You have to overcome this limiting belief that when you do stuff in your business, it's, quote, free. Hey, it's Brad here. And before we get into the show, I want to tell you about today's sponsor, Next Insurance. You know, a lot of us contractors spend so much time keeping the jobs moving that we push off the boring stuff to the back burner. And insurance is usually at the top of that list. until the day you really wish you had it. A customer slips on a job site, a tool breaks right in the middle of critical work, a supplier screws up again and leaves you holding the bill, you can lose thousands overnight. And most folks only realize they need insurance when something's already gone sideways. That's why I really like what Next Insurance is doing. They've made business insurance ridiculously simple. You just answer a few questions online and next tells you exactly what coverage your business needs. And you're insured in minutes. No sitting on hold, no paperwork, no call us back later nonsense. Next is built for builders, contractors, tradespeople, or anyone running their own shop. And here's the kicker. Their policies start as low as $29 a month and you get your certificate of insurance instantly. which means you never have to delay a job because you're waiting on insurance. Protect what you've built and keep your business moving with confidence. Get covered in minutes at nextinsurance. com forward slash hammer. Now let's get back to the show. Hey, welcome back to the show. I'm your host, Brad Hebner. And on this episode, we're going to be talking about the myths, the benefits, and everything it has to do with hiring a virtual assistant. So stick around because if your business right now is in chaos, you're going to want to listen to how you can start solving that problem with a virtual assistant as quick as next week. All right, so just hang out with me. This is going to be a good one at the end. I'll have some resources you can use to help with this situation. And some people that can help you do that, too. So here we go. Why would you want to hire a virtual assistant? Okay. First of all, let's just define a virtual assistant. It may sound simple and self-explanatory, but some people don't understand this. A virtual assistant is just somebody that assists you in your business. but they do it virtually meaning like over the internet so in other words they're not in your location they don't come to your place of employment and work with you like a traditional employee would virtually just means that they're on a computer somewhere doing doing stuff that can be done without being present OK, now some this is not going to replace some things that need to be done in person. For example, I recently hired an operations assistant here in person because there's physical things that need to be done. And because I also like there's certain parts of what we do where I need a physical person there to be able to help me do things. Right. I also have VAs. I have two different VAs that work for me, and I've hired VAs in the past in my construction business, and we'll get into all that. But a virtual assistant is just someone who is helping you, working for you, that is not in the physical location that you're in. It can be, you know, one city over, one state over, one country over across the world. It doesn't matter. It's just they work on the computer, essentially. So let's start with, are you ready for a VA? And because obviously you don't need to hire a VA just to have a VA, that's not the point. It's to solve a problem. So here's five simple questions. Do you miss calls, emails, and follow-ups? Do they fall off? Do you forget to call people back? Do you forget to email people back? Do calls come in and you don't get to call them back for two or three days? That's a clear sign that you need some help, okay? Number two, I work nights or weekends on admin. Admin. Right. If you do that nights and weekends on admin, you are clearly ready for some help. OK. Number three, my schedule feels chaotic, like your schedule is all over the place. OK, meaning you're just like you're running, running, running, running, running and you don't control your schedule. Again, a clear indicator that you need some help. Number four, I am the bottleneck in my business. Now, this can apply to many things, but if you're the bottleneck, it means that you need to. hand off some tasks so that you have more bandwidth to be able to do higher level things in your business. And number five, I want to focus on selling, leadership, or family time. In other words, you want to focus on things that are more important to you personally or to the success of the business and not get bogged down with all the admin and stuff that may seem like it's not important, but it needs to be done. Okay. So those are just five simple questions to answer. whether or not you're ready to hire a virtual assistant or just hire some help. For the purpose of this podcast, we're talking about virtual assistants, but this can also be in person. You can also hire someone in person. Obviously, we hire people, we call them office managers or office assistant or whatever, but that would be like an in-person type of person, a position where it'd be like an office manager, but it doesn't have to be. It can just be an assistant. Okay. So number two, let's talk about What are some things that your VA should own? Like what should they do? What should be responsibilities or what responsibilities within the business should they own? Okay, right here. They own the email and inbox management. Like you don't have to be the first person to check your email. You can actually have someone that filters your emails and then they just mark it through a system. You can use a tagging system or whatever. It's a market so that when you log in and look at emails, you're only looking at five or 10 emails that you need to solve or answer to. And the other 10 spam emails and 15 emails that aren't related to you or that need your assistance or need your attention is handled by your VA. So they can handle all of your inbox. And by the way, let me turn around. I'm turning around here in my office. I'm looking at my bookshelf behind me. There's a great book. It's called Buy Back Your Time. by Dan Martell. It's a book that I've given out to my clients when they sign up. But it's a really good book to figure out what is your time worth. And anything, any task in your business that is less than what your time is worth should be delegated. So example, as an owner of a business, you know, especially if you're doing sales. or project management, or even working on the tools, but the value that you bring to the business is much higher than what you charge per hour to a customer. So you may charge a customer 50 bucks an hour, but the value that you bring to your business may be $100, $200 an hour, okay? Because you're doing all these other activities