Dave Braun
00:00:00
Alrighty, welcome to the HireMyVA team and business building podcast, where we help you to reclaim your freedom through hiring and thriving with virtual assistants without breaking your bank. I’m Dave Braun and I’m here with Larry Broughton. Who’s my great partner and friend, cat and dog owner, and sometimes stinky cat owner. What we were just talking about we were busting up.
Larry Broughton
00:00:24
Yes, yes. Yeah. I still love him. I still love him.
Dave Braun
00:00:28
Yeah. Animals can, they can kind of like stink things up, right.
Larry Broughton
00:00:34
Can’t we all? Oh yeah.
Dave Braun
00:00:36
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Okay. Well enough about stinky animals. So here’s the question that we get that we’ve gotten, you know I’ve heard that the Filipinos and the culture and stuff, and you know, anybody really, that they can just disappear days at a time, no communication. And I’m left, stuck with all this work to do, and I don’t know what to do. So what do you think?
Larry Broughton
00:01:04
Well, again, I’m sorry that we keep saying this, but this is not just for VAs that are overseas. It really comes down to three things. I think one is the personality of the person that you’ve hired. The second, that can be cultural because there are some cultural events or life circumstances that happen where culturally, they deal with it differently than we might here in the U S additionally, part of the cultural thing is the way that they respond differently to their boss versus here in the U S and the third thing is communication, right? Have we communicated effectively what our expectations are of what happens when some kind of life drama, emergency, tragedy, holiday, comes up? Right. So really, I think comes down to those three things and we can kind of winnow this down from there.
Dave Braun
00:01:54
Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. It does happen to anybody and the Filipino culture. One of the great things about it, you know, it’s got, they’ve got great family ties. They have extreme loyalty to, you know, bosses, owners and very, a tremendous amount of respect and they have a lot of loyalty, right? So those are great strengths. And that’s one of the reasons why we recommend going there. But then of course, in the language, from the language, and then of course on my board here, right. Strengths have weaknesses, that’s true, and sometimes it has happened before, but it’s pretty rare. And the family loyalty will cause them to deal with their family situation almost exclusively.
Larry Broughton
00:02:35
We’ve had that a couple of times.
Dave Braun
00:02:37
Yeah. And, and it’s happened. And, and that’s why, like you said, Larry, we’ve got to establish those, that proper communication from the get-go. Those boundaries that are basically check in and check out every day and just communicate, right. It’s, you know, it’s no problem, but just communicate with them, and we have that, those appropriate expectations with them
Larry Broughton
00:02:57
Well, listen if this is the, I’m using air quotes, reason, or excuse that you’re going to use not to hire a VA, your business is not going to grow, it just isn’t. Dave, I can think of times where I’ve had to take time off unexpectedly. I know there’s times when you’ve had to take time off time off unexpectedly. If I did not have VAs or people on the team, the business would have come to a standstill. Yeah. So I dunno, I, I please don’t use this as a, as a reason on why not to hire a VA.
Dave Braun
00:03:32
Yeah. Because something will happen to you. There’s no question. And it’s going to be unexpected. I remember, I think it was when I was like 30 or something like that. I got the chicken pox and I was out of work for three weeks. And I, that was a long time ago because I’m old, but that was a long time ago. And there was really, the internet was in its infancy. There was no opportunity to work from home. So I was out, I really couldn’t contribute to work. Just a couple of years ago, Cheryl had an appendicitis that was an emergency. And she was out of work for almost two weeks. It almost burst. So they couldn’t really prepare a ton for that. You know, in fact, I was talking with my brother-in-law, who used to work for Federal Express. And he told me a story about a guy who was, he was, they invested what they do there is they invested like six weeks of training up front before they even get them into a van to start delivering packages. And of course they have to deliver a lot of packages. They have busy routes and it’s, it’s kind of stressful. This guy couldn’t handle it. And so he ended up taking his keys, putting them in a mailbox and park in his truck. And he had thrown the keys in the mailbox, calling him and saying, here’s your truck take it. I’m quitting. Just like that. Yeah.
Larry Broughton
00:04:53
Yeah. So it can happen anywhere, I think is the point. This is not just a cultural, regional country-based challenge or problem. What we can do though, when we are onboarding new team members. Well, first of all, you got to prepare, which means that we have to actually vet the people and communicate with our team members or potential team members before they even come on. Board of what’s expected, should something like this happen is this part of the conversation. Hey, what happens when? Because sometimes it’s, it’s a matter of using one of their communication tools, whether it’s slack or texting or email, Hey, this just happened. And so I’ll be communicating with you periodically throughout the emergency or whatever it is. Expect that there’s not going to be any perfect person out there. We are all people. And so there’s going to be problems that go along the way. You heard me talk about that before in business, all problems are people problems. At the end of the day, they are people problems. How do we respond to it? How do we have checks and balances? We have backup plans in case this does indeed happen.
