is there’s a lot of wasted time on unnecessary tasks that somebody could easily do. Second thing is that a lot of people don’t have a good flow in their days, so they’re jumping and changing from so many things. Whereas, if they had a person that could take care of all those little things for them, they would get into a better flow and be far more productive.

Barbara:  I think as well with that, I mean I love those [inaudible 00:10:04] because I know that a few years ago I was terrible for that jumping around, multitasking, which is just a terrible way to do anything. Even if you think you’re a good multitasker, it’s just not a good way of doing anything. So I had to change to this energy-batching idea, which is to say, for example, I will do all of my financially-type stuff in the one batch, so if I have to do … and this is all of the stuff I probably should delegate. I’m just thinking as I’m talking about it.

But, let’s say, I have to do a bit of, you know, I’ve got to figure out some stuff in my accounts, or I’ve got to do some affiliate commission payout or something like that. I’ll actually do all of those things on the one day because in that day, I’m in that energy field and it’s better than … I can’t switch from that to writing a blog post, which I used to try and do, and I did it very badly.

Matt:  But I think what was interesting as you were just talking then, Barb, was that even in that starting to think about what you’re doing, you’re, like, I should probably delegate that, and there’s probably half a day’s worth of work that somebody else could do, hence, now that you only have to do half the work to get the same outcome.

Ask yourself – “How can I stop doing?”

Barbara:  Well, I think, you know, and I want the listeners to do it. This is a little trick I do with myself a lot. Every day, I actually say to myself “How can I stop doing …?”and I know your books called that. How can I stop doing this task, that task, and it’s not because I’m that busy, I’ll be honest with you.

It’s because I want to spend more time with my daughter, so I always think, how can i outsource more things, or delegate more things in my business, so that I can actually take on the job I really want to do right now, which is the mother job? I don’t want to delegate that to a nanny and do everything else myself. I’ve actually made the decision that I would like to do more of the motherhood one, and delegate more of the other stuff, so that’s an interesting mindset shift that I’ve gone through.

Matt:  Let me share a little bit of the tactics behind that. I remember when I hired Vanessa, who works with me. I said, “If any of your friends are like you, want to work like you, you’re amazing, let me know. There’s always going to be an opportunity.” One of her friends was looking for some work, I interview her, she was an amazing candidate. I was just about to go on leave for three weeks and I’m, like, this woman couldn’t afford to wait three weeks to get a job and I was, like, okay, I’m going to take her on.

I took her on and I remember putting these two Post-It notes on my computer screen. One Post-It note said, “What must I stop doing today?” and the second said, “What could I get Shahani to do today?”

Barbara:  Yeah, that’s really effective.

Matt:  And they were just staring at me all day, all day, so … and you know, I do a bit of travel so I had the Post-It notes on my office computer, on my laptop, so anytime I was in front of my computer, these two Post-It notes are staring at me, and believe it, before I knew it … and I didn’t actually have a role for her, at the time. I just thought I knew that I was going to need someone in the near future, she was a good candidate, I’m going to take her on. Before I knew it, and we were talking about this before the show, I had probably five, 10 hours of work, initially. I needed to get the next person within three months because my focus was, “What do I need to stop doing now, and what can I get Shahani to do right now?”

Barbara:  Well, that’s interesting, Matt, actually because this comes back to the strategic thinking thing again. Guys, the listeners, I just want to sort of highlight something that Matt talks about a lot in the show and he’s very good at the strategic thinking part of business, where, if you are just caught up in the day-to-day doing, you’re never going to have a chance to be strategic. But if you know that you’re launching something, you know this year’s plan, and you know what your 20 … we’re in 2017 right now. You know what you 2018 plan is, which I know in my business what way that’s going over the next one, three and five years, what I want to achieve.

Positive stress

Sometimes what happens to me is, you know, in our business, obviously, sometimes clients will have to, for various reasons, they may have to cancel their account or they may have to pause their account because their own business needs change. Sometimes when a really good person comes back into our pool, I’m faced with the decision of, oh, it wasn’t in my plan yet, but that person is really good and we invested a lot in training that person. They’ve just come off an amazing account that they learned amazing stuff, and I’m pushed into a position of going I don’t want to give them to another client because I want that person on my team.

All of a sudden, I find I also get overstaffed very quickly and for a month or two, they might actually not be doing much, only a few research projects for me, but before I know it, my plans move closer and my business grows much faster because I have the resources in order to be able to push myself into up-leveling quicker. So sometimes it can be a good thing, I think, to hire a little bit early when you know what your strategic plan is for the future.

Matt:  It’s what we view as a positive stress. You put the positive pressure on yourself to grow faster because you understand that, with this person, you’ve now got this opportunity, but if you don’t grow, that you’re going to have to let them go.

Barbara:  I have in my situation then, what happens me, is I have to let them go, then, my plans come to fruition when I want to do the things I want to do and I have to bring the new person who doesn’t understand our brand, who doesn’t, you know, I have to train. The training is much harder. Whereas, if I had somebody already floating, that’s already been trained by Virtual Angel Hub, I just love to take them on my team because we backed them in the first place to a client, why wouldn’t I take them on?

Matt:  Exactly, exactly.

