Dave Braun
00:00:02
Hey welcome folks to the HireMyVA Team and Business Building Podcast, brought to you by Yoogozi.com and this podcast. And of course at HireMyVA, we help you to reclaim your freedom through hiring and thriving with virtual assistants without breaking your bank – without breaking the bank. I’m Dave Braun and I’m here with the Larry Broughton! Every new episodes, I just got to do that. Easiest but that’s fine.
Larry Broughton
00:00:33
Thank you, sir. Yeah.
Dave Braun
00:00:35
Yeah. Well, thanks for being here with me. We’ve got a great topic again, man.
Larry Broughton
00:00:40
This is fun.
Dave Braun
00:00:40
Let’s jump into it. You ready? Okay. So here’s the question. What is a good executive virtual assistant job description? Okay.
Larry Broughton
00:00:50
Hey, can I jump onto that first? Yeah, absolutely. I know that a lot of you stumble on this podcast on YouTube or iTunes or wherever your favorite podcast is. And some of you are watching the video and others as others are listening to it, but we have this very cool thing called hiremyva.com, which is actually a course in programming, how to hire virtual assistants and the great thing, unlike any other virtual assistant program I’ve seen out there, we actually help you focus on growing your business as well as a podcast, right? But so I’d encourage you to, you know, do put your Google to work and find, hiremyva.com. And frankly, you can do any kind of internet search for Dave Braun and Larry Broughton. And you’re gonna find, you know, all kinds of, lots of stuff on our coaching programs, on the victory masterclass and all that kind of stuff out there.
Larry Broughton
00:01:47
But in both of those programs, particularly in the HireMyVA program, Dave, we’ve got an actual template, a job description for an executive assistant a VA executive assistant. And they are so powerful day because I think when people are first launching their business or as they’re growing the business and they start having department heads, they realize, oh my gosh, I’m doing all these other things, Dave, I need help for me as the leader of the organization as the business owner, or even if you’re working inside another organization that I need, I need help myself. How do I do that? And this is where our executive assistants are so powerful, particularly virtual assistants who happened to be an executive assistant. So I would encourage you if you’re part of the hire my VA program, go inside the program, go to the Kajabi or go to the website.
Larry Broughton
00:02:40
And you’ll just to search for a job description. You’re going to find that there, but it might help us out. Dave, if we actually walk through a few items, a few of the items, but I think first of all, if you’ve been through any of our programs before, you know that we’re big, we’re strength based junkies, right? You’ve to understand what your strengths are. You’ve got to understand what you are, candidates strengths are. And we do that by administering you have the Kolbe A Index that measures the congnitive mind and the, the Clifton strength finders. Right. And so I think the key David just started off on what are your strengths and what do you need the person to do?
Dave Braun
00:03:22
Exactly. Yeah. You gotta be in touch with yourself, right? Yeah. You really do. Yeah.
Larry Broughton
00:03:30
Can I share one of the things with my own personal executive assistant, one of the things she wanted out, like, so what’s the job description here? You know what, the first thing I told her is more than anything else, your job is to protect my time and reputation.
Dave Braun
00:03:45
Right.
Larry Broughton
00:03:46
Yeah. And so, and so what does that mean? Well, doing things that I’m not good at, or that I don’t want to do, I don’t have time to do and to make sure that I’m showing up on time that I’m presenting myself properly, which means helping me spell check things. If I’m writing a new book, help me get that out properly. Right. If I’m doing any kind of social media, make sure that that’s maximize and looking good, whatever it is to protect my time and to protect my reputation. I think any executive assistant worth their weight that would be right there near at or near the
Dave Braun
00:04:22
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. You mean that? I mean, cause your time is for all of us, our time is our really our most valuable resource. Yeah. Cause he can make more money. You can stretch money, we can borrow money, but you can’t borrow more time. I mean, you can do a certain extent by, you know, exercising and taking care of yourself and do all that. And we talked about that in other episodes, but yeah, your time is critically, critically, critically important. And you talked about your reputation, you know, I think about the branding ladder and we should go into detail on that in another episode. But right now how long it takes you to climb up the ladder to where your reputation is stellar, but you can go down very, very quickly that’s right, right. Climbing up a ladder, you know, step-by-step takes some effort, but you can go all the way to the bottom by just very shortly.
