Dave Braun
00:00:01
Hello folks. 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, your bank account. Hey, I’m here with Dave Braun. Actually. I’m Dave Braun. I’m here with Larry Broughton. I’m just so excited. I can’t say anything right today.
Larry Broughton
00:00:23
It’s been a long Dave! day
Dave Braun
00:00:27
Long. Yeah. Anyways, I’m and Broughton Larry I’m here Braun! Dave with
Larry Broughton
00:00:33
All right, great. David’s great to see you. Thank you for your leadership on, on this. I love you. I’m glad you’re in my life.
Dave Braun
00:00:39
Yeah. That’s awesome. All right. So people have this question. This belief, the question is, is that we need to answer today is they might steal my customers.
Larry Broughton
00:00:49
Yup. Hey, that came up during one of the original webinars that we did. And, and I don’t know, we, we hear it over and over again, but can I, I kind of pledged a couple of years ago to try to change the way people thought about those folks who actually pay our bills. Those people that we provide services for. As long as we keep calling them customers, we’re going to treat them like customers. To me, customers are transactional. Clients are relational. All right. And if we just switched that, and I’m sorry to go off already, Dave, we’ve not even gotten to the topic and I’m already off on a tangent. It’s a teaching moment, right? And that is, clients are relational. And I think that the VA’s are less likely to steal a client from you than they are a customer from you. Anybody can steal a customer from you. A competitor can steal a customer from you, but the reason people stay with you is because they’re a client. So let’s get that out of our heads. All right. Let’s, let’s think of the people that we provide services for that pay our bills, the pay our fees that pay our salaries as client and not as customers. So let me start with that, Dave, and then I’ll hand it over to you to get this thing, rockin’ and rollin’.
Dave Braun
00:02:06
Okay, cool. You know, and, and I’m glad you started that way because your clients are your clients because of the main reason is because they know like, and they trust you. That’s why they came on board. That’s why they want to do business with you in the first place. I think you and your company, what you have created. And you know, that’s not going to be able to be, I mean, you can’t just easily duplicate that. Right. A virtual assistant, they may try, but, you know, chances are, it’s going to be pretty difficult for them to duplicate it, especially if you’ve got somebody in, you know, in a, in another country. Right. And you know, likely, especially if you’re doing your first one or two or three, most likely you’ll be limiting any kind of interactions that you have with those, those clients to pretty much you and them, as opposed to you and your VA’s. Although I do have Daphne gets on with some of my clients, for sure. But it’s in a limited capacity.
Larry Broughton
00:03:01
And she did not in the beginning it took to a point to build trust, see what their skill set is. That whole kind of thing. But also what we need to remember is this, if you haven’t figured it out yet, you’re about to, the whole business ownership, entrepreneurship game is rough. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it. Most VAs do not want to be business owners. Most VAs do not want to go out and find their own clients. Most VAs, unless they’re in the VA business of hiring more VAs want to have somebody that they work for and they can service them, whatever the parameters are that you’ve given them, they don’t want to be managing client relations and doing business development. They just don’t. But another thing is Dave, is that I think it ought to be a goal that once we get the VA on board and you realize, Hey, this is somebody that I, that I like that is really an asset to the organization.
Larry Broughton
00:03:57
Our goal as business owners ought to shift to how do I keep this person here? How do I make it so attractive – me, my business, what we’re doing, the service that we’re providing, so attractive that they don’t want to go somewhere else. And we addressed that in the thrive module. Right? So I think that that’s a really important element as well. So you might want to pick up on either one of those points and expand on it. But I think there’s a lot of reasons why you should fear not when it, when it comes to this.
Dave Braun
00:04:30
Yeah. I mean, there’s, there are so many companies out there that just, you know, they don’t appreciate their, their team members. And there’s little things that you can do just by the fact that you care about them and communicate with them, and want to know what their vision is for their life. And you help them take a few little steps towards that. They’re going to be so loyal to you. It’s just not going to happen. I mean, I’ve, I’ve managed, I’ve had VAs for over five years now, multiple ones,. They don’t want to have their own companies. They don’t want to steal your clients. I mean, they just, they want to do their jobs and they don’t want to have to sell and win clients. And plus the other thing is, and we talk about this all the time, Larry, and you talk about it, MIC: motivation, integrity, and capacity. There’s the integrity part of hiring, that’s so important in this. And if you’re hiring for a high level of integrity for somebody then pretty, it’s a pretty high chance that they’re not even going to think about stealing your clients.
