The First Hire I Make in Every Business

Hello, ladies and gentlemen, James Blackwell here, founder of 3 7-figure companies that started from scratch. In today's video, I'm going to be talking about that one hire that really bought back my freedom. So we're gonna be going in the Range Rover today, and we're going to be driving around London, and I hope you enjoy the video. Most founders are working 60-hour weeks and doing tasks that someone else could do for a fraction of the cost. So today I'm going to be breaking down step by step how one hire literally changed my life. Looking back, when I first founded my first agency, 11 years ago, I was literally doing everything. And one book that really changed it for me was The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. So this was a book that was really like game-changing back in the day about outsourcing and actually having an assistant. And since I read that book, I started hiring my first assistant. And it was really important to me because when I was trying to build the business and I was trying to ground hustle, meet clients, get candidates, like build out the recruitment agency, I just had zero time, you know. And there was a lot of tasks that we were doing very manual that I really shouldn't have been doing. And that really held me back at the start because you just have— as a founder, you only have so many units of time per week, normally on average 40 to 50 hours of units of time. And that's mixed in with all sorts of different tasks, particularly in an agency. You're doing everything— sending proposals, pitching, lead generation, sales, then you've got delivery, fulfilment, the backend, the ops. Like, there's so many different tasks that need to be done. And then checking your emails, your LinkedIn, your social media, your marketing, everything. And I realised back then, as soon as I read that book, I was like, I can outsource and start to delegate and start to create SOPs. So back then, 11 years ago, there was no AI, there was no ChatGPT or Claude. And the only leverage you could have offshore was really the Filipino VAs or Indian VAs. I went down the Filipino route. And that's when I first really hired my first assistant. And once I hired that first assistant, I realized like effort alone was always going to be the bottleneck because you're just going to run out of time. As a founder, you try and do everything yourself. And to get past like this $100K, $200K mark, you had to be able to delegate. And that was something that I learned early by hiring the first 2 years, and that was off in the Philippines. That was basically my first personal assistant, executive assistant, did all of the operations, a bit of the social media, very ad hoc. And I remember hiring them, I think back at the time it was like $3 to $4 an hour. And then I just started getting her to create these SOPs. So back then, Loom videos had just came out, so that's when I could start to document certain processes and start to delegate. And once I bought back, it was around about 10, 15 hours a week of my time. That gave me so much leverage and so much mental bandwidth to then grow again. And yeah, that was the first hire that I made. And since then, obviously, I've hired many assistants. But that first hire was crucial to learning that leverage and buying back the time was so crucial to get out of this hamster wheel of trying to do everything yourself. So that brings me on to working out your hourly rate as a founder. This is so crucial because As you expand your business and you have more employees, more bandwidth that you need to take on, you need to be very delicate with every single hour that you give out. So if you work 50 hours a week, which most founders, if they're honest, they really work 50 hours a week because you're doing all sorts of ad hoc tasks on the evenings and weekends. So if you're working 50 hours a week, you work 48 weeks a year. So let's say you take 4 weeks off for holidays. That's like $2,400 in the year. Let's say, for instance, you work that amount of time, you earn $200,000 in your first year in the agency. That will work out around about $83, $85 per hour. Then if you're doing $400,000 a year, then obviously you've got $170 an hour. But really, the first year or two is crucial. There are tasks in your business right now that are $10 an hour tasks that you really need to delegate and give out. And I see this with founders all of the time, particularly in recruitment agency space that I'm very heavily involved in, and mentoring many founders in that. They spend a lot of time on LinkedIn trying to source candidates and trying to source prospects. And that going offshore in South Africa with our remote assistant team, that saves them and buys them back 15 to 20 hours a week, which when you add that up and compound, because not only do they get the 15 to 20 hours a week back, but then they can leverage those 20 hours a week onto higher income generating tasks that could even double or triple their business revenue. So it's not just saving, like buying back saying you're paying $10 an hour for the assistant, you're saving, what, $70 an hour? You're not, because that extra hours that you can double the revenue, you're probably saving $140 an hour and making an extra $140 an hour. So that leverage of the hourly rate is very important. And one hack that I always recommend all founders to do, especially the ones I work with one-on-one, is to time track for one full week everything they do in their business. So you can download time tracking software, you can get a lot of tools for free now, put it on your MacBook or whatever computer you're using, and literally every hour analyze what did you do. Were