Dave Braun
00:00:04
Hello, everybody. Welcome to the HireMMyVA Team and Business Building Podcast, where we help you to reclaim your freedom through hiring and thriving with virtual assistants without breaking your bank, of course, breaking the bank is breaking your bank. I’m Dave Braun. I’m here with my partner, my fantastic business mentor, and coach, but most importantly, my very good friend, Larry Broughton.
Larry Broughton
00:00:27
Hello handsome David! how are you today?
Dave Braun
00:00:29
I’m doing good.
Larry Broughton
00:00:37
That’s what I thought of.
Dave Braun
00:00:39
Okay. Are you ready to jump into it?
Larry Broughton
00:00:43
Awkward pause. Remember where we set The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson?
Dave Braun
00:00:48
Well, we’re having an awkward pause because you know why? This is Episode number 100!
Larry Broughton
00:00:58
We should’ve had balloons. I should wear my tuxedo.
Dave Braun
00:01:03
Alright. Daph, when you’re editing this, bring in some balloons for us.
Larry Broughton
00:01:05
Post-editing. Yeah. Oh, by the way, if you could like give me a shave and put a tuxedo on me and post-editing, that would be awesome.
Dave Braun
00:01:16
Well, okay. Yeah. Daph, you heard it, you heard the man. Okay.
Larry Broughton
00:01:19
Hundredth Episode.
Dave Braun
00:01:23
So this one is a celebration of our hundredth HireMyVA Podcast Episode. And we’re going to talk about our lessons learned because we’re thinking, okay, what is our favorite episodes? But what did you tell me, Larry?
Larry Broughton
00:01:37
I said I don’t even have one. And you said they’re all great. Now, I didn’t say that. I did say, I said it would be hard to go through and pick one. And you said they’ve been all great. They’ve all had some great nuggets in them, so they’re hard to pick.
Dave Braun
00:01:51
That’s right. So if I had to pick one, I would pick all of them. All right. So related—
Larry Broughton
00:01:59
What are we going to do?
Dave Braun
00:01:59
Basically, we’re going to do an AAR, an After Action Review on our own stuff. We’re going to like swallow our own medicine here a little bit. And if you don’t know what an AAR is, go back to episode number 98. We’ll talk about how to do it and the importance of it and all that. So go back to that, but let’s go into doing our own stuff.
Larry Broughton
00:02:23
A quick reminder, an After Action Review, if you’ve not seen it, and it’s plenty of stuff that’s out there is basically, and it started in the military, in the army and then all of the branches picked it up. Basically, in its simplest form, what do we do right? What we do wrong? How can we improve the next time around? Dave and I do these formally and informally. Basically, after everyone was, Hey, how did that go? What could we have done differently? And so we’re constantly tweaking in the corporate arena and a good after-action review, when you’re with a team member; might be sitting down and actually doing a performance appraisal, but then you might do spotlight coaching, it might be an informal AAR. The thing I have from when I speak from the stage, oftentimes I do a keynote. I often have used the analogy of teaching a child to ride a bike.
Larry Broughton
00:03:10
And when you first run next to the child and let go of their bicycle for the first time, they ride off, pedal, pedal, pedal, pedal, pedal, and they crash. You don’t run over and scream at them and tell them what a fool they are, what an idiot they are. No, you go through a quick after-action review, which would be a formal spotlight coaching with them. Here’s what you did, right. Here’s what you did wrong. And here’s how you can brew the next time. Simple as that. Don’t overcomplicate it. Let’s do an AAR.
Dave Braun
00:03:39
Okay, here we go. One of the first things though is you know, we have to congratulate ourselves in doing the discipline and getting this going and doing it for a hundred episodes. That’s pretty awesome, pat ourselves on the back. But of course, we couldn’t do it without our team, especially Daphne and Brian, but especially Daphne how much she’s edited and created some great graphics and, Daph, it would have just taken us so much out of our extra time to do this. So we really appreciate you. And we thank you for helping us out.
