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HireMyVA Podcast 44- How do you pay your VA for their trial work?

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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. And I’m Dave Braun, I’m here with my partner and great friend, Larry Broughton. And you may be wondering why I’m laughing.

Larry Broughton
00:00:19
Why are you laughing, David? Because we’re dorks. We’re dorks.

Dave Braun
00:00:24
Yeah, in one of the episodes, I was thinking about that breaking the bank. Remember I said breaking the brank?

Larry Broughton
00:00:31
Right. Well, yes. Slash between brain and bank. Yes. But David, it’s good to see you. Thank you for being in my life. I love you, my brother. And let’s get on this.

Dave Braun
00:00:40
All right.

Larry Broughton
00:00:41
What do we have today?.

Dave Braun
00:00:42
Yeah. So we’ve got a really good one. So the question here for the day, for the podcast is how do you pay your VA for their trial work?

Larry Broughton
00:00:52
For their trial work, once we’ve kind of gone through the interview process and we’ve got a handful of candidates and we’re kind of really like, okay, this is the final task. Is that what we’re talking about here?

Dave Braun
00:01:02
Yeah. It’s kind of like, you know, you whittle it down to some candidates and you really want to do more of an in depth trial because as part of our process, we want to tell ’em to do some kind of like a three or four, five-minute thing, right? But now you’ve got a couple of ’em and you’re like, well, I’m, I’m not exactly sure. So you want to give ’em some kind of a detailed task. Right? So how do you pay them for doing that?

Larry Broughton
00:01:29
Well, I think that there’s a couple ways to do this, but it all depends on what kind of task you’re actually giving them, you know, you’re doing it with one person or two people. There are some folks out there, Dave, who don’t— they say it’s part of the interview process and they don’t pay the candidates to do this. I don’t like that.

Dave Braun
00:01:50
Yeah.

Larry Broughton
00:01:51
I don’t like it because I feel like you’re gonna get some benefit out of it. Right? And so I do think we need to pay them for it. And even if you pay them in a little bit more of a premium them than you would for their hourly rate, that you would normally charge them. But you have to have some sense on how big of a project is it? What you don’t want to do is you don’t want to give them a research project that’s gonna take them a week to do. And you want a huge value out of it. That’s just immoral, right?

Larry Broughton
00:02:27
But I think it’s a short project that you would do. And I’m a little bit cautious about saying how to do this with the exception of saying you gotta have some kind of idea, tell ’em, Hey, I expect it’s gonna take X number of hours or minutes to do this. And that’s what you’re gonna pay them. I’m not a big fan of paying people upfront. I mean, fully upfront for something like this. I know people that do. What I prefer you do is you give them, you say, I’m gonna pay you 50% now. Well, expect it to be—and upon successful completion of this, I’m gonna pay you the other part. What has to come into play here, Dave is this whole trust thing. Right? This is what we need to talk about more and more. The sooner we can get to a level of trust with our VA, the more effective and productive the experience is going to be.

Larry Broughton
00:03:25
And this is one of those things—I had a guy years ago at a former company of mine. And when he was brought on board, he used to this— When I was living in San Francisco. During the first meeting, he was hired as a senior executive in the organization. And one of the things that I found out that he did and it’s very savvy actually. Every time he went to go meet with someone and when he was meeting all the new managers in the company, he would say, Hey, you know, I walked out of the house today without any money. Do you have a buck that I can borrow from you to tip the valet guy?

Dave Braun
00:04:03
Okay.

Larry Broughton
00:04:04
And he paid you back the very next day, he made a point to come back the very next day and pay you that dollar back. Why did he do that, Dave?

Dave Braun
00:04:11
To see how much you’re gonna trust him.

Larry Broughton
00:04:13
Exactly. It’s a quick way to build trust. Right? Pretty savvy. You know, it kind of became a laughing joke once people started talking about this, but you get the point I hope, is that this process can lead to a trust-building exercise, as well as you finding out how effective are they in doing this. So how do you pay them? I don’t know, Dave. What are your thoughts on— I mean, I do know but what are your thoughts on this?

Dave Braun
00:04:46
Yeah. You know, I think that’s great, 50% up front. You definitely want to pay them upfront. Now, you might be thinking in the back of your mind—

Larry Broughton
00:04:55
Pay them something up front, you mean?

Dave Braun
00:04:57
Yeah. It’s gotta be something 50%. I wouldn’t recommend like 25%, you know, it’s gotta be at least 50%. Because these folks have had employers or potential employers say, Hey, do this for me and then I’m gonna pay you when you’re done. And then they skip out. So you gotta start looking at it from their perspective as well as yours. So meeting in the middle 50% sounds pretty good. And chances are, you’ve gone through this vetting process where you’ve gotten down to like the one or two or three of them. Right? And you’ve followed our program and you know that these folks are, you know, they want the job and they’re good at it. And they should have a decent and pretty high level of integrity. That’s how we teach, right? So they’re not gonna— I mean, the chances are they’re not gonna just like take the money and run. But if they do, it’s a small price to pay for finding out upfront, you don’t want to have that person on your team. You know, it’s a small price to pay, because we’re not talking about thousands of dollars, we’re talking about tens or 50 bucks or something like that. Right?