Larry Broughton
00:05:20
And on the time thing, I don’t want people just let me just put a little more color into the time thing. If it’s requiring you to work outside your strengths, that’s a time suck. If you have to, if you’re a virtual assistant or your executive assistant is booking meetings at the wrong time, you go, you drive to a meeting and actually the meeting’s supposed to be tomorrow. That’s not protecting time. If they’re not screening calls for you, but you’re screening calls. That’s not protecting time. If you ask them to do research and on something. And instead, instead they just send you a link. I could, I could’ve done a Google search.
Dave Braun
00:06:01
That’s not protecting your time. Oh my gosh. People, people let me go on a tangent here. People do that all the time. It’s like, Hey, here’s a good article for you to read and they send you a link. Yeah.
Larry Broughton
00:06:12
Well what’s the highlights of it. Yeah. It’s
Dave Braun
00:06:14
Like, why should I read that? Give me your top one or two or three takeaways from that. Yeah. So anyway, that’s kind of a side note, but we should all be doing that sometimes I don’t. But I try to do that more often than not.
Larry Broughton
00:06:27
I’m going to give a shout out to my former spouse. There was a 26 page report that we both needed to read recently that came from a, a professional that we’re both, you know, had to, had to look at. And she was really good. She forwarded it to me and she said, Hey, here’s, here’s the report. I had already gotten it. But I think she knows how my brain works. And she goes, here’s, here’s the highlights of should put like five or six of the highlights. He came out of this 26 page report. That’s like protecting my time. Not even my executive assistant for crying out loud. Right. But that’s kind of, that’s what that would look like.
Dave Braun
00:07:04
Yeah. Yeah. Well, let’s go in a few other things on that. Well, you know, I think, you know, one of the things I remember talking with Melissa about, and she described herself as kind of a Jack of all trades master of none. Right? So she’s
Larry Broughton
00:07:20
My executive assistant.
Dave Braun
00:07:22
Right. And she’s not a true expert in anything I would say, but she’s really good at many, many things. And I think that’s important if you’re going to want your executive assistant to do a variety of things and then you don’t need somebody to be an actual expert, but you need them to be pretty competent and do a really good job.
Larry Broughton
00:07:40
Yeah. I think that’s a, that’s a good point now since they’re not experts, one of the things that Melissa helps me out a lot with is just basic social media posts. Now that might be appropriate. I’m just thinking like most people that are going to be listening to this or, or using a virtual assistant executive assistant, you’re probably at a point in your organization where both you and the VA going to be doing a lot of different things, but frankly, your organization Dave, is getting to a point where you’ve got so many clients so much business. You now have a specific VA who’s focusing on social media. Right. So that, that could be another one as well. But the life cycle of most businesses are going to require that you’re going to be doing multitasking. So yeah. So Melissa does help me out with, with my own personal social media.
Larry Broughton
00:08:35
And then we’ve got someone else in the company in the organization who does social media for the hotels separately. So that’s a good thing to, you know, another thing that Melissa helps both you and I on and any virtual assistant executive to get help on this is researching and booking travel airlines, rental cars, hotels, Melissa has done all of that for me just in the last 10 days a week. I mean, it’s, it’s a constant thing that saves me a whole lot of time and she manages my different status accounts or frequent flyer accounts that’s associated with the travel. I hate that kind of stuff. And so I always feel great that she can take that off my plate.
Dave Braun
00:09:21
Well, and, and let me, let me go back to kind of the beginning and frame this a little bit more too, is that when we talk about protecting your time and taking things off your plate, it’s not just saving you time, it’s saving your brain power that’s right, right. And so that way you, as a CEO or a leader in your organization, wherever you’re at can spend that time thinking at a higher level than, you know, travel plans are important, but you know, if somebody else can do it, then get them to do it, but they can’t in your organization, you know, come up with new products, new services and work out how you should be executing on those. Right. It usually takes higher level of thinking for stuff.
Larry Broughton
01:10:03
Yeah. If I found joy in that, I would do it right. When you don’t find joy, it’s not your strength. It requires more brain energy to accomplish it. Right. Right. And so the more brain energy I spend on things that I don’t like, I’m not good at the less energy I have left over to do things I am really good at because you do need to refill your fuel tank. You know, your brain power. It’s not just an endless supply. This is why you feel burned out. This is why you get tired at the end of the day. This is why you identify certain times of the day. You should be doing certain tasks. Right. So that’s a good point, Dave, I’m glad you brought that up. Yeah.
Dave Braun
01:10:42
Yeah.
Larry Broughton
01:10:42
Well, I’m going to be working on, there’s probably a boatload of thing.
