Dave Braun
00:00:00
Welcome everyone, 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. And that means your bank, which is the most important bank. And I’m Dave Braun. I’m here with my partner and my great friend, Larry Broughton. And we’ve got a lot of stuff to talk about in this episode.
Larry Broughton
00:00:22
Hello David.
Dave Braun
00:00:23
Hey, Larry. How are you doing my friend?
Larry Broughton
00:00:25
Awesome. That’s been a great week.
Dave Braun
00:00:28
And it’s gonna be a great week coming up, right?
Larry Broughton
00:00:31
Yeah. Always. Positive attitude.
Dave Braun
00:00:34
That’s right. Well, we’ve got another great question that we can share with our folks. Are you ready?
Larry Broughton
00:00:41
Great. Let’s do it. What is it?
Dave Braun
00:00:43
Okay, here it is. What if my Virtual assistant wants to change their hours? How do I handle this?
Larry Broughton
00:00:54
Well, this question came up in our last community call. And so I’m glad that we’re addressing this, maybe in a little bit more compact format, which is just a great reminder. Folks, one of the most valuable parts of this program is the community and the community calls that we do twice a month, I think we’re doing them right now, where you can come out and ask your questions. Our goal here is to help you get more freedom. I will just remind you, wherever you’re listening to or watching this podcast, it would help us out if you put comments in there, it helps the algorithm, and people find it easier. And frankly, it gets a little bit more banter and communication between everybody. So the question is, what if my VA wants to change their hours? It’s gonna happen.
Larry Broughton
00:01:45
We keep reminding folks that when you treat your Virtual Assistants, just like any other team member, which I encourage you to do overtime. And that is to make sure that they share the same core values, is your organization that they understand, the goals and mission and vision of the organization. You’re gonna see a whole lot more productivity. But life happens. Life changes. You know, Dave, we are talking to a guest on the podcast, Navine, last week and he’d had a VA who’d been with him for over 8 years. Daphne’s been with us for how many years?
Dave Braun
00:02:18
5+.
Larry Broughton
00:02:18
5+years. Life happens. People get married, they move, and they have children, kids graduate from college, whatever it is. It happens. So what we need to remember, Dave is that you are hiring VAs to bring more freedom to your life. And you’re building your business to help you in your life. If it’s not gonna work, then it’s not gonna work. But I would encourage you, if it’s someone that you want to work with, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, as they say. Can you be flexible? Is it worth, is it worth the turnover? I think we need to ask ourselves. Right?
Dave Braun
00:03:01
Because there’s a cost to that turnover.
Larry Broughton
00:03:04
Absolutely. There’s value to the institutional DNA that they might have or that they carry with them. What happens if they’re not with you any longer? So there’s likely to be hiccups if you can’t be flexible. So where am I going with this? There’s probably not, like a cut and dried answer.
Dave Braun
00:03:26
No, there isn’t
Larry Broughton
00:03:27
Like yes or no. There’s not a black or white on this. You gotta do a little bit of an evaluation.
Dave Braun
00:03:34
Yeah. And I think it really starts with understanding. Having that conversation and really, really understanding the why. And I don’t know if you guys have ever—and I know you’ve read it and I have and other folks. Hopefully, you have Stephen Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”. And I just love, I think it’s number 5 where he says, seek first to understand and then to be understood. So if this kind of a request happens, I mean, you’re not going in and saying, well, don’t you realize that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, we said, you have to be on this time because blah, blah, blah, blah. You go and you say, well, tell me more. Let me understand what’s going on as much as you can tell me and let me understand, well, why and what the benefit is gonna be for you and then how it’s gonna potentially benefit our organization. Have that conversation and try to understand what’s going on.
Larry Broughton
00:04:35
And sometimes it’ll work and sometimes it won’t. But if you seek to understand first, you are gonna go a lot further and don’t take it personally.
Dave Braun
00:04:45
Good point.
Larry Broughton
00:04:45
Don’t take it. Sometimes we just get pissed off. Well, don’t they know how it’s gonna impact my life? Take a deep breath. Take a deep breath. Well, because we don’t—we oftentimes don’t like change. Change is where innovation comes from though. Change is part of life, but we may not like it though, because we’re dealing with a bunch of other stuff. Cause what you’re probably gonna find is that your VA team member is gonna wanna change their schedule in the most inopportune time.
Dave Braun
00:05:16
Yeah.
Larry Broughton
00:05:17
Murphy’s law is probably gonna happen when you’ve gotta cut over to a new piece of I.T. that’s going on in the organization or you got new clients coming on board. It’s just gonna happen. So we’ve talked about the good side of that. Keeping the institutional DNA, going in the organization, limiting the amount of turnover, which brings down costs and keeps productivity high. But you know what, there may be times, Dave when you’ve got a VA, who’s just kind of on the bubble and you’ve been suffering through it with them and it’s been, all right, they’ve been okay. It’s kind of been like the old milk toast.
