YouTube tutorial by Eric Deeran teaching video business owners how to buy back time by outsourcing low-level tasks to virtual assistants. Steps: conduct a time audit (log activities every 20–30 minutes), mark tasks that make money vs. not, flag tasks you hate, estimate outsourcing cost (dollar-sign buckets), group tasks into roles (e.g., admin vs. editor), create SOPs and Loom training videos, post roles on hiring platforms (example: onlinejobs.ph), then follow a hiring funnel (post → ~100 applicants → shortlist top 10 → group interview → top 2–3 → one-on-one interviews → test project → hire). Video emphasizes cost-effectiveness (examples of $5–$12/hr candidates) and promises reclaiming 10+ hours/week to focus on revenue-generating work.
Questions this video answers
20–30 minute intervals.
Expect ~100 applicants → pick top 10 → group interview → narrow to top 2–3 → one-on-one interviews → give a test project → hire one person.
Examples given: as low as $5–$6/hr for admin roles; other listings noted at $7/hr and $12/hr (platform examples).
Chapters
One of the main problems video business owners and video agency owners have is that they're spending time on things that don't actually make them more money and they're spending time on lower level tasks. And when they get wrapped up in those lower level tasks, they can't do things that actually make them more money. And so in today's video, we're going to be talking about buying back your time, hiring a VA and hiring people to take those lower level tasks off of your plate so you can actually buy that time back, make more money. Let's go ahead and jump right into it. So today we're going to be talking about buying back your time. Now the first thing I want you to do and what I tell our clients to do is to do a time audit. Now what this means is basically go through. We give our clients a specific custom built Monday.comboard to make sure that they are tracking everything correctly. But what I want you to do is just take a Google Doc and basically just write out everything you're doing at each 20 to 30 minute interval. So just track or you can put in your calendar, whatever's easiest for you. Go to your calendar and just basically make little blocks and label what you're doing. So it could be like gym, right? It could be editing. Sorry guys, my handwriting's not the best. It could be shooting. It could be admin. Let's say emails are in there. And so we're just labeling every little block and what we're doing throughout the day. And we're doing a time audit. And then what we're gonna do is go through and figure out is this making me money or is it not making me money? And so you want to go through and label these things based on if they're making you money or if they're not making you money. And you'll label things that are making you money with high dollar signs and things that are not making you money with low dollar signs. And so you want to go through and categorize that and then we want to look at what are all the things that we absolutely hate doing. And then we're going to want to label those things as things we hate doing. So let's say that we hate editing. We're going to label that in red. Right? Right. Let's say that we hate doing admin work. We're gonna label that in red. Let's say we're gonna hate, we hate doing emails. We're gonna label that in red as well. And then we're gonna go through and just label all the things we hate doing. And then we're gonna look at the next thing is labeling it with how much it actually costs to outsource that thing, right? So if we look at editing, it doesn't cost us that much money to outsource it. So I'm gonna put $1 sign. Now shooting. If I wanted to outsource that, it might cost me a little bit more. I'm gonna put two dollar signs. So to outsource that admin, I'm gonna put one dollar sign. Because that doesn't cost me that much to outsource. And emails, I'm gonna put $1 sign. Cause that kind of falls under admin. It doesn't cost me that much money to outsource it. And then I'm basically gonna make a bucket here. Let's go over to the side. I'm gonna make a bucket and I'm gonna put all of the things in here that I don't like doing. And this is just on a Google Doc or anywhere you wanna write it. Not that hard. So I'm gonna go in here and just label all the things that I hate doing. And let's say I hate doing emails, admin and editing. And then I'm just gonna look at this. I'm gonna say, okay, can these things fall under one role? Well, emails and admin can probably fall under one role and then editing can fall under another. And so I'm basically gonna be hiring two different roles here. So now that I've categorized it into two different roles, I'm gonna say, okay, emails and admin. Let's put together what we call an SOP here. So I'm going to put together an sop. And an SOP just means standard Operating procedure. It's basically just a manual on how to do the thing that you want the person to do. So we're going to do an SOP here, an SOP here. And for this one, we're going to make this our editing sop. And this is going to be our admin sop. And then what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go through and make. And this is just in Google, doesn't have to be anything crazy. I'm going to do like how to respond to emails. That's literally what I'm gonna write. And then I'm gonna put a loom video of me recording how I respond to certain emails. And then I'm gonna put that together. And that's my training. And you're Just making an internal course for the admin side and for the editing side. And you're just making that internal course and showing the person how to actually think about doing these things. And then when it comes to an SOP editor, I have another video on the channel on how to actually put together an SOP for an editor. But you'll categorize everything into different buckets of types of edits that you want them edited. And, and then you'll do loom videos on each one, showing them how to actually do it. And then if there's anything else with emails, you'll just make how to check emails, how to put them in the proper tagging system, how to put them in the proper bucket, you know who to get back to it in which timeline we're just gonna put together a training on how to do that. And then once we do this, then we're gonna go to something called online jobs and we're gonna put up a post for these specific roles. And so we're gonna say we're looking for a admin. I'll use that as an example here. We're going to say, hey, we're looking for an admin to, you know, respond to our emails, do our admin work, respond to clients, and then whatever else you have in that sop. And so if we go over to online jobs here, it's very, very simple. Typically what I recommend is posting a job. But for the sake of this video, I'm just going to show you how to actually look for these people. So let's just type in admin here. Boom. Let's see how many people we have. 10,000 job seekers for admin, you can see administrative assistant, $7 an hour. They have a high school diploma. We can look through all these people and then we have General admin, associate's degree, $12 an hour. Let's look. Customer Service Pro Virtual data. Like, there's so many people who will become an admin for literally like $5 an hour here, $6 an hour. Think about it this way, guys. If you could have somebody in your email responding to every single email that you get, so you can focus on taking sales calls, focus on new clients, focus on shooting projects and doing all the things you don't want to, like doing the things you actually want to do that make you money and fuel you and fire you up, and you could pay someone $6 an hour to do that, would you do it? And the answer should be a resounding yes. And if you don't, then we have to look at like, what, what are we spending our time on that's not actually making us more money? And so go to online jobs. Ph. And this is the actual hiring process I would go through. Let me write it out for you here. So you're gonna post a job, and in the job you're gonna say, this is what we're looking for you to do. This is the pay, and this is the type of person that we're looking for. You're then going to get 100 applicants. And then of those hundred applicants, you're gonna pick your top 10. You're then going to do a group interview with your top 10. You're gonna whittle that down to your top two to three. You're gonna do a one to one interview with those top three. Then you're gonna give them a test project, and then you're gonna whittle that down to your top person. And then from there you're gonna make your top selection for whatever role you're looking to hire. In this case, it's an admin. And this is the process for buying back your time, guys. Like, if you could pay someone five to $10 an hour to do all the stuff you don't wanna do, this could be accounting, could be bookkeeping, it could be editing, it could be admin, it could be interfacing with clients. Anything that doesn't make you money and you hate doing is something we want to get off your plate. And then you just bought yourself back 10 hours every single week to focus on things that make you more money. So if you want our help hiring an admin, buying your time back, getting more leads, getting more calls, go ahead and click the link below, schedule a demo with our team, and if not, keep enjoying these free YouTube videos. Make these so I can help you guys. And if you have any questions, let us know. And hopefully this is helpful.
