94 - Empowering Small Businesses' Growth with Virtual Assistants with 20four7VA's Catherine vanVonno

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started.

Katherine von Vano, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are the CEO of— I've got to look at my notes to get this right— 24/7 VA. Which can be found at 247va.com. And I want to spell that: 20-2-0-4-F-O-U-R-7, the numeral 7, V-A-V-A-V-A. So there it is, 247va.com. Welcome to the show.

Thank you, Doug. I'm excited to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

So tell, tell, give us a little bit about your backstory.

Uh, okay. Yeah, I, um, I, this is, I started this company in 2014, uh, so we've been in business almost 10 years now. Uh, we have— this is our second year in a row making the Inc. 5000 list of fastest growing businesses, small businesses in the United States. So, you know, really excited to where this company has come from and where it's at right now. Prior to 24/7 VA, I was a stay-at-home mom for 10 years. I raised 4 children. My 2 youngest are getting ready to go back to college. My 2 older ones are, you know, they're in their professional careers already. One's a lawyer, one's an engineer. So I think I've pat myself on the back. I've done pretty well there. Prior to being a stay-at-home mom, I was— I graduated with a PhD from Virginia Tech in applied research and statistics and wound up my first job, my first real job out of school was working for Blue Cross Blue Shield Association as an epidemiologist. Wow. And yeah, so just studying their member population and the, you know, the diseases and comorbidities that they suffered from. But, you know, that sort of catapulted into me really at the forefront of the entire industry and creating innovative solutions for health plans to be able to effectively manage the costs of people, you know, with asthma or diabetes. And that's what really started the disease management revolution, the Ask a Nurse revolution in healthcare, where instead of always denying claims, the insurers are more about making people, improving people's health and providing programs that did that. So, you know, that's sort of my background. When I was with Blue Cross Blue Shield, I managed a very large team, so learned a lot about human resource management. I also had a master's degree in industrial organizational psychology. So, you know, dealing, you know, working with people, understanding people, understanding, you know, what makes them tick and makes them more productive has always been you know, something that I care deeply about. So, so here I am now.

CEO and president of a virtual assistant company.

Yep.

Tell us about, tell us about how the company got started.

Okay. So, so while I was a stay-at-home mom, my husband is a serial entrepreneur. And, you know, every time he was developing another company, he wanted to create an online presence to that company. So he was creating websites. And we started looking for offshore solutions. You know, things, you know, we just didn't have a lot of money and the cost of US labor was, you know, especially for in the IT field back then was high. So we went into talent marketplaces like back then it was called oDesk and Elance. Um, those two companies evolved to— they, they combined and they've evolved into Upwork. Um, you know, most, most of your listeners probably are aware of Upwork. They're right. Um, yeah, they're a massive company now. But yeah, we used to go on those talent marketplaces looking for web developers, uh, and, and, you know, it was hard to find that. If first of all you, you had to sift through tons of resumes. Uh, you didn't know who these people were on the other side, somewhere else in the world, you know, not somebody that you could go visit their office or sit in front of them and speak to them. Um, so it was a little challenging, and— but we saw the value, uh, in that. We saw the value that it brought to us as a company in terms of, you know, just reducing our staffing costs. Enabling us to really find great talent that we may not have had the opportunity, you know, didn't have locally, but also just the appreciation that we got or that we received from the workers that we hired in terms of giving them a good job. And they, they're in communities, they're rural communities where they don't have the opportunities. That we have here in the United States. And so just that level of appreciation. But that is really what started the concept of 24/7 VA, that, you know, if we can make it work, you know, for our small businesses, then why don't we take this to other small businesses and create a recruiting platform and a vetting platform so that they don't have to, you know, be out there doing this all in the background, but we'll do it all for them. They know that they're getting somebody that's been fully vetted for their skills, fully background checked, that they can feel secure and confident that, you know, they have us as an agency security layer between them and their worker. They still, you know, our company is, we're a full-service agency. So, you know, small business clients, small to medium-sized business Businesses come to us with just their open jobs, and we find the candidates. We present, you know, online profiles. So it has their resume, you know, their voice sample, a video sample, personality tests, all those sort of things. They review those, and, and then if someone looks interested to them on paper, then we facilitate the interviews, we facilitate all the onboarding. We have a training team that will assist in terms of any upskill training that they need. Or we have a technical team, an IT help desk that helps facilitate getting everybody connected on messaging platforms or with phone, voice over internet phones. So we facilitate and help all along the way. We do all the payroll processing. We have an HR unit. Some clients hire seasonal and part-time. Other clients are looking for more full permanent placements. And so our HR team does all of the annual performance reviews. So, you know, we're just— we're here to help.

