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. I’m Dave Braun, I’m here with my partner, my great friend, Larry Broughton.
Larry Broughton
00:00:20
The crowd goes wild. Hello, David!
Dave Braun
00:00:22
Yeah, I hear them all. I can hear you. I heard the one. There was so much applause. I just, I couldn’t hear you.
Larry Broughton
00:00:29
David, I love you. Thank you for being in my life!
Dave Braun
00:00:31
Yeah, yeah, you too my friend. All right, you ready for the next question? Bring it on. All right. Another fantastic question for our podcasts, so,
Larry Broughton
00:00:41
I’ll be the judge to that. Okay. Sorry.
Dave Braun
00:00:43
All right, judge and jury. That’s right. All right. Question. Is there a way to determine what stuff or what tasks you need to do and need to stop doing? Where should I start to know all of these tasks that I’m doing in general? I mean, it’s like, how do they weigh through all of the stuff that they’re doing, how do they know what to give up, what to start and stop doing or to keep doing actually.
Larry Broughton
00:01:08
This is probably David, One of the most frequently asked questions that we get because entrepreneurs, business owners, leaders, high achievers, we tend to do so much. We know we need help. We hear about these mystical, magical unicorns as some people call a virtual assistants and say, I want one of those or two of those, or like one of our client’s cases four of those within a very short period of time but I don’t know what to even hand over to them. You know, Dave, I think the direction we’re probably going to go on, this is our three column exercise that we, we started out with the tool that I had developed years ago. And it’s one of those tools that’s just kind of tried and tested but, so we, what we call a three column exercise, and imagine you take a piece of paper and turn it landscape, in fact is part of this tool is in our resource section here.
Larry Broughton
00:02:09
Right? And you take a piece of paper, turn it on a side. So that it’s landscape, I guess you’d call it. There you go. And in the far, right? So in the far left column at the top, you’re going to write Doing and you’re going to list everything that you do right now. I mean, everything that you do, and it’s probably gonna be a very long list. Everything from, maybe you are closing out the cash register, maybe you’re running your credit card batch. Maybe you’re doing inventory. Maybe you’re doing social media posts, whatever it is, everything that you do, you put it on there. And I also put personal stuff on there as well, grocery shopping- All of it, the next column you’re going to put great at. So the middle column you can what you are great at, and these are things that you’re currently doing that you’re great at.
Larry Broughton
00:03:03
So all you’re going to do is you can either rewrite it, or you can just draw a line from the far right column before far left column. So far left column was DOING, at center column is GREAT AT. And now there may be things that you’re great at that you’re not doing though, and you can add those to this column. Okay, that probably that column is going to be shorter than the doing for most people. And, and then finally in the far right column is going to be LOVE IT. Okay. And so now you’re going to move everything that’s in the GREAT AT column over to the LOVE IT, cause the goal here is to move you from doing maybe 3 to 7% of things that you’re great at and that you love on a weekly basis. We’d love to get that up to over 25%.
Larry Broughton
00:03:51
Imagine, you know, if you’re doing, we do have some folks that are then, or some clients of ours in our mentoring program, the VICTORY mentoring program who are, who claim that they’re spending over 65% of their time, only doing things that they’re great at and that they love. Imagine that. Now, there may be things that you are great at, that you don’t love. Like right now, like I tend to be great at looking at a financial statement and immediately picking out, oh, there’s an error there. I’m great at it. I don’t love it though, and so that would stay there. And so ultimately anything that’s in the doing column, you’re going to delete delegate, defer. Those are the three basic things, but there’s the, what do you call it, Dave? We just did a sign of a brain freeze. I do that. Do out a data data. Yeah. So why don’t you, why don’t you pick up from here? So anything that you’re not great at or loving our candidates to move over to the VA. And we can get into, how do you categorize that in a second, but why don’t you take over? I gotta get a little sippy sip here. My delicious ice cream. Yeah.
Dave Braun
00:05:07
Yeah, no problem. So yeah, we talk about in our, in our training and we’ve done this for years and people really love it. A system where you can take some of the tasks through that. Larry talked about you writing down through a system, We call DADDA. And the first one is Delete. Cause you don’t want, you don’t want to give to a VA for example, or a virtual assistant or anybody else, things that they shouldn’t be doing. So just delete the stuff off your plate. Larry talked about that. Right? Delete.
Larry Broughton
00:05:40
Here’s one of the things, there are some things that we’ve realized that people do only because they’ve always done them. Yeah. That’s true. There are some that, like, you don’t need to do that any longer. Maybe it’s already been automated. Maybe the software that you’re using now does that for you, what would have always done it that way? So there’s not time to actually analyze, like, it doesn’t need to be done. There will be some things that you can just really like I never have to do that again. Okay. Keep going, Dave. Sorry.
Dave Braun
00:06:06
So let’s delete. Then the next thing would be automate. Right? It’s whatever you think that needs to still be done, but you want to have a tool to automate because generally having an automation tool do it, or at least as much of it as you can, is going to be cheaper than having anybody else do it, especially you.
Larry Broughton
00:06:24
Like invoicing, for instance. Yeah. That’d be great. Setting calendar invites. Yep.
Dave Braun
00:06:31
So that’s delete automate. And the next is delegate, which what we turn more we talked about in anything that falls through that goes to be delegated to somebody else. So it’s delete, automate, delegate, and then, DADDA – delete automate delegate. And the last D is defer.
Larry Broughton
00:06:54
Right. So we want it done right now.
