Dave Braun
00:00:00
Hey, everyone, 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 the bank, without breaking your bank, which is the most important one. And I’m Dave Braun. I’m here with my partner and cohost, my good friend, crazy crazy dude, Larry Broughton!
Larry Broughton
00:00:20
Crazy!
Dave Braun
00:00:21
Crazy, crazy. Ready to get into the topic for today?
Larry Broughton
00:00:24
Let’ do it!
Dave Braun
00:00:26
Allright! Well, normally you tell me, thank you for being your friend, but I’m going to tell you, thank you for being my friend!
Larry Broughton
00:00:32
Thank you for being my friend, David. It’s been a busy day today.
Dave Braun
00:00:37
So here’s the question. What are the benefits of recording training videos for my business and for my VAs, and there’s something that’s a little bit interesting twist to this, I’ll say it at the end, so what do you think are the benefits of recording these training videos?
Larry Broughton
00:00:58
Well, I think it starts with who is it that says begin with the end in mind. Steven Covey. Now for a lot of us, I think that if you’re an entrepreneur, you gotta be thinking what’s the exit strategy with your business. If you don’t know when that exit strategy may come, you may have an exit strategy in your mind. The example that I always use is, because I’ve seen it happen twice, somebody walks up to an entrepreneur and says, “I love your business, or I love your idea, I will give you X number of millions of dollars today, but you’re not in the business any longer. And I need all your operations and systems.” And then you realize I have zero operations or zero systems, and I’ve got no operations manual or no training tools or anything like that.
Larry Broughton
00:01:47
But guess what happens when you’re in that position? The value of your business declines. So I love the idea that we’ve been doing for a while, Dave, and that is starting to recording how things are done because we get overwhelmed, we think we’re just going to sit at our keyboard and start typing out how to do everything in your business. I still remember, I’m never going to forget, we had that coaching client for a long time who was absolutely stuck. Couldn’t get his operation systems in place. And so you got on a plane, flew to his business, and you guys just started recording from, Hey, when you pull into the parking lot, that day, that morning, what’s the first thing you do? Step-by-step step, you just recorded everything from how to turn off the alarm, how to fill the tills, the banks and the cash registers.
Larry Broughton
00:02:44
How to do your opening checklist, how to make sure the shelves are stocks, all of it. And it wasn’t just one long running video, but there are a few minute segments on here’s how you turn on the alarm. Here’s how to balance your petty cash. Here’s how you do whatever, whatever it is that you do in your business. So I think Dave, that when it comes down to what you do for your virtual assistants, I think it’s even more critical because most not all, but the whole idea of a virtual assistant is that they’re remote. You’re not in the same room showing them how to do it!
Dave Braun
00:03:18
Yeah. You can’t point to your screen. I mean, you kind of can with a zoom meeting, but it’s not very repeatable.
Larry Broughton
00:03:27
So I think that it’s a great way to start your operations manual, to get that thing going. So what input do you have on this?
Dave Braun
00:03:36
One of the funny things is, thinking back to that story, I remember sitting down with him at his location and we were going to start typing in a document and all the different things. And we just got stuck, it didn’t work well. And then he’s like, Hey, I’ve got this video camera, let’s do that. And we just blasted through stuff. It worked out really, really well. You talk about the videos as being the basis of your standard operating procedure or your policy manual. But that’s the cool thing is that that’s a huge asset for your business. And like you said, Larry, somebody may come up to you at any time and want to buy your business.
Larry Broughton
00:04:21
Well, there’s that, you want to sell your business. But also, what if the team member who’s been helping you launch this business, or this product ,gets sick, they quit, you have to terminate them? Then you got to start all over again. Whereas if you actually record how to do specific task, not like policies or procedures, but task, on something you’re building or doing, whether it’s a graphic design template for one of your clients, whatever it is, then all you have to do, is you’ve got this library of videos, you’d say, watch these, and we’ll get you up to speed first. And there’s great tools like loom. You probably know more of them than I do, where you can actually record your screen while you’re doing all kinds of little fancy technique techniques on it, that will help you do this.
Dave Braun
00:05:14
And Vimeo now has come up with a little screen recorder that works really well.
Larry Broughton
00:05:19
Yeah.
Dave Braun
00:05:20
It’s not as good as loom, I don’t think in a lot of ways, but the nice thing about it is, it works. You can restrict your videos a little bit better, and there’s some good things about it. But anyway, that’s the thing is, the work continuity is important. So if your team changes for any reason, it’ll allow you to bring somebody new on board and get them up to speed a lot faster. And one of the things that we talk about is people get wrapped around the axle of, oh my gosh, I’m going to record a video and I’m not very good at doing it. And then they start recording it, and say Oh man, I messed up here. Let me redo it. And they there’s so much time and effort to do it. Don’t worry about all that stuff! If you at least get it to where it’s 80% of the way there, that’s a lot better than zero.
Larry Broughton
00:06:10
Well, sure. Think about it this way. This is an internal document. This is not going to be published to the world. Right? And so you can stumble, you can have ahs and ums in it, and you don’t need it to look perfect because it’s not gonna be published. Just get it going. Because guess what you can do? You get it 80% of the way there, how’s it working, you can tweak it, improve it, do it again. So you get closer to 95% of the way there. But this is one of those things better done than perfect. Get something done, get going on it.
Dave Braun
00:06:40
One of the other benefits is that videos are a lot easier to understand than slogging through a document. There’s that aspect of show me, not tell me, that happens with the video. There’s a lot of subtleties in the video that you may skip over when you’re actually doing it as a document. But as a video, when you’re demonstrating it, how do you skip anything? How do you skip over anything? It’s kind of hard to.
