Dave Braun
00:00:00
Welcome, everybody 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, the big bank, your most important bank because that is yours. Anyway. Hey, I’m Dave Braun, I’m here with my partner and co-host, friend, mentor, and coach. Too many superlatives to get out there. Hey, Larry.
Larry Broughton
00:00:29
David, how are you? I miss you. I love you. I’m glad you’re in my life. Thank you so much. Looking forward to seeing you here.
Dave Braun
00:00:35
A couple of days, right. Again, three days? It’ll be fun. I always enjoyed it. Okay. Well, we got another really good question. And this is something that was within our community that asked this question. I’ve hired my first VA, when is the right time to hire a second VA? That’s a tough one, huh?
Larry Broughton
00:01:00
Well, the time to hire them, when you start thinking about it, you need to start planning for it. It’s interesting. You know, sometimes this is one of those that kind of falls into two camps, because most of these, I say there’s no easy answer, there’s not a right or a wrong. This usually comes down to two. You’ve either hired them too soon or you’ve hired them too late. How’s that? Have you ever hired someone on the right wing at the right time? No.
Dave Braun
00:01:33
Yeah. There’s never a right time.
Larry Broughton
00:01:36
But there are probably some things we can kind of kick around here to say, well let’s kind of bury, not bury but what can we uncover to find some of the clues. I would say though that before you hire the second one, you need to make sure that the first one is onboarded properly and that not only are they productive, but you are productive in the way that you are allocating tasks to them, that you’ve got systems in place and that if they were to leave, that you could easily replace them.
Dave Braun
00:02:12
Right.
Larry Broughton
00:02:13
So, I would say that before you even consider it, make sure that those couple of things, you’ve checked those off your list. What do you think, Dave?
Dave Braun
00:02:22
Well, I think in addition to that is, when you’ve hired your first VA, some people, when they hire somebody, they can just get lucky. That’s like, oh, a friend referred to this other person and they just get lucky. They didn’t ask them many questions or go through a really good rigorous process and they just come on board and they get lucky. You don’t wanna do that with your second one. Because you’re attempting fate. You wanna make sure that when you hire your first one, that you’ve got at least some type of a process down to where you feel like you’re gonna have some confidence that the second person you get, you’re not just throwing darts at the wall or spaghetti at the wall or whatever.
Dave Braun
00:03:08
So I think you’re right. You wanna make sure that you’ve got some systems in place to work with the one you’ve got. You’ve also gotta have a few systems in place for hiring. Because if you’re gonna be successful with, you know, you’re gonna get the second one, you’re gonna probably wanna get three or four down the road. You’re gonna want to keep doing it. So that’s one thing that we provide in our HireMyVA course and community is a system for you guys to take as much of the guesswork out of this as possible.
Larry Broughton
00:03:38
Can you pause there for a second? I wanna put, kind of a finer point on this thought. And that is, that you really wanna make sure that you, me, whoever it is, is leading this VA effectively. I’m gonna encourage you to at least wait a few months before you hire your second VA. Make sure that you’re doing a great job of leading and managing them. Remember leadership and management are two different things, right? Because you can be fooled for the first 30 days that everything is sunshine, lollipops and rainbows. But are you double-checking their work? Are they meeting deadlines appropriately? Because just because you’re getting along and it’s all smiles, every time you talk, doesn’t mean that they are effectively, positively impacting your business or your life yet. They’ve had this experience with some clients before. They’ve hired too many VAs too quickly and they didn’t even have their management functions in place. And then things start to crumble.
Dave Braun
00:04:45
Yeah. Right. Quickly.
Larry Broughton
00:04:47
Quickly, that’s right. So this isn’t much about you as it is about them. And that’s a hard thing for some of us entrepreneurs and leaders to swallow. Right?
Dave Braun
00:04:58
I agree.
Larry Broughton
00:04:58
Sometimes we are the roadblock.
Dave Braun
00:05:01
Okay.
Larry Broughton
00:05:02
So there you go. Just wanna make sure that we touched on that before we continued.
Dave Braun
00:05:05
Okay. All right. So now let’s assume that you’ve got some of this stuff in place and you’re like, okay, I think I’m ready. I think Larry, we talked about identifying four different camps here for this person or your reasons for wanting to hire this person. So number one, I’ll just briefly touch on them and then we’ll go into the details. The number one is you wanna do more of what your business gives to the world. Or you want to do better at what your business gives to the world, you wanna step up your game. Number three is you wanna work more at your highest self, meaning you wanna do things that only you can do more and more. And then number four is maybe you just want to work less, maybe you don’t wanna work as many hours, you just wanna work less hours, and farm it out to some folks. So those are really the four categories. Let’s go through those real quick, Larry. Are you ready? All right. So the first reason is you wanna do more of what your business gives to the world. And the question is, can you justify the expense of that relative to their cost?
Larry Broughton
00:06:16
Well, cost or investment let’s —
Dave Braun
00:06:19
Investment, yeah.
