161: Inbox Taming with Yaro Starak

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Hate to say this, but often entrepreneurs are so busy they write one sentence back to a lot of emails when you know it'd be nice and better for them if they could really dedicate the time. But they have multiple hats. We don't. We're doing your email so we can do a great job at it.

This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the Freetime Cafe, your home for heart based business. I'm your host Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with authors, friends and fellow business owners as we explore ways to free your mind, time and team to do your best work. Now onto today's show.

Welcome back Free Timers. Omg. I'm so excited for today's guest because he is wrapping his mind around the Achilles heel of my business. If you've been listening for a long time, you know exactly what that's going to be about. I'm delighted to welcome Jaro Starock. He's the co founder of Inbox Done, an email management company with a team of 45 plus more even more serving clients including restaurant owners, venture capitalists, accountants, doctors, lawyers, you name it. He's the host of the Vested Capital Podcast, the author of Blog Profits Blueprint and an angel investor. I I first heard about inboxdone through Dori Clark. Who else? I learned about so many cool things and people from dc, Shout out and Yarrow. I'm just so excited to dig into the systems of inbox management with you today. So welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me Jenny. I'm happy to be here.

So I mentioned to you before we hit record, my listeners are sick of hearing me say it, but I find email so vexing. Even as a systems and automation lover. You know I love problem solving, I love systems thinking. And yet email seems to encompass just chaos. Like it seems almost untamable. But somehow you not only have probably tamed your own inbox, you're creating a company around this. Which blows my mind that you sought to dive into Such a complex space. So can we just start with what inspired you to actually start a company? Tackling the email beast.

It is funny, email is such an old technology, yet it's the one we're probably still spending the most time on, isn't it? Like most entrepreneurs, I had a. We've got to go back a bit in time to like early 2000s. I was running my first ever online business when I was, you know, young, my early 20s, and it was an online essay editing and proofreading company focused on academics, usually international students studying at universities. I grew up in Australia, so it was very much an Australian focused business. And my goal was always focused freedom first. So I think that ties in very much with what you're all about. Jenny and I wanted to travel, I wanted to have a kind of lifestyle business, not a 12 hour day, stress filled, always putting out fires kind of business. And like you just described, email was the last piece of the puzzle to figure out because that business was so driven by email. Like we'd get students saying, I need to have this paper back by tomorrow morning and I have to make sure I get that email in time, confirm an editor could do it, confirm, collect the payment and then approve the job. And that wouldn't happen over email. And if there was like a gap of time where maybe I didn't get to my inbox for 24 hours, I might miss two jobs, three jobs, and you know, there goes the money and the business doesn't work. So it really came to the forefront when I tried to travel with my business and I spent most of my time just processing email and rather than actually seeing the place I was visiting, I was actually visiting Sydney at the time, not my hometown in Australia. And I came back from that trip and said, I have to sort this out. And at the time no one talked about outsourcing email. In fact, even just outsourcing and delegating was fairly new at that time. So I ended up just kind of hacking a solution with a friend of mine. She was about to have her first baby, she was going to be a stay at home mom. And she was really keen for that kind of stay at home mom job. And I said, well, let's see if this works, let's see if I can have you take over my inbox. Everything that goes in it, both business and anything else. And you know, we kind of figured it out. I trained her over about a month and a half, showed her, you know, here's how I answer this email, here's how we deal with this situation, here's how we go and update, you know, this payment software if we need to make a change there, or, you know, here's how we bring a challenging situation down if we have an angry editor or something like that. So just every situation sort of slowly handed over to her. And then it was quite an amazing moment. I woke up on a Monday morning and I turned my computer on and went straight to my email by default because of habit and the inbox was empty and I thought my website must have crashed or something. And I was like, where's all the emails? But I'd realized she'd actually woken up and replied to every single message before I did it. And then I had this existential crisis. What do I do with my life? Because there's no work for me to do anymore. I had like an hour, a week of big decisions to make and the rest was basically her running the business. So it was an amazing moment and it does connect with the company we run today. That experience always had a little seed in my mind that this is a service that other people need, that we all entrepreneurs, even professionals who are just, you know, management executives, we all have email and it's sort of reflective in the kind of clients we have. I never would have saw as having a rabbi, a bakery owner, a used car salesperson, venture capitalist, a lawyer, doctor. It's just reflective that we're all struggling with email. So it's a company I love to run today.