Larry Broughton
00:04:16
And by the way, if you’re doing this with a group of people, like a team of people, again, go back and watch episode number 98, or listen to 98, depending on what podcasting platform you’re on. There may actually be a facilitator. We’re not going to do that. We’re just going to go through and list stuff. We’re going to do more of an informal AAR. But I would say this day, one of the big things that we did right? We just started, we just did it. I mean, I want to over-complicate it and really get into the details and have it highly produced and all that. Which we’ll do on a different podcast that we’re going to do with the one that we’re talking about. But what we really want to do is we said, let’s just get the information out there. And that’s what we’re doing as we just started. And if you go back and watch episodes number 1 and 2, it’s different than episodes number 9899.
Dave Braun
00:05:08
Oh, Do I even want to go back and look at them? I think I should.
Larry Broughton
00:05:12
Listen, one of the biggest podcasters in the world is Joe Rogan Podcast. Right? Go back and watch his first two episodes. They are funny— Funny-bad.
Dave Braun
00:05:29
Yeah.
Larry Broughton
00:05:30
Just start.
Dave Braun
00:05:31
Yeah. And that’s a great lesson for other people, because if you’re not starting and if you’re holding back because you’re waiting for perfection, you know, the information that you have, the gifts that you have to the world. If you’re holding back, you’re not giving those out there. People can not be blessed by you and your message. So that’s the message. Just get out and start.
Larry Broughton
00:05:49
Well, speaking of you and your message, Dave, I think what I really like is that I know that you’ve got so much to offer and I think I’ve got some to offer too, and we’re committed to helping each other, pull that out and share that with the world. I think that’s something else that we did right. And we committed to a timeframe as well. We said, Hey, we’re going to record this many a week. We’re going to get it done. And we’ve committed to it for a hundred episodes at this point. I think we might’ve fallen behind, you know, once, maybe twice. But I think just once, but we got caught back up again. But I think once you start anything, its consistency is the key. Right? Small things is consistency. So I think we did that. Right? What else did we do right?
Dave Braun
00:06:33
And as far as our schedule we’ve created a little bit of a buffer, you know, getting ahead so that we could absorb when things happen in our lives, like either us being sick or the edge conference. So we just got back from
Larry Broughton
00:06:47
Yeah. Speaking of scheduling, we wouldn’t have done that without you. Which is one of your strengths, right? Is that you’re generally very organized. You are a systems type of person left to me. We would have done it when I felt like doing it, you know, which might’ve been two o’clock in the morning, one day and noon on a Saturday. But because we stuck to the schedule, you develop systems, and you’re so good at the prep work and working with Daphne on the edits and getting that uploaded and all the technical stuff that goes on behind the scenes. And then we use my kind of —maximizer strengths. Right? That Kolbe identifies and taps into my experience of coaching and mentoring and running businesses over the years. I think it’s a great combination. So we’re doing that, right?
Dave Braun
00:07:39
Yeah. And you know, really, I think this content that we produce and all the discussions we have is I think it’s world-class. And I think it’s only that way because really it’s, you know, we play off each other, but because you’re such a maximizer and you’ve had so much experience and we’re letting you be at your best doing this and it’s great, and it’s blessing the world. And the thing is when we’re using our strengths, we are really, really blessing the world with that.
Larry Broughton
00:08:11
Well, one of the things I really love about you, Dave, is that, although you’re great at the systems of setting them up, you also remain flexible. And I think this has been good for us as well. This has been something that we’re doing well, is that we tweak the thing as we go. Right? We didn’t say, okay, we said, we were going to do it this way and we have to stick to this. Well, you don’t improve that way. And so we continue to improve because we tweak it as we go, we let Daphne do her thing. You know, she’s very creative, we’ve finally said to her, Hey, let’s create some opening, whatever you call them — cards, thumbnails for this thing to better describe what’s going on. And she’s having a blast with that. You guys have been doing a great job with the SEO stuff for the titles lately. That’s really good, right? This is all falling under stuff that we’ve tweaked along the way because we didn’t do that in the beginning. And one of the things I think that we’ve gotten better at that we’ve tweaked, it’s more frequently we talk about the benefits of belonging to the community. And we referenced the courses in the community along the way. We didn’t do that in the beginning.
