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The Buzzworthy Marketing Show
When growing a business there is no one secret to success, but a series of strategies that help business owners scale at will. Hi, I’m Buzz and I’ve spent over 20 years marketing for entrepreneurs just like you. On this podcast we uncover invaluable insights that successful entrepreneurs and industry experts use to profitably scale businesses. Welcome to the Buzzworthy Marketing Show.
The Buzzworthy Marketing Show
Delegation in Business Part 1
Ready to revolutionize how you manage your day?
Discover the secrets of our "freedom plan," a strategy designed to maximize your productivity by compartmentalizing life into four key quadrants. We'll guide you through the crucial first step: hiring an executive assistant to offload repetitive tasks. We also explore cutting-edge advancements in AI technology that are transforming the landscape, particularly how students are pioneering its use. Gain a nuanced perspective on the strengths and limitations of AI versus human workers, and learn to navigate the disparities in technology access and regulations around the world, with a particular focus on the unique freedoms available in the United States.
Ever wished you could start your day with a clear plan and stay ahead of the game? Learn about the transformative impact of a dedicated personal assistant on your productivity. From pre-screening emails to managing your calendar and even attending calls on your behalf, a virtual assistant can become your secret weapon. We'll also discuss the benefits of hiring affordable, highly-trained virtual assistants from the Philippines, who can help you maintain a laser focus on what truly matters. Tune in to master the art of delegation and leverage AI tools, ensuring you consistently outperform your peers and start each day with a well-structured plan.
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Something that I like to illustrate with people is something that I call the freedom plan, and it's really about separating your life into four quadrants. The first quadrant, the easiest thing to delegate in your life, is the repetitive things. So, for example, I always recommend and I may be biased because I own a virtual assistant company, and I may be biased because I own a virtual assistant company, but I always recommend that the first hire you have should be an executive assistant.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Buzzworthy Marketing Show. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?
Speaker 1:Let's do it. Oh man, it's been wild, you know, just thinking about, like, how much advancement we've made since our last talk about AI and remote teams and it's just, it's a crazy time for productivity, man.
Speaker 2:It is amazing. You know, it's a funny thing. Since the last time we talked, we have also really looked at AI almost as another employee, right, and because we talk about I mean today I definitely want to talk about automation and delegation. Really delegation, right, but like when we talk about AI and you know you're an AI master, right, but like when we talk about AI and you know you're an AI master and you know the things that I never, just in the last 12 months, never thought AI would do is already getting there.
Speaker 2:But you know, it's funny, tell me if, if you, if this resonates with you and the people you're talking to, remember the guys are like and are going oh, ai is going to take over everything. You're all going to be on a, a job. Remember those guys? Right, then it was well, ai is not going to be able to do anything that we can do and we'll always humans always do it better. Remember those guys? Mm, hmm, right, and now I feel like you have a bunch of people who have realized how good it could be, but they have no idea what they're doing as far as not necessarily the AI. Ai is easy to use, but if you don't understand the fundamentals of what you're trying to do. Ai is always going to suck. Would you agree or disagree with that statement?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I agree, I agree. And the thing about it, the way to look at it too, is it's kind of goes back to the old, the, the old, original cliche statement, which is a man is only as good as his tools. Uh, right, right, and you know resources, people, um ai, you know, it's just. You all have to just think of it as as another tool in the toolbox and you know whoever does have the best toolbox wins. You know, but at the end of the day, you can have all the tools in the toolbox and you know whoever does have the best toolbox wins. You know, but at the end, at the end of the day, you can have all the tools in the world. If you don't know how to use them, they're still useless exactly.
Speaker 2:I think it's skills. I think a person with all the skills and none of the tools can still outperform the person with all the tools and no skill well, especially, like you said, with ai.
Speaker 1:I mean, you know, a lot of these tools are free, so I think it's really leveled the playing field for people, and not just all around the world as well. Funny story you know who the highest adoption rate of AI is?
Speaker 2:No Students, students. Oh, I should have known that. Lazy students.
Speaker 1:You don't want to do their homework.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's hilarious, yes, and there's technology to counter that. It's so fun to be living in America, because in other countries some of this stuff has been locked down. There's technology that we get for free that's illegal, put you in jail, illegal to even look at in other countries, right, right. And so I count my blessings. I just came back from Ireland, and even in Ireland, there's things like you can't even talk about certain things when you're in certain parts of the country, even though they're a free country, they have these things, and so I don't want to digress too farther, but I just want to say God bless America, for the love of Pete. It is awesome to be back. I love visiting other places because it reminds me how good we have it here. So, with that said, though, in the toolbox we talk about toolboxes tools are just the shortcut right. Yeah, tools are just the shortcut right.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right Now, when we talk about leveraging, I want to then pull that into delegation, Because delegating is another form of leveraging right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and, as a matter of fact, you know, I think one of the reasons why I've become so successful in the AI field is just because I've been running remote teams for a long time, and delegating to a remote team is very similar to remoting, you know, to delegating to AI. So if you understand the fundamentals of delegation, no matter what the tool, you're going to be able to get good results. And here's the key you're going to get repeatable results.