Barbara:  Sometimes, I’ll be honest with the listeners here, there might be some listeners on this who’ve done this, sometimes our clients let very good VAs go because they can’t make it work themselves and, then, I take them on and my business explodes. I want listeners to realise that sometimes this is actually a major mindset block with you, as a business owner, and not necessarily with the person that you have not been able to make it work.

Shifting your focus

Matt:  Absolutely. Now, one last thing I just want to say on this topic is I think one other thing that holds a lot of business owners back from delegating more is they go, “If I could just get these five hours, then my day wouldn’t be as busy,” rather than focusing on, “If I can get rid of half of what I currently do, I could do more of the income-producing or maybe the things that I love.”

We’re constantly focusing on, “Okay, I don’t want to overwork or burnout, so I’ll just get rid of this little bit, and that way, I can just keep the rest of this, and it’ll be nice and neat and tidy,” as opposed to actually thinking bigger here and going, “If I can just wipe out 50% of what I currently do, and have that go to somebody else, that will probably do it better than you will, anyway, then I can focus on the things that I love doing, that tend to be more income-producing.” Number one, you’re making more money. Number two, you’re happier in your business, not just because you’re making more money, but because you’re doing the things that you actually wanted to do when you set this business up in the first place.

Pros of committing to a full-time VA

Barbara:  Also, just an add-on comment to that, think about it from the VAs point of view or whoever it is that you’re hiring. It doesn’t matter if they’re a VA or wherever they are, put yourself in their shoes. Let’s say they’ve got you for five hours a week and, then, they have this other massive contract that took them on for 40 hours a week. Where do you think their energy is going to be? Because often clients would say to us, “Once I get going, I’d like to take them on full-time.”

I go, okay, do you think that VA is going to sit there with no income until you decide that you’re ready to take them on? No, they’re going to go and get another contract. So either we have to give it to them, or they’re going to go online and pick one up somewhere else. With all due respect to the people who love their business and want five hours, that person is really not going to have … their central focus and their main commitment is not really going to be to you because you’re not really committing to them.

Matt:  Absolutely.

Barbara:  That’s just my view. You’re not going to get the level that you’ll get if you really commit to someone, and bring them into your vision properly.

Bringing on specialists for ad hoc tasks

Matt:  Just on the flip of that, too. If you’re only looking for a few things that you want to have done, there’s no reason why you couldn’t have someone just take care of certain tasks on an ad-hoc basis. Like I know with all of my slide presentations that I do for my speaking gigs, I don’t need someone full-time on the books to be able to do that. I have a regular contractor that I use on Upwork and we’ve got a pre-agreed price because I’ve been working with him for the last four years. It works for me, so that task doesn’t need to consume somebody within my team. I can get a specialist to do that piece of work and that works in that fashion.

I think just on the flip of all of this for a second, if it’s specific specialist tasks, you may need something designed, you may need a PowerPoint presentation, whatever those little sorts of one-off type of things, again, these are things that you would normally sit there and probably do yourself. Put it into perspective, to do a full-day presentation would probably take me a minimum of three to four days of sitting there and constructing it and putting it all together. I can pay 48 cents a slide and have them produced, animations done and I get it back within 48 hours and all I have to do is provide a mind map. It’s unbelievable.

Barbara:  Yeah, that’s brilliant. Yeah, that’s a great tip for those people who do just want to have that little ad hoc-type stuff…

Matt:  But in reality, just to back on to that, my belief is that every business owner could have somebody doing a minimum, minimum of 20 hours a week for them, and it really is life-changing, in my opinion. It really is.

Barbara:  Well, I’ll be honest with the listeners. People would often ask me why do you not do a pay-as-you-go service? Why do you not do a smaller contract of less than 20 hours? I’ll be brutally honest. We want clients who are committing to their business and committing to our business and our VAs, so we want long-term contracts for our VAs and that’s the business that we are in. Everything outside of that, I’d feel is, like what you are doing, it’s a project, it’s ad hoc, it’s here and there. That’s kind of why we don’t do that because we just feel it’s businesses that are committing more heavily to their strategic direction that we’re sort of playing in that space.

Matt:  But I’ll also add just one last thing to that, Barb. Having someone just for 10 hours a week in that capacity, it actually doesn’t work.

Barbara:  No.

Matt:  Even if Barbara did offer that as a service, it doesn’t work. I remember we had the discussion about this in the infancy of Virtual Angel Hub and we were like, it actually doesn’t serve the business owner in the best. I know that’s one thing that Barb is extremely passionate about, is providing the service that serves the business owners’ best interests, and a 10-hour VA is actually not in anyone’s best interest, in my opinion.

Barbara:  No, and I’ll tell you something. The other person it doesn’t work for is the VA. If you think about it, if somebody wants a full-time job, a 40-hour-a-week job, which every VA that we have has the right to have a full-time income with us, we need to put them on four different contracts to get 10 hours each. Their mind is so scattered it’s very overwhelming for them. Usually, a person who buys 10 hours will try and overload that VA a little bit more than 10 hours, so we get very stressed-out VAs that want to resign from the client, and not from us.