Why do you think it is that business owners, as I say it, free time with delightfully tiny teams, why is it that they still struggle to delegate? You know, why is inbox done needed? Because in a way it's needed. Because we're all stuck. No matter what we've tried, we're somehow unable to successfully delegate emails. So I'm curious if you could just describe the gap of why is it that like, smart, thoughtful, even systems oriented people kind of fall down in this area?

Let me turn it back on you, Jenny. You just described yourself, right, smart, systems oriented. You said you're still having problems with email, so why haven't you outsourced email? What's your reason?

Sometimes team turnover, I lose some intelligence. We document everything in my business. But I just recently onboarded someone new and I realized that onboarding her, to quote, help with email as a job role, it's like run the entire business and my life. It's not one thing. It's not one thing, it's everything. And it's also not always predictable and repeatable. There's always new and different situations, new in different people. And then I think at the root of it, my own indecision sometimes, or I always talk about my micro guilt when it comes to email. My own emotional attachments probably are something that get in the way as well.

You're listing everything that everyone. And there's other reasons, too. There's the financial issue. Can I afford to pay someone to do my email? That was a big one for me at the start with my very little small business. There's the control issue, like, are you worried someone will lose you, a customer because I sent the wrong email and reply to something? Or you missed an opportunity because it was handled the wrong way. Then there's just this weird thing that I understand it, but I certainly never felt it. This feeling of I can't let go of my email because I have to be the one to do it. It's just part of my life. It's like an addiction. You almost need to go to rehab for email just to realize that it's not something you have to do. It can be done by other people. And that's probably what I spend most of my time going on podcasts for. I have to kind of evangelize this idea that email is something that much like your bookkeeping that you delegate to an accountant or bookkeeper, or your website design that you delegate to a website designer, or your copywriting you send to a copywriter. You know, whatever task it is, you go to the dentist to do your teeth, you don't do it yourself, right? So email, just for whatever reason, isn't something people default to think they can hand over to a person. Now, like you said, it's a complex place. So there can be also that challenge, that roadblock of not believing it's even possible. Can someone like you said, run your entire life in business putting another assistant in there? I think that's actually one of the core tenets behind our company. Like, we built it as an emo first executive assistant company, not a general VA company, which I think is where a lot of people tend to go wrong. And I don't want to say you're going wrong, but maybe like what you're describing in your situation, you've just brought on board someone new and you're thinking about having them take over your email. They may come into your company as a very talented, smart individual, but email is a very specialized area of what you do. So you need to kind of have not just smart, talented, attention, detail, great communicators, great writers, but you have to kind of come in there with some idea of like, what are they going to do, how are they going to build systems, how are they going to create automation, templates, procedures and then deal with you? Like, how do they figure out, okay, I have to extract certain knowledge from Jenny's brain in order to do some of these emails. So I have to get her time. So we have a system, we call it a handover as part of our onboarding where we do all that. And it's very much systematized. You know, we're doing this for our sake so we can very carefully take over email for the client's sake so they are comfortable. We go through a draft writing process. We're not just going to start replying to your emails without you seeing drafts first. I could tell you more about that process, but that's kind of the nutshell. We have a system that gently and carefully and strategically takes over an inbox and that's kind of hard to expect anyone to do if they've never been trained on it. And our company's one of the only ones that actually has that process because that's all we do. We focus on email.

I love your focus on gently, carefully, strategically. And that also speaks to the high stakes nature of email, how it feels to the person handing it over. And I think part of the reason I want to come back to what you said about not hiring a general va, because I agree, every time I've tried to do that, email goes, falls by the wayside, they end up doing other stuff, email falls apart again because it's not the only thing that they're doing. But I want to go back to what you said of the emotional attachment to handing it off. To me it seems obvious and pretty easy once I got used to it of handing off even high level client communications because there was a time in my business where I thought I couldn't even do that, but I got used to it. The part I find tricky are the middle business relationships where maybe they want to hear from me or it's kind of my extended network or then on the personal side, let's say my Gmail inbox. So like, how do you handle high touch relationships or even just light touch extended relationships where, I don't know, is it weird if one of your kind of extended business connections doesn't hear from you but they hear from someone on your team? Do you step in? Do you respond to those? How do you handle those that are.

Kind of fuzzier or your husband or your Wife, right.

Well, yeah, the assistant's replying. My husband doesn't check email at all. He freed himself from that long ago.