Larry Broughton
00:05:57
Just like mediocre kind of stuff. So this may actually be the opportunity to up your game. So you may say, well, thanks for letting me know, but I really need to have somebody. So how long can you give, give us, come up with a transition plan, but find someone who’s gonna up your game in the organization, who’s going to set higher standards, who’s gonna offer more productivity. So look at it as an opportunity to grow, to improve, to set higher standards, to build a better team. Because if you’ve got more than one VA or you’ve got a VA in some kind of in-house staff or team members as well, whenever you increase the standards, everyone moves up including yourself. So, I guess what I’m trying to say is no matter what the situation, if it’s somebody you want to keep or someone you want to actually set free, look at it as an opportunity.
Dave Braun
00:06:59
And part of that opportunity could be, if you are potentially open to it, whatever they’re gonna do, whatever they’re gonna shift to, it could mean more productivity for them. And it also could mean more productivity for you. For example, if they switch to having, say, less overlap with you. Well, that could be okay, because then you can spend time concentrating, getting things prepared for them to execute while you are sleeping. And they are not necessarily on that same time with you and bothering you through slack or whatever. And I don’t mean bothering you, I mean, communicating with you that way and disturbing your concentration. So there could be some productivity advantages and you could switch a little bit about the way that you’re doing things. So, I think it’s like we said, have that conversation, and maybe be open and potentially try it. But if you’re gonna try it, it doesn’t, you are necessarily gonna say, okay, we’re gonna switch hours and it’s gonna be like that for the rest of our lives. No, you may just say, okay, we’re gonna try it temporarily. And if it doesn’t work out, then somebody’s gonna have to make a change. Right?
Larry Broughton
00:08:15
Right. That was the final point that I wanted to make, is don’t be afraid to communicate and do things on a trial basis.
Dave Braun
00:08:21
Yeah.
Larry Broughton
00:08:21
But the key is communicating about it. And I would give it a set or a specific set of time. Don’t say, let’s try this for a while. What’s a while? Is it a week? Is it six months? What is it? Say, Hey, let’s try it for the next 30 days, or let’s try it for the next 90 days. And if it’s just not working, then let’s revisit it, and then we’ll come up with a trans plan.
Dave Braun
00:08:42
And then if you do this, give yourself a little bit of an adjustment time because there’s gotta be some adjustment in time.
Larry Broughton
00:08:49
Two days won’t be it.
Dave Braun
00:08:51
Yeah. It won’t. And that means that it’s an adjustment for you, for your other members of your team, and for this person.
Larry Broughton
00:08:58
And clients.
Dave Braun
00:09:00
Yeah. And clients, too.
Larry Broughton
00:09:01
It does depend on what role they play in the organization. Right?
Dave Braun
00:09:05
Yeah. So I guess the Larry, the way we’d sum it up is it’s, there is no easy answer. You gotta understand, potentially understand what they’re going through, what’s going on, and then decide if you want to maybe sacrifice one way or the other or not, and maybe move on. And like you said, use it as an opportunity to potentially upgrade your team if it doesn’t work out.
Larry Broughton
00:09:27
Well, this is just a comment that we should probably say more often, most of these questions, there is no exact right or wrong. There is no black or white. There is no, just cut and dry answer because it’s business. We’re dealing with people, we’re dealing with moving targets constantly. And so there are a lot of caveats. And if that’s not how your brain is built, then you need to get more flexible and you need to build a team who can help you with this. Right?
Dave Braun
00:09:58
Yeah. And I love the way you said that because it really means that when you have an issue like this or when you’re ready to, or if you need to make a decision and you’re not quite sure, that’s why we have the community. Because you can come in, you can get on a call with us, ask your question, and then we can ask some questions of you to get a little bit more in-depth understanding of what’s going on to help you work through it. However, whichever way you wanna go on it.
Larry Broughton
01:10:31
Yeah. That’s absolutely right.
Dave Braun
01:10:34
All right. We wanna put a bow on this one?
Larry Broughton
01:10:37
I would say this, I’m gonna put an exclamation point on this one. Go to the community. Ask your questions there. Offer feedback to other people in the community who got some questions. Really, I believe is the most valuable part of this, get on the calls that we do twice a month. Ask the questions there, banter it or around. Because Dave, you and I may have felt like we’ve answered this, but there may be some new once that just didn’t connect with somebody. So if you got a question, if you felt like we didn’t really answer the question or you got a comment, put it in the comments wherever you found this podcast and we’ll get back to you.
Dave Braun
01:11:14
Okay. All right. Sounds good.
Larry Broughton
01:11:16
All right.
Dave Braun
01:11:16
Well, thank you, everybody, for being with us today. Remember building a team is the way to reclaim your freedom and we’re here to help you. So three things we’d love for you to do. We really, really would 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 what we just talked about, our community, which is so valuable. So remember though, even without experience, you’ll learn how to prepare for hire and thrive with Virtual Assistants. Larry, and I’ve helped a lot of folks. We’ve got people we’re helping all the time and we just want to help you too. We wanna help you reclaim your freedom. So just go to Hiremyva.com for more information.
Larry Broughton
01:12:00
That’s right, my friends. Don’t forget to go to the community and do yourself a favor. Do the world a favor. Go do something truly significant today. All right, my friends. God bless you. God keep you. God hold you. All right, go get them.
Dave Braun
01:12:14
Okay. Bye, everybody.