I’ll be open about that, that’s the reason, so it’s two-fold. It doesn’t work for clients long-term, even though they think it does. It doesn’t work for the VAs and it causes enormous pressure on our team in Virtual Angel Hub. That’s why we don’t do it. I’ve just realised the answer to that whole question is … I might even do a blog post on that because …

Matt:  It’s a lose-lose-lose strategy. Nobody wins in that strategy.

Wrapping things up

I guess in just wrapping up for today, I think the most important message that Barbara and I really want you to understand today is that you can easily find at least 20 hours of work for a virtual assistant to do in your business if you commit to it, if you focus on it, if you start to work through and understand, number one, where you’re spending your time, number two, where your time is better spent, and number three, just having some prompts in front of you that remind you, hey, what could I get somebody else to do right now? What do I need to stop doing right now? If you follow those simple little tips, as I said, before you know it, you’ll jump from five hours a week to having a 40-hour-week person.

Barbara:  You will, and go to stopdoing.com.au if you want that tool that actually helps you to take you through this process. It’s a fantastic tool, so it’s over Matt’s new website, buy the book…

Matt:  Thanks.

Barbara:  Stopdoing.com.au. Matt, thanks very much. That was great insights. I know this is something a lot of particularly smaller businesses really struggle with, so I think it’s a great topic to help people get over that hurdle.

Matt:  I agree. I agree. If you’re enjoying the show, we’d love for you to leave a review and also share the show with others, but also write us an email and let us know if there’s any other specific topics you’d like us to talk about. We’re always looking to ensure that the topics we present to you on this show are for our listeners, so if there’s anything specific you’d like us to talk about, please feel free to write it in. Otherwise, Barbara, thank you once again.

Barbara:  Thanks, Matt. See you on the next show.

Matt:  See you, then.

Matt Malouf is a passionate business coach, speaker, author and entrepreneur on a mission to help entrepreneurs around the world break the shackles of mediocrity and reach new levels of personal and business success.

Barbara Turley is the Founder & CEO of The Virtual Hub, a company that specializes in recruiting, training and managing superstar ‘Virtual Assistants’ in the social media, digital marketing and systems automation space.

Want the transcript? Download it here.

Some of the areas covered include:

Let us know what your key takeout has been from this episode and join the continuing conversation over in the Virtual Success Facebook Group.

In this episode:

02:05 – About Yaro

03:22 – The laptop lifestyle

04:15 – Having the right people on your team

08:20 – Yaro’s blog: Break free from emails

13:10 – Steps to break free from emails

13:25 – Separating personal from business emails

14:35 – Hiring someone to take over your emails

15:56 – Creating systems for dealing with emails

19:07 – Emotions experienced when handing over emails

22:35 – Key competencies needed to take care of emails

25:48 – Tips on training your new recruit

35:41 – Wrapping things up

Barbara:  Hey everyone and welcome back to another episode of the Virtual Success Show, where I’m joined by my co-host Matt Malouf. Matt, how are you?

Matt:  I’m well Barbara, how are you?

Barbara:  I’m good thanks. You must be having a good week. Finally, your book has come out. Your book has launched – The Stop Doing list.

Matt:  It has. It’s been really exciting over the last … it’s been out for about a month now. Getting some really positive feedback. So really, really enjoying the journey.

Barbara:  Yeah and probably a bit of rest time after all the push that was involved with pushing the book out.

Matt:   Absolutely, absolutely.

Barbara:  I can imagine.

Matt:  There was a few things that I might stop doing years from now.

Barbara:  Yeah. Well, I’m reading it at the moment and I’m thinking “Gosh, there’s so many things I can still stop doing.” Anyway, one of the things that I do need to stop doing is my own email, and our guest today on the show, I’m very keen to talk to today’s guest about this because he wrote a fantastic blog post about this a while ago which triggered me to bring him on the show. He’s not only a friend of mine, but he’s very big in the online marketing space online. I would call him sort of the King of people who would want to start a blog and figure out how on earth to get traffic to your blog. And get going with your blogging journey. Yaro Starak, welcome to the show.

Matt:  Welcome Yaro.

Yaro:  Thank you guys. Love to be here and looking forward to talking about something I don’t really talk about on podcasts very much.

Barbara:  Yes, obviously you would usually be interviewed about online marketing, getting started in blogging. Tell us a bit about your background, tell the listeners a bit more about your background just to get things going.

About Yaro

Yaro:  Yeah, you’re quite correct. I do normally talk about blogging on I’d say, 95% of the podcast interviews I do. Primarily because that’s what I teach and what I’m known for, and I’ve been blogging myself for, we’re in year 12 now of blogging. I started in 2005, so it’s been a career. I’ve pretty much had an online entrepreneurship career my entire adult life. It’s been great to me.

I have to really thank the Gods for being born in a time when I can use the internet as a way to run a business, and I’ve pretty much made my living entirely online. Thankfully, also been able to travel around the world, taking my business with me. What you would normally find me doing is sitting in cafe’s, writing on my laptop. Either writing a blog post or an email, coordinating with my team on Slack. I teach courses and I have a membership sight, I sell ebooks as well. I’m basically a writer, teacher, entrepreneur, and running a publishing company is probably the best way to put it now. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last, more than a decade. And I love it.

Barbara:  You’re heading from Vancouver to France next, so you’re truly the laptop lifestyle entrepreneur. You truly live that.

