Dave Braun
00:00:01
Hey, hello 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 – your bank, which is most important. So I’m Dave Braun. I’m here with my partner and cohost friend, crazy dude, former Green Beret, and I have to say amazing businessman. Larry Broughton.
Larry Broughton
00:00:27
Hey Dave, how are you?
Dave Braun
00:00:28
Fantastic, fantastic. Looking forward to getting into another topic
Larry Broughton
00:00:31
man, I like this topic today.
Dave Braun
00:00:33
All right. So today’s topic without further ado, where did that come from? I don’t know the ‘ado’. Anyway, The topic is how do I handle the fact that they aren’t in my time zone or their day is my night because virtual assistant is virtual and could be anywhere, in the country, overseas, wherever. How do I handle the fact that we just aren’t in most likely won’t be in the same time zone?
Larry Broughton
00:01:00
Yeah. That’s a great question. Can I hop into this first look? I had the same problem, just getting it in my head. Like, how the heck do I deal with this? What am I going to communicate with them? Dave you’re saying in particular, we are using a VA, we have been using VAs for years in the Philippines. And once I got into my head, I thought, wow, this is actually going to boost my productivity if I could just manage this darn thing thing. Well, one of the very first, not the first, but one of the first VA that I’d used in the Philippines we are using his name was Ray. He was helping us with our social media stuff. And so what my in house, real executive assistant and I would do, we would meet with him at four o’clock in the afternoon, which is seven o’clock very time in the morning, seven in the morning.
Larry Broughton
00:01:50
And so it was really nice to be able to meet with them in the afternoon, give them some tasks to do. Clearly we had our strategy for the week lined out, lined up, but when we come in the morning, a lot of the tasks were then completed. So in many ways it boosted our productivity, right? Because you know, challenges and opportunities and strategies get developed during the day. And then if we were only using people here in our office in our same time zone, you’d have an entire what, 16 hours, sometimes 12 hours sometimes depending on when the ideas are forming before you ever were able to implement. So what I like about this is we would store things up during the day, talk to Ray in the afternoon, and then think it would be executed while we were sleeping or home having dinner with our families.
Larry Broughton
00:02:37
Now I tend to work crazy hours and from time to time, I would then check in. And the evening before I went to bed just to see how things were going, just to give a little more feedback. Now, you don’t need to do that if you don’t want to, but this is all about Dave, you and our clients, lifestyles build this around your lifestyle. What works best for you now you were with, with Daphne in the team. Now you’ve got a really great program. I think on how you guys are handling this. Why don’t you share that clearly these folks from the Philippines.
Dave Braun
00:03:09
Yeah. And, and what I have found typically is that you got to have some overlap. I mean, like in the case of, you know, your example, Ray, you had a little bit of overlap. You’d have a couple of hours, a day of overlap. I mean, it’s got to be a minimum. And usually that’s one of the things we say in our requirements. It’s one of the key things you have to say upfront is say, what hours of overlap do you want? Give them a potential choice. So a lot of times what I’ll do is I’ll say, Hey, you can, we got to have four hours of overlap or three hours of overlap. It can be in your morning or your evening, depending upon what you want to do. Because we find that people work, I mean, this is just anybody people work better at different times of the day.
Dave Braun
00:03:52
For example me, I love mornings. I’m more energetic, but then afternoons, I start lagging a little bit. However, like my son, Andrew, he is like a night owl and he likes to work, afternoons and evenings. In fact, the way we’ve got it now you talked about my situation with Daphne and Adrian and Brian Valentino. We’re working typically we’re overlapping most of the day. They like to work in the evening because it gives them freedom to do things with their family during the day. And of course they have to sleep some, but they just, they just like that. And for me personally, I love to do a lot of things. Side-by-side with people I love to collaborate and, and we’ve been pretty successful with that. So it all depends upon, you know, your business and what works for you. In fact, here’s another story is that one of my previous VA’s, he just did not like to collaborate that much. You know, he’s like, give me the tasks that define it, record a video on it, and then let me work on it. We didn’t really need hardly any overlap. And I found that while I got a lot of work done and it was great. I lost a little bit of enjoyment in my business because I like to work with people.