Larry Broughton
00:06:20
Let’s consider the investment of time and training them, the financial investment in them. So that’s only something that you can do, but you have to analyze it for sure. If you’re paying them $500 a month or $1000 dollars a month. What’s the ROI on that? Can you generate more revenue or decrease expenses enough? It’s not just a revenue thing. Right? So the combination between increased revenue and maybe it’s increased productivity across the organization or decrease cost from the time that you’re spending doing something else. You’ve gotta ask yourself that question. So that might be a time if you realize, Hey, I’m gonna spend a thousand dollars on this, but it’s gonna generate $5,000 in increased revenue and decreased expenses. That’s pretty good math.
Dave Braun
00:07:12
Yeah.
Larry Broughton
00:07:13
You might wanna say, yeah, it’s probably time to do that. What else you got, Dave, on that?
Dave Braun
00:07:20
And of course, if that ROI is—You know, when you hire somebody, that ROI is likely not gonna happen the first day they start working for you. Right?
Larry Broughton
00:07:30
Right.
Dave Braun
00:07:31
Take a little bit of time. So you’ve gotta factor that in but I mean, you’re in vet. So I like what you said, it really isn’t a cost, it’s an investment, but you gotta be clear on what that ROI is once they are hired and trained up, you should be getting a particular return. Now, of course, this is the reason if you want to do more of what your business gives to the world. Right?
Larry Broughton
00:07:53
Yeah.
Dave Braun
00:07:54
Well, let’s go to the second one. The second one is you want to do better at what your business gives to the world. You wanna step up your game and you want to get more to the higher level of client, a higher level of what you do. But I think it’s in certain ways, it’s a very similar calculation, although there’s a little twist. You still want to be able to justify their expense, relative to the investment that you’re doing, right?
Larry Broughton
00:08:23
Yeah. Particularly if you’ve been a solopreneur up to this point and you’ve been doing it all. If you hire right with your first VA and I mean, I mentioned this interview again, it was a good interview with someone that we know who’s been using VAs for a while. And his recommendation was particular with your first VA, don’t hand your entire business over to a cadre of VAs, pick one aspect of your business and have them do it. And so particularly, it’s like most entrepreneurs aren’t great at graphics and sales and finance and business development and content creation. They’re not good at everything. And so if you can find something, a task or responsibility that your VA is going to do, that’s gonna up-level the entire organization, provide better service to your clients, provide better graphics, work, more accurate financial reporting. That’s what we’re talking about. That might be a contributing factor to, yeah It’s time to hire somebody else.
Dave Braun
00:09:30
Yeah. And the idea behind that is they will hopefully help you to attract better clients, higher-paying clients over time. And that, of course, if they’re higher-paying clients and they’re gonna be able to pay you more, but you’ll be able to charge more for what you do. So you’ll be able to get more revenue per client in this case.
Larry Broughton
00:09:51
And hopefully for you up to allow you to do more of what you do best.
Dave Braun
00:09:55
Yeah. More of what you do best. And that kind of leads into the third reason. You wanna work more at your highest self or as what Larry said, kind of doing the things that only you can really do in doing more of them. So I guess that ends up leading to that question is, will you be able to, assuming you hire that person in this category for this third reason, will you be able to bring in more dollars or can you increase your level of love for your business that will justify the cost. So you’re working more at your highest self and what you do best. Right?
Larry Broughton
01:10:33
Right. And bringing in those more dollars isn’t necessarily gathering and closing more deals today. Part of bringing in more dollars is you being the face of your organization so that you have a higher profile in the community and in the industry so that you become what we call a honey pot so that more people see you. So it might mean if you’re not working in the weeds so much, and the minutiae of the business, that you have time to go out and do a TV show or a speaking engagement or a panel discussion, or go to a mixer. Those types of things. So oftentimes it’s not like the answer is not right in front of your face, like, I’m gonna go out and close this deal today, and all of a sudden I’ve got an extra $500,000 in the business. Now, again, it’s about investing time so that more people can learn about who you are as an organization.
Dave Braun
01:11:22
Exactly. I love your comment about the honey pot. We have a webinar that talks about that. That’s awesome. Okay. So that was the third reason. So, then the fourth reason that you may be thinking about hiring somebody is you just want to work less time in your business.
Larry Broughton
01:11:39
This is the freedom that we talked about.
Dave Braun
01:11:43
Yeah, absolutely. We have a client who had to do this and kind of forced into it because there was something personal that happened in her life. She just could not spend the time she needed to spend in her business anymore. She wanted to spend more time with her family and frankly, she had to. So, this is harder to quantify, right? I mean, what does the ROI of working less and spending more time with your family, with your kids, or with a, maybe an aging parent or something like that. You can’t really quantify that too much. So, you’re gonna have to be the judge of that. I don’t know exactly how you would do that, but I mean, I can give you an example of something that happened to me, related to this, is because— I’ll tell you a fun story, is my son, Brian, he’s in his thirties now, but when he graduated from college, it was a little bit of a struggle for him to do that.