The Laptop Lifestyle

Yaro:  I like to represent what I teach as much as I can. Yeah, that’s for sure. Especially at the moment. I’ve been traveling, I wouldn’t say non-stop. I’ve certainly been stopping in Canada and I’ve had a number of trips back and forth to conferences in the States. But, yes, it’s really go, go, go, go keep traveling, and if there’s an event we want to attend, I’ll hop on a plane and get to it. Life doesn’t really change that much. It’s Airbnbs and Ubers and sitting on my laptop working. That’s kind of what the day to day life is like.

Barbara:  I’m sure there’s lots of listeners going “Yeah, I want to do that” So, you’ve got to follow Yaro if you want to figure out how to get that lifestyle. Because you teach that really, really well.

So, Yaro, obviously you mentioned Slack, which we’ve talked about on this show many times before, which is a great communication channel when you have a virtual team. How many people do you have on your direct team at the moment, helping you to run this laptop lifestyle.

Having the right people on your team

Yaro:  I should officially count. I’m pretty sure we’ve got 10 people in Slack at the moment. Nearly all of them are working with me every day. Basically, I’ve got three people in what we call, Client Care. Which is email and customer support and sales support too. It’s sort of like an all-around Client Care. That’s why they’re called Client Care. I’ve got two … I wouldn’t call them full-time – all my people are contractors but the Client Care people really do check in every day.

I’ve got two tech people, who are pretty much my main tech resources for doing all website changes, blog changes, setting up pages and that sort of thing. One Graphic Designer, one Facebook Ad Manager, one Content Auditor. At the moment, it’s going to be content audit on my website. It’s sort of a social media management role too. Well, it will be anyway. One person handling my podcasts, publications, I think that’s kind of everyone.

Then there is the more, not really day to day, part of my team. The person who does the transcripts and then occasionally if we need something written, we go to a writer. If we need something formatted, we go to a desktop publishing specialist. Really the day-to-day team is the people I just mentioned.

Barbara:  Yeah. You know what I love about that, and I want to say to some of the listeners that are listening to this that think that running a blog, and making money from content marketing, coming into courses, can be done by just one VA. I just want listeners to realise that, if you’re really running this like the true business that Yaro teaches you, basically how to do.

Look at all those people you have on your team. Yes, you’re working from your laptop, but you have a fully functioning team that is firing every day. So, to make this thing work, you’re really taking it very, very seriously. I think that’s important for people to realise.

Yaro:  Yeah. It’s actually been more recently though. If you go back in time, my team was really me, a tech person and an email person and that was it. We certainly had the odd contractor come on board, now and then, for one-off calls. But, for a long time it was a three person show. I did all the content and all the marketing and all the email writing. I just had the tech person and the email person sort of as my main two support team.

To be fair, I ran a great business. It just was capped in how big it could get and in the last maybe four or five years, I wanted to go beyond that phase and that’s why I brought more people in. Which has been really interesting actually because it’s allowed me to not only grow further, but to also test some theories around systems that I’ve always wanted to set up. It’s actually taken me out of the business even more because it’s allowed me to sort of say “Okay, what if Yaro does absolutely nothing, except for maybe show up for one group coaching call and communicate with a few clients who pay for private time with me. Does the business still run?”

That requires a slightly bigger team and certainly more systems in place. I have to spend a bit of time creating email funnels that run without me. So that was a deliberate change in strategy, because before that it was very launched-based. I may create money, I can’t complain, but I didn’t feel about it, that it was as automated a business. It is a business still, but I guess it felt more like I was a … I don’t call myself a freelancer but I was a coach, or a teacher making a great living. Now, it feels more like I’m still that, but my content is kind of doing a lot of the heavy lifting for me. More so than it was in the past. And because that’s working, the team is needed in place to kind of manage the more sales, the more customers, the more queries coming in. It’s been fun to see that transition and that growth happen.

Yaro’s blog: Break free from emails

Matt:  Yaro, the blog that Barbara referenced earlier about breaking free from emails. Talk us through just what inspired you to write that and what the general gist of that was.

Yaro:  Yeah, it’s one of my favourite topics actually. It’s weird that it’s taken so long to write about it. Even before I was a blogger, I was obviously an online entrepreneur and I had an editing company, which was set-up to specifically be what you would call, I guess Tim Ferris kind-of-business today. A four-hour work weekkind of business.

I built it before Tim was Tim, and he hadn’t written any of his books. But, back then I was still chasing very much what Tim represents now, which was that lifestyle business that provides a cash flow source so you can do whatever you want with your life. That was my primary goal to begin with as an entrepreneur, was to create some kind of income stream business like that. It’s weird because today, people don’t build online businesses necessarily thinking about how they can run without them, but that was my entire goal.

This particular editing company I had, the main job that kept me involved in the company was email. Even from day 1, I knew at some point email would be one of the first, probably the last thing I’d outsource but it would be the thing that would take me out of the company. I did…after, I mean it took a number of years to get the business up and running, and getting enough customers, and getting enough cash flow.