Dave Braun
00:06:56
Yeah. So that’s the question that you want to ask yourself is I, yeah, I need to do it, but it doesn’t need to be done. Now. Maybe it can be done next week or the week after. Right. So it doesn’t have to be done at the moment because one of the reasons you want to potentially defer it is if you defer it to, you know, a few days or a week from now, you might find out that it doesn’t need to be done or need to be done in the same way. Or, things change. Life changes, information changes, right? So you want to defer what you can. And then the last a, so we have delete automate, delegate, defer. And then the last A is attention. What do you really want to do yourself? What do you, and hopefully only you have to put your attention towards
Larry Broughton
00:07:41
Yeah. You know, that differ one’s a big one. Right? I remember a few months ago, you and I were supposed to go to a meeting, you call and said, I can’t go. And I called you and said, dude, oh yeah, basically. I just said, no, you need to go. And you gave me all these reasons on why you can’t and what we did. And he said, what, why can’t we just defer that this doesn’t have to be done right now? Yes, you would. You want it to be done right now, but it doesn’t have to be done this way right now. And sometimes when we just give ourselves permission to put that off to the next quarter, it’s like, the weight just falls off your shoulders and then you become much more creative. So don’t be afraid, this is an opportunity to get clarity and freedom. I keep going back. This program is about gaining you freedom, right? Yeah. Get you freedom in your life. Exactly.
Dave Braun
00:08:35
Yeah, exactly. Now, one of the things that we’ve kind of taken you through, the three column exercise and this DADDA acronym to help you figure out what you really, really need to concentrate in your time on dueling. And we have, you know, another tool in there that talks about kind of, if we go back to the beginning time tracking, you know, tracking your time, right. Because you may be doing something and if it takes you five minutes a day, well, okay, just that’s okay right now. You don’t have to get back every single set of five minutes that you’re doing. It may add up over time. But right now, when you’re first starting it, you want to look at the bigger chunks. So what we recommend is we have a tool used is to track your time for a week. What are you doing like every 15 minutes or every half an hour? What is it that you’re doing? You may find that you, you’re doing stuff that is taking a lot longer than you thought or less time than you thought, but you’ve got to track your time. You know what we found and what I’ve found Larry, is that just by doing that, I become a lot more efficient with my time. But no, I was going to say, because I’m, what’s measured is improved, right?
Larry Broughton
00:09:52
You are more aware of it, right?
Dave Braun
00:09:54
Right, but still, you’re still coming up with, to the limit of your 24 hours a day, seven days a week, right. That you still have a limit on your time. You can only get so efficient with your time. That means if you want to get more stuff done, be more significant in your life, make a bigger impact to the world, you’ve got to hire a team to help you.
Larry Broughton
01:10:19
You absolutely have to, you cannot get there by yourself. I use this analogy all the time. You know, like in the military, you’ve got a swim buddy. You know, even snipers have a spot or nobody does anything is worth anything by themselves. And we’ve just seen this over and over again. People who are starting their businesses oftentimes view themselves as a hobbyist until they get that first team member. Do you remember? We, I remember one in particular who she was so darn excited and we did it like a little celebration on the video call. I remember cause she had hired her first VA. Yeah. And now look at her, she’s got a bunch of team members. So yes, this, this is meant to actually multiply your efforts. This is more multiplication than addition. And so, yeah, so I, I think these are two really good tips tracking your time.
Larry Broughton
01:11:18
Like what are you actually spending time on and once you start specifically tracking and I mean, like you have got to on this grid or in this tool that we have, you are oftentimes we’ll be surprised or shocked at how much time you’re spending or wasting by doing things that aren’t directly tied to your 12 week goals. And so when you get much more attention about how you’re spending time, when you measure that and you start delegating things to your, your team members, to your VA and you start deferring some things that you’re doing that you’re doing that don’t need to be done right now. Oh my gosh. It gives you more freedom to focus on what you’re really good at that you enjoy doing. And you’re going to find joy go up, productivity go up. And you’re going to closure to that. You know, those goals of your organization for a lot of it is like breaking that million dollar mark in my business. Right. VA’s are going to help you get there.
Dave Braun
01:12:14
Yeah, sure. Pretty necessary. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. All right. Anything else, sir? I think that’s good. All right. Yeah, that was, that was fun. That was fun. Good. Good. All right. And remember folks, we’ve got this great program HireMyVA. You hopefully, you know about it by now where we talk more detail of all this stuff. And we’re there for you to help coach you and work through it. And we’re continuing to learn ourselves and tweak ourselves because we are after, you know, more and more productivity ourselves and with our teams. But we’re learning together. But thank you guys for being on the call with us today on this program, listening in, and like we talked about building a team is the way to reclaim your freedom. And it’s really the only way to make a significant impact in the world.
Dave Braun
01:13:03
So we are here to help you though. And if you can, right now, we want you to do two, a couple of things, subscribe to the podcast, if you haven’t already. And number two is give us a rating, five star. We’d love it. And then number three, of course, go to Hiremyva.com for more information on our course in community. Because remember even without experience, you’ll learn how to prepare for higher end thrive with virtual assistants. Larry and I’ve helped a lot of folks, we continue to do it. We’re loving what’s happening. So, but we want to help you too. We want to make a bigger impact with our lives on more and more folks. It’s one of the reasons why we created this program. So go to Hirem va.com for more information on our program and our course and community.
Larry Broughton
01:13:44
That’s right. Yes. And community such an important element of this. So do yourself a favor, do the world a favor, go do something significant today. So God bless you. God keep you. God hold you. Now, go get them. Okay. Bye folks, see you later!