Speaker 2:The consistency of AI once you have it dialed in, and I think it's hilarious that so many-.
Speaker 1:And the consistency of humans. When you get it dialed in, yeah, it's not really. Once in a while you'll get somebody who and there's obviously advantages of humans and there's advantages of AI, For example, AI is never going to quit right.
Speaker 2:Never going to ask for vacation, not going to call in sick, Never going to ask for a raise. You know. Well your service provider is probably going to ask for a raise every once in a while, but it's minuscule.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, compared to a human. But you know, you know. For me, I think, one of the things that we're looking at right now is ip, and you know, when you're dealing with intellectual property and you're, you have team members that are learning from you and and growing, and then you know after a year and a half or two years they by the way, the average tenure for a technology company is 1.8 years so you spend, you don't even spend two years, not even two years in, and usually they're out, they're gone to another job and everything you've taught them is gone, compared to AI, which is going to stick with you forever and you never have to worry about it stealing. Well, I mean, you do have to worry about stealing, but you're fighting against a different type of theft right?
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, it's a controllable threat.
Speaker 1:Right, and you know, when it comes to delegation, though, you know there's a couple things you have to think about, and it's almost like a readiness thing, and something that I like to illustrate with people is something that I call the freedom plan, and it's really about separating your life into four quadrants. Okay, the first quadrant, the easiest thing to delegate in your life, is the repetitive things. So, for example, I always recommend and I may be biased because I own a virtual assistant company, but I always recommend that the first hire you have should be an executive assistant, somebody who knows your day-to-day routine, who logs into your emails. They are the gatekeeper for your calendar, they can manage your social media inboxes, they own your to-do list you should have a daily to-do list and just those things alone. And they also come on my calls, they take meeting minutes, they follow up with action items. So just that one piece alone will guarantee so much more success compared to an entrepreneur who, literally, is reliable to one person themselves. They're only accountable to themselves.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Which, by the way, is a massive problem for entrepreneurs, because we typically don't like to be held accountable to ourselves.
Speaker 2:Yes, a lot of us don't know. I found that those who are good at it are probably the better of the entrepreneurs out there, though.
Speaker 1:If you ask an entrepreneur why they started the business, the number one thing and I've pulled this over and over and over the number one thing that they always say the reason why they started their own business was because they wanted freedom.
Speaker 2:Freedom. It's funny, because it's the one that I always hear is that they wanted to be their own boss which is freedom which is another form of freedom. But the problem with that is that it's like, yeah, you got, you took, you got rid of one boss and now you have how many clients, whatever amount of clients you have, multiply that, that's, that is, the number of bosses you now have.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:You know like people talk about. Well, I only got fired by one job as an entrepreneur. We get fired. Some of us get fired every day, like you just don't know. I mean, depending on your, depending on your industry, yeah, some people get fired every single day yeah, and I think you know there's a level of accountability that we we don't.
Speaker 1:I feel like most entrepreneurs don't hold themselves to um and having that person who like, for example, my assistant her name is jackie- you've met her and you know virtually you've met her and you know, like even this call right, she scheduled it right, so right.
Speaker 1:She's the ultimate gatekeeper. She knows what I want on my calendar. She knows the people I don't want on my calendar. She's she's very protective of my time and one of the things that's beautiful is that, like when you're thinking about delegation, you know those repetitive tasks that we start talking about. Those are the things that you want to really start getting off your plate right away. Because what, what? What happens to an entrepreneur when they free up their time, when they take less off the plate? What does an entrepreneur? They're like oh, I have more time now, I can do this, and they fill it with other things. They do, we do, we do.
Speaker 1:And this is this reliability piece. This is why it's so important to have a reliable assistant. Right, an executive assistant is someone who's with you. They're committed. They're not juggling multiple clients. Do not hire a freelancer. Hire a dedicated assistant who wakes up and you are their job. Not I have five clients right like you don't want a juggler, you want someone who wakes up and says how can I make your? Their job is to make my life easier. Exactly your assistant's job should be to make your life easier, to make you look good, really, really.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think, oh, go ahead, go ahead.
Speaker 1:No, go ahead. I know you had a good thought there.