This is a big operation you're running. How many employees do you have?

Well, we have about— running the internal operations that help me, and they pretty much do everything nowadays, but about 80, maybe a little bit higher., that run the internal operations. And we have, right around 300, virtual assistants working through our company for our clients. So, and at any given point in time, we probably have like 500 just sitting in the waiting, hoping that they're that perfect match for our clients.

A lot of people looking, looking for work.

Yeah. Oh yeah.

Oh yeah. Are most of your VAs in the Philippines? That seems to be where a lot of people come from now.

The Philippines is where we started, and we started for good reason. Number one, English is a national language in their, in their country. And so they go, they grow up through the school system learning English. So their English communication is really good. We've, we've migrated a little bit into other areas as well. We're also in India. More of our technical staffing is staffed from India, Pakistan. We're also just created recently within the past couple of years recruitment streams in some of the Latin American countries like Argentina. We're finding our clients are coming to us really wanting bilingual English-Spanish speaking assistance. So, you know, we're started recruitment streams there. We also have just some, you know, like a heart project. So we do a lot of impact hiring projects where, where we, you know, it's sort of what I was talking about, bringing jobs, stable jobs to rural populations that don't otherwise have those options. So we partnered with a nonprofit in South Africa where, where we worked with them to take a cohort. I think it was about 30 or 35 young women through training and placed them all with jobs. And there was a tech center there that, you know, offered them space, you know, for, for, you know, small, small payment. But in comparison, you know, they couldn't— but they had transportation from their homes to get to the tech center to be able to work. So, so we still, you know, that we do have projects like like that that we do on occasion where we, we team up with nonprofits in different countries.

That's really, that's really great. So what is it that gets you really excited in the morning, gets you out of bed and gets you moving?

Uh, just being with my team. Um, you know, I, I get excited about how, how exciting the company is and how active it is. Um, I have, uh, you know, we have people that are working pretty much around the clock. Our recruitment team is in when I'm sleeping, very, very in the wee hours of the morning. And our marketing team, because that's when they're most productive and you want your marketing team not working your graveyard shift. You really want them when they're thinking straight. So it's just there's people working all the time. And I think that's what really You know, every morning I know I gotta get online, I gotta get online, see what's going on.

So it's, it's, people are working 24/7, but that's because it's all around the world. People are all around the world.

People are all around the world. Yeah, I am the only one located in the United States. So we are—

only you, really?

The only one. We are a remote-first, fully distributed company. So yeah, yeah, it's, it's pretty incredible. So talk about diversity, uh, cultural diversity. And yeah, we're there.

Um, what is it that, that's unique about you that you bring to the table that makes this company so successful?

Uh, well, I would hope my leadership. Um, I think that, uh, that, that is really, um, what propels my team every day to do the great things that they do. Is the way that I manage. You know, as I said, I sort of, you know, my only job in the company now— and when I started, I had one virtual assistant and it was me, and I was in a little apartment in New York City, and this was fall of 2014. And what I did is I just chunked it out, you know. So once I knew you know, I sort of figured out, okay, I did the sales, I did the recruitment, I did the customer service, I did the contracting, I did the accounting. So, you know, as I grew, I just chunked pieces out, hired somebody, not necessarily for their skill, but hired them for the person that they were and their tenacity for work and, and wanting to be successful at whatever they did. And so I'd mentor them. The onboarding, you know, I spend many, many hours, you know, mentoring them, allowing them to make mistakes, you know, giving them constructive criticism, helping them. Information sharing is critical. You know, you have to be able to really open up your book. You don't save any. You don't hold anything back. Right? If you want someone to be successful in what they're doing, you're going to give them every tool to make them successful. And you're going to get— and some tools are information sharing, wanting them to be better than you could have been. So that's sort of what I've done is I've just chunked out little pieces along the way till now. I have a management team that I meet with. We have— I attend an all-staff meeting every Tuesday Tuesday we have an all-staff meeting. We have our management meeting, we had it this morning, once a week. And other than that, I think that, you know, my job now is, is really just to keep them motivated, keep innovating and, and thinking of new ways that we can tweak the business, and listening to our customers and, and, you know, what their needs are for further staffing, and, and to push the payroll button once a week. Right. And I'm happy. I, I'm telling you, I'm happy to do that every single week. And, and we are, we're a weekly payroll. So, um, that's a big advantage in these, in these other countries where, um, you know, they really rely on that steady cash flow, right?

