Dave Braun
00:00:00
Hey, everybody. 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 brank. I say that all the time “without breaking the bank”. There’s no brank.
Dave Braun
00:00:16
Maybe the—
Larry Broughton
00:00:17
It’s a cross between brain and bank.
Dave Braun
00:00:21
Well, we don’t wanna break your brain either. All right. So I’m Dave Braun who can’t talk today, but I’m here with Larry, my friend, you guys know him from being on the past podcast. I hope, but Larry Bratton, who’s my partner and my friend, my co-host on this mentor. You know, we just have a great time together doing this and living life together in so many other ways. Right, bro?
Larry Broughton
00:00:47
That’s right. Thank you, Dave, for being my friend. Thanks for being in my life. You are a mentor to me as well. And I think it’s a good —we’ve got one of those relationships now where I think that people look at us like, I want a relationship like that. I had somebody tell me that the other day. You and I learn from each other, we support each other, we see each other outside of our work as well, and we’re both committed — we are committed to each other in living life and together, and be on the journey together. If you folks don’t have someone like that in your life, you’re missing out
Dave Braun
00:01:21
Oh my gosh. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, thank you. Thank you. Are you ready for the question?
Larry Broughton
00:01:27
Let’s jump in. Yeah. What we got today?
Dave Braun
00:01:29
All right. So here’s a question, somebody says, I have no clue about fill in the blank subject. So they have no clue about a particular subject. So how do I know if the proposals that the VAs, the virtual assistants I’m planning to hire are good or correct?
Larry Broughton
00:01:48
That’s a good one. It’s a good one. And we’ve heard versions of this before. This is one of the tough things, Dave when you’re on the entrepreneurial journey because oftentimes most businesses start out with zero clients and zero team members. And you as the business owner or entrepreneur have to be responsible for everything. And most of us don’t know everything. Right? And so maybe it’s like, you need accounting done. You don’t know how to hire a VA to do your accounting or maybe you are a spiritual coach and you don’t know how to have somebody do your marketing or your graphic design. It’s those kinds of things or SEO or whatever it is that you might hire a VA for. Well, this is why most people, or — no, that’s not accurate.
Larry Broughton
00:02:44
This is one of the challenges that most entrepreneurs struggle with. And it’s this, you’re not gonna be a master at everything, but you have to know the basics of every function in your business. This is why most people never become entrepreneurs. This is why they are “wantrepreneurs”, right? They have the desire to be an entrepreneur, but they don’t have the guts or the courage or the time or the patience to learn at least a little bit about every position that’s in the company, Dave. And so I think step one would be some online research. Do a basic internet search for top five things I should know about hiring a—whatever it is. There’ll be a plethora of articles, just on that, guarantee if you just do that one thing, you’re gonna learn a lot about it. So I would start with that. I mean, six or seven things come to mind right away. But what I say ye Dave, on maybe that first step of just doing a flipping online search on the topic.
Dave Braun
00:03:54
Yeah. And there’s no reason why not because you’re gonna get some pretty good information that should be relatively accurate and you can get up to speed enough at least to kind of know, what some of the questions to ask, but to start knowing the language and the lingo and all that so that you can hopefully not be snowed as much. Right? But one of the things that we talk about and we’ve seen in our mastermind and stuff, as you know, we also wanna rely potentially on our friends or colleagues. Now they’ve gotta have a little bit of a background in that subject and see what their thoughts are and see what to look for. Because they’ve got some experience, hopefully, they’ve gone through a little bit of this and they can kind of, guide you as well on what to look for.
Larry Broughton
00:04:44
Yeah. One of the classic mistakes though I see with that general approach is that I am in a bunch of different masterminds skill, specific masterminds. And someone will ask a question that has nothing to do with these people’s skill sets or experience like, Hey, I need a new logo. What do you guys think about this logo?
Dave Braun
00:05:06
Yeah.
Larry Broughton
00:05:07
And it’s a bunch of people who know nothing about emotional triggers, they don’t know about the way the brain works, they don’t know about marketing. So you gotta be careful with that. But going to your network. And it’s the way you phrase the question, right? Whether you go into your mastermind or your community or your friends or your family members. It’s how you phrase the question like, what should I be looking for when I hire this position? And it’s much more helpful to do that when you have a job description. So I think, by developing a job description that will help you. All right. So, how do I find a job description for this position, Larry? There are job boards out there all over the place and just do an online search for a job description for—All right. And that’s gonna give you all kinds of things. There’s a lot of organizations— Well list what are the qualifications that I’m looking for and what are the skill sets and experience that this person might have that you never would’ve even thought of before. So, this is all part of your online research, I think, to start with.
Dave Braun
00:06:15
Yeah. Now, let’s assume that you’ve done some research and I guess a great analogy to this is when you’re going to a lawyer or a doctor, an attorney, or like you said, an accountant, you know, you really gotta have a little bit of education ahead of time. One of the things that you can—you can make a mistake, it’s like, oh, my arm hurts. And you go to your doctor and you trust them totally to give you the right exact answer. And they say, well, just here’s a bunch of pills and all that stuff. Well, you know or you’re sure that they’re not really getting—you want them to get to the root cause of it, not just treat the symptom. So I think you’ve got to, in anything in life where you’re trying to solve a problem, that’s why you’re hiring somebody, you’re wanting to solve a problem. You’ve gotta like, have an idea of what some of the solutions are gonna be ahead of time. Right? And then, like you said, that goes into your position profile, etc. Go ahead.