Dave Braun
01:12:52
And Larry, as you know, I used to work in the corporate world, but it wasn’t too far from being removed from that where I was laid off because they went bankrupt, that I started working from home and doing web development. And I’ll never forget the day he came in after he took his last final because he was so relieved, he came in and I got up for my work and I said, Hey, how was your last final, how did it go? He just gave me this big, old bear hug that lasted for, I swear, it lasted for a minute. And it was just a special, priceless time in my life that I wouldn’t give up a hundred million dollars if somebody would pay me money and they’d erase that memory in my mind, give me a hundred million dollars for it. I would never accept that. So, that kind of a moment in time that I had with my son was just so priceless and precious to me.
Larry Broughton
01:13:53
It’s very interesting. You’re right. How do you put an ROI on that? While you were talking, I was looking up some statistics from some of our past coaching clients and mentees and what we found is this, as many of you know, the HireMyVA program is just one program that Dave and I offer. But how do you put a value on this to work? 16 is the average number of our coaching clients and mentees two years ago, I think it was, 16% fewer hours that people were working on in their business, but they realized a 62% average increase in revenue. So that’s kind of a great ROI right there. But how do you calculate this one? 16% fewer hours, but 52% reported improvement in their relationship with their families and friends? Yeah. Or no, that’s not it. It was a 52% increase in the relationships. Not 52% reported or everyone on average reported a 52% increase in the relationship with their family and friends.
Dave Braun
01:15:03
I’d forgotten about all that.
Larry Broughton
01:15:04
How would you like your relationships with your family and friends to be improved by 52%?
Dave Braun
01:15:10
Amazing.
Larry Broughton
01:15:10
The other one is this, what’s the value of a 33% increase in your overall health and fitness while working 16% fewer hours on your business? How do you put an ROI or a dollar value to a 52% improvement in your relationships in a 33% improvement in your health in a one-year period? It’s very difficult to work fewer hours if you don’t have better systems, which usually means having team members who are executing all those brilliant ideas that you have.
Dave Braun
01:15:44
That’s right.
Larry Broughton
01:15:47
I’m sorry if I looked distracted and I was typing and that kind, it’s because I was. I wanted to pull up these stats.
Dave Braun
01:15:54
Yeah. I mean, I’d forgotten about that and it’s like, oh my gosh, yeah, that’s right. Well, I’m glad you brought that up. So for you guys—Larry, let’s do a quick summary and we’ll bring this to a close. So we talked about making sure you have your systems in place. Within your business as well as having a system in place, so that when you do get the second or third or fourth VA, you’re getting somebody who’s—We talked about this in a previous episode, high levels of motivation, integrity, and capacity. So having those systems in place and then being clear on what the reason is so that you can calculate the ROI. And those are the reasons where you want to do more of what your business gives to the world or do better at it, number two. Number three is you wanna work more at your highest or your best self. Or number four, you just want to work less. And that’s the hard one to calculate the ROI.
Larry Broughton
01:16:55
Yes. You got it.
Dave Braun
01:16:57
All right. What do you think? Anything else? Any final thoughts?
Larry Broughton
01:17:00
Well, I would just encourage people that don’t get sucked into this lone Wolf myth about entrepreneurship. This is why we have intentionally developed a community for you. This is why we’re doing these podcasts. This is why we do right now, the twice-monthly community calls. And we’ve got some announcements about that coming up as well. Participate, go on the journey with us, go on the journey with other people that are in the program. That’s where you’re gonna really find some amazing value because you can ask these questions and we can go deep with you. If we’ve not hit the point that you are hoping we’re gonna in this call, then in the comment section, wherever you are watching or listening to this, then ask a question, offer a comment and we’ll get back to you on it. So, I guess that’s how I’d wrap this up. Don’t go on the journey alone, participate in the community and let’s go on the journey together.
Dave Braun
01:17:52
Yeah. Because we are here. Larry and I are here to help you. We’ve helped a whole bunch of folks. You heard the statistics of what Larry talked about and how much we’ve helped folks. And we want to help you guys too. And you guys have taken a great step in that in joining us today on this podcast. And part of that also is just remembering all the stuff that we talked about is achieved through building a team because that’s the way to improve what you’re doing in your business and generate more revenue, reclaim your freedom, which is the most important thing. So as Larry said, three things we love for you to do, go in, leave some comments for us either on the YouTube channel there or where you can in the podcast, and give us a rating, five-star rating. So, subscribe to what you’re doing. So do that. And then of course finally go to Hiremyva.com for more information on our course and community. Because even without experience, you can learn how to prepare for hire and thrive with Virtual Assistants. Larry and I, we’re here, we’ve helped a lot of folks, we’re continuing to do that and we want to help you too. So just go to Hiremyva.com for more information.
Larry Broughton
01:19:04
Yeah, that’s right. And I’m just gonna remind you of this. Do yourself a favor. Do the world of favor. Stop chasing success, but instead, go do something significant today. God bless you. God keep you God hold of you. All right, my friends, go get them. See you later.
Dave Braun
01:19:21
See you later, folks. Bye.
