Scaling with Virtual Assistants Without Losing Control

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the developer podcast where we work on getting better step by step professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well hello and welcome back. We are continuing our season of Building Better Developers. We are building momentum this season. We're focused on getting unstuck, getting those blockers out of your way and diving into the new year. As I said, this is Building Better Developers, also known as the Developer North podcast. I am Rob Broadhead, one of the founders of Developer North, also the founder of RB Consulting, where we help you with the technology reality check. It's like where are you at before you take that big step, before you make that big investment? What the heck have you got? Where do you need to go? Do you maybe need to step back and pause for a second? Good thing and bad thing. One thing is in one weekend I had my good thing and bad thing. I went off on a ski vacation for a weekend. The first day was sort of the bad thing, even though it was good. I was out skiing, hadn't skied there before, whole different country I'd never skied in. All that was good. The bad thing was the visibility was about zero. It was basically there was nothing you could see out there. I couldn't see the mountains that I was in. It was very challenging for most of the day. The better thing, the good thing out of that is the second day I was there was the most gorgeous day I have ever skied just about. And many, many years of skiing, I think that is in my top three. The views were gorgeous. The weather was perfect. I didn't fall a single time, didn't hurt myself, survived the vacation, all of that good stuff. And it allows me to pass the introduction on to Michael. Hey everyone, my name is Michael Milaj. I'm one of the co-founders of Building Better Developers, also known as Developerner. I'm also the founder of InVision QA, where we create reliable tailored software that helps you work smarter, scale faster, and stay in control. Good thing and bad thing. I'll start with the bad thing. So we've had a lot of bad weather here, a lot of rain, and unfortunately we've had some erosion on the property, had to bring an engineer out, got a quote, and what we can get fixed is going to cost a lot of money. So that was the bad side. The good thing is, though, after talking to said contractor, once they do all this work, we are going to pretty much be set and a lot of the problems that we've been seeing due to the weather are going to go away. So that is one of the awesome things. It's like a peace of mind. Once this gets done, it's going to be like, thank goodness. It's just, unfortunately, that price tag is just so painful. I guarantee you this has nothing to do with Michael leading us into the episode we're talking about, but it is one of those kinds of things. As a perfect example, like you go get a VA, you get an assistant, you get somebody else to do the work you can't do or you don't want to do. It doesn't have to be that expensive, though. That's what VA's usually are. That's like their selling point is that they're very affordable. Or if you use AI, oh, I shouldn't have said that. If you use AI as your VA, then that could also be very cheap, depending on how you do it or very expensive if you do it wrongly. But yes, that is what we're going to talk about, along with a lot of other things about entrepreneurship and side hustles and building your business as we continue part two with our discussion with Antoine. So if you haven't gotten the first part, go back and listen to it because I think it'll help quite a bit because as always, we pause there and we're going to pick right back up where we left off. And here we go with part two. Now just we'll go a little further afield on this. Have you found because you can get you can find VA's just individually and just here and there and find people one offs and stuff like that. And then there's also whole agencies that will offer you VA's, particularly of a wide range. Have you found one or the other that is has been more successful, particularly since you're sort of adopting them into your organization? Have you found that that works better in one situation or another? Or is it doesn't matter? Yeah. So I would say for us, we've already always sourced our own VA's. And the way we do it and we get continuous VA's all the time is we will post an ad for our job online on different sites, online jobs, pH. And we have that VA apply at the link. So we have a form set up that's in our ad where the VA comes in and applies for the position. And we leave the posting up. So it always stays up. So we're always getting additional applicants for the position. What we what we will do then is so we will always have running VA's apply for that position. So then we will go in and say, hey, this is a good fit. This is not not a good fit. And everyone that's a good fit for us, we leave them in our database. So if one VA end up leaving or doesn't work out, we've already interviewed multiple other VA's that we felt they were good fits for us. And some of the questions that we ask VA's are, hey, do you have multiple jobs? How many hours can you dedicate to us a week? Do you have any referrals? And then we also pay our VA's on a flat monthly fee instead of about an hour. So then that eliminates us having to track how many hours a person has worked per week. So that's an interesting approach. How do you track productivity with that then? So the productivity is based on the task that we assign every day. So it's based on a task requirement versus an hour requirement. So we sign them three or four tasks per day. As long as they're getting that done per day, that's pretty much our productivity. We're not having to track, well, hey, this person, we gave this task to them and five days later they haven't finished it yet. Gotcha. That makes sense. Just curious because some people track it differently and kind of try to do it hourly based versus task based, which I like the task based approach better myself. So you primarily are using VA's. Do you actually also look at hiring additional employees as well or are you just still kind of in the mindset of just hiring the workers you need at the time as like assistants and then scale up and scale down as needed? So we've brought the VA's on and here's another thing as well as we're talking about VA's. So when I initially started, I hired one VA and I gave that VA like five different hats. And I quickly realized that that was probably not the right thing to do. So now what we do is we hire VA's just for certain things. So we have a graphic designer VA. We have someone for doing editing videos. We have someone that does admin work and that specialty, that's their zone of excellence. So we don't have to worry about a VA saying that they could do something and