How Matthew Saffer Empowers Businesses with Virtual Support | The Biz To Biz Podcast

Welcome to the Biz to Biz Podcast, your number one source for all business news. Hey everybody, welcome to today's episode of B2B Vault, the Biz to Biz Podcast sponsored by Nationwide Payment Systems. And I'm Allen Kopelman, your host. And today we have a special guest, Matthew Saffer, who I met on LinkedIn, and he has a company called Ethos VAS, and we'll get into what that is. VAS is virtual assistants. So I have made a post on LinkedIn about virtual assistants and how that— how does it work? And Matthew chimed in and we started talking, and hence now we're here shooting a podcast. So today, so today's guest, Matthew Saffer from Ethos VAS. Matthew, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Hi, how you doing, Allen? Thank you for the intro. So I've been in the virtual assistant business for over 15 years. I've owned and operated virtual assistants and call center services all across Latin America, everywhere from Panama to the Dominican Republic to Mexico, and nowadays over in Belize. And we provide services to clients specifically in the US. We provide a very high-end service at a very discounted rate to the clients in the US compared to what they're used to spending. They get to experience anywhere from a 40% to a 75% reduction in their overhead and operating expenses. And they're able to expand their teams basically with a phone call or a push of a button. You know, the days where you would need to— you want to get another 10 people in your office to do your admin tasks or some of your client-facing activity as well, and you do expand your office. Those days are over. All you have to do is call a provider like us.

So what kind of jobs do virtual assistants basically do? Like, is there some specific things like accounting, making phone calls, sales calls? That was a good question.

Good question. So, you know, um, there's different types of virtual assistant providers out there, um, you know, and us specifically We are specialized in the insurance world. So what that means is, is we handle all of the back office admin tasks for some of the highest level insurance agents and MGAs, which are managing general agents over in the USA. And these are primarily independent insurance agents and MGAs that we work with. So what is the, you know, the main benefit of having VAs like us? Is that these agents and these MGAs, they're all about production, they're all about growth, they're all about sales. And these agents are amazing at selling their products and their services. But with that growth comes a huge bottleneck. You have to actually service the clients. And a lot of people let those clients fall off their book of business, which isn't great when you're an MGA and you're above them because you get huge bonuses. Based upon things like retention and also growth. So you wanna be growing your book of business while also retaining that client base. So where do we come in? Basically, we do all the shit and all the things that you don't wanna do that are not revenue-generating activities. So we handle all the document retrieval, we handle all the general servicing, all the custo, all the active referral requesting, basically all of that work that prevents that agent from signing up new customers and also doing all of that work that retains that client on your book of business. And with that being said, originally Ethos grew vertically through the insurance industry because of my connections, but I come from a very strong real estate background and I used VAs personally for over a decade in my life before I got into the virtual assistant business. That's how I knew the model and everything worked and how effective it was. So nowadays we do have real estate clients, we have solar companies, we have water filtration companies, we have medical supply companies, we have doctors' offices, we have law firms. All these different types of services use our virtual assistants.

Wow, that's really cool. 'Cause, you know, labor, you know, when you look at a business today, you know, labor is a huge expense. You know, rent is another big overhead expense. And, you know, if you can save money on labor, that's always good.

Hey, hey, hey, Allen, you know, there's a lot of cost to, as I'm sure you know, to hiring people in the US, right? You have to, you know, you have the payroll taxes, you have all the other benefits and everything that you have to pay as well. So we take care of all that for the client. So you have none of those hiring headaches. And then additionally, when you're hiring people, you know, you're over in the Fort Lauderdale area. I come from the South Florida area as well. Fort Lauderdale too, not too far from you. And, you know, when you're hiring somebody, there's a lot that goes into that process. It, you know, it could take weeks or months to be able to find the right candidate. And then you come in and now you're training that person and spending other weeks or months to train them. And let's just say of a specific situation, let's just say, Yeah, the person you trained is married to somebody in the military service and then their partner gets relocated, you know, to another base. And now all of a sudden you just spend weeks or months looking for them and then months training them and now you got to start over and do it all again. So we take care of all those training headaches and all those hiring headaches for you as well.