Oh, nice. But imagine he emails you and your assistant writes back, sorry, Jenny cannot see you for dinner tonight.

Hilarious.

Yeah, we have, as I said, the onboarding process. So we actually assign two assistants from our team to every client. And that's actually because of what you mentioned before around turnover. People need holidays, they need sick leave, and because email's so critical, it's kind of horrible to go back to it once you have delegated to someone else. So by having two, we have backup redundancy. We don't have to kind of disrupt you when one person needs to step away. So when we bring those two people to you, one of the very first things they're going to ask you is for what we call triage or prioritization of those emails going into your inbox. So are there certain people, certain situations, just certain emails that are critical to you, maybe only you can ever answer them. There might be some kind of relationship or technical knowledge. This is often for situations where you work with doctors. We're not going to answer medical questions. So there will be a portion of emails that always have to be dealt with directly, you know, by the client, by the doctor in that case. And every business different, Some they have technical knowledge, but we can actually extract it from that person and template it and, you know, learn from them. It's not, you know, medicine, it's not something that has to be done by that person so we can extract it. But what happens is through that prioritization, we're not only asking, you know, what do you need to know about? As soon as it hits the inbox, we also ask what do you need to know about? But maybe not urgently, like an end of day summary or an end of week summary. And then what you don't need to know about it all and should be completely taken out of the loop. And that usually is 80% of the emails. Like most people's inboxes are full of either newsletters that maybe they want to read, but it's like a once a month thing they can do in like some kind of summary document we can give them. It could be they need to update a piece of software, they don't need to be the one doing that or seeing that email. Sometimes it's. And this is more common, it's like routine sort of queries from people that are part of a sales process. So, you know, basically customer service or sales where it's how much is this? Where do I download that? What happens if I want this added to my package? You know, all these kind of questions and part of our handover, we study the products and services that you sell so that we can understand your sales cycle, you know, the benefits and features. Even if, for example, in my previous business I had a coaching business and I had a course, my assistants would take the course so they would be better able to answer questions from potential clients for that course, what's in the course? So they can answer it and understand my methodology and everything I taught. So there's all those kind of things we can do. It's not instantaneous, but we can learn all those parts of the puzzle. And there may be always 5% that will be in your hands, Jenny, like you're talking to your family, certain high level relationships, legal matters, medical matters. But it's always surprising, I think, for a lot of people to realize, oh, they're not as important as they actually think they are for some of the emails, that there's a lot of things that can be delegated, can be systematized, can be templated, just can be taken from their knowledge and replicated by our assistants and still give a good answer, if not better. Because one of the things that we can do is we can dedicate our time to a reply that's thoughtful and considerate. Where I hate to say this, but often entrepreneurs are so busy they write one sentence back to a lot of emails when you know it'd be nice and better for them if they could really dedicate the time. But they have multiple hats. We don't. We're doing your email so we can do a great job at it.

That's so true. Like I'll respond to emails six months later. So sorry I missed this. And you're right, that's worse. That's the worst case scenario.

We'll be right back just after this.

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Walk me through the life of an email that we finished this podcast and I'm not one of your best friends. I'm not your inner circle. There's no way I've been put on a white list with your team. And I write and I say hi Yaro. I love that conversation. It was so nice to meet you. Let's get together for coffee sometime in New York wishing you happy holidays. What happens to that email? So can you just walk me through how it flows through you? Yarrow, your inbox with the parameters you've set.

That's a good one. Well, first of all, we connected through inbox Done. So that email you're going to reply to will go to the inbox. Done. Team. We have Arman and Ben as our inbox managers for our company and they work with me because we're more on the sales side. Well, there's some crossover with other parts of the company too, but they're the ones who would see your email and what they would do is they would already know who you are because they have already been the person to add your interview to my calendar. And that's the other thing we do. We do scheduling and calendar management. So what happens often with like a podcast situation? I'll be told that there's an interview with Jenny added to your calendar for this date through a Slack message, not urgent. I see it whenever I decide to look at my Slack and I'll see your entry into the calendar. So I showed up today for our interview. But what will happen if you did like a follow up email after that? So they will know the context that's so important with email understanding context. So they can already confirm, well, Jenny is this person. She was on this podcast with Yarrow. They've already done it now because we know it's past that date. So there's some kind of relationship established and it's not like a random person just emailing out of the blue asking for a coffee with me or something like that. So what they would then do because it is very in person relationship type question and honestly that's very rare, they would ask me on Slack, I'd say, hey, Jenny's just saying thanks for the podcast. You also mentioned, hey, since you're in New York and she lives in New York. If you wanted to, you know, meet up for a coffee sometime and that would be to me, I could write back to them in Slack and say, I never want to see Jenny. And they'll write back a nice message to you and it'd be very friendly and sorry, Arrow's on the move, he can't meet you. I love it. Or they'll be like, sure and kind of like up to me in those dynamic situations. I could say, let me just take over and schedule something with Jenny. Or I could say, hey, can you get Jenny just to book into the calendar? And instead of that being a zoom call or Riverside podcast, we'll know it's a face to face meeting. But really the great thing is it's a wall of defense. Like, you know, Ben and Armin and my assistants in that case will adapt to whatever I want to do in the situation and they'll be the front facing interface, always friendly, always professional, no matter what I want out of that situation. And that's nice to have.