Larry Broughton
00:07:06
Well, we also know that we are a video culture nowadays. People don’t read, very few people read. We know that it’s easier to watch a video, or listen to a video, on how something is done. This is why YouTube is so freaking popular. You don’t know how to do something? I’ll guarantee there’s something on YouTube on how to do it. How many millions of videos are uploaded every day on that darn thing? So that’s just a testament to that people aren’t reading it, they’d rather watch a video on it. And you know, a lot of manufacturers who have developed products, whether it’s a game or a piece of technology, they will have video tutorials now rather than having an operating manual that you have to read. Americans are very interesting. I heard something that in Japan, people will read the operating manual when they get a new phone or a new piece of technology.
Larry Broughton
00:08:01
They’ll read that first, before they ever turn the thing on. But here, what do we do? We start trying to get it to work. And then we get frustrated. So the point is that here, we only use, I forget what it is, something like 20% of the capacity of our phones, because we don’t know what it can do, whereas in some other countries that take the time to learn. So this is the great thing about videos: what we’re trying to do is create systems and operating tools that work for your team members here. Western countries, Canada, US, whatever.
Dave Braun
00:08:36
And we talked about in case, you have to fire or let your VA go, or your team member go, bring somebody on new or set them free. But, also if you want to expand to bring in another person to say, I’m going to double my output, how else are you going to do that? You’ve got to have some training. Now you can have one of your team members train the other person, but that’s not a very repeatable and scalable way to do it. You want to have them learn from the same foundation.
Larry Broughton
00:09:09
I don’t know if I’ve ever shared this with you. I know I’ve shared it in masterminds, but I don’t know when. I used to be a manager at a McDonald’s a hundred years ago, before I went into the military. And do you know how they did their training?
Dave Braun
00:09:22
I think so.
Larry Broughton
00:09:22
They had the choice between VHS and Beta cassettes, on everything that you could think goes on inside of McDonald’s, from cooking a hamburger to a cheeseburger, to a quarter pounder, fillet-o-fish, fries, how do you clean the stock room? How do you work the cash register, how do you clean the dining area? It’s all on video. So when you get there, depending on what you’re hired for, let’s say you’re gonna be a fry cook, before you go walk down the floor, you’re gonna watch a series of videos before you ever go down there. So at least you have some basic orientation of the station and what your role and responsibilities are going to be before you ever step on the floor. So imagine if you had this, this series of videos on whatever it is that you do in your business, that before your VA actually starts doing it, they can watch this. It’s worth the investment, I believe, in a couple hours of training before they actually start doing things.
Dave Braun
01:10:26
And by the way, you’re way older than me. I don’t even know what VHS and beta means! You remember blockbuster and all that, right?
Larry Broughton
01:10:42
Yeah. Rub it in.
Dave Braun
01:10:43
Well, there was one other thing, and I hadn’t realized it except for Melanie in our community, talked about this on one of our calls. And this is one of the reasons why you’ve got to be in some type of a community, come in ours, but you get all kinds of new thoughts and ideas. Well, she said, when she was recording the videos for training, it helped her to know how long it would take for the VA to do the task, her team member to do the task. So if it takes her 20 minutes to record a video, well, that task better be done in around that time by the team member, as opposed to taking all da.
Larry Broughton
01:11:22
Well, yeah, that’s particularly true when you’re hiring a VA who skills and talents should be augmented. Like that should be their strengths and their augmenting your weaknesses. So why hire somebody to do your strengths? You hire somebody to focus on your weaknesses or things you don’t have experience in. So it was funny, we were talking to one of our mentees the other day and he was saying that two of his VAs now are doing, and he’s been doing what he does for 30 some years, and he said, the two VA’s he’s gotten do it faster than he ever did. And so he’s like, I had no idea, I’ve got to like find work for them to do because they do things so fast.!That’s a good problem to have.
Dave Braun
01:12:10
That’s a great problem to have.
Larry Broughton
01:12:12
And then all you can do is go out and fish, get more clients, bring them in.
Dave Braun
01:12:18
That’s right. It’s amazing, once you start having some team members, the shift in your thinking and your business, that will happen.
Larry Broughton
01:12:31
If we’re not hitting all the marks, then go ahead and leave a comment where you find this video and we can expand on it, particularly in the community. If you see it here in the community, go to the community, say, Hey, I’m not clear on this or that. We monitor wherever these videos or the podcasts are found. And we can always expand on that in a ater podcast. So thanks for your feedback.
Dave Braun
01:12:55
Yep. Absolutely. So the lesson is record training videos of everything that you’re doing.
Larry Broughton
01:13:00
That’s right. Yeah. Good.
Dave Braun
01:13:02
All right, well thank you folks for being with us and listening and maybe even watching us today, remember that building a team is the way to reclaim your freedom. And of course, we’re right here to help you, we’re here in the podcast, we’re here on the video. We’re here to help you, and even in our Facebook group. So three things we’d love for you to do right now. Number one, subscribe to the podcast or the video or the YouTube channel, if you haven’t already done so, please subscribe to the podcast. Number two, give us a rating, five stars, what we like, but do what you need to do. And then number three…
Larry Broughton
01:13:40
$5 foot long?
Dave Braun
01:13:46
Number three, go to HireMyVA.com. You’ll get all kinds of information about our course and community, because without experience, you’ll learn how to prepare for, hire, and thrive with virtual assistants through our program, or course and community. Larry and I have helped, lots of folks. We just talked about a couple of folks in our community now, and we’d love to help you too. So just go to HireMyVA.com for more information!
Larry Broughton
01:14:10
That’s right. Hey folks, do yourself a favor, do the world a favor, go do something significant today. Go get ’em folks!
Dave Braun
01:14:18
All right. Take care!