What is it? So when someone wants to start with, you know, hiring virtual assistants, obviously needs to be in an industry you guys specialize in. And what is the onboarding process? Look like for that?

So the onboarding process is super fine-tuned and very, very effective. So when you come on board with Ethos, you don't only get a virtual assistant, you also get what we call a client success manager. So you get somebody who's been with our team for over 5 years, who has worked at different levels, usually started out as a virtual assistant, and then they went into our executive team. And they understand exactly what it takes for that client to be able to onboard that virtual assistant to use them effectively. Because one of the biggest bottlenecks when it comes to setting up a VA, it's when you work with a lot of other vendors, they come on board, they— here, here's your VA, now figure out what to do. You have no idea what to do with your virtual employee. That person is there when you come— when you hire Ethos, they're there 40 hours a week, 160 hours a month, But you need to figure out how to make them work effectively. So that Client Success Manager first starts out with you and we create what's called a playbook. It's a living piece of ongoing documentation that outlines all of the tasks that your VA will do on a day-to-day basis. It has all of the passwords, the logins for all the tools, the voice, all, all, all the different types of technology that your VA is gonna need to use to plug into your infrastructure. We don't come in there trying to change any of your infrastructure, okay? We're only there to enhance it. That's all we are, is we plug into the existing systems and we help you map out a playbook. That playbook is now used to onboard the virtual assistant, so when they show up on day one, they're ready to get started at work. There's absolutely no training headaches at all for that client.

So, so, you know, someone like me, if I'm hiring a virtual assistant, I have to provide them with an email address. Log into my CRM and then possibly set them up with RingCentral or something similar to that.

You got it. You got it. Exactly. If you're using RingCentral, then we would never recommend that you switch off of RingCentral. It was a trial and tribulation process way back in the beginning. Like most business owners, you know, when I got into the game and I was expanding, how do I carve out other revenue niches? Okay, I can set them up with a VoIP provider that gives me the best referral fee. I could set them up with a CRM that gives me the best referral fee. Well, that, that didn't work out too well. Why? Because we're not in the CRM business and we're not in the VoIP business. And if somebody has systems that already work, we just wanna plug directly into those and we want to give you the back office support or the client-facing support that you need to enhance your total operation. We don't want to change a thing. Yeah.

And I'm sure that most of those systems work very similar So it's pretty easy to plug and play with, you know, different types of CRM today. They're not as— they're not as crazy, not as difficult to use as they were like 10 years ago.

We have a— we have a whole IT and tech department that, you know, if you guys have— if a client ever has any issues and they're not totally capable of onboarding and setting up new users on the CRM, or they're trying to plug in new software, we do have people who will step up and will help them out in the process. Um, we try to stay away a little bit from it becoming a full-time endeavor for us, but we're definitely always there to lend a helping hand, especially to smaller and medium-sized business owners, because we absolutely do know what it's like and we want to see you succeed.

So what's like the timeline? Somebody signs up, you assign someone from your executive team, and they've never done any— had a virtual assistant before, but it's an industry, you know, you guys generally know about. What's the timeline? A week, 2 weeks before somebody's working, or how's that go?

Another great question, Allen. So we can get you set up in as little as 72 hours.

Why?

Because we have a long roster of VAs. We don't outsource. We actually hire and train in-house, which is a totally different model than most other virtual assistant providers, you come to them and then they'll call up a provider like us and then they'll actually white label our VAs. We don't do that. We recruit, we hire only the best. We require, we acquire people who come from some of the biggest BPOs in Belize specifically. Why Belize? Because Belize is a former British colony, so they're native-level English speakers. They sound just like you and I. There's no sounding like they're from other parts of the world, not to name any specifically. But they're a wonderful reflection on your clientele. And we could set them up in as quick as 72 hours, but that all depends upon your specific needs and also your availability to be able to meet with that client success manager. It usually takes 2 meetings of 30 minutes to 1 hour each to meet with the client success manager, about 24 hours in between the meetings for your playbook to be generated. At least one day, maybe more depending upon the complexities of your playbook, for that VA to be onboarded into your system and understand everything that you need, which is outlined in that playbook, and then they're ready to go. On average, for specialized types of VAs, you're looking at anywhere from 1 to 2 weeks, and that's taking into consideration the client's availability.