It was a completely contractor-driven company. I had contract editors. I just built the website and did the marketing and initially did all the email and customer support myself. And then once there was enough cash flow, I brought on actually a friend from university, back in Brisbane, Australia. She took a job and from that point forward, we’re talking like 2003, 2004, she did everything with that business. I really was out. I maybe did one hour every 5 or 6 days, I had to pop in and do something and ever since then, I’ve always seen email as the first thing I need to get off my plate if I really want any sense of freedom. It blows my mind how many entrepreneurs I still spend time with who are devoting large chunks of their most productive hours to simply replying to emails.

So, the impetus for writing this actual article, was a very small networking dinner I went to with some other entrepreneurs. And one of the woman there, was talking about how, we were sort of sharing our problems, and she was saying “Every night I go home, I just can’t get on top of my email. I spend like 4 or 5 hours before I go to bed.” And that’s when I kind of dropped the bombshell at the table and said “I haven’t done my own emails in 12 years.” There’s all these shocked faces when people think about that because it’s … I don’t know what it is about it. Barbara, you mentioned before, people have trouble letting go of their email or seeing that as something other people can handle for them. Yet, we all know most the time, it’s not a part of your business that moves forward either. It’s something you kind of do that is like treading water. It’s not growing your business, you are always responding to things.

For me, since that experience with the editing business and then with my blogging business, and pretty much any business I’ve ever had, Email, along with tech support have been the first two things I always get other people to handle because I need to be writing the blog posts or doing the joint-ventures or creating the webinars or the videos or the podcasts because that’s my growth activities. Responding to emails is barely a growth activity. I think it’s one of the most important things to outsource.

Barbara:  Yeah, I mean I’m so fascinated by that whole story because I know and as you were talking I was thinking, I know one of the areas our clients would probably delegate last is their email because it’s kind of difficult to do it. And also because they’re probably hiring virtual assistants and I know you didn’t necessarily get a VA to do it. And I was also thinking about my own email and I actually still manage my own email but what I’ve done with mine is I’ve managed to eradicate as much email as possible. I actually don’t get that many emails. I don’t really have to deal with email in that way cause I’ve automated a lot of things and I push everything on to project management tools. I’ve tried every which way to sort of eradicate email but I recently dived into this blog post and I read it several times over. I was like, I really need to nail this because I want first of all to do it for myself, and second of all, to start talking to our clients about how to do this safely, effectively; Because it is your personal email.

Let’s dive in. I’m sure the listeners are dying to know, ‘how do we actually do this?’ Do you have a couple of steps maybe you can share with us that we can digest and actually activate ourselves?

Steps to break free from emails

Yaro:  Sure, sure. You mentioned one thing right there that’s worth covering. You said, “Handing over your personal email.” I think that’s a distinction that needs to be made. I have a personal email account and then I have a business email account. I don’t hand over my personal one and frankly, there’s no need to. I get maybe two or three emails a day and it’s really just friends, family, and a few things like notifications about a flight booking or an Airbnb booking or something like that. Even that, I could potentially have someone else handle but, I like to choose where I live and I like to choose which planes I fly on so it’s more of a personal preference there.

Separating personal from business emails

My business email is everything else. That’s I think step one for people is to separate their emails, which they’re happy to have someone else handle and, which ones they want to maintain. But, really be realistic about that because you’d be surprised how little you really need to touch in terms of email yourself. You can if you have someone you trust do 99% of the messages. One of the things I like to do is go into your inbox and just have a look at all the emails and ask yourself, “Should I be the one replying or filtering or even just deleting these messages.” I know this is crazy but, hiring someone just to delete the bad emails, the emails you don’t need to deal with can make a huge difference in itself, so that might be step one.

Hiring someone to take over your emails

But, I guess I should stick with my article cause I did have three steps in there that I mentioned. Then really step one, is the obviously step, which is hiring someone who is competent to do this job but this is not more difficult than hiring someone for any other outsourcing role in your business. There’s not some sort of secret spy test they have to go through to handle my email here. It’s like any other thing I outsource. I look for qualities I look for in any person I’m hiring. Do they have good attention to detail? Do they have good written communication? Are they familiar with the technology I make use of like Slack, Asana, Gmail. Then we run tests in my business. We have a one-month long trial to see how they work live. We have training systems in place as well, which is part of my process. Assuming they do well with all that, then it’s basically here’s the inbox and … look after it.

Obviously, the first time you do this, just like the first time I did it, I was the person training them. They learned how to be me as best as they could or even be better than me, is probably the best way to put it when it comes to answering emails. How to reply to certain messages that they didn’t know, I taught them. Sometimes, they improved on that.

Creating systems for dealing with emails

Just sort of continue the steps cause it would make sense to explain here. As you hire and train someone, part of the process will actually be creating things that make the inbox more systematised. Like template responses because you probably get common queries coming in, perhaps from potential customers or even current customers or just current recurring situations so they can be templated. Plus, you’ve obviously got folders and filters so we make use of those heavily within Gmail.

We actually run a shared Gmail account that my entire team basically has access to. It’s me, I have my own folder there, or as Gmail calls it a label and so does each member of my team and they all access it so we have 24/7 … We have three main people in my client care team all going in there every day. They’re in different countries around the world so we can get that 24-hour coverage of it and they just put the messages in my folder, if it’s a message only I can deal with which is probably 5% of my email at most and I check that folder every two weeks.