Dave Braun
01:10:46
Well, another one is, you know, they really should be good with the, our general office suite of tools like Microsoft office or Google the Google suite of tools as well. Right. They need to be able to be pretty decent with PowerPoint, you know, word, you know, spreadsheets, that kind of thing. It doesn’t mean they’re an expert. Again, they maybe they can’t do pivot tables or whatever in your spreadsheets, but they should be able to help you organize data and create those things and help you create presentations like DAF on our team. I mean, what does she do? She creates the presentation templates for us with our graphic skills and other things. So we don’t have to worry about that.
Larry Broughton
01:11:29
That’s so important, which reminds me, you know, yes, they’ve got to be good at those tools, but you, as the leader, as the CEO, as business owner, whatever it is, you gotta make sure that they’ve got the tools. They’re good at them that they’ve got the tools. This is an example. It wasn’t, I don’t get it right all the time. Okay. And was just an example in the last week, like we’re having problems with our social media, media scheduler. Right. And I keep getting like, why is this not up? Well, okay, well you have permission get a new scheduler. Right. That’s going to be a scheduler. And then just today, I think you, you know, this day there’s been like a lot of fraud with my credit lately and my credit cards. And frankly, I’m going to the police station or right after this call to file a formal report.
Larry Broughton
01:12:21
Right. Because now we have found out just as juicy stuff, there’s mail, fraud, wire fraud, forgery, there’s all kinds of things. So I can’t just do an online police report. I mean, I got actually go, so Melissa and I are meeting with the police station right after we’re done recording this. And so one of the things that came up was we needed the new version of Adobe. Right. Because Melissa was working on something and it’s like, well, Chris is out of the office. Can you do this? Well, I don’t have the tool to do it. I was like, well, let’s just put another corporate credit card. And she was like, Larry, we currently don’t have corporate credit cards. They’ve all been closed. So I was getting frustrated that the task wasn’t getting done, but they didn’t have access to the tools. Right. And so I said, okay, use my credit card and I’ll get reimbursed for it from, from the company. Right. So yes, they gotta be good at the tools, but you have to make sure that they have the tools. They have to have the tools and sometimes you just have to ask, okay, what tools do you need to be effective as in your role? Right,
Dave Braun
01:13:24
Right. Yeah. Absolutely. That’s a good, that’s a good one. Yeah. Another thing they should be able to do is just following up with important team members and potentially some clients on some things, depending upon what you, you know, how you’ve set it up, but they should be able to help you communicate to important people in your life, essentially. But as you know, indefinitely in your,
Larry Broughton
01:13:47
Well, that brings up the good point, Dave, you know, you’re saying they need to be able to, but that means that they need to have excellent. And I mean, excellent control of the nuance of your language. Yes.
Dave Braun
01:13:58
Yes. If you’re going to, if you’re going to have them do that then yeah. They definitely,
Larry Broughton
01:14:02
You know, and so don’t just jump to the gun because some things get lost in translation, right. And I’m not saying that they have to, that the language that you’re using a business needs to be their primary language, but they need to have an excellent handle on it. And I am not getting honest because oftentimes they’re going to be dealing with, you know, and reading legal things on your behalf. They’re going to be screening. Things are going to be talking nuance of your business with your most important clients, because they ought to be able to step in and take messages from your most important client before they get to you. And just getting one or two words wrong can really screw things up
Dave Braun
01:14:39
And we can certainly can. Yeah. Yeah. Great point. Yep. You know, when you were talking about tools before, well, there’s going to be times when, yeah, like you said, this particular tool is not working for you. Well, they should be able to go and search out there and look and do a, you know, an evaluation of those tools and say, here’s what I recommend Larry. That we get that it looks like it’s going to be good. I want to try it out. Okay. For sure.
Larry Broughton
01:15:05
Yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure. And then that’d be able to come back to you and offer you a chocolate, chocolate or vanilla option. They do the research on five different tools and come back and say, okay, here’s what, I’m, here’s two different ones. And here’s the pros of this one. So here’s the cons. Here’s what I would recommend. Right.
Dave Braun
01:15:22
I think that’s no, I was going to say, that’s an important point where you say, here’s what I recommend. Right? They should, they should be giving you the chocolate or vanilla, but they should be saying, well, you know, given all the conditions high, recommend chocolate at this time.
Larry Broughton
01:15:37
Yeah. And which means that they need to have strong discernment skills. Right. And so I think that they need to be able to proactively think about what do I need and what does the organization need. Right. So the most effective executive assistants are not people who are just, taskmasters where I’m asking him or her to do things proactively coming up with ideas that are going to save your time and reputation and help you be more effective in your role. Okay. So they should be what I oftentimes remind Melissa, you’re no one else in the organization has the, the permission to manage me.