Huh. So how, so as you think about it, what's it feel like to go from having a PhD in applied science and statistics to becoming a leader of a fast-growing virtual assistant company? That's a big leap.

It was scary because I was very much an introvert. You know, think about research and stats, you know, it's not somebody that you think would be a frontliner and, you know, wanting to do sales or wanting to grow a company or be an entrepreneur. I think that that's just, you know, it's sort of been my development slowly through the years. And I think having kids was a big part of it because having kids, and I was a stay-at-home mom, I was involved in the schools, I was involved in their sports teams, you know, I was team mom, I was Girl Scout troop leader. But putting myself in those positions just, you know, sort of opened up and opened up a piece of me that sort of said, you know, yeah, I can talk to people. I like talking to people. I, you know, I like leading. It was fun. Um, so yeah, it was a big leap from where I was to where I am today.

So, fascinating. Well, of course, this show is called Listening with Leaders, and that's because I believe that listening is the foundational skill of relationships. And so how important is listening in your work?

Well, it's one of those secret sauces. You know, clearly, if I had to pick one thing that, you know, really makes a leader stand out, it's their ability to listen, you know. So it, to me, it's all about creating a bond. So when I give my attention to a team member, it's sort of my way of saying, I'm here, I value your thoughts. You know, it just builds a powerful connection. And, you know, it allows, allows me to fully understand them. You know, so I, if I want to make a decision that I feel will truly resonate with, with my team, you know, I need to get at the heart of what they think of what their needs are for any particular project, what the success factors are, what their challenges might be. And it's really that level of understanding that helps me align my decisions to make sure that they motivate the team, right? And, you know, just on a side note, another secret sauce besides listening, but it's similar, but great ideas don't always come from the top. Right? So I surround myself with really smart people. My leadership team are top-notch smart. Again, maybe not hired for the skill that I was hiring them for, but they're intelligent. And so, you know, I listen to them, I listen to what they have to say, their perspectives, and it makes me make better decisions. I mean, hands down, 100%.

I'm curious, do you get out on the road and meet people around the world?

I have not been, you know, pre-COVID, the thought was there that we were going to do a meet and greet, you know, a meetup in the Philippines because that's where the hub of all of us, all of our workers were then. But then COVID hit, right? And so they get together. So they get together, we have an annual town hall, where anybody that can travel and get there, and we pay for travel expenses, you know, gets together. And it's a big town hall, and I Zoom in. But yeah, other than that, and but you know, that's so far, it's only been in our biggest hub, which is the Philippines, and where they The HR team is now looking at how we can do that in other areas as well. India is our next— India and Pakistan are our next biggest areas.

And maybe you'll get on the plane and go there.

Yeah, someday.

Someday. Someday.

I'm not a big, you know, I'm thinking maybe a boat might be more my style. But yeah, someday I will.

And where do you, where do you see yourself in 10 years?

I, I'm not, I'm not leaving this company. I'm not selling. We get offers coming in every day.

Really?

Yeah. No. So this, one of the other reasons that I was so excited back in 2014 to start this business is I remembered sitting at the kitchen table with my husband. I know we had some friends over that were visiting, and my mind was just not there. It was, you know, my mother had Alzheimer's. So, and this was right around when it was getting really bad with her. And so I don't know if it was mental for me that I was just so nervous about my ability to speak or what. I have no idea. But I remember sitting there wanting to say something, but, you know, wasn't able to verbalize it. So, and that was, you know, probably back in like 2013. My mind is so sharp right now because of this company and the work that I've done. So, you know, to me, I think possibly I may have progressed in a similar way as my mother did. Had I had not done something like this. But folding laundry and cleaning house just wasn't giving my mind enough activity.

Um, so this business is taking care of that problem.

Yes. And yeah, I feel really healthy in my mind right now. So, uh, that to me, it was a gift actually. It was a gift from God. That I'm doing well and I have this company. So 10 years from now, I hope— yeah, I hope it continues to grow. I hope we're at 600 virtual assistants working through that. So, you know, maybe even more, you know, I don't know. I hope that, you know, we are looking into it, my finance manager, but I want the company to be profit-sharing model.