Speaker 2:I everything you said. I'm like a hundred percent. I, my my executive assistant is Becky and, um, you know, when I first started needing, when I, when I first realized that I could use an executive assistant or just an admin assistant, right, like when I had a brick and mortar, I had an office manager who was technically my EA, except I never thought back then, I never thought of like having them monitor my, my emails. Like I just didn't make like nobody tells you this thing, like I wish there was like an owner's manual. Like you're, you're gonna start a business and your first hire is going to be this this is the softwares you're going to stay away from. You know all the things that we all go through, right, but I think the biggest thing is that you don't have to hire a full-time one, right? No?
Speaker 2:Sometimes, you know, you said like don't get the ones that are like a freelancer and stuff like that. But isn't there like a space for somebody who does say, hey, listen, I only need you for five to 10 hours a week max, like not, you know. So now you have to like look for somebody situation.
Speaker 1:So first, off if there nobody wakes up and says I want a part-time job, right.
Speaker 2:Right, well, yeah, whenever somebody says that they're looking for a part-time job.
Speaker 1:Right, Right, Well, yeah. Whenever somebody says that they're looking for a part-time job, what that means is that hey look, you're not my main priority, but I want to make some extra money. Okay.
Speaker 2:Or they might have exchange circumstances, their stay-at-home parent or they have like. So my EA's got fibromyalgia. She can only work 20 hours a week, yeah, and she hadn't been in the work and she hadn't been in the work, uh, so I I mean, I got extremely lucky with mine like that. So I want everybody that's listening to this to know that I am extraordinary lucky. This is not normal, but when we started, we did start with 10 hours because we needed to test how much her bandwidth was. She hadn't worked for 15 years.
Speaker 1:It also depends on what their job is right. So, like, if this person's like helping you, know, make some proposals here and there and they don't need to be on all your calls throughout the day, right then. Or maybe they're just helping you create social media content or whatever, um like, if it's not something that really requires them to be on for a set amount of time, that's great. But what I'm saying is, if you want to have a level of accountability and you want to make massive, if you want to make massive movement, if you want to start pushing the needle faster than you've ever seen before, you will get a person who works with you every day, all day. I will tell you right now that this is one of the big.
Speaker 1:Let me just break it down to you here's. Let me do some math here, I think. Let me give you six things that I can think of right now. That gives me an advantage. Over 99% of all the entrepreneurs that I personally know Love it. Okay, bring it on. All right. That don't have an assistant? Okay. So for those of you who have an assistant, this doesn't apply to you, but maybe, even if you have an assistant, this could help you in how to schedule.
Speaker 2:Take full advantage of what you have. Yeah, yeah for sure, here we go, okay.
Speaker 1:So number one, my assistant. She starts her work shift one hour before I even wake up. Before I wake up, she's already gone through my emails, my notifications. She's basically responding to things that she can, that she knows about. She's flagging things that maybe are important, that require my attention or that she doesn't know how to respond to.
Speaker 1:So, that when I wake up, and the first thing we do when we wake up is what? We grab our phones, right, our alarms are on our phones. Usually the phone goes off, like ah, I hit this button, you know. And then you grab the phone. You're like okay, and then you, the first thing you do is you, you scroll down and look at that notification bar and you see, oh my gosh, I have like so many notifications, right, right. So, um she, what she does is she eliminates notification, hell, right. So what she's doing is I wake up to a very small amount of things that require my attention and she's done the rest.
Speaker 2:Nice Okay.
Speaker 1:Number two before I even wake up, she reviews my calendar and she gives me a layout of what I actually need to do for the day my calendar. And she gives me a layout of what I actually need to do for the day Nice. And she takes my to-do list that we've been working on. It's basically a growing and shrinking list throughout the day. We have an ongoing to-do list that gets updated on a daily basis. So here's my calls for the day, here's my to-do list for the day. We have a call every morning at 9am, just a 15 minute call, just to go through what needs to be done for that day, what are the priorities, and, and then she'll run through usually my to-do list and my calendar to make sure what I want to do. Okay, like, for example, yesterday. She's like hey, your tax people said that they need this report done, you need this done. And I'm like, well, I don't want to do that today, let's do it for tomorrow.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:So her and I are proactively setting things up so that. I'm successful Okay.
Speaker 2:Number three.
Speaker 1:She attends all of my calls. She's on all my calls. As a matter of fact, sometimes she'll show up to a podcast.
Speaker 2:I'm like, hey, it's just a podcast you can leave.
Speaker 1:She's like okay, right, she's taking attendance of the call, she's writing my meeting minutes, she's going through actionable discussion notes, she's doing action items. She's actually using AI to do a lot of this now.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah.
Speaker 1:But the AI still doesn't know me. The way that she does, she knows what is actually important from a call. The AI is trying to guess Right, right, right, right, right, so, and then of course, the action items, the follow-ups, all the different things. She'll even like 15 minutes before a call hey, just a reminder, you got a call coming up, whatever right.