Dave Braun
00:09:13
Not nearly as much because we really believe in the course and community. Right? There’s like, we need to put this out there because you know, really, I think everybody who’s a business owner really should be in our course and community because it’s that good, It’s that powerful, and we really believe it.
Larry Broughton
00:09:30
Yeah. I agree with you on that.
Dave Braun
00:09:32
So, yeah. Well, we’ve got, you know, talking about systems, we’ve got a pretty decent system of how this all works and how we prep the content and you referred to some of the SEO. So we do some keyword research—pulling out now, which I think is important for you guys to do, if you’re going to do a podcast because it helps you to find new topics that you may want to talk about as well. And right now, even though we didn’t plan on this originally but we’re just recording this with zoom. There might be better ways but the cool thing is that we have the recording, it goes into our Dropbox and it’s automatically ready. And then of course we notify people; our team and then Daph edits it, does these amazing memes. Like you talked about it, we get it up to YouTube and then we have a service that auto copies it from YouTube, to distributing our podcasts for us on the different platforms. So that really, I guess helped.
Larry Broughton
01:10:29
Yeah. Well, we didn’t get stuck. I think I’m glad on that, this is what we’re doing. Right? We didn’t get stuck. We have to have the absolute best. I think I actually said, Hey, what are we improving on? That’s not what I wanted to do. What are we doing well? And we didn’t get stuck and then, Hey, we’re going to use Stream yard or we’re going to use some other services and we got zoom or you use zoom, let’s use zoom. Let’s move out. And again, we just keep making more and more improvements as we go. I think that’s something to celebrate.
Dave Braun
01:10:58
I think so too. We got to give ourselves a hand. How about a clap?
Larry Broughton
01:11:05
Attaboy.
Dave Braun
01:11:05
Okay. So shall we get the next little section, right?
Larry Broughton
01:11:09
Yeah. That’s it. Is there anything else that we’re doing right? Hey, if you see things that we’re doing, right. Put it in the chat. I love to hear that. What else are we doing right? I think there’s enough little banter. I started hearing from folks, you know, like we get to the end and then sometimes I do like a little, what I call a mini homily. I’ve been hearing from some people that those are kind of fun. So we’re doing that. Right? I think what we’re doing right, is that where we’ve relaxed a little bit more on this in the beginning. I would never dress like I’m dressed right now. That’s true. I don’t know why, but I mean we’re at my home for crying out loud.
Dave Braun
01:11:48
Yeah, why not? I think, you know, you talk about the dress and we just had another podcast. The previous one we talked about is, you know, creating your culture and stuff. But you know, as far as the dress goes, as long as it’s not taken away from somebody enjoying the content and that’s what’s most—
Larry Broughton
01:12:07
Well, there was that time you came in shirtless state, but I said, no, you must put a shirt on,
Dave Braun
01:12:11
You know it’s a good thing it was only you viewing me from the top level. Right?
Larry Broughton
01:12:19
All right. Let’s move on.
Dave Braun
01:12:21
Daphne, I think maybe you can cut that out. See? We’re having fun.
Larry Broughton
01:12:26
Yeah. Dave, you know, sometimes an AAR as we try to identify, like what are the things that are outside of our control that might not have gone so well. And you know, in my former office, like we started this during COVID we’ve been talking about doing the Victory Podcast, which is more of an interview-style long-form podcast that we will launch at one point. But we had our big office there over in Anaheim that we actually— we’re building out a podcast studio. And then in March of— what heck year was that? 2020? Is when the pandemic, the COVID pandemic hit. And so we closed the office and we were bummed like, oh my gosh, what are we going to do? And we said we’re going to do it. We’re going to use zoom. We won’t be in the same room. We’ll do it anyway. And so that was outside of our control. And so we had to pivot. So folks, when you’re doing your AAR sometimes there are just things that are outside of your control. Exactly. Accept it. Right?
Dave Braun
01:13:34
Absolutely. So then, and a lot of times when you’re thinking about the stuff that you didn’t have control over, it usually is one or two things. So then you don’t have to spend too much time on it, but it’s always good to recognize it because there’s always, a lot of times you can kind of turn that around and say, well, we pivoted because of it.