So if you say, you know what, yeah, why not, I'll grab a coffee sometime, they would still respond. They'd say, jumping in for Yaro. He had a great time on the interview too. And let's definitely get you two on the books for coffee. Like, they would still handle that, I suspect so.

I mean, you're giving me a situation where it's so like personal to me, it's face to face.

Well, that's it. Those are the tricky ones.

Yeah, I might, like just for the sake of speed, just say, hey, Jenny, like I'm going to be in. You're in the northern Manhattan part of town or the midtown. I'll be in that area this day. Does that work for you rather than us kind of like having a go between where it might be a little slower or exactly what you said. It might just simply be better case for you to book into a calendar with me and then I'll know that's a face to face meeting even though every other calendar scheduling is virtual. Sometimes when it's personal, though, I just like to take over because it's my personal time and it's got nothing to do with business. But a lot of our clients, you know, it's. Those two things are the same. Their personal time and their business time are one calendar managed by one person. So I think I'm probably unusual in the sense that I'm actually not busy at all. So sometimes I will just take over something like that because I actually just want to control. Good example, booking flights. I could delegate that in the team easily. But I'm so pedantic about what kind of plane I'm on, what time of day it leaves. I like to check options. Can I fly through this area first? And that would just create so much drama and extra steps for that person. Like, we'd both be annoyed because I'd feel like, are you sure you check this thing and this thing? So there's certain situations where I just still be the control freak, but they're very rare. All the business stuff is 100% handled. Well, not, I should say all the business stuff. There's certain very high level things I still do, usually to do with money and accounts, but most of the day to day is done by the team.

Well, it's so funny about travel. I'm the same way. I know the traffic patterns of where I'm coming from, where I'm going to seat has to recline. You got to put stuff in front of it. Can't be near the bathroom. There's like so many requirements. It's really interesting too. So I love hearing how your team has context and based on that context they could put something in slack for you. And that I love it. You're such a great free time case study. You're a true free timer because you're not that busy because you're not in the weeds. So then if it's someone you want to build a relationship with. The reason I gave you the podcast example is because it is ambiguous. And I know for myself. I'm on a lot of podcasts too. And sometimes I'm like jumping out of the house to meet up with that person again. And sometimes I'm like, there's just no way. I don't have the bandwidth. So it'd be hard to even set that rule. Do you have a rule that random coffee requests in person coffees or let's say even zoom coffees? Do you have a general rule that the team knows to say no or do they always check with you if someone says, yara would love to get together and learn about xyz. I mean, I won't say pick your brain because that probably gets an automatic no.

I stepped a little bit more behind the scenes when I started inbox diet. I mean, it became more and more behind the scenes. I totally understand where you're coming from. For back when I was front and center with my blog and my podcast and I was selling my course because I was the personal brand I was the coach, the mentor, you know, the person giving advice. So it was way more common to get that kind of pick your brain or oh, you're in my town, let's meet up again. That's the situation where I would very much, case by case, it for my coach business, it still exists. I have an assistant there as well. It's much smaller, much more side hustle. And I know Alex, whenever that kind of email comes through, it's more a case of context for that individual first. Like, you know, what is the prior relationship even? It's funny to say this, but who are they? Like some you can just do a LinkedIn look up. In fact, that's what I used to have for podcast requests. You know this very well. You get these can I come on your show emails. That's probably way more common for me now than the coffee meet.

We get five to ten a day sometimes.