Larry Broughton
00:05:32
But you know this can happen, whether it’s a VA or whether it is, you know, someone who’s living right here in your own hometown, working in your office. I remember the first time this happened to me, it was, gosh, it has to been 30 years ago. I hired a guy at my old hotel company and he’d been there for about a year. And I wondered why he was always asking so many things about how do you do this and how do you do that? And, and I thought, wow, this guy’s a real go-getter. You know, he wants to learn, well, it turns out about 18 months later, he put in his notice because he went out and bought himself a small hotel. And he was trying to figure out how do I, you know, own and operate a hotel.
Larry Broughton
00:06:19
And at first I was angry, upset, pissed off, you name it, you know, felt betrayed. But after I kind of reflected on it, I’d realize, listen, one of the mantras that we used to have for our old organization was that we’re an incubator for entrepreneurs. When you say that you’re an incubator for entrepreneurs, because we want people to have this entrepreneurial mindset to be thinking for themselves, coming up with innovative ideas, then guess what? You’re going to, you’re going to attract entrepreneurs. And so it, it can happen right here as well. Now, the truth of the matter is when he opened his property, he never competed with us. He didn’t take any of our clients, didn’t take any of our rockstar employees. So all of that angst that I felt for about a week was, it was a waste of time and energy that had been spent on it. But I’ve gotten over it at this point. And now you’ve got to look at it as, hey, you know, it’s one of the risks that you take in business. But again, you touched on it earlier, Dave, and that is, when you hire, right, and you really get the integrity, and by the way, just during conversations you have during the hiring process, you can find out in the interviewing process, what are their goals? What do they want to do?
Larry Broughton
00:07:33
I’m starting to go on a tangent. Don’t worry about it, I guess is my point. There are so many other hurdles to be worrying about. I think you need to charge ahead and get a VA on board.
Dave Braun
00:07:48
Yeah. And one of the, one of the things that we were talking about before the call before we started recording, was that, you know, when you’re hiring a virtual assistant to help you, that’s, I mean, that’s really the furthest thing from their mind. But this is going to be more likely to happen if you have a, like a business partner and you guys separate or something,
Larry Broughton
00:08:06
That’s a good point. That’s a good point. Yeah. Yeah.
Dave Braun
00:08:09
And or somebody else who’s like a co-owner or even if you’ve hired somebody at, in sales and marketing. And part of that reason is because they are establishing the relationship with the client.
Larry Broughton
00:08:21
And they are more senior level, too.
Dave Braun
00:08:23
Yeah. And they’re more senior level, but you’re right. But I mean, the way it is now with most of the people that we’re working with and people hire virtual assistants to do certain functions and tasks within their company, it’s like you said, there’s so many other things, other concerns to worry about.
Larry Broughton
00:08:39
Yeah. But it’s a valid concern. We must have heard it at least a half dozen times in the last six months.
Dave Braun
00:08:45
Yeah. Yeah. Because people fight to get clients and once you have a client, you know, you want to hold onto them. So yeah, it is a valid concern. However, just like all the things that we’re addressing, there are answers to it and ways to not, not be concerned about it. Anything else, sir?
Larry Broughton
00:09:04
No, Ihink that’s it. That’s good. Thank you.
Dave Braun
00:09:06
Well, thank you everybody for joining us today, remember building a team is the way to reclaim your freedom and we are here to help you. So we want you to do three things right now. We’d really, really appreciate it if you guys would do that. Number one, subscribe to this podcast, if you haven’t already done so. Number two, give us a rating, preferably five stars and number three, go to hiremyva.com for more information on our course and community, because without experience on your end, you just rely on the experience that we have, you’ll learn how to prepare for, hire and thrive with virtual assistants. Larry and I have helped a bunch of folks. We’re helping people right now. We’d love to help you too. So just go to hiremy a.com for more information.
Larry Broughton
00:09:51
You said the word community and that’s my cue. The community is one of the most important parts of this program. I believe that we were created to be part of a community. And with that said, do yourself a favor, do the world a favor, do your community a favor and go do something significant today. Alright, folks, go get ’em!
Dave Braun
01:10:08
Bye folks!