Larry Broughton
01:13:51
Yeah. But there had been some things that we’ve done wrong. There’ve been a lot of things like I think individually per podcast, but globally, the thing that stands out for me and you may have something else, but the thing that stands out for me that I still wish that we would just —and part of it has to do with me. I understand. And just timing is I wish that we would have spent more time on developing a real marketing and promotion campaign. I think most people are, although we’re doing a better job with the SEO, most people across all of the podcasting platforms, I’m not just talking about YouTube. More people are stumbling on us I think or these folks that are actually in the community, they’re watching them inside of Kajabi. But we do have to get better at that. That is something we did wrong.
Dave Braun
01:14:43
Yeah. We have to get better at promoting. Promoting ourselves and going on other podcasts as well. And because you know, we need to —when we go on the podcasts and if you’re doing a podcast, you go to on another podcast, you should be promoting your podcast as much as you can on those as well. But yeah, we hadn’t done it. And I think when, and as we’re going through these, we start seeing certain things that are outside of our strengths that it’s just like, sometimes for us, it’s like pulling teeth. But we have some adjustments that we’re going to be making. So one of the things that I think, you know, it may depend upon who you are and what you like, and how much you like having guests. But sometimes I don’t think we have enough guests. I like podcasts where, you know, it’s —you will get tired of the same person. It’s, I don’t know, maybe it’s podcast fatigue, but you get tired of the same person over and over and over. So it helps to have guests on the podcast and making some of the episodes more about them instead of about, you know—
Larry Broughton
01:15:47
Well, and it brings in a different perspective sometimes as well. And it helps me change my mind. I mean, I look forward to people changing my mind. I mean, there are some core issues. I feel pretty damn strong, strongly about, you know, based on experience. But if people are able to help me change my mind or shift my perspective, that means I’m growing. Right? I don’t have all the information out there. And so I’m willing to say, Hey, I think about some things differently today than I did before. And maybe there’s a new tool. So yes, I agree with that. We had to bring more guests on, that may have been limiting us. And by the way, when you’re doing a podcast, when you have a guest on, they oftentimes might have followers. So when they’re on our podcasts, maybe they’ve introduced, some of their followers would be introduced to what we’re doing.
Dave Braun
01:16:39
Oh yeah. And it’s the best way to grow your podcast of course. If you’re going to have other people on, then you got to make sure that you give them the tools to promote and we just don’t have our system set up yet for that, but that will be changing.
Larry Broughton
01:16:54
Yeah, that’s right. You know, another thing I think that we, I wouldn’t say wrong, but I guess I just wished that we would do some things differently sometimes, but I said, it’s a conscious decision we’ve made when we said, Hey, we’re just going to get it done and go with zoom. And we’re not going to bother with Streamyard right now. Although we might—you know, like when we have guests on, I wish we do better lower thirds. You know, having people in the green room and those types of things. And so I don’t know that it’s wrong, but I do have a preference that we continue to improve the podcast as we go on. And, but I can’t think of like, huge major things, we’re like, we’ve totally blown it. I think it was small things. Like I said that we’ve tweaked from podcast to podcast. But —yeah.
Dave Braun
01:17:45
Yeah, I agree. But most of the stuff is pretty minor except for the marketing stuff. But yeah. And speaking of that, one of the things that we haven’t done is getting these episodes and getting transcriptions on the side. It’s like, and I wrote in the notes, like — it’s like, oh, it’s just driving me nuts. And it’s, you know, Larry, it’s me not getting to where I’ve got the first couple or three up there and it’s working well. And then training my team. I’m not taking my own medicine on this. I’m not taking my own advice to the first one, two, or three. Myself, record videos and train my team and then let them do that. So that has got to change.