Speaker 1:So she's doing a lot of the stuff to again to number one to increase the value of my time by protecting it. Number two she's already showing that my time is valuable. When you tell somebody, hey, talk to my assistant and she'll schedule it instantly, the perceived value of your time is higher. So people don't mess around too much. Right Like I'll get people all the time. They'll be like, oh, I don't want to talk to your sister or whatever. I'm like, well then, you don't want to be on my calendar.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, exactly that's it.
Speaker 1:I mean.
Speaker 2:I wonder if I should do. Sorry, we have our calendar set. I have certain calendars set for certain types of meetings and certain type of people. So on the spot I can give them a specific link of like how far in advance I want them to be out, like how long they get yeah.
Speaker 1:And your assistant can, totally, can, totally run that for you Like you know, I don't even use calendar.
Speaker 1:I don't even use a calendar link or anything Like she manually sets that up. But just because that's the way that I like it that way, I mean it could probably save her time to do it that way. But the other thing is too, is that she knows what time of the day that I want to do things. And when you go on Calendly and you're like, well, I don't want to have calls from this time to this time, whatever, like things pop up, like the kids basketball game yesterday, Like you know that was not.
Speaker 1:You know I wanted to leave early at four o'clock so I can get there in time, because my office is 25 minutes away from the from the game. So there's little things like that that pop up Right and so. So number four is that throughout the day, she's checking my emails, she's looking at what's going on, you know addresses any issues that are happening that I need to know about. Well, usually when I'm on calls or when I'm doing a podcast, like right, now here I am recording the show with you.
Speaker 1:For sure, she's doing all my emails. She's catching up on inboxes, like this is when I'm working and she's not on a call is when she actually gets the time to catch up. I love it, I love it, I love it. So, back to what you were saying, though, earlier, and this is number five day probably, five to 10 meeting requests from people that are like hey, I want to either have you on the show or I want to ask you a question or an AI consult call or whatever it is you know, throughout the day, usually on Facebook and Instagram or LinkedIn, has been pretty popping for me lately. But these people come to me and say hey, I want to pick your brain about some stuff, whatever, and she's actually screening those calls, she's figuring out if I want to do those calls right, and a lot of times, she'll hand them off to team members.
Speaker 1:So, for example, we have a leader who does all of our client onboarding, so if there's a client issue, like, she'll say, oh, no problem, let me introduce you to whoever. If another client's like hey, you know what? I want to use a. I'm thinking about using one of your vas to to do some graphic design or build a website. Oh, no problem, pop on a call with julio and julio will do the inbound sales. She's sorting things, figuring out where they should be and on a rate on a very rare occasion she'll let someone on my calendar nice, nice but here's the last thing.
Speaker 1:Okay, and, by way, this is just a few of the things that I can think of on a day-to-day basis. She's doing.
Speaker 1:But here's the final thing and this is where I believe a lot of people are missing out, and this is a massive productivity hack. If you follow my instructions I'm going to give you which is before the end of every shift. Okay, before the end of the day, she checks in on me and we usually do a wrap up of the to-do list again and say okay, what did you actually get done for the to-do list? Is there anything that needs to be added on? And we reprioritize the to-do list for tomorrow, right?
Speaker 1:So, that when we log in the next day, we already are running straight hard on the ground ready to get stuff done. And I'm telling you, if you follow what I just did, what if I, if you just follow, if and, by the way, my ea does way more than that, she's doing presentation slides for me she's she's doing I've seen them, yeah yeah, she's using um.
Speaker 1:She's using my AI to write email newsletters. She's doing all sorts of different things. So those are all bonuses, right? Because if all she did was organize my calendar, make me look good follow up on my clients.
Speaker 1:send links. She's literally using AI to create proposals now and contracts. Send links she's sending. She's literally using AI to create proposals now and contracts. Like if all she did was those six things that I did, I'm already going to be way more productive than 99% of entrepreneurs who wake up flailing their arms trying to figure out what they're going to do for the day. If you are thinking about getting an executive assistant, you're like you know what he's right.
Speaker 1:If you're nodding your head listening to this and you're like, man, I wish I had that. I wish I could woke up every day with someone who actually cares about me. Just hit me up vastaffordcom. We have been doing this. This is our 10th year. Man, it's been wild. We have over 150 virtual assistants who are all hand recruited and trained in the Philippines. We have a 45-day process from when we recruit to when they're trained, and then they have two weeks of shadowing our existing senior executive assistants. So they're battle ready and they're ready to plug in. And it's they're battle ready and they're ready to plug in. And you know it's super affordable. You know it's about $1,600 a month and you can have a full-time person you know, dedicated, who wakes up every day who actually cares about you. I know this isn't, you know I'm not trying to sell a plug with, but I do know that I could really, if I can help somebody. I hope that I can.