Larry Broughton
00:05:10
Yeah, that makes so much sense. And you know, again, this is about what works for you and your business in order to launch it and they get more freedom in your life. And we got to remember whether they’re in the Philippines or somewhere else around the world, these are people too, right? And there are some people who are going to like the work that overnight shifts, there are going to people who like to work in the mornings or in the evenings as well. And so all of this can be called, vetted during the hiring process. So don’t be afraid just because they’re in a different time zone. I think I, I hope that you’ve got that both with my situation that I explained and Dave situation is that it can actually increase productivity, that they’re in a different time zone than you with all of the video conferencing and video editing, you know, like loom for instance, that you can use, you can communicate in many ways more effectively than somebody who’s sitting in the office right next to you where you’re interrupting each other throughout the day, by getting up from your chair or walking over to them and then, you know, interrupting the workflow.
Larry Broughton
00:06:15
So there, I promise you at the time zone, if you manage your time effectively, although it will be a little bit different at first should not be an impediment to your success.
Dave Braun
00:06:26
No, in fact, yeah, like you said, it’s a productivity booster and if you have, so one thing I have to be careful of, because we have a lot of overlap. If you do have a lot of overlap, then you’re going to be like, I got to turn off my notifications in base camp or slack or whatever, because I want to get some hard thinking work done and you know, they’re interrupting me. Well, that’s not good either. And that’s sometimes, you know, the danger of when you’re not working virtually you overlap totally in on a regular office, constant interruptions.
Larry Broughton
00:06:56
Yeah. And just to put a fine point on this, you may, many of you probably will get to the point where we are, where we have multiple VAs and we have in-house assistants and team members as well. So you could have somebody who does a complete overlap with you or a partial overlap or very little overlap. Just remember, just do what works best for you. And w what works with the strengths of your new team member. This is going to take time to tweak. You’re not getting it right the first time. Probably it might take a couple of times to actually figure out what works best for all of you, but we’re going to guide you through this. This is what the community is about. So go to the community. If you’re having challenges, let us know. And we’ll absolutely people will be chiming in and helping you through the process.
Dave Braun
00:07:38
Yeah. And it helps. We were just talking beforehand, you know how, especially with people in the Philippines, they, they tend to want to please, right? So a lot of times, if you say, well, you’ve got to work these hours, that may work for them, but they may not. So what I’ve found is it works best is kind of give them an overlap choice. Yes. Morning or evening. If you can do that, especially if you’re hiring your first VA. Now, if you’re hiring, you’ve already got a couple of people on your team and you want to make sure there’s overlap. Well, then you might have to specify it. And then another way that you can do it is you can say, well, you can work whatever hours you want, but we have meetings on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, or whatever from this time. And you got to be on during this time. Otherwise be whatever on whatever time you want. So that’s a possibility too.
Larry Broughton
00:08:22
Yeah. And you know, Dave, we had talked about this before and we will be doing live chats with the community and we’ll have Daphne and Adrian, and some of the folks on there, if you want to ask them directly with what’s working for them, we’re going to take all the mystery out of this for you here. Now, stay with us.
Dave Braun
00:08:38
Absolutely. That’s a great point. So to sum up, make sure you do what works best for you, because this is your business and have your VA’s aligned with that. But keep in mind, they need to work when they are most productive, as well as you. Anything else? No, I think that’s good. All right. Awesome. Well, thanks for joining us today Folks remember building as a team as the way to reclaim your freedom, the way to do it. We are here to help you. As Larry said, we take the mystery out of it for right now where there’s three things that we would love for you to do. And we’d really appreciate it. If you do them, number one, subscribe to this podcast, if you haven’t already done. So number two, give us a rating, preferably five star. We love five stars, but maybe give us whatever you want.
Dave Braun
00:09:25
And then number three, just go to hiremyva.com for more info on our course and community. Because remember, even without experience, you’ll learn how to prepare for hire and thrive with virtual assistants and Larry and I, as you can tell, we’ve helped a lot of people. We’re working constantly ourselves to fine tune our processes. So come with us on the journey because we want to help you too. Again, go to hire me. God, I can’t even say that. Go to hiremyva.com for more information. All right, folks, have a great day. Go get them. All right. Take care.