Yeah, it's, you know, I get hit up like every day on LinkedIn from all these people, oh, hire me, I'm a VA, I'm a, you know, they're Upwork, they're on, uh, what's the other one, I can't remember, whatever, on all these like different websites. And I'm sure that they, they have a team or they're farming it out or whatever they're doing, but it's like super scary when you go to— when you go talk to these companies, when you go talk to some of these people as to like how is their operation really running and how long have they been in business and, and things like that.

So that's a pretty cool point you brought up and a very astute thing to notice. So what normally is going on there is you're not hiring a company. These are what they call— what you call freelancer websites. You're hiring a freelancer and somebody who calls themselves a virtual assistant. Now there's nothing wrong with that. I respect the hustle, um, but when it comes to being a business owner, there's a problem with that. If you just need like 1 or 2 tasks outsourced Sure, send them over to somebody like that, and when they get around to your tasks on their to-do list, you'll get over the results. But if you need somebody who you want there for the long term and to create a sustainable relationship with them so they can grow with your business, that person is not going to be there for you because you're not providing them with enough work for them to be full-time. So you need to give somebody enough work so they don't keep looking around for other clients. If you really love that freelancer you found, how are you actually gonna retain them? So for example, when we have clients who come to us and they're like, "Hey, we're not big enough, you know, we only want somebody part-time." That's great. I would love, you know, to add you to the revenue of a company, but I wouldn't be doing you a service because we create what are long-lasting sustainable relationships between our virtual assistants and the clients. And in order to do that, we gotta offer our virtual assistants full-time positions, or else they're always going to be looking around for another job. And as they learn everything and become a super valuable asset to your business, they're not going to be there in 1 year, 2 years, or 3 years because another opportunity full-time will open up.

Yeah, it's super— yeah, it's super important to really understand how the industry works, you know, what your requirements are, how that— how those requirements are going to be met. Because we've looked into it before for like our business.

It's a scary thing, kind of, because in a way you're, you're giving somebody who you've never really met in person— you're meeting them on a screen, and if they at least have, you know, enough respect and courtesy to turn on the camera, you know, or you're just talking to somebody through an email saying, sure, I'll handle all these tasks, send me over your passwords, send me over your logins. Are they using, you know, secure technologies like us where all the passwords are protected? Are they creating totally separate work environments like we are to where all your work is separated from what's going on? Are there— is their work environment being monitored and tracked like we do so we know every keystroke that's going on on that screen so we know none of your data is being taken anywhere, having anything done with it? Are they using, you know, the tracking and monitoring software where you can actually set certain permissions and we go over those with the clients. So, you know, the client says, hey, this is exactly how I want my data handled. We actually, we actually use the same type of software for tracking and monitoring that banks like Bank of America and Wells Fargo use. So it creates a totally separate work environment for that VA. Yeah, it's super important.

I mean, you know, like different companies that you mentioned, like especially insurance, And real estate, you know, they can be handling sensitive documents, Social Security numbers, got it, and things like that, people's email addresses. And it's a lot of data and you want to make sure it's secure. And if then they're using your CRM, so you know that it's in the CRM and you know it's secure.