you checking emails? Were you in Slack? Were you on Zoom calls? Were you making calls? Were you on meetings? Were you on team meetings, huddles? We do marketing. What were you doing in that department? And then we can look at the reflection of those 40 to 50 hours of units of time. We can break down what was operations that you can hand off, what was low-hanging fruit that these are tasks that you don't really need to do, that you could hand off. And that's when we can start to break away and visually see these 10, 15-hour week units that you can start to outsource to a remote assistant. What does my executive assistant handle day to day? So my executive assistant is a lady called Cara. She literally runs my entire business now. She's what I'll call head of ops, executive assistant, pretty much everything. I've always had an executive assistant. So I talked about at the start, I had Filipino VAs, then I moved into South Africa around 6 years ago. When I was in my physical office in one of my businesses, Ronald James, in Newcastle, I had an office manager stroke executive assistant. And then when I moved to Dubai, I had a remote executive assistant. And since then, that's worked really well for me. And I can't even imagine life without having an assistant now. And I feel like most founders, particularly when you're at $20K a month, let's say $15K to $20K a month and above, you should all have an executive assistant. Every founder I speak to thinks, well, James, what do I get them to do? You will be surprised the amount of tasks that can be done by them. And it's not just tasks, it's mental bandwidth. For example, my assistant does the team huddles every day. She does the end of team week meetings. She organizes all my data, CEO dashboards, the spreadsheets, the reporting. She does first and second stage interviews for hires. She will do one-on-ones with the team. She will do everything, you know, and that didn't happen at the start. Just over time you give more and more. And the biggest benefit from this was not just the tasks, it's freeing up my mental bandwidth to not have to think about all of these things. So it's not just doing the task because as an entrepreneur, I can get certain things done fast. It's not about that. It's really about not having to think about it. So you've got free bandwidth in your head to think strategically on the business so you can actually help grow the business. So actually having 15 to 20 hours a week of your 40 to 50 hours should be just doing nothing. Should be just thinking strategically and then being able to be fluid in the business. That's what really gave me the true leverage was the fact of like I didn't have to do the tasks, but also I didn't even need to think about doing the task and worry about them. What I looked for when I was hiring my executive assistant is the first thing I always look for is high levels of conscientiousness. And that means they just spot things that need to be done without being told what to do. Like they just get it. And that is very hard to sort of interview for. But over time, once you have the hire, you can start to see these things. If they're missing things or you happen to repeat a certain procedure needs to be done again, or SOP and not following it. And then also being able to have high levels of conscientiousness in a way they take something and improve it and make it better and don't even come to you. They just solve the problem and come back to you once it's solved. That's the first thing. They must show batteries included. They have to have good energy. So they have to be a good personality, good energy, always positive, because a negative attitude is contagious. And if I'm going to have to spend a lot of time with them, and I've had executive assistants in the past that I've made a mistake with, you know, and they were a bit negative or had a bad energy about them. So I just didn't even want to speak to them. They were more ones that I had in the office, actually, in Newcastle. I remember one assistant I hired, absolute crazy nightmare, and I would just not come in the office sometimes. You know, I joked to my brother Dan, who runs the agency with me, I was like, I'm not coming in today just because I didn't want to see her. And you've got to be careful about who you hire. Somebody that you know are easygoing, but also can take the pressure of like when they're dealing with an entrepreneur. I can be very abrupt sometimes just because I want something done. So they have to be able to withstand that. And that's one of the things why one of my companies, RemoteAssistance.ai, where we actually find, train, and help you hire your remote assistant, your executive assistant, we train them up from day one for you because most founders do not have the time to train up that executive assistant, give them the onboarding procedure. And that's where things go wrong. So maybe you're a founder right now that's tried to hire and it just didn't work. Or maybe you've hired fractional executive assistants where they are on an hourly rate or something like that. You need someone that's embedded in your company that is working for you. And yeah, the beauty about an executive assistant is that if you do get them from South Africa, for example, you're only paying around about $1,500 to $2,000 a month, and that's for someone really good. And that hourly rate works out so cheap that even if they were working 20 hours a week for you and the rest of the time you were looking up what else you can give them. Because over time, over these weeks, we give like a full SOP process of like the things you start to delegate and hand off and chunk off. Even then, it's going to be worth your while. So brings