then they can. We only hire VA's in their zone of excellence and that works out a lot better for us. So I don't want to sidebar too far into this next question, but I have to ask it because this kind of leads to it. So with the advancements of the AI chatbots and AI systems and that, do you still see AI taking over the VA rules more? Or do you still see the need for the VA's versus kind of going more with the AI chatbots and kind of rules engines? Yeah, so I think it's kind of depending on what you're using the VA for. Because if you really think about it, even before AI came out, they had come up with different automations that could send emails and respond to different forms that are submitted. So it's really based on what you're using the VA for. For us, I think we've used both. We don't use VA's and things like that to make calls because just of the regulations and everything that you know, that different states have about VA call up individual or not and you have to get access. So a lot of the things that we do, we still use VA's for hands on approach. And then I think a lot of the different courses and things, it teaches you, you know, hey, you really do need human people to actually be able to expand to certain levels. So what would you consider using the AI for then? How does AI help your business? So what we use AI for is we do use it on our websites for different chats. And then also, we use AI for just a lot of data research versus actually making calls and receiving calls. It's more just on the data and doing the analysis that we need. It's a lot quicker. Nice. That's a good use of the tools. Are you using your own custom tools or are you using just the tools that are out there? Yeah, so we actually designed our own tools. And one of the things that, you know, the reason why is we designed internal tools initially to just help us out. And then we realized that the tools that we designed were really good. So, you know, we started offering them to our students to actually build out their systems and everyone loved it. So then we started offering the tools that we have to other clients as well. Nice. Are these tools on your website or are they like are they open to the general public where we could go check them out? Yes. So the name of our company is Skillful Brands and we have a skillful family of products. So, you know, we have Skillful Advisor, which is our accelerator program. We have Skillful CRM, which is our CRM program. And then we have Skillful Projects. Skillful Projects is the tool we use to communicate with our VAs, assigned tasks, our calendars. So, you know, in our skillful family of products, it's pretty much everything an entrepreneur would need to get going. But we don't promote that as much as our mastermind accelerator program, because that is the key of our focus to help entrepreneurs like understand where they need to be. And then they get access to a lot of our tools to just help them out. Wonderful. Because, you know, I would say that really as a new entrepreneur, it's about cost savings. So, you know, what also drove us to actually create our own tools is because when we started before we knew it, we had six or seven hundred dollars in subscriptions for this tool and that tool. And as a new entrepreneur, that's kind of a big burden on, you know, new entrepreneurs that come out of pocket for six or seven hundred dollars to be able to run their business. Oh, yeah, those things. Those things tend to grow on their own, too. As you get something, you're like, oh, there's this I've got this new problem I got to solve and this thing's out there and it'll solve it. And sometimes it's like you nickel and dime yourself. It's, you know, 10 bucks here and 20 bucks here. And the next thing you know, like you said, you've got several hundred dollars a month that you're not really utilizing it to the level you need to. And it helps immensely to coalesce that down into something that's actually more focused. Now, you mentioned your mastermind groups. Do you have a I guess two things is how often do you run cohorts or mastermind groups? And then do you have a certain size that you found is like a sweet spot for them? Yes. So we run one mastermind every quarter. It's a nine week program where we have industry experts come in to talk to our students about, you know, marketing, about structure, about building your business. And our our focus is no more than twenty five students per cohort. I think once you start getting over twenty five, it becomes a challenge to be able to support everyone and give everyone the attention for their business that they need. Now, do you guys meet every week? Like you said, nine weeks should be like once each week. Yes. So we meet once. So we meet once a week on Thursdays. And then also they have individual sessions with me. So individual sessions with me once a week and then the industry expert comes in once a week as well. So your schedule is full. You're not going to be able to expand too much more on that. There's only so much of you to go around. Now, one of the things that we sort of talked about the once you get to a certain point in growth of, you know, now you're like you sort of you're getting out of that, like you said, so you put a number of that like making 10K a month as you're sort of like working your way up to that. But before even that, like what are some of the what are some of the things that you see that is that almost every entrepreneur you see a lot with the entrepreneurs that if if they just knew this in the first three to six months, that alone would be a big help to them. So so are you saying like within the first three or four months of getting started? Yes, yeah. So I would say just, you know, starting with laying the framework, you know, I have these three S's that I try to teach everyone, which is structure, systems and strategy. Right. So structure, you know, having the right mindset, you know, put in the right system. I consider a system stands for, say, your self time energy money. So put in the right system in place and then the strategy, you know, just knowing and working on the right things at the right time versus, you know, doing marketing now versus doing marketing later, doing mindset now versus doing mindset later. So just having the right strategy in place at the right time when you need it is very helpful. You mentioned bringing in this is I hate to jump back to this, but I forgot I wanted to talk about this a little more. So you mentioned bringing your your VAs in and make them feel a part of the company and things like that, is that they said they feel some ownership. Are there any are there any things that you do that outside of like you've got you've got a really good onboarding process is sort of how you parcel out projects and tasks. But are there any additional things that you do that are part of what like make people feel a part