It, it could go beyond that too. Let's just say somebody could all easily be taking a screenshot without you knowing of that data and those Social Security numbers, which is why it's been that much more important to have the right security monitoring software on that computer. So we know that when a screenshot is taken and we know exactly what to happen. We do background checks on everybody we hire so we know that they have a clean criminal background. Belize is a very, very small country. 400,000 people sounds like a lot of people, but super small for a country. So it's a— when you get into the business process outsourcing world, virtual assistants, call centers, everybody knows everybody. My general manager knows every other general manager of somebody from another BPO. So we have a very good rapport and a very good methodology for finding out the quality of the worker that we hire. And, you know, this is important to point out as well. So like I mentioned before, Belize is a huge BPO country. There's places that are like bigger than the Mall of America that are just set up for call centers. Crazy. It's nuts. Okay. It's nuts. So many people crammed into these offices. It makes a, it makes a very uncomfortable work environment. Let's just put it that way. A super profitable business, but an uncomfortable work environment. So what we do, and part of this aligns with where I have changed my mission in the last several years. So I'm all about creating sustainable jobs for people in developing countries, and it's become a win-win-win situation. So I create a job for somebody in a developing country like Belize, I offer a discounted rate to somebody over in the US so that business saves on their overhead. So they win, they win, and then my company wins as well because it is a rather high margin business. So it's very a win-win for everybody. Additionally, what I'm doing in Belize— so these, these, these virtual assistants and call center reps, they travel an average, some of them, you know, 2 hours to work and 2 hours home from work on a bus every day in order to get to these large malls that look like call centers, that are call centers. So that's 4 hours of a commute, and that's 4 hours that they're away from their family. So we do have office locations in Belize City and San Ignacio, but we also offer a hybrid work model where we come in, we inspect and set up their home work environment, and we give them the ability to be able to work at home. So what that does is it allows us to recruit the best of the best. We take only candidates who are up for supervisor-level promotions. So if they're working at these large BPOs, they only get about another dollar or two per week for taking on a supervisor role. And in that role comes with so much more responsibility. So we know that they're super reliable, super productive, they meet all their KPIs, and then we're able to offer them an even better salary with benefits, with Social Security in Belize, and offer them 4+ more hours a day around their family. So it's a major, major game changer that we're creating over there, and it creates for a very loyal, dedicated, and high-quality virtual assistant.

Yeah, work at home is a whole nother big subject that everybody's always talking about, is that how people are working at home, how to monitor people working at home. Because I found, like, unless you, you have to have— obviously you're a big company with a lot of people, so You have, you know, you have to have the right software in place when you're having remote workers and you have to have somebody like in your office. Because let's say I hired a remote worker, I would have to have my assistant watching those people, you know, while they're doing their job. They're checking, they're watching what they're doing because I don't have time to watch what they're doing. It's almost like a full-time job. But if you have one person in your office, supervising, I don't know, 2, 3, 4, maybe 10 people, you know, it's— that can be super effective.

Yeah, absolutely. So, um, like, a little bit more about— a little bit about me personally. I want to keep it totally on the topics of VAs, but something about me that totally overlaps. So I, I created a life for myself of what I like to call time freedom and financial freedom. So I can work in from anywhere in the world. I travel a lot. Internationally. I could pick up today and go somewhere else tomorrow, and my whole operation will always run.

Why?

Because it doesn't revolve around me. I have a business, I don't have a job, and I used the virtual assistant model that I sell to everybody else to actually grow my own company. So I'm not only a, you know, I'm not only a provider, but I'm actually somebody who also uses that. I don't only use it in my business life, I also use it in my personal life too. If there's a, you know, I have AT&T, for example, I don't want to wait on hold when I have something to do with AT&T. My, not my virtual assistant, my PA, my personal assistant gets on the phone with AT&T and handles everything for me. When my car needs to go in for service over in the US, what happens then? My virtual assistant calls, they schedule the service appointment. First phone call I receive in the morning: Good morning, Matthew, how are you doing? Are you on the way over to this meeting already? Because you know you got to be there in 45 minutes. Thank you, Sasha, for the reminder. Starbucks is on the way. Do you want your Frappuccino? Yes. And do you want your croissant as well today? Yes. You'll call it in for me? Absolutely. You know, so there's all these little things during the day. Um, you know, Matt, you're supposed to go away next weekend with your kid. He has a a soccer event over in New York. Did you book the hotels yet? Of course not, Sasha. Okay, here's 3 options, tell me which one you want. Okay, cool. And your plane tickets, here's your options. What seat selection? She does it all for me.