in your business and without you, the business would fail. So therefore, your value of what you charge or what you bring to the business is much higher than what you think. So if my value, let's just say it's $100 an hour, I figure it out to my value that I bring to the business is $100 an hour. Any task that can be completed by someone else for less than $100 an hour, I should be subbing it out or I should hire it out. So if I can hire someone that costs me $50,000 a year. And it's going to free up my time, like 10 hours a week of my time. That is a worthy investment because now the extra 10 hours a week that I'm spending on things that are less valuable than that, I get to do the high value task. I get to do more of it. I get to do more sales, more management, more project, you know, whatever. And so that's going to increase the value of the business and allow the business to make more money. If I can make more sales, I can make more money. Right. So if you look at this from the perspective of you have a certain value to the business and you need to stay at that level and anything else you delegate. So that book is a great book to buy. I recommend buy back your time by Dan Martel. Check it out. It helps put things into perspective. He even has ways in there to track it and figure out what your value is and all that stuff. So back to what your VA should own. They can own your email and inbox management. They can do scheduling. They can schedule estimates and follow ups. And by the way, some of these things can be done with a CRM, but not everything can be handled through a CRM. Like even though you may have a CRM with automations and all this and AI and enabled and blah, blah, blah, and all this crap, there's still things that need to be done with a human touch, right? Just this morning, we had a situation where somebody wanted to cancel a subscription. I still needed to go in and verify that it needed to be deleted and that we had to manually. uh start the process of canceling their subscription but then the automation took over and did everything else but there's still a human element that has to go in and double check to make sure like oh is this a valuable you know request is this person actually a customer does this need to be done we need to verify some stuff and even though it may only take five or ten minutes to do that if i'm doing it as the owner it distracts me from what i'm doing you know what else i should be doing I can have someone else, an assistant do that for me. I don't have to do all that, even though there may be some automations and things that go on in your business. So missed calls, voicemails, website inquiries. You know, one of the best things you can do as a service-based business contractor is the answer to the phone. And the second best thing you can do is call them back right away. So if you can't answer the phone because you're working on the tools, then you hire a VA to answer the phone for you. And if that's not good enough, you can hire a VA that can call them back within a few minutes. You can improve the quality of service that you bring to your clients because you have more people doing things in a much faster way and a better way. Job files, photos, contracts, documents, expense tracking, receipt logging, customer reminders, follow-ups, basic social media posting or inbox replies, invoice reminders, and admin follow-ups, subscriptions, renewals, license tracking, daily task lists, and deadline tracking. How many of you have spent time and time and time trying to track down your subcontractors to get their COI? Raise your hand if you've ever had to fight with someone to get a COI, a certificate of insurance from your subcontractors. If you've spent more than one minute doing that, your admin can now do that. Your VA can do that for you. You don't have to deal with that. They take over that responsibility. They own it. You don't even have to check on them. They just own that responsibility. So let's say you want to hire a VA. You're like, okay, Brad, I hear you. I want to hire a VA. Perfect. Here's 10 things,10 tasks that they can start with. And we kind of covered some of these before, but it's 10 tasks they can start with. Answer missed calls and messages. Pretty self-explanatory. Schedule estimates and follow-ups. Manage your inbox. Talked about that. Send appointment reminders. Organize job files and documents. Track expenses and receipts. Follow up with unresponsive leads. Manage your calendar, both personal and business. Send review requests after jobs. Keep your daily task list updated. Now, again, you may have a CRM or software that does some of these things for you automatically. That's cool. These are just 10 things. I have a list. I actually have a list of 50 different tasks that your VA can do for you. I just I didn't want to go through 50 of them. I was just trying to shorten it down to 10. But I can share with you a few others just to give you an example of what they are. Let me pull this up right here. I'm not going to read all of them. I'm just going to read some that we haven't talked about. Let's see here. They can draft basic emails for you, text or customer messages. They can track job timelines and key deadlines. They can manage basic social media. They can communicate with vendors and service providers. They can check on materials and see when they're going to be coming in, right? They can do some of that. They can order materials for you if you have a good system. They can pull permits, potentially. They can order inspections. There's lots of things they can do. They can prepare job notes before client meetings or calls. They can make your office digital, like maybe you're all paper right now. They can help you implement a digital system in your business. They can handle last minute admin tasks that you, you know, You fail to drop, you're supposed to do something, you forgot to do it, you just say, hey, can you take care of this? They can do that. They can set up meetings. They can document simple systems. They can create SOPs for you. You can hire someone and say, hey, I'm going to rely on your expertise. I don't know how to do this. I want to help you. I want you to create an SOP. So back to my operations assistant, she's helping me create some SOPs. We created a, you know, all the files and documents and everything that I have for my coaching is in a Google Drive folder, but it's all disorganized. I mean, it's somewhat organized, but over the years, it just kind of got crazy. So one of the first things that she's been doing is creating a shared Google Drive folder with a, you know, with how the folders are set up and named so that it's a central location for things to be put in there so that she has access to them. I have access to them. And she's been doing that. She's been setting up that file system for me so that going forward, we have a standard process for how we name