Exactly right. So, you know, that's a vetting process. So. And I was like, oh, this is tough because I'm the one who has to do the conversation on the podcast. So I want to make sure I'm happy with who I'm inviting. And I kind of whittled it down with my assistant in that case. And I said, I need you to be the line of defense to get people qualified for the next step with me. So first thing we got to do is basic research on the person. Let's look them up on LinkedIn, check out their website, their blog, their podcast, or their social media, whatever they have. And I gave them specific criteria. I was like, I don't want any more bloggers who sell a course. It's ironic, that's what I was teaching. But I had had so many of that kind of person. I wanted to level up to maybe people doing software as a service, like a SaaS business. And I'm saying this, this is like in the last year or two with a rebrand. On my podcast, I wanted to kind of get a different type of guest. And I said to him another criteria, which is a little tricky. I said it, from now on, they have to be making at least a million dollars a year with their business. That's just a base level criteria. And that's not easy to tell. Sometimes you can't find that out. So he would do that initial research and if all the boxes got ticked, then it would get through to me and I'd be like the final decision. And then sometimes it would just be the method of them. I say this because I have an entrepreneurship podcast so whatever their method of making money, like if it was another property investor who just happened to buy a multifamily block of units and was making like they could call themselves like a multimillion dollar property owner, I was like, no, we can't just have one more after that. They all do the same thing, very similar ways, just in different cities around the world. So I was like, no, no more of that. But if someone came along and said, oh, they're building AI software for something unique, like I had some, you know, really cool green energy stuff, I was, oh, well, that's interesting and new, then it would get through to me. That's the beauty of working with a human being. I think this is what we forget about with a lot of delegation and systemization. We try and use apps and software and people think, I know, I'll build folders, I'll create some templates, I'll install some kind of software that helps me with reminders and I'll, you know, have this great system where I can put this kind of email in this folder and this email that folder and then it'll be cleaner and, you know, my inbox won't be as busy. At the end of the day, there's no one replying to those emails still. So by integrating a human being, you get the ability for them to reply for you. But more importantly, you get the ultimate intelligence, a human intelligence that can also be dynamic and adapt and get the context and then, you know, you can learn together the best way to deal with any kind of situation. And that's so true for all of our clients because everyone's different, personalities are different. I sometimes joke, because we have like a matching process where we match our team with our clients and something as simple as like one person's very leaning Democratic and the client's very leaning Republican might end up in like a big blow up every time there's a political situation situation or you know, just the way the client's doing something. And the assistant's like, I'm trying to be professional, but the way that what they're saying about Trump is killing me or something like that, you know, we gotta deal with those kind of situations too.

That's so interesting. Some of this may be proprietary, but can you describe the email machine that you have found works best? So when you're gonna take over someone's inbox, we know you have two assistants for redundancy. What is the basic machine that they set up? Like you said, there's things like filters and automation and canned responses. But is there anything that you've developed or discovered, having managed so many inboxes at scale, that is truly a game changer for enabling the business owner to do a successful handoff and step away?