What I have is people going in there, replying to messages using templates, archiving messages that don’t need to be responded to or seen by anyone and they also put labels for messages that I need to see but not reply to, which is a huge chunk of my email. That’s like all those newsletters you get that you might just want to glance at but not do anything with. And then, of course, they have the ones I need to actually reply to. This is all systematised and the great thing about email is it teaches you what you need to do, as you do it.

What I mean by that is, you hire a contractor. Let’s say you start training them up on the basics and then more emails are going to come and that’s going to trigger them to learn how to reply, to come up with a system, to maybe create new folders and filters if we need to. New templates if we need to. Possibly improve on it because you can potentially turn this into a sales role if they can get better at converting people to customers or keeping potential refunds and stopping them from refunding. There’s are all kinds of opportunities for the person in the inbox to really impact your business and that takes time but the great thing about it is, there’s constant feedback cause you’re getting emails every day. I think it’s one of the best things you can spend some time working with someone to get right.

Barbara:  That’s fascinating. Yeah, Matt, go on.

Matt:  No, I was going to say. Just a couple of things you mentioned there Yaro. One thing fellow listeners that are done in conjunction with what you’re talking about there was, I’ve got a small group of clients that we coach personally. I just set up a personal email for them and then everything else can be managed by somebody else, which is something as an interim step that people may want to consider. But, the question I wanted to ask you is, what was some of the emotions that you experienced initially when you started handing over your email?

Emotions experienced when handing over emails

Yaro:  Well, euphoria is the first one actually. Honest. Only because the first time I ever did this, it was literally the final step in proof of concept of a true lifestyle business. I remember clearly waking up the next day and logging into my computer following the pattern I always had prior to that to go into my email to see if any editing jobs had come through and my inbox was empty but I checked the all-mail tab to see what had happened and the sent mail tab to see how my person had replied and they did everything right. I can’t remember specifically but I know during those first few weeks I would’ve had sales come in from my business and they would have been processed by this email person, assigned to the contract editor to do the job. I was making money and that whole day, or those weeks that followed and I wasn’t doing anything anymore.

For me, it was like, this is real. I built a business that had ran or runs without me and I’ve been obsessed with systems like this. Very much human powered systems like this ever since. Email is the simplest but the best example of that. Ever since then, I guess I’ve become complacent with it because it has been so long. We’re talking 12 years of not having that stress point cause I do remember before the 12 years, needing to simply log into my inbox and feeling stress because there was a … It’s like the dishes. You wash them and then there’s more. As emails, you empty your inbox and then a few hours later there’s more. If you let it go for two days, you’ve fallen so far behind you can’t keep up.

And then I’ve got some friends who I see their inboxes and they’ve got 100,000 messages in their inbox because they’ve given up on actually dealing with it. I’ve got one friend, in particular, he had 300,000 emails in his Gmail. He was proud of the fact that he had that many unanswered emails and I was like, “How do you operate that? How do you find your emails? And he uses search all the time. It sounds ridiculous. That was definitely the first feeling.

After that, I don’t know, it’s the lifeblood of every business I’ve run. I’m still very much in my inbox in the sense that I watch it. My sales notifications come through. I get the fun stuff comes through like invites to be on a podcast with you guys. This is organised through email so a lot of things that I enjoy about my business still come from email but I think the overarching feeling today is the lack of stress and sense of comfort to know that no matter what hits the inbox, it’s ultimately not my responsibility. I’ve had to force myself over the years to you know, don’t take this on, let the team handle it. Once you get to that place, it really is like … If you ever read the 4-hour Work Week or you ever read The E-myth Revisited or any of the books on systematisation. Your book Matt, probably no doubt as well. This concept of having a business run without you, the email is the first place you can really taste that. I taste it every day and I love it.

Matt:  As far as the competencies of the people that run your email, what are some of the key competenciesyou’re looking for in the person or people you bring in to run these emails?

Key competencies needed to take care of emails

Yaro:  I mean, communication is number one. Especially, obviously written communication. When I hired Angela, my very first email person, she was a fresh out of university. She has an Information Technology degree so she wasn’t qualified like an English major or had training in customer service but I knew she was intelligent, I knew she had good emotional intelligence as well so that when you got an angry customer writing an email, you know how to react and calm that person down. That’s the first thing. Just that report, the ability to communicate well in English even in the sense of a customer service situation. It’s kind of funny but people who possibly work in retail or hospitality can be good at this because they know not to get emotionally responsive to an angry, or a person who doesn’t communicate very well back at you. You know how to deal with those situations. I worked at a help desk so I knew the patience required sometimes to work with certain people. That’s one.

I really also respect people who have attention to detail more than anything because they tend to see possible ways to do things better than I do and think about the things that need to be done that you might not see in front of you. They’re not always just reacting to the inbox or to the situation, they’re proactive about something they could do better depending on the situation. This really helps with sales too, because I let my team come up with special offers for people. That is a very dynamic thing to do. You have to kind of figure out, based on who you’re communicating with what to offer them.

For example, we have someone who might be considering canceling out on my membership site and they decide, my team member decides, let’s give this person 1 month free because they just need to get to their next few months when they get a salary again from a job or something like that. They have to have the competence and also the intelligence to solve that problem without me. Without needing to come to me either because I don’t want to be, be being asked questions throughout the day. I need someone who has the ability to work on their own and that was also a big thing early on so that the independent worker … Obviously, all of this comes into play after some testing. You don’t just throw someone at the role and say figure this out, do it all yourself. You want to make sure they’re doing a good job, right? But, once they’re there then you can be confident that they’re going to keep doing a good job. So, those are kind of like the main things though.