Dave Braun
01:16:22
That’s right.
Larry Broughton
01:16:24
Everyone’s got permission to talk to me, to give me their ideas. I mean, manage me, tell me where to be at a certain time, but you do right. And so think about what do I need? What’s the organization need and proactively make suggestions and recommendations about that. That those are the most effective, right? That they’re, it’s, they’re anticipatory. They know the organization needs even before you do. So they really need to be able to have their finger on the pulse of you and the organization. And I can just tell you, having had several executive assistants in my life, it takes time to get there, right? They’re not going to get there on the first week, the first month, maybe even in the first year. Okay. But if you stick with it and you communicate effectively, they will get there.
Dave Braun
01:17:10
That’s well, and that’s, that’s a really, really important point. So often only get somebody to come into a particular position. We expect that, okay, you’re going to be making that huge, huge impact on day one. Sometimes it can happen other times it may not happen and you’ll need as the manager of that executive assistant or that team member to figure out how do you help them? Have you really give them permission? What is it they need to hear from you so that they can step into their greatness. Right? Yeah.
Larry Broughton
01:17:42
And I, a lot of the other things we’ve talked about today about you will start recognizing the impact on day one, day two week two, you know, but this area is one of those where it will take time. I’m going to give a word of caution, however, as well, what don’t you want them to do? Well, right out of the gate, you don’t want them having access to your credit cards. You don’t want them to have an access to the credit account. You don’t want them to have bank account numbers. You have to build a sense of loyalty and trust. Before you open all that up to an executive assistant. I have seen it go terribly awry. Where when you thought was going to be a great candidate, end up really being frankly, a thief, you know? And it’s sad when that, when that happens, because it hurts your, when someone like that breaks your trust. If you’re not evolved enough, you take it personally as, oh my gosh, I made a terrible decision, bad judgment on my part. And you ended up being wounded for awhile, you know? And that, so that, well, that person screwed, screwed me over. I can never have an executive system again. No, that’s not the right answer. Okay. Give them incremental levels of trust, which means you need to give them small projects to build trust first, along the way, take the risk. Take small mitigated risk first before you give them the keys to the kingdom.
Dave Braun
01:19:12
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. We talk about that in our course and you know, how you can establish a trust plan and where do you start and in a place with, you know, any for virtual assistant that you hire, no matter what the role is. Yeah, No, I was gonna say where any person that you hire, go ahead.
Larry Broughton
01:19:29
Well, just going to say, Hey, I’d love to hear from you. What if you’re listening to reviewer of this, what are, what are the things that you’ve done successfully with a virtual assistant to make sure that they succeed? Have you had any nightmares or horror stories? I’d love to hear those too, because we oftentimes learn more from those failures and those horror stories. And we do from the successes and the victories. That’s true that we have either way, leave a comment, send us a DM or an email. I’d love to hear your stories about effectively or not. So effectively hiring virtual assistants. Awesome. As executive assistants.
Dave Braun
02:20:05
Okay. Yeah. All right. Well, there you have it. Folks. We just talked about, we just talked about a good executive executive virtual job assist mood. Oh my gosh.
Larry Broughton
02:20:17
What did we talk about today?
Dave Braun
02:20:19
I good executive virtual assistant job description about that or position profile and what you can expect folks. So a great episode, Larry, thanks for doing that. And thank you all for joining us today. Remember building a team is the way to reclaim your freedom. And we are here to help you with our course in community and our white glove service, where we find a rockstar VA for you. We walk you through the process, holding your hand the entire time. It’s fantastic. And three things we’d love for you to do. And we’d really appreciate it. Of course. So number one, subscribe to the podcast on your phone, subscribe to our YouTube channel as well. And then number two, give us a rating. Obviously we want five star leave a comment. As Larry said, you know about your failures, about your successes. And then number three has got a higher my va.com for more information on our course in community and our amazing white glove service. And remember, even without experience, you’ll learn how to prepare for hire and thrive with virtual assistants. We’re helping folks. Now we want to help you too. So go to hire my va.com for more information.
Larry Broughton
02:21:31
Yeah. Hey, my friends, we love you. We’re glad you’re on this journey with us. We’d love to hear your feedback and any additional questions. You know, a lot of these questions we get from you or from other folks that are coaching programs or mentoring programs. So we’re all in it together, right? We’re all on it together. So we love you for that. I just want to remind you of this simple fact that you know, God bless you. God, keep you, God hold you. Right. My friends, go get them. Have a great day. Bye everybody.
