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I would say Larry, and this is one of the things that does spill over into other areas as well. If you create, I shouldn’t say create, create a community is definitely good and you want to do that, but also make sure that you are in community. We’re built to be in community, the be in community around these different areas, if at all possible, at least the ones that you’re struggling in. So like Larry, you, me and a couple of guys, we are in our own little community where we support each other, spiritually, physically, mentally, everything, right where we meet every Wednesday night. And the last couple of this month, we haven’t met a couple of times just because of the craziness going on, but we went a whole year and we, I think we missed just one time, but we are committed going 2022 to continue to meet every week.

How did I do this past year from standing out from the competition and it sometimes it might start from the name of your entity or the branding of your business. But I think that every business ought to have at least one major differentiator from your competition. Yes. Okay. And so you can’t know what that is unless you do a competitive set analysis. Well, gosh, Larry, what’s a competitive set analysis. Well, if you were in the victory coaching program or the higher, my VA, and you might know that.  But yeah. So do a competitive set analysis to find out or to help you identify what is your one significant or a major differentiator?

You know, Dave as we were talking about this, we said that really, there’s three separate categories that make for a, kind of an easy framework to, or recovery and they are the Micro Rest , Macro Rest and the Long Term Rest. Well, there’s some ideas there, but it was like, we were talking about it and those are our terms, so we can kind of like you said, put some framework around it and make people understand is what category this is in. It’s always easier for me. I think of, I always try to think in terms of threes, right. It just makes, it makes it easier for me. And hopefully it makes it easier for other people.

Can I share one of the things with my own personal executive assistant, one of the things she wanted out, like, so what’s the job description here? You know what, the first thing I told her is more than anything else, your job is to protect my time and reputation. 

Well, let me start with one of our tips that we’ve got. So I guess it may seem obvious, but as we go through these it’s important. So number one, if you’re going to hire somebody to do this, you’ve got to define what type of leads that they’re going to be getting for you. I mean, what are they going to be cold, warm? You know, where are they going to do it? That kind of thing you need to identify what type of leads, what industry type of leads and start and start really defining like what we talked about, your ideal client in a lot of ways.

Have you ever worked with a leader who is always stressed out, always anxious? How has that worked out for you and the team? Not very well. Right. So if you could be more attractive to your team members, David, you’re saying the team members become more attractive, but also you become more attractive to your clients. Clients want to interact with them, right. And I just promise you it’s, it’s going to be a better work environment. Life is going to be a whole lot more fun.

Well, I think first of all, we need to ask tons of questions, right? Leaders have to do and ask more questions than delivering edicts. If all we’re doing is delivering edicts over and over again. We’re not learning, we’re not learning about our team members and Dave, you know that I’ve got this to-do list, right? That I carry with me everywhere. And at the bottom of it, for anyone, everyone who’s been through any of my programs or Dave programs, my programs, I’ve got a bunch of questions down here at the bottom that I ask my team members on a regular basis.

Well, listen, the great news. I’ve got a good piece of news for these folks who say that is that, you know, like leadership and management skills are learned skills. You can learn how to do this. And we all started somewhere like this. Hey, if you’re just a jerk, that’s a different story. I can’t fix being a jerk. I can’t. And that might be why people don’t want to work for you or with you. If you’ve got an attitude where you are better than other people and you like to manipulate, then this program is not right for you. But if honestly, it’s just that, Hey, I’m, I’m nervous about it. And I’ve never had the experience before. This is why we have the community. This is why Dave and I are here.

That’s the way that we need to look at virtual assistants is these aren’t expenses. These are investments, they’re investments in your time, they’re investments in your productivity. And most importantly, and this is the thing, the reason we’ve developed this program, it’s an investment in your future. Freedom, for crying out loud. I would not encourage anyone to hire anybody, whether it’s a virtual assistant or it’s an in-house marketing person or in-house operations person or an in-house accounting person who is going to be in your office every day, if they’re not adding more freedom to your life. So when you’re ready to bring someone on board, you need to expect there’s going to be a boost in productivity, somewhere in the organization.