Dave Braun
00:07:20
Yeah.
Larry Broughton
00:07:21
I was gonna say, this does take a lot of research and I know that there are a lot of people out there that are like me and you don’t like going on and reading through a bunch of articles. Guess what? I would lay dollars or donuts that video sites like YouTube will probably have this same question, you know, just go into YouTube and listen to it instead of going online and researching it. But there’s something to be said about your— if this is really an important task in your business, is to just try it yourself.
Larry Broughton
00:07:54
If you can try it yourself I wouldn’t suggest that, you know, like, do surgery on yourself. Right? But it might be a lower-risk task. You can try it yourself and see how difficult is this thing to accomplish. Now, keep in mind there are strengths that may prevent you from actually doing it really well. But during the vetting process, once you have talked to your network, you’ve talked to your mentor, you’ve talked to your coach, you’ve talked to your mastermind, you’ve talked to anybody you know, you’ve gone onto LinkedIn and found people that are in your network that you can ask some of the questions, like, what should I be looking for? And you come up with a job description. Once you start actually interviewing people, one thing to consider is, judge them based on the questions that they’re asking you. That might be really interesting to find out. But a question that I like to ask, whether I’m hiring someone that’s gonna be working in my office or a VA is, ask them what could go wrong.
Dave Braun
00:09:01
Hmm.
Larry Broughton
00:09:02
What could go wrong during this project that I’m asking you to do? Or what could go wrong in the day-to-day function of being the blank? Whatever position you’re hiring them for. And this becomes kind of an asset test question. So that’s something I would actually have you consider as well.
Dave Braun
00:09:24
Yeah. I think you could put a twist on that, right? And say in your experience—
Larry Broughton
00:09:31
Yeah. There you go.
Dave Braun
00:09:32
In your experience, where have you seen people fail at this?
Larry Broughton
00:09:36
Oh, that’s good. Yes. Yeah. That’s really good.
Dave Braun
00:09:39
Yeah.
Larry Broughton
00:09:41
Yeah. I would just go back to, I just wanna put a finer point on this thing when it comes to creating the job description. Again, look at what other people are looking for, like larger organizations. Let’s say that you’re looking for a graphic designer person. There’s a scene from the office, you know, the TV series, The Office, when Pam decides that she doesn’t wanna be a receptionist anymore, she wants to be a graphic artist. And so she’s actually at this trade show and they’re trying to hire these interns. And so on the slide, she goes and speaks to this recruiter who are hiring graphic artists and he starts listing off all these different programs and software programs that she’s supposed to know about and her eyes just get big like, she has no idea what this person is even talking about. So in a job description, I would say, Hey, you need to know Cork or Photoshop or whatever. These might be terms you never even heard of before. Right? But you might see that larger companies are requiring that and there might be a reason you ask why.
Dave Braun
01:10:44
Okay. Yeah, I agree.
Larry Broughton
01:10:46
So those are some things that kind of come off the top of my head, Dave. Others that you think might be helpful?
Dave Braun
01:10:54
Yeah. And at some point, so you know, I think we’ve gotten to the point where you’ve gotten yourself a little bit of education, you know what questions to ask, you’ve checked around to the different job descriptions and created your own position profile. And now at some point, you’re gonna be talking to people. Right? So, you know, like that was a great question about where have you seen people fail at this or what could go wrong. But then as of the process, I think a key thing is gonna be, you gotta have the person, whoever you’re talking to, give you some results or show you results of what they’ve done. Those speak a lot louder than, I mean, even testimonials in my mind, those speak a lot louder.
Larry Broughton
01:11:35
All right. Testimonials/reference is what you’re talking about, right?
Dave Braun
01:11:40
Yeah. I mean, hopefully, whatever you’re asking them to do, they can give you some kind of results. Like, Hey, I did—you know, like if it’s SEO—I increased traffic to their site by 50% in six months or whatever that is—
Larry Broughton
01:11:57
As long as it’s verifiable because people can come up with this kind of, you know, frankly make stuff up. But yes, looking for a portfolio, seeing a sample of their work, like a copywriter, for instance, that’s a pretty standard position that people are looking for in VAs. Get to get samples of their work. But one of the things, Dave, that we offer or suggest oftentimes is to have folks do a project for you first.
Dave Braun
01:12:23
Right.
Larry Broughton
01:12:24
See what the results are, right? And even if you have a couple of people doing multiple projects for you at first or you can have them give the same project to do to two different candidates and see who provides the better product. I just wanna remind people. You’re not just hiring for that specific skill set.
Dave Braun
01:12:45
Yeah.