Larry Broughton
01:18:26
So for those who are following us here on what we’re doing here, we’ve just kind of switched from what are we doing wrong to what needs improvement. And you’ll probably pick up on this as you’re doing your AARs. The things that you’re doing wrong, ought to be at least in the things that you’re gonna improve upon. Okay? So we’re saying here’s what we’re doing wrong. Like we are using a very basic podcast and recording platform. I mean, we ought to consider adding transcriptions or whatever, you know. So what can we improve upon? So if we just go back to what we’ve done wrong, yes. Doing transcripts would be good. How can we improve? Well, let’s identify some guests that have some pertinent information, that adds to the conversation about VA’s. What’s worked for people, what hasn’t worked for people. I think we’ve got two or three in the past, over a hundred episodes, you know, it’s only a couple of percent. So maybe we need to set a goal that we’ll do 20%. I don’t know what— let’s talk more about that.
Dave Braun
01:19:23
Yeah. I kinda like that 20%, that sounds about right. Yeah. I like that. And then, of course, you know, as we talked about the marketing and the promotion, we got to improve that. We are going to be hiring somebody for that on our team. And we’re in that process. And right now, Larry, I’ll be honest, not sure we’re going to go through our White Glove Service or just use our course and demonstrate that again. We’ve done that before. I’m not sure which way we’re going to—
Larry Broughton
01:19:50
You’re gonna actually have a VA do this, David?
Dave Braun
01:19:51
Yeah. Can you imagine that? And so that’s a great way to start building your team and start identifying the gaps that you’ve got in your process. Doing AAR is a great way to do that. And then the idea is, as you do that, this is not to give you more to do, it’s to identify what you want to get other people or expand your team to have them.
Larry Broughton
02:20:18
Yeah. Well, I think that’s a great point because right now we’ve got Daphne doing things that are outside of her strengths. Like she’s the one right now, who’s doing the descriptions for the podcast. And so there’s a new person that we hire, that we bring onto the team, can actually do that. And so all of a sudden we get Daphne working inside her strengths, her productivity is going to go up as well. So yes, the idea is not that we’re doing all of this.
Dave Braun
02:20:43
Yeah, absolutely. And then the next thing is, we’ve really got to have a better list of our episodes, so we can quickly look at it. I mean, we can go look at YouTube and that works, but you know, I’d rather have like, the list and the title and what the real question was as opposed to what we do for SEO purposes. And I mean, there’s just a little bit, maybe there’s a little summary that we would have there. So that way we can refer back to previous episodes when we’re recording these, like, for example, this one is because we just recently did episode 98, which is how to do an AAR. It was easy to remember to tell people to go, to tell you folks, to go back and listen to it. Right? But, what the heck did we do in episode 20?
Larry Broughton
02:21:31
I know.
Dave Braun
02:21:32
There’s valuable stuff there.
Larry Broughton
02:21:34
Yeah. So, get some kind of directory or library of past episodes would be really, really important. You know, one of the things I think that we’ve improved on, but I just don’t think, I still don’t think that we were there yet, Dave, when it comes —every time I listened to you I could go back and listen to them once we uploaded them onto iTunes and that kind of thing is I still don’t think we’re doing a great job with our calls to actions, our CTAs. We do need to improve on that as well.
Dave Braun
02:22:03
And I think when we have to talk about what type— because right now our call to action is just pretty general, go to Hiremyva.com for more information. That’s very generic, which is okay, but we may want to start saying, you know, Hey, by the way, perfect, free download for you for this episode is our quick guide on how to do an AAR. You know, for example, something, you know, we probably should have a few more downloads that we refer to, that maybe are more relevant to this particular episode.
Larry Broughton
02:22:39
Right. But also having calls to action throughout the podcast though, or maybe having screen cards that pop up because some people don’t make it all the way to the end of the podcast.
Dave Braun
02:22:48
Yeah. I agree. And we should probably be starting to promote some more stuff a lot more at the beginning and just, with our words. Right? Verbally.
Larry Broughton
02:22:57
Yeah. Another area I would like us to start getting better at is, people have approached us and we’ve not done anything with it. It’s either seeking sponsorships or better ways to actually monetize the podcast because across all the platforms we are starting to reach a good number of people when you add them all together. And yes, we’re doing this because we love doing this, but why not make some money along the way?
Dave Braun
02:23:26
Yeah, absolutely. Because if we make some money, we can pour that back into the business and make everything that we’re doing even better.
Larry Broughton
02:23:34
Pour into my pockets.