Yeah, that's, you know, that's what some people need when you're, you know, running a— when you want to run your business and you need to do things, there's lots of options of ways you can have it all done.

Absolutely. You know, it's about maximizing your time and maximizing your value. You know, your business is supposed to— your business is supposed to create freedom for yourself. That's why we all work so very damn hard in this world, right? Not to become a slave to our business, but to be able to do other things. You know, spend time with your family, your friends, your loved ones, and be able to enjoy life a little bit. So the more you're able to automate things using technology, you're able to outsource things and create an ecosystem that doesn't rely on you personally day to day, the closer you're getting to achieving, you know, true financial success and time freedom.

Yeah, it's super important to make sure— use— using your time wisely. Like, for me, my time, you know, I make sure everything is on my schedule. I use my scheduling software. Oh, book appointments, I'm using Calendly. Everything's on the schedule. You know, I have an assistant that's in the office and, you know, and we're about to release like a new product. And once we get that start, once that starts to get rolling, then we're going to have to incorporate like the whole virtual assistant thing. We just got to figure out how that's all going to look.

Well, you know me, I'm here for you.

I'm calling you.

And, you know, you don't, you don't have to figure it all out. You know, the guy who can figure it out for you. So I set you up with some of my team members. They listen and they'll say, hey, Allen, look, this is Game Plan A, Game Plan B, Game Plan C. Which one do you think works best for you? You know, let us put it into effect.

Yeah, that's because it's, you know, it's a great way to grow your business, you know, because you have to, you know, people, you know, you know, people want service, right? And if you don't give people service and answer your phone and do those different things and have people to answer the phones, then you end up losing business. And that's why it's super important to have put things in place where you're running your business even though you're not sitting there answering the phone.

So you absolutely got it. That reminds me of a little story here. Um, so I had a client, um, he, he's I think he's like 25 now and he retired from the insurance industry. He was my client when he turned 20, 20, when he was 21 turning 22, right out of school. A young kid named Sam from Massachusetts. He came into the insurance industry super hot. He built himself a book of business that paid him about $50,000 a month within the first year. His goal for year 2 was to be able to get to $100,000 a month. He wanted to be making $1 million a year residually. And this kid, he grinded his teeth off. He worked as hard as he possibly could. He had 15-minute appointments booked with every client with only a 20-minute lunch each day. And he worked for 12 hours a day. He was determined to get there. And what was the bottleneck between him going from $50,000 to $100,000 was the fact that he just kept writing business and replacing clients at that point because he wasn't servicing those clients. He wasn't answering his phone for them. He couldn't care, but he wanted to care. So the people who he worked under, the MGAs, knew me and they were like, look, you need to use Ethos.

Why?

Because Ethos is going to keep those people on the book as you're constantly writing them, and they're going to service all the people. Look at the phone. You have a phone with, you know, like 100 messages every couple hours that you're not answering because you're busy selling new clients. Let all those people feel comfortable so they stay with you. And we were actually the growth tool that allowed him to propel from making $50,000 a month, which is very, very good money, especially for a 20-something-year-old kid, all the way up to becoming, you know, a million-dollar residual earner, to being able to retire a couple years later from the insurance industry. And he's still making a million dollars a year.

Yeah, that's a great story. I'm sure there's many success stories of people being able to grow their business. I mean, I've talked to of mine who told me, you know, yeah, I got all— you know, may— I'm not like big on cold calling, so I know that's like one of the worst jobs anybody can do.

It'll teach you a lot. It'll teach you a lot though. Everybody should do it a little bit in their life. It builds character and builds grit.