Dave Braun
00:05:57
Yeah. And I think it’s important, obviously that you consider, especially if you’re a solopreneur, and have not done this before. You need to give them some kind of paid personal leave, got to have a policy in a way to keep track of their vacation and sick time. So they’ve got some freedom to use some of that stuff because you, you know, you want them to do that. And the other thing that I was thinking is that as business owners and as leaders, we’ve got a model that same
Dave Braun
00:06:22
Type of behavior that we want to have in our team members. So that means if we’re going to be out, if we’re going to be sick, we need that. You know, let them know, Hey, here’s, what’s going on. I’m going to be out. I’ve got this going on. I’m I’m out for the day because of ABC and D or I’m taking vacation and you guys can prepare for that without me, et cetera. We’ve got them all, all that for them. If we don’t do that, then how can we expect them to do that?
Larry Broughton
00:06:48
Yeah, that’s right. And by the way, those benefits that you were talking about also separate you or us from all the other people that are out there, they’re trying to hire VA because honestly, most employers, most businesses who are hiring VA’s, aren’t offering this kind of stuff and so we are going to build more loyalty. You’re gonna attract a higher quality person, hopefully a better, a little more experience. And it will build, I think I used the word, but loyalty. Yes. They’re gonna, they’re gonna want to keep this job or this gig, whatever it is, they call it. Yeah.
Dave Braun
00:07:23
Yeah, absolutely. And there’s going to be times in your business when you’re going to have to, all right, guys, we’ve got to, you know, work some extra time because we got this deadline coming up or this emergency thing happened. Right. And so if they’ve got loyalty to you and you’ve got these benefits and you’ve created this great culture, they’re going to be like, Hey, no problem, boss. I’ll do that. No problem at all.
Larry Broughton
00:07:44
Yeah. Particularly, let’s keep in mind that some of the, now we’ve got some full-time VAs, right. Who are dedicated to us, but there are some VAs who have multiple clients. We would be a client of the VA. Right. And so if you’re the type of business leader manager, who’s constantly just belittling them, grinding them down. I’m now giving them benefits. When crunch time does come, they’re going to go probably where will they help maybe, possibly. But they may also go to the person who treats them fairly. They’re fun to work with. They’ve got decent benefits as well. So this is a competitive advantage that you’ll have. And again, all of this is laid out in the program. The interesting thing is in the community, people ask these types of questions. What kind of benefits should I do? What do you find is most effective for people from this part of the world? And you can just bounce, bounce your questions off of other people who are actually in the process like you are, or who are further down the road. And by the way, there are people in the community who are The VA’s. actually VA’s who helped build this program are in the community and responding to questions. So it’s, it’s a great, it’s a great tool to be using.
Dave Braun
00:09:00
Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know of any other program like it, I don’t know. I don’t know.
Larry Broughton
00:09:04
Not in our competitive set analysis. We’ve not seen that. Yeah. Yeah.
Dave Braun
00:09:06
That’s for sure. Yeah. Well, anything else Larry on this
Larry Broughton
00:09:09
Topic? No, I think this is good. I think we’ve covered it. Okay. So
Dave Braun
00:09:12
I hope you guys got some great value out of this. And thanks for listening. Of course, as always remember building a team is your way to reclaim your freedom, we’re here to help. Remember Larry and I here, we’ve got a lot of experience. We’ve got our VA’s in the community you can ask questions of, to get an idea is this normal is this expected, when there are situations that come up, you have some people that can help you, you know, resolve it and say, what’s the best approach. So the community is really important. So what I want you to do right now, guys is take a few seconds and do these three things. One subscribe to the podcast, if you haven’t already done so. Number two, give us a rating. Okay. Hopefully five stars, but be honest, of course. Cause we want to improve and we want to grow and let us know how we can improve. And then number three is go to hiremyva.com for more info on our course and community. We’ll help you thrive with virtual assistants and prepare for them and hire them the appropriate way. So Larry and I have helped a lots of folks. We want to help you too. So just go to hiremyva.com for more information.
Larry Broughton
01:10:17
Yep. Dave it’s great seeing you today. I love you, bro. I’m glad that we are doing this together. Hey folks, do yourself a favor. Do the world a favor. Go do something really significant today. Now go get ’em. See you later. Bye. Bye.