files, where we file them and all that stuff. Okay. That may seem like, well, that's right. That's not a big deal. Like, why do you need to organize your folders and file? That is a big deal. If you're like me, you create a file, a Google doc, and you name it something. And then three weeks later, you need to go back and find that file. And you can't remember what the hell you named it. And you're searching for 10,15 minutes, trying to find this file because you named it something else. than what you think of. At the time, you thought this is a great name for it, or you didn't even name it. It's just named Untitled Document because you didn't even think to put a title on it. And you can't find that file. You spend 10,15 minutes looking for it. Well, now I can make a document, shoot it over to her and say, hey, file this because we have a folder that just needs to be sorted. So if I sit down and I bust out a file, like for example, this file that you're going to be able to download, I'm going to make it in a document. I'm going to put it in there. I'm going to throw it in the needs to be sorted. She goes in, looks at that file and puts it in the appropriate folder it needs to be in. Like that's, that's, it's helping me. So I don't have to deal with that stuff. Right? So those, these are all different things that you can do with a VA in your business. I mean, there's, there's so much more, by the way, we haven't even got into technical aspects. You can hire pretty much any job that does not have to physically be present virtually. So VA is a virtual assistant, but you can hire virtual draftsmen. You can hire virtual estimators. You can hire virtual marketing people. Like you can virtually hire just about anyone else. I have lots of clients who are using virtual assistants or out of country, you know, people that are doing work for them virtually like design, like CAD design. If you feel like you have to create a 3D design for every project you do, and in the past you've done that yourself, you know, self-taught on Chief Architect or SketchUp or whatever you're using, and you spend hours building these 3D sketches and designs for clients only to lose the job, well, you could hire someone in another country where the cost of living is much less expensive. And you can get a college-educated, degreed, specialist who does CAD design for a fourth to half the cost of someone in the U.S. These are highly trained people. You know, a lot of times we think of employees and people in other countries as like not being, you know, as well trained as us. That's not true at all. Some of these people are better than you. They're better than U.S. trained, you know, specialists. You can hire a part-time CADsman or drafter who can do high-level, high-quality designs. And it may only cost you 50 bucks or $100 per design versus you spending four hours doing it yourself. Again, remember, if your hourly value is $100 an hour and it takes me three hours to do a design, what does that design cost me? What does it cost the company? It's costing $300 to do this design because my hourly value is $100 an hour. By the way, that's low. Most people's hourly value is closer to $200 an hour. But I'm being conservative just to prove a point. Even at $100 an hour, it's costing you $300 to do a three-hour design for someone if they don't hire you. What if I hire someone who's better at it than you? I know it's going to hurt your feelings and your ego, but they're going to be better at you because that's all they do all day, every day, for years. You do it three times a week for four hours a time. You're not an expert at it. No matter how much you think you are, you're not an expert. They are an expert. You can hire an expert and pay them $50, $100 total. for a design that costs you 300 hours to do yourself do you understand the value of hiring other people now you have to overcome this limiting belief that when you do stuff in your business it's quote free right because your time is free well brad i can do a design you know sitting at the table i can i can i do it on my couch when i'm watching tv with the family i can do a design and it you know it's not costing anything yes it is It's costing you time with your family. It's costing you more hours and stress. It is costing you something, no matter how much you lie to yourself. It is costing you something. So yes, it's costing you. So therefore it is, you have to figure out a way to do it cheaper. You can hire estimators that all they do is estimate. If you want to do that, you can hire marketing people that all they do is social media marketing or whatever at a fraction of the cost. These people are experts in what they do. Almost all of them have degrees. They're bilingual. And for a lot of, I mean, I would argue, this may upset some of you, I would argue that a lot of these people in other countries are smarter and better human beings than Americans. I mean, they work and live in much less quality and comfort than we do, and they are smarter and more educated than we are. So why wouldn't you want to hire someone who is smarter and more educated than you at a fraction of the cost? See, everything in the U.S. is so skyrocketed in cost because for the most part, we're lazy. I mean, we're lazy POSs. I'm being honest. We're all lazy. Everything we have makes us lazy. We all seek comfort. In a lot of other countries, they don't have these amenities. They work hard for what they have. They don't put value in material things. So that's why I said in some instances, they're actually better human beings than we are because they don't waste and buy frivolous crap that we don't need. Right. All of their and all the stuff they do is very intentional. So VAs from that perspective can be actually better. OK, now, some of you may say, well, you know, I'm a patriot and everything has got to be a U.S. based. And, you know, why would I want to steal jobs from Americans and all this and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Listen. I served in the military. I was in the Marines. I am a patriot. I'm a very, very strong believer in the America. Even whenever people want to crap all over Americans who live in America, I'm still a patriot. Okay. That's not the same thing as running a business. You're not stealing a job from somebody who, one, you only have a job. Like it hasn't been a job and now you're going to create it. So you're not stealing it. You're creating a job. And two, these people in other countries, also need a living. They need a living. So you're helping them out by giving them a job. In a lot of these other poverished countries, in second and third world countries, they don't have jobs. Like they're jobless. There's more people than jobs. So when you can hire them, you're actually helping them and their family. You're giving them an opportunity. You're giving them a job. And so that's why you can actually help people.