me on to the hardest things to let go of is for sure the banking. For me was like I used to always be in the bank every day, like on my online banking. I would do all of the payments myself. I was just really in with that for many years because I always controlled the money, and that was really important to me. And then having my current executive assistant, who's been with me now 4 or 5 years, starting to hand that off to her. So she still WhatsApps me the payroll at the end of the month, for example, and I just look at it, sign it off, but I trust her to make the payments and all of the other invoices. So as long as it's not over a certain amount, I think the threshold I've got is like $3,000, $4,000, anything else that needs to be run by me in terms of signing off a payment. So that was probably one of the hardest things to delegate. The email for most founders is hard as well, but I didn't really find that hard. So we've got like a grading system of how you get out your inbox. And so that's like where you've got urgent, need a reply now, today, which is a client or delivery to make sure something's happening that needs to happen. And then you've got not urgent but important. And then you've just got like social or things that you maybe look at emails once a week. Getting out your inbox is crucial. So most founders again are in the inbox a lot, in LinkedIn inbox a lot, and trusting your assistant to be in there first. And the whole idea is they're the bridge between the email or LinkedIn or your team and you. So having that barrier just frees up so much mental bandwidth of your time. To be able to then work on the business. So you need to be able to delegate the things that are quite hard that you are very controlling over. And that just takes trust. And you just have to be comfortable being uncomfortable about that for probably the first few weeks or months. So I built a big remote team in South Africa. I think now we're around about 15 to 16 employees and we've placed over 600 remote assistants from South Africa into agency owners like yourself. And I went with South Africa, one, because they speak perfect English. It's very common for South Africans to be in the UK, and the same in the US and Canada, etc. So it means like when you're hiring that employee, they can be seen as being based in the UK or being based in the US, and it's very normal to show on their LinkedIn profile, etc. So that helps with client outreach, customers to feel comfortable with them. And yeah, those are the two of the main factors. And thirdly, they are very happy people, you know, and they turn up, they are loyal. A lot of my employees that have worked with me, some of them 4, 5, 6 years from South Africa, never left. Started off maybe a $1,000 base, going at $1,500, some of them earning a lot more than that now, and they're just very loyal. And their cost of living, etc., to live in South Africa is very cheap, so $1,500 a month to them is still a big salary. In South Africa. So I think I did the studies on this when I did a workshop, was— it might be wrong, I'm sure— 30 to 40% of all people under 25 in South Africa are unemployed. It's some crazy stat anyway. And so them having an opportunity to work from home from a laptop with a US or UK-based company, like, that's unbelievable to them. Like, they don't have to travel an hour to 2 hours to work. And in certain parts of South Africa, if they're outside of Cape Town, for example, it's dangerous for them to travel on public transport or whatever it is. So like, they are very thankful for having that type of job. And a lot of them have progressed very high in my companies. So South Africa has always been the key driver for us in terms of the growth. And that's where we've really built the hub of Remote Assistance, the academy, the training. The full recruitment team is out there in South Africa as well. That works really well. And obviously the more you place, the more you refine, the better the processes is to onboard the next hire. And a book that I read recently again was by Dan Martell, Buy Back Your Time, and he talks about don't hire people to grow your business, hire people to buy back your time. And particularly for founders, if you're between $20K to maybe $100K a month, you should be hiring to buy back your time first. There are tasks in your business right now that you might need 2 assistants, for example. Like, I've got 2 assistants in my companies. There might be 2 that you can hire to buy back your time. So all of these hires that you buy to grow your company, you're just adding more complexity, layers of chaos that you need to manage. So having your, what we call, executive assistant team, because it might be 2, that's going to help shoulder a lot of weight for you in terms of dealing with the next hires to grow your business. Okay, so if you've resonated with this and you don't have an executive assistant in your business right now, book in a call. There's going to be a link in our company, remoteassistance.ai. So you'll speak to one of our team and we'll walk you through and roadmap how you can buy back your time, how an assistant can be embedded in your company for as little as $2,000 a month, and really how you can get that leverage back. And one thing I want you to take away today is you will not get rich by renting out your time. Famous quote by Naval Ravikant, and that should be stuck in your mind of like the hours that you're wasting on tasks that you shouldn't be doing. You should be buying back your time. So if you like the video, give it a like. If you have an assistant, comment below. If you're interested in having an assistant, make sure you book a call, and I'll catch you on the next video.