of your organization? So, yes. So a lot of times, depending on what the VA specialty is, I'll bring them into the meetings that I have with, you know, different clients to make them feel comfortable. When we assign them a task, we don't micromanage them. You know, they have that ownership. And then as we continue to grow, it's a sin for the VA because they obviously get raises and things like that. So they feel as they own a portion of the company as well in this, you know, theirs as well. So it's just about bringing them in, making them feel comfortable, showing them that we care about, you know, them as well as employees. So, you know, during our weekly meetings that we have, you know, we talk to them like, tell us one exciting thing that you've done, you know, during your like one win that you had during the week. It doesn't have to be business related, but, you know, we give them opportunities to share. And it's not always just about, you know, running a business. So how do you manage all these multiple VAs? I know you mentioned Asana and Monday, but do you pull them together like weekly? Have like, are you doing like an agile shop where you have your standups in the morning, talk to everyone, get them on task, or because they're so task focused, you just drive everything through the tools? Yeah, so I don't meet with every VA every day. I do meet with my admin assistant every day. And then the other VAs, I manage them through an operations manager. So the operation manager is pretty much the person that's communicating with the VAs every day. And then I meet with them every week, once a week. I meet with everyone once a week is how we do it. Like on Tuesday mornings, we meet, you know, with everyone. And that's where we go over our KPIs. We go over, you know, different events coming up, how many people that we have in the company, how many clients, issues. So we have a good system in place that really helps us out. So I love the structure. Interestingly, there you mentioned an operations officer to kind of help you manage that. At what point did you realize that you had scaled to the point that you needed additional help to manage the VAs to keep things going? Well, it may not be a place in your business. It's all about everyone's personality. So sometimes, you know, people don't like, you know, giving instructions or people are not listening. For me, it was a little bit of both. I just didn't have the time to keep meeting with everyone every day to just tell them what task or I want to assign a task to them. And then I would turn around, you know, it would be a couple of days and it may not be done. So I felt for me and, you know, my experience being in the leadership, you know, in the military, that that was valuable to have someone that could oversee, you know, different tasks that we had and projects that we had going on. Excellent. I'm kind of that way, too. It's like I struggle. It's like I'm not going to be able to do it. I'm kind of that way, too. It's like I struggle. It's like you kind of get in that mindset where, well, I can do it myself. Why hire someone? Then you hire someone that's like, OK, now I'm spending time managing them. Why don't I just do it? It's kind of that feedback loop. You know, it's like, when do you let go of the reins? And sometimes that's hard. But thank you so much. Thank you so much. Is there something you would like to pass on to our listeners to help them or encourage them with their businesses? Yes. So I will say that, one, you can't do it all on your own. And then, you know, get in the mindset of leveraging other people's knowledge. Seek out different mentors that definitely can help you and doesn't have to be paid. There are people out there that you can definitely research and make connections with that can help you operate your business. You know, LinkedIn is a great source for different business owners that are willing to help. So a lot of people are not using LinkedIn, but they're on Facebook or Instagram. But LinkedIn is also a great tool to be able to find clients and also people that can help you with your business. Yeah, I love that is that that idea of, you know, there's a lot of places you can reach out. You can honestly you can help others with that as well. I think there's a lot of give and take that you can get into these groups where, you know, maybe you know how to solve a problem, but somebody else knows how to solve your problem. And, you know, that's what networking to me. That's what networking is all about is like finding those people and being able to to grow your for like a better term, grow your knowledge base through, you know, getting a wider group of people that is your your circle. I want to thank you so much for your time. This has been as I expected. This has been great. This has been it's been really fun to to pick your mind and see where we've had similar struggles and see where you've you've seen people with similar struggles, struggles, struggles, I'll say struggles that we can work our way through. Especially because I think it it feels like you sort of you're on your own. Sometimes as an entrepreneur, the solo and solopreneur sometimes feels a little bit strong and judgy almost you feel like you're almost chained by that. But you're not you can reach out to the people. There's mentors, there's coaches and things of that nature. If they've heard people out here have heard some good stuff from you, what is the best way for them to get a hold of you and maybe talk further to you about this stuff? Yes, there's a couple of different ways. So if you're interested in communicating with me, you can find me on LinkedIn Antoine person. So this A-E-N-T-W-O-N last name person, P-E-R-S-O-N. And if you're interested in finding out more about our accelerator program, you can go to skillfuladvisors.com and you can find out more about our program there. We will make sure that we get links in the show notes for all of those pieces. And that means it's about time for us to wrap this one up. So thank you so much for your time for hanging out with us. Everybody is there's a standing ovation. I'm trying to talk over all the loud applause is going on right now. It's everybody hooting hollering back there for you. Appreciate so much your time and your energy and doing so and in helping the entrepreneur community because I think that is one that it's not completely overlooked. But I think definitely does not get the help and the assistance that sometimes it can. That being said, I want to thank everybody else out there. Thank you for your time and your patience and hanging out with us always. You guys are why we do it. Thank you so much and have yourself a great day, a great week. And we will talk to you next time. Or every listen and remember a little bit of effort every day adds up to a great success. Keep learning, keep growing, and we'll see you in the next episode.