Obviously, tech skill. You need someone who knows how to use a computer. Has a good internet connection. In my case, I work with a lot of stay at home moms and that’s great because they have that flexibility in their schedule and that’s what was great about Angela and I think two out of my three current client care team members are both work-at-home moms as well. They can be checking the email all throughout the day. There’s no sense of needing to be anywhere for large chunks of time away from the job, so that’s good. Those are the main things.

Tips on training your new recruit

Barbara:  Can I ask though, actually Yaro sorry. The question I have is if the initial is probably easier by now since you’ve done it for so long but how about the initial training period. Even when you get someone competent and has the ability to take initiative, think outside the box, all those things. You still would’ve needed to train them, first of all I would imagine on your actual business. So, what is it you do, how you operate? Everything. It would’ve been a lot of training initially before they can successfully take over email.

Yaro:  Right.

Barbara:  How did you tackle that? How did you not become overwhelmed with that part of it in the beginning?

Yaro:  This is so much easier than you think it is Barbara. It’s ridiculous.

Barbara:  Okay, cause I can ask my clients. Clients would ask us these questions and I would-

Yaro:  We’ve been doing the same thing when it comes to bringing on new people since I did with Angela, day one. Obviously, nowadays I have my current people train my new people so that’s an advantage but even if you’re just doing this for the first time, this is all you have to do. Tell your new hire to go into the inbox and read your replies to messages. Go into the sent folder and then read how you reply to things and then go back as far as they need to. Might need to look back over the previous two months or something like that depending on how much email volume you get. They can learn pretty much everything from that one activity. How you reply, what you reply, what your business is about, what you sell, what web pages to refer people to. It’s not going to solve every problem but it will get them up and running really, really quickly.

We kind of do it like this. We phase them in so they will spend probably about a week just reading how … In this example, it would be how I reply but in my company today, it would be how my other already established people reply but if you’re doing this for the first time, it’s going to be you.

Then the next week, assuming they say they’re feeling confident, we say “Can you start doing replies to the emails you feel confident in?” And you just check over their work and make sure they’re doing that correctly and then they’ll get better and better cause they’ll start doing more and more replies. Obviously, they’re going to ask questions. There’s going to be, “How do I deal with this? Is there a special page for this?” But, they only need to ask that once and then the next time it happens, they don’t need to ask again. They’re kind of building up a mental database of how to answer probably 80% to 90% of your emails. Within about two weeks to a month, they’re feeling confident to deal with about 80% of the messages that come into an inbox. That’s the basic starting point.

From that point forward, you might get the odd email. Maybe one a day that they just don’t know how to deal with that’s fresh and new and they’re not sure and they want to run it past you. That’s what they do then. Then, when you really takes things to the next level, you set up a system for all the more common things. That’s when you start completing templates, you create videos and ideally, you get the person who’s learning it to do the systematisation as well because when you first learn something, is a great time to teach it. Once I just learned how to do something, I’d get them to record a Screenflow desktop recording video, if it’s something that needs that. Or, I get them to write the template reply or sometimes they just take the template from one of my previous replies and then the next person you hire has all these templates and all these training videos to follow as well as all your previous emails. It really isn’t that hard to do. It blows my mind more people don’t do this.

Barbara:  Yeah, actually I just realised as you were talking that … I think Matt, the question you asked is the most critical one. It’s the emotion because I know that for me, it’s the emotion of letting go of that and feeling like it won’t be done right. Even I would be a bit overwhelmed with handing it over, but that’s great that I now have this strategy. I’m going to do it. I’m going to do it.

Yaro:  You have to. One of the things to expect is they won’t do it right. You do have to realise, they aren’t going to write exactly like you are. They are going to make mistakes and it depends on how much of a control freak you are because I’ve had moments where I’ve just been so angry and frustrated because I’d seen a better way to reply to something. A way that could have saved a customer that we lost or brought in a new customer that we didn’t or something like that. But, more often than not, that’s a very rare thing that happens and then it’s an opportunity to train a person. They’re getting new skills in sales and in fact, if you hire a good person, they’ll go on to do even a better job of selling than you did. I mean it’s-

Barbara:  Actually, I should clarify that in my email though, I have eradicated all client contact in my email so actually my team do deal with that. I guess-

Yaro:  What are you dealing with Barbara? What’s in your email inbox?

Barbara:  Yeah. My inbox is actually full of things, things I’ve signed up to and I’m great at unsubscribing from things too. But, I know you’ll need somebody to do that for me and delete stuff. And then the odd email, normally its more business opportunity type stuff, which really is going to come to me anyway and you only get one of those every now and then so email for me is not a big job for me everyday, it’s what I’m saying anyways. So, I have eradicated-

Yaro:  You’ve done the outsourcing of the business emails already.

Barbara:  Yes.

Yaro:  You’re ready where I am in that regard.