You know, when I get this question, I always would like to give you a this system works. But. And there is some things I can tell you and I will, but. But the ultimate answer is the human being part of this because of all those things I just said that dynamic nature, the ability to adjust and learn. But what we will do is when we introduce you to assistants, they begin essentially a learning process to see what you have already going. What's the situation? Because some people, I don't know about you Jenny, but you might have 10,000 emails in your inbox unread and that's a big pile of email. And some people are not so crazy, but they have something going already in terms of systems. They've got some folders, they've got a few canned responses and maybe they're using a cleanup tool that does automatically move emails to certain places and unsubscribes them from newsletters. So we have to kind of get a lay of the land for what you're doing and how you do it now and then part of it is what parts of that process actually work and we will keep versus what we might change. Often I find this funny, but a lot of people will have like 20 folders and they just move all their emails into these 20 folders and they just disappear into that. And it's almost like you've created 20 new inboxes that you never look at. So often we're deleting folders and bringing it down to like the three that you actually will need on a day to day basis. I actually had that from my own inbox for a while. It was like the Yarrow, the no reply section where Yarrow doesn't need to see it. There was the Yarrow does need to see it urgently. And then there was the Yarrow should look at this once a month kind of thing. And that's most of it would be going through no reply. Like I didn't need to do anything with it. And every person is different though. So what that might look like for a baker versus a rabbi or a doctor is going to be different. But we'll do that first. And a big part of this is also learning about your writing style. I would go into your scent folder and see how you write. What's your culture in your company? Are you very friendly? Are you very short and, you know, logical and just try and get a feel for that. And who do you email most frequently and what are the most common situations. Just understand everything going on and how you do what you do now. And then with that knowledge in place, then we can go, all right, what we're going to do is, and this is always a suggestion, it's a strong one because you know, we're coming in as a specialist. So we want to make sure the client's happy with it too. We'll say, listen, we're going to eliminate this part of what you've got set up. We're going to create a whole bunch of templates. Probably going to use additional tool like maybe yesware. It's common, we use yesware just for more power with templates and reminders. Not necessary, but we like to use it. Then we're going to very much create documentation for processes. We call them SOPs. Most people know what that is. A standard operating procedure. It's not complicated. It's often just a Google Doc that documents, not just the email part of the process. Like a good example, you get a new client and as part of that you have to send a welcome email back to them. You have to inform maybe another team member to onboard that client. Maybe you have to update CRM like a customer management software, create some tasks in a to do list software, issue a receipt. So there's these procedures that are triggered upon a new client coming on board. And we document, okay, this email hits our inbox. Do this to this, do this to this. Your assistant will actually do all those things. But they also have the documentation for the future. That's in case we need to onboard a replacement or even an additional assistant. Sometimes they get three if they they're growing. More importantly, just the client has the documentation. Kind of like a little roadmap for running common procedures in their company. And then a lot of it's very bespoke around what is the best way to handle dynamic situations like calendar scheduling. You know, obviously we can use things like calendly to make that process a little bit more efficient with software. But often there's some kind of understanding that needs to be set up first about the context. Because like you were mentioning before with the coffee data, the podcast interview, it's like, who is this person? So sometimes there needs to be a dynamic human powered criteria first and then a procedure triggers. So it's like, oh, this person qualifies for the podcast. All right, trigger the podcast invite procedure, get them on the show get them in the calendar, make sure we collect their bio information. I'm sure you have something like that already, Jenny. So a lot of it is just procedures we will bring in adapted to what you do on a day to day, week to week basis with a little bit of software like I guessware but most of it's just Gmail or Outlook. We can do a lot just with the tools in there.

Do you have your team send you a roll up or a report or anything at the end of the week or the month like you had mentioned at one point? Maybe a daily summary or you know, do you just get any high level report that they synthesize from all this?

And this is from me again, our clients, everyone has what they want. So what I have and I'm a client I guess for our inbox done management team that manages me for our own company. So Ben and Armen are my assistants. Ben gives me a daily summary of bullet points of what he did that day. And that's just a little thing I like to instigate because I want to make sure I have a kind of a touch point for what's going on. I don't need to do anything. I can read it or not. And then there's once a week a summary of the status of leads because I'm basically the cmo, so the chief marketing officer. So I can see. Okay. You know, Jenny showed interest on the podcast. Have we got her do a discovery call yet? And you know, Ben will list all the people and where they are in our sales process behind the scenes, of course. He's actually doing that every day. He's the one who sends the emails to trigger sales but get people to become customers. He updates our HubSpot software, changing the status of people, you know, keeping all the information in there, the phone number, the email address, so I get those things. And then I will also get kind of high level or Yarrow specific things dropped in slack. So actually the podcast is a good example like I will because we've had some situations where I've just just missed the booking because it never got into the calendar. So we have like triple checks now. You know, Yarrow, don't forget you got to show up for that podcast today or tomorrow, you know, that sort of thing. So whenever those kind of situations arise, sometimes it's fun stuff like hey, this person just signed up or hey, this person says they know you. It can be very random. My co founder, we were sort of the top decision makers. So if there'll be a big Decision about how to deal with a unique situation that will be floated in Slack first. But really like 95% is just happening in the inbox and I'm just not seeing it. A little bit comes through Slack. What I used to have when I was sort of more like I said, the personal brand with my coaching business, I used to have that like a three folder structure plus Slack. So again Slack was for urgent decision making or routine recap information. But then I also had a Yarrow folder and I still have it for all my businesses where certain emails will be put in it and I check it once a month and more often than not there's nothing critical in that, but it might be like, oh, interesting newsletter, some kind of relationship building that's not urgent, that's only I can do. Could be information about an event I'm attending. It's just in there for me to access when I go to that event. I used to have like I said, a three structure. So I have the folder where I'd look at for my newsletters and research type info and I might look at that once a week and there was the stuff I knew I had to reply to urgently and that's where I would find it after I was told about it on Slack. And then there'd be like another folder full of nothing that I don't need to see at all, but it might be related to me like you know, oh you were mentioning this or something good happened but you don't need to know about it kind of thing. But it's very bespoke and dynamic so every client will be different. Like Jenny, you might decide. You know, I love this idea of a daily recap and I also love the idea of like following up on what our leads are for, signing up for coaching with you and then maybe you want a summary of your podcast stats, your downloads sent to you once a week and you know what was the top episode for that previous week or something like that. And then we do that and we just, you know, build that for you.