Larry Broughton
00:06:05
Right. Particularly with these folks that are overseas. You’re you’re right. If they’re making $7 an hour or $4 an hour, $5 an hour, you’re not gonna be asking them to do a 20 hour project for this. And so it is kind of a small investment. I think that’s a really good point, Dave. Better to know upfront than later on once you hire them. But also just asking them to do the job and then talking through this, the whole payment process, you’re gonna learn a lot about each other, just going through this process with each other. Right? The asking them to do the project is actually part of the vetting. There may be people who, “I’m not gonna do that”, you know. Well then you don’t really want the job.

Dave Braun
00:06:48
Right.

Larry Broughton
00:06:48
Right.

Dave Braun
00:06:50
Yeah. I mean, it really does come down to you starting to establish the trust, by doing things the right way. And then we talk about how. Well, you know, we usually recommend a particular service to pay people through this, for this, and once they are on your team. But for now the easiest way is to do it through just PayPal Friends and Family and they will get the money. Right?

Larry Broughton
00:07:18
Yeah. So there are really two things, how do you pay someone. I guess what they’re asking here is, how do I actually get the money to them? That’s the PayPal side. And then how do you actually charge or not charge—How do you—go ahead.

Dave Braun
00:07:35
Yeah. How do you actually set up the test or set up the project and how much do you pay upfront.

Larry Broughton
00:07:42
Yeah, there you go. Right, right. So, I would suggest, keep it a smaller project. So you can just test their ability. How well do they follow instructions, how efficient are they, how much guidance do you need to get them. You should have some sense of how long it’s going to take to do this small project. You come up with a number and you say, Hey, we’re gonna pay you 50% upfront, I’m gonna pay you 50% when you’re done. And I’m a big believer, Dave, do this, give at least two people the same exact task.

Dave Braun
00:08:14
Oh yeah. It’s gotta be the same task.

Larry Broughton
00:08:15
So you’re comparing apples to apples. Don’t give one person to research task and someone else a graphic, whatever, give them the same task. It can give you what comes out better and more efficient and communicates most effectively and —

Dave Braun
00:08:29
Yeah. And give them the same task and say, go you’re on the clock basically. Right? You wanna know how long it’s gonna take ’em as well.

Larry Broughton
00:08:40
Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Braun
00:08:42
All right. Well, that’s a good question. You have any other thoughts, Larry?

Larry Broughton
00:08:45
No, I think it’s really good. I just encourage you to go to the community, this is my thing over and over again. Ask these questions to the community and get some feedback from folks that are going through the process with you on this. But just make sure that you communicate as the potential employer or contractor. What it is that you’re actually looking for in this. Set people up for success. Okay? Don’t make this a, “I gotcha”. We have seen that before, right? Don’t make this a—just try not to set them up, set them up for success and not for failure.

Dave Braun
00:09:23
Yeah. And oh, there’s one thing that just occurred to me.

Larry Broughton
00:09:28
What’s that?

Dave Braun
00:09:29
When you’re doing this, give them something that they would normally be doing in your business—

Larry Broughton
00:09:35
Oh, of course. Yes.

Dave Braun
00:09:37
I’ve had some people say, they’re gonna have to go in, like from a web perspective, they just have to—I’ve broken a site for them and they have to go in and figure it out. Well, I mean, you can do that and that’s okay. But the problem with that is that happens so rarely in your business and that you’re asking ’em to do something that rarely is gonna occur. And so you should do something that’s more, something that happens on a normal basis.

Larry Broughton
01:10:05
That sounds like an I gotcha thing. It’s like asking a graphic designer to name the 12 cranial nerves, you know?

Dave Braun
01:10:14
Yeah. So, all right. Well, that sounds good. So, everybody, we’re gonna close this one down and thank you for being with us today. Remember building a team is the way to reclaim your freedom and we are here to help you. Three things we’d love for you to do right now and we’d really appreciate it. Number one, subscribe to this podcast if you haven’t already done so. Number two, give us a rating, preferably five stars. And then number three, go to Hiremyva.com for more information on our course and community. Because remember, even without experience, you’ll learn how to prepare for hire and thrive with virtual assistance. Larry and I are helping folks as we speak, we’ve helped a lot. We want to help you to get your freedom back. So just go to Hiremyva.com for more information.

Larry Broughton
01:11:00
Yeah, folks. And do yourself a favor. Do the world 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
01:11:12
All right. Bye, everybody.

Larry Broughton
01:11:13
See you later. Bye.

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