Dave Braun
02:23:35
Oh, well that too, we might take a little bit. I want to go out to dinner every now and then.
Larry Broughton
02:23:43
Yeah. That’d be nice.
Dave Braun
02:23:45
So that’s kind of folks, that’s how, you do an AAR and there’s some stuff that hopefully you can learn if you’re going to do a podcast or even if you’re not doing a podcast, there’s probably some nuggets in here, like making sure that you’ve got before you start doing any type of venture for your business, making sure you understand some type of, have a marketing or a promotion plan behind it. Right? It doesn’t have to be a podcast, it could be anything else. So grab a few nuggets from this episode, write a few things down and take some action on them.
Larry Broughton
02:24:19
Yeah, I love it.
Dave Braun
02:24:21
Okay. Anything else sir, comes to mind?
Larry Broughton
02:24:23
No, I think that’s it. Let’s shift gears.
Dave Braun
02:24:27
Okay. Do you want to do your homily now or do you want me to do one or—
Larry Broughton
02:24:33
Well, let’s see. I was just thinking, I was talking to a coaching client this morning and it reminded me that years ago when I used to teach martial arts, one of the things you want to do is just help prepare your students. You know, inevitably, you know, we all face danger and conflicts in our lives. And sometimes just the way we show up our attitude can—what’s the word I’m looking for? Lower the temperature of a situation by exceeding some level of confidence. I’m not talking cockiness, I’m talking confidence right now. And so this was a term that I first heard in the dance world to a friend who was a dancer and the idea here is this, imagine that you’ve got all this energy inside you that it’s bubbling up and it’s about to explode. And if you let that energy explode in a high-pressure situation, it can turn to chaos and pandemonium. But if you think about just letting that energy build up and then backing it off a couple of degrees, It’s a concept called access within control. Access within controls. So, Imagine that you’re controlling it so that in a flip of a switch, you can release that energy— Why are you searching around like that?
Dave Braun
02:26:10
No, I’m just thinking, because I have an analogy that just came to mind.
Larry Broughton
02:26:13
Oh good. And so that kind of popped up, you know. I used that access within control. Like before I stepped on the stage to give a keynote. So you can tell there’s always energy there that people— like what’s going to happen here? But I’m not just like Gallagher. You remember the comedian Gallagher with a big sledgehammer and smashing watermelons on the inside, but that’s not what I’m letting out. Right? And it builds the mojo, builds the confidence and the energy that you’re pulling back just a little bit, it’s attractive to people. Right? So, I guess that’s a little teaching lesson to that. I was sharing that with somebody this morning. So —
Dave Braun
02:26:54
It’s kind of like, having power but under control, right? Like steam. You know, it can cause a lot of damage, but if it’s under control, it just powers locomotive.
Larry Broughton
02:27:05
That’s right. Okay.
Dave Braun
02:27:07
Awesome. All right. Well, we’re going to— given our celebration of our hundredth episode, normally we do a longer outro, but we’ll do a quick one. Folks, just come and join us in our HireMyVA course and community. It’s going to benefit you. We’re helping take people through it. And I mean, we’re changing lives, changing businesses, changing families through it. Right? And getting people to get what we’re really after when we’ve created our business, which is more freedom. Right? And then to do that, you’ve got to build a team. So folks, check out a course and community. Go to Hiremyva.com. Make sure you subscribe to this podcast if you haven’t already subscribed to our YouTube channel as well. It’s really easy. The subscribe button and the little bell next to it, so you get notifications, do those things. Please leave a comment because your comments are going to help other people. Put down something that you got out of this, maybe it’s a change that you want to make in your business, a change in your life, or that you’re going to like go back to another episode and do it or whatever action item that you’ve got coming out of this, so just put that in the comment. But we’d love to have you in our course and community. Just again, go to Hiremyva.com for more info.
Larry Broughton
02:28:26
Yeah. And I’m just going to leave you with this, God bless you, God, keep you, God hold you. All right my friends, go do something significant today. Go get ’em. We’ll see you next time, see ya.
Dave Braun
02:28:37
Take care, everybody. Bye.