We'll be right back just after this.

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Tell me about what prevents a successful handoff. So where does it get the trickiest with your clients of making that transition from dabbling and you know, like the shadowing, the drafting. But maybe they're afraid or for some reason just don't want to or don't align. Like what gets in the way of them fully handing it off.

For most people, if they're not ready for it, they don't even sign up. So they will maybe do a discovery call and then hear about the process. Kind of like what I talked about with you on this podcast. And they go, I can't see myself being comfortable with a person doing half of the emails. Like they're too specific to me or I'm just not ready to be out of the loop. And then we come back and say, but you can be in the loop still. You can always check the sent folder to see how we're applying. You can always get an update in Slack if you need to know about certain things. But it's a mental habit thing. It's actually kind of funny because a lot of people, their to do list is their email. Like that's how they make a life. Every day they wake up and they open their inbox and that decides what they do today. And that's kind of scary because more often than not, the email is not the most important. Move your business, move your life forward. Tasks, it can feel like busy work, like you're, you're getting something done. I think that's one of the biggest things, the addiction to that feeling of archiving or you know, sending a reply and completing that process when most of those are not big decision, move your business forward. You know, life changing things. And this is what I often pitch to people. Like get us in there to take away. Even if it's just 60% or 70% and you still are doing 30% at least then you know you're doing the 30% that actually matters and you're freeing up whatever it is, an hour a day. And you can use that hour to write a book, start a new marketing campaign, create a new product, go to the gym, see your family, go travel. You know, the benefits are huge. Rather than just feeling like, oh, I got to clear the inbox and that that was your achievement for the day. So outside of that, the other kind of major concern, I guess for a lot of people is just budget. So, you know, there's a certain type of business, like at a certain size that this becomes realistic. Like if you can't say $2,000 for a couple of instance per month is not going to return the ROI in terms of time, back, mental freedom, relaxation, all those things, as well as potentially just growth in your business, then you're not quite there yet. And you might need to see what you can get done internally just with some basic systems to start with, but you know, plan as soon as you can get to that level where you can justify the cost.

It does seem like once you're at that level of investment, the person might wonder if they should keep it in house. Do you find that some owners are just debating, well, do I hire an outside service or should I just train up two people internally?

Usually one person internally I think is what's true.

They would never do two. You're right, you're right, yes.

I mean, more often than not, when a client is sort of shopping around, they're comparing us to other VA agencies, which I always feel confident because we're email specific if email is their problem or usually the best choice. Or in hiring internally a full time or part time person, which is sometimes the right choice. Like I don't want to say we're always the best option. There will be situations where they just need a person eight hours a day to be sitting there doing something that's not us because we check in twice a day, clear your inbox, do all your tasks. We're not like sitting there just waiting for things to happen for eight hours a day. It just doesn't make sense, especially with our business model. And if things are like very routine and basic and not complicated, that's when you do get a general VA and perhaps even a lower cost one offshoring it to Philippines or India. Like, we're all onshore, we're all American. We have a few overseas Australians, Europeans for other time zones. But most of our team are American based and American educated and that was a deliberate choice. We just want that level of English native speakers and so on. We also have a part of our business because it happens occasionally. It's rare, but people actually say, oh, I'd like to hire my inbox done assistant. Like, oh, you know, Jenny comes to us and says, listen, I love Sam, he's been amazing. Can I poach him from your company? And we have a buyout clause basically where if Sam is happy to come work for you, then we complete a buyout. There's a one time fee that basically covers the cost we went through to train that person and to extract them from any other clients they're working with us for. And then basically you can employ them on whatever structure you like. It's direct, we're not part of the relationship anymore. And if you want to give them full time work and benefits and all that sort of thing, you're happy to do. So. So