Larry Broughton
01:12:46
You’re hiring for someone who shares the same core values that you do, that communicates effectively with you, who gets along well with you and your team members, and your clients if that’s part of the job description or the position profile. So it’s not just, Hey, who’s got the most experience or can do this the fastest, you gotta look at the entire—the whole health of the person that you’re gonna be working with.
Dave Braun
01:13:08
Oh yeah. Otherwise, you could be making some big mistakes, even if they can do the job, they may not do it the way you want. They may not mesh with you and maybe they’re only for a short period of time.
Larry Broughton
01:13:20
Yeah. And when you’re asking for the testimonials or the references, if they can’t give them to you, ask them why, not in an accusatory tone. It might be that they’ve only worked at one or two places and they were sexually harassed at one place and they’re not gonna get a good result or they had a personality conflict somewhere else, or the company was shut down and there’s nobody to talk to anymore. There are legitimate reasons why someone — particularly an overseas VA, that you can’t get a reliable reference from them. So in that case, all I would do Dave, is just have them do a couple of projects or hire them on a short-term or a temporary basis first to see how things go. They’ll understand.
Dave Braun
01:14:08
Yeah and one of the things that I just realized as we were talking, a great way to see, kind of vet them is, I was listening on a podcast today and they were talking about frameworks. In other words, frameworks on how to do things. And I was thinking, that would be really a really good question. So let’s take the example of you’re hiring somebody that’s gonna do a bunch of logos for you. You can ask them, what is your framework, or what is your process for creating a logo? So they should be able to articulate something like, logo. So I talk to the client and I get what their best colors are and then I talked to the client, figure out what kind of emotions they want. And so then I start— Anyway, so there’s the whole framework or process that they should have an idea if they, how they would do that if they’ve done that before.
Larry Broughton
01:15:08
Yeah. So it seems like we’ve hit at several items. We’ve talked about Dave, asking them your asset test question. What could go wrong? We’ve talked about doing online research into some of the basic requirements of this task. We’ve talked about talking to your network of coaches or mentors or mastermind groups or friends. We’ve talked about getting testimonials. We talked about trying the job yourself. We talked about judging them based on a question that they might ask you or that they might ask you during the interview process. Clearly go through the HireMyVA Program. There are ways there. Did we talk about testimonials? Did I mention testimonials or references? So, there’s a lot of ways to do this but there is not an easy—well, I shouldn’t say easy. Some of these are simple.
Larry Broughton
01:16:05
Maybe they’re not easy but it is gonna take an investment of your time. And I wanna make sure that we’re clear on this. This is an investment, okay? If you ultimately want to have freedom in your life, freedom in your business, this is gonna take a little bit of effort on the front end. In fact, we just did it. We just finished up an interview podcast with one of our clients and this is what he talked about, that it is an investment, that one of the things that he did for years in his business is he would just hire somebody and not even really know whether they were effective or not. He’d say, here’s your job, go do it. And couldn’t figure out why there was so much turnover. But then when he invested time in the front end, by following the recipe that we provide in HireMyVA, he started seeing productivity skyrocket to the point now where he’s got four VAs now and is about to hire his fifth. So think about all of this as an investment. Okay. And you’re best presenting yourself.
Dave Braun
01:17:02
Yeah. And you would think that anything, you know, being really general here, any, almost anything worthwhile in life requires an investment of time. Things just don’t happen right away. Except, if you want to put some money down and win the lottery. Well, yeah, one out of millions get that, right? But then we’re not talking about that here. If you wanna build the business the right way, you’ve gotta invest some time at learning how to do it.
Larry Broughton
01:17:28
Yeah, right.
Dave Braun
01:17:29
You have to. Any other thoughts on this, Larry?
Larry Broughton
01:17:32
No, I don’t have any other thoughts on this right now. I would just encourage people to participate in the community. If you’re in this community, ask these questions first. Go there first and people can always guide you. I’ve seen it. A lot of people are corresponding. So in fact, I think this question may have come from the community. So this is why we’re doing this.
Dave Braun
01:17:53
That’s right. All right. Well, thank you everybody. For being with us today, it’s been fun. And remember, building a team is the way to reclaim your freedom. And of course, we’re here to help you. Three things we’d love for you to do right now. We’d really, really appreciate it. Number one, subscribe to this podcast if you haven’t already done so. Number two, give us a rating. We’d love a five-star rating, but rate us however you want. But then number three, most important is go to Hiremyva.com for more information on our course and community. The really valuable part that Larry talked about. Because remember, even without experience, you’ll learn how to prepare for hire and thrive with virtual assistants. You know, Larry and I, we talked about one of our clients, we’ve helped him a lot. Like Larry said he’s hiring his fifth VA right now. So we’ve helped a lot of folks. We’d love to help you too. So just go to Hiremyva.com for more information. Anything else, Larry?
Larry Broughton
01:18:49
Yeah. Do yourself a favor, folks. Do the world a favor. Do your community a favor. Go do something significant today. God bless you. God hold you. God keep you. All right, my friends. Go get ’em.
Dave Braun
01:19:00
All right. Bye everybody.
Larry Broughton
01:19:01
Bye.