Oh, nice.

Or the, yeah, for the people that helped build the company and, and for the people, the new ones that come in to, yeah. So whatever I can do to keep this company moving, steamrolling forward, that's, that's what I'm gonna do.

Good for you. You obviously love it.

Yeah, I do. It's, it's my passion.

What do you, what does your husband think about all this?

Uh, well, he's, he's just so proud of me. He is. He's very proud. You see, I've got my ink in the background. But yeah, he's just really, really proud of the concept because it was, you know, it was, you know, concept that developed from his companies and he just let me take it and go with it.

And he doesn't have anything to do with it.

No, it's all on you. When I go, when I go to conferences, he comes with me and he's my sidekick and Yeah, he's a good— he's a good salesman, so he knows the business. He just, yeah, really is not part of the day-to-day stuff.

Well, how do you think that— you think the virtual assistant business is going to continue to grow?

Oh, absolutely. I mean, with COVID the acceptance of remote work, number one, is huge now. And the tools, the productivity tools that have come out you know, because of COVID are exceptional. And, you know, the, you know, the issues with, you know, just trying to, to number one, for small businesses to afford talent is, is, is, is tough. And, and then just to be able to hire the most skilled person, whether that person is located you know, next door or whether they're in some other country. I think people are— that's beginning to resonate that I want the best person for the job. And if that job can be done remotely, then I'm going to look outside my borders.

Well, I'll tell you, I just— I didn't know about you, but actually I have a VA now, a Filipina.

Okay.

Through a company, through another, probably a competitor of yours who I interviewed quite a while ago, and I ended up getting a VA. I cannot believe the difference it makes.

It makes a difference. It makes a difference. You know, it takes time to build that trust.

A lot of training, but the training, that's okay. Yeah, I'm just astounded at how much time, free time I have now. Yeah, that I was able to offload stuff. And what's really nice is that since she's in the Philippines, obviously way ahead of us, she can get onto all my accounts like LinkedIn and all these places, log in as me, and there's no conflict.

Yeah, no, none. I know.

Yeah, it's great.

It's amazing. And just keep, as your business grows, you just keep carving out pieces.

I don't know how. I'm a solo practitioner. I don't have aspirations for growing a big business. Oh, okay. But I have, but I do have aspirations for the work that I'm a lawyer turned peacemaker.

Yes, I read your bio. Yeah, very impressive.

Very, very interesting work that I do. And I teach, I teach people how to stop fights and arguments in their lives. That's kind of my thing. So if I can spread the word on that in whatever remaining productive years I have, then I will be very happy about that.

Yeah, that's pretty cool. I, yeah, I read your bio. You're a lawyer, went back to school. Yeah, pretty, pretty awesome.

I'm even thinking about going back and getting my EdD. Really?

Yeah, I used to teach EdD students.

Is that right?

Yeah, stats, so that they could get through it and help them with their dissertations.

Yeah, I'm thinking there's a program that's being designed down in Southern California. I live in Central California, but there's a program down Southern California that's being designed around conflict resolution and education. And one of the things that I'm really interested in is getting into schools and teaching schools these de-escalation skills because they desperately need it.

Yeah, no, I think about it. Yeah.

Anyways, I got one more question for you and then I'll let you go. Um, what is one thing about you, Katherine, that we wouldn't even have a clue about? Unless you revealed it to us?

Uh, one thing about me that you wouldn't have a clue? Um, well, uh, I can't say I'm a good cook, but I've tried. I've learned a lot through COVID. Um, that if you didn't know me, um, that you couldn't tell. I mean, I'm just such an open book.

Um, I think it's just unique and different about you that we wouldn't know unless you revealed it to us. Maybe something in your childhood.

I, I, I love nature. I love flowers. Is that too typical? Um, like, um, you're a—

you're a— you were a stats nerd.

Yeah, I was a stats nerd. Yeah, I was a stats nerd. Um, Yeah, turned into, you know, just, um, yeah, just a people person.

It's kind of a great transformation you've done. Well, thank you so much for your time today, Catherine. Really appreciate it.

Oh, I appreciate you, Doug. Thank you very much, and, and good luck with the good work that you're doing.

Thank you.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up ratings and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Wanna know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.