Believe me, when I started in this business, the way you got business back in 2001 and 2000 when I started was you were out pounding pavement and, uh, wearing out soles on shoes, you know, going door to door and going to networking meetings. But, you know, one thing COVID definitely accelerated was it accelerated people willing to look at, like, a Zoom— have a Zoom meeting with you. I mean, I don't leave my office now. I mean, it's basically everything is booked. It's a Zoom, it's a phone call. Oh, I'm going to show you a software demo. All these demos are just online. Whereas we used to have to drag equipment everywhere and do that. And I had— when COVID hit, I kind of had a leg up on everybody because I was already doing all these virtual software demos, you know. And then I was like, yeah, you guys got to get with it, man. It's— this is— this is the way— this is the way to go.

COVID was a rough time for everyone, but there was some very positive change that came out of it, especially in the business world like you're talking about. And, you know, for me, COVID actually, I think it made me more relatable in other people's eyes because I never— the office environment was never for me. It wasn't somewhere where I thrive. I've always preferred to work virtually and have, you know, I have the brick-and-mortar locations, I have GMs in place and office managers who take care of them all. But me, I like to be out on the boat. I like to be fishing. I'll answer my phone call any time of the day for any client that I have who has my number. But I like to be out living my life. And a lot of people didn't really relate to that. And then when COVID happened, it was a game changer. People loved what I was doing. And also like a lot of businesses that had these larger operations and these back office support staffs and used call center type models, they couldn't afford to start back up again. And they reached out to us and they were like, wow. So for a fraction of the price, we can get back up and running. And COVID was absolutely one of the biggest growth factors in Ethos's history because everybody needed to get back up again and they couldn't afford it. So they started—

I mean, it's definitely, it's definitely like a growing industry and it's maturing more off of, you know, hiring people from Upwork and, you know, all these different websites to companies who are actually like have a system in place and have security in place and have trained employees in place that know, that know what to do. So you're not like recreating the wheel as you go along with, with somebody.

You got it. I have some friends in real estate up in the Toronto area, and they were actually, they were fishing with me a couple of weeks back and they were telling me, they were like, hey, Matt, We— I never really knew what you did, and we wish we knew exactly what you did. You just don't really talk about your business too much to us. We know you're, you know, we know you do very well, and we had an idea, but we didn't understand it was VAs because we built our whole own VA department for our real estate, for our luxury real estate division. They're like, and that took us years to be able to figure out how to do it, not only recruiting, but how to actually manage the team, how to put the SOPs into place. And if we knew that you existed, we could have just reached out to you and had you guys do it all for us. And, you know, it's, you know, it's— they, they learned. I mean, and some people try to figure it out themselves, and then when they don't figure it out themselves and they realize, hey, it's a full-time job, you come over and you find somebody like us. You say, hey, you guys know how to do it the best, please do it for us.

Okay, so as we're wrapping up here, what's the best way for people to get a hold of you? To go to the website ethos, E-T-H-O-S, vas.com. And then is there like a form?

That's it. Go in there, book a calendar. You'll end up, uh, you'll end up meeting the general manager, um, or perhaps the vice president. And if I'm available, I always join in. And anytime you sign up to be a client, at some point you end up meeting me because I love to meet every new client who comes on board to Ethos. So you get to actually know the owner and have a little bit of a personal relationship with me.

So give us 3 good reasons, or could be more, why somebody should use virtual assistants.

You should use a virtual assistant, A, to reduce the overhead from your office, B, to reduce the hiring headaches that you're going to entail, and C, scale upon demand.

All right, I like that. So I want to thank you, Matthew, for coming on the show today. I hope everybody, uh, learned, got a lot of questions answered about what is a virtual assistant, how does it work, and got some good information about Matthew's company. You can find Matthew on— he's on, uh, LinkedIn, Matthew Saffer. We'll post the link in the— and the link to his website when we, when we do the podcast. I hope everybody enjoyed the podcast today. Thank you again for coming on. And again, B2B Vault, the Biz to Biz Podcast. You can find us on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, anywhere you listen to podcasts. And I'm on LinkedIn, and the podcast is on LinkedIn. And I hope everybody enjoyed today's show. Matthew, again, thank you so much for coming on and talking about virtual assistants with us today. And I hope everybody learned something about the virtual assistant industry. All right, peace out everybody, and carpe diem, seize the day.