Barbara:  Yep, yep. That’s probably it. Just to clarify for the listeners. I always say to clients, “You have to get email out of your lives.” Either delegate it or do whatever with it but, you got to try to get rid of it using all automation, delegation. Whatever strategy you can. FAQ’s on your website. Videos.

Matt:  One important thing and you’ve mentioned it multiple times Yaro, through this conversation, is there’s a system for it. There’s a system for responding to certain emails in certain ways. You’ve templated things where you can but there’s a system all around this. Most people even if they’re managing their own emails, don’t have an effective system. And hence, what it does, is it makes it near impossible for them to hand it over to anybody else. In which case, when they do hand it over, they’re handing over 300,000 emails in an inbox like you were mentioning before.

Barbara:  Yeah. A mess basically.

Matt:  I find that – it’s so and I mean Barbara, you and I have had conversations on the show before around ‘the system’. If you want anything in your business done by somebody else, it must start with a clear system that you can train somebody in that, that needs to be refined, over time. I think that’s just an important message to hammer home to everyone. That Yaro, he’s not just talking about handing over emails. He’s got a clear, definitive system on how to do this. Hence, other people can operate and run the emails for him.

Barbara:  Yeah, that’s a key point to make. Yaro, thanks so much for this inside. You think this is easy but so many people struggle with delegation of their email. It is a letting go process. Its lack of system. All of the above. But, to just dissect down on the show like this, is just gold for our listeners because they do want to do this. The fact that you have successfully done it for 12 years is amazing. It’s inspiring.

Matt:  Absolutely.

Yaro:  Yeah, I don’t think it’s that hard. I think the simple thing to walk away with after this interview is go back to your inbox and look at any messages that have accrued and ask yourself, “Am I the one who should be dealing with these emails?” How many of them are mission critical for me to answer? You’ll probably find there’s a solid 80-20 rule. There’s only 20% that really matter and 80% someone else could be dealing with.

Barbara:  Actually, I’m just going to interject here with something I have done, which is sort of along the same topic of what we’re talking about. Recently, I made a decision. Matt and Yaro, you’re both in my Facebook friends list, so you’ll know that I’ve done this or maybe you didn’t see it. But, I made a decision after about two years to separate my private and public profiles on Facebook. So, now I have two profiles. Facebook messenger on my public profile is managed by a VA because I kind of got sick to be honest…my parents live- I live in Sydney, my family live in Europe. We live very far away from each other and we have big Facebook messenger groups for different family members. I wake up very early in the morning and I got sick of jumping into Facebook messenger to see had my mom commented on a photo or something. I’d have someone wanting something in my Facebook messenger, so I made the decision to separate completely. One will be completely private for that reason, cause I just don’t want to deal with those things at that time. My VA manages to inform me and she lets me know what I need to deal with.

Yaro:  It’s such an interesting point actually Barbara. You’re touching on messenger and messenger, is sort of like the new email for a lot of people, right? Messenger is becoming a place where bots, you know, those automatic robotic responses are starting to make an impact. I can imagine it happening to email too. Then it won’t be a human being managing your inbox, it will be a bot just doing automated template replies based on the questions being asked in an email, and that’s probably where we heading.

Barbara:  Well, that’s a topic for another show because we have actually just put Jane … We called her Jane and we have introduced an automated bot on the Virtual Angel Hub Facebook page. There is a bot in there that actually answers your questions when you go there. Her name is Jane. That’s a whole other topic. Yaro, thank you so much for your time.

Matt:  Yes, thank you.

Wrapping things up

Barbara:  If people want to find out more about you and they want to follow you and not email you but email your team. How do they connect with you online?

Matt:  The simplest answer to that one is just Google my name, Yaro, Y-A-R-O and you’ll find the blog, the podcast. If you’re interested in blogging, look out for my report. It’s called the Blog Profits Blueprint is where you can find that but Yaro. Y-A-R-O. Just remember that and that’s the easiest way to find me.

Barbara:  Guys, The Blog Profits Blueprint, I will put my hand up and say it was the first pivotal moment in my online career where I discovered Yaro’s online blog, The Blog Profits Blueprint and I knew nothing about online until that moment. I’m a big fan of that piece of work. It’s very, very good.

Matt:  Excellent.

Barbara:  Any final thoughts from you, Matt?

Matt:  No, thank you so much Yaro. You’ve given an amazing insight and I think just, one thing I’ll reiterate in what Yaro’s been saying today is email, to get it off your list is so doable and it’s a lot easier than you think.

Barbara:  Yeah, absolutely. Guys if you’re loving this show, we’d love to get a review. We’re trying to get the reviews up on iTunes right now and the ratings so just throw us a review and be sure to let us know other topics you want us to cover that you’re trying to outsource, delegate. Whatever you’re trying to do. Until next time, we’ll see you for some more Virtual Success.

Matt:  We will. Thanks, Barb.

Yaro:  Thank you guys. Bye-bye.

Matt:  Bye-bye.

Matt Malouf is a passionate business coach, speaker, author and entrepreneur on a mission to help entrepreneurs around the world break the shackles of mediocrity and reach new levels of personal and business success.

Barbara Turley is the Founder & CEO of The Virtual Hub, a company that specializes in recruiting, training and managing superstar ‘Virtual Assistants’ in the social media, digital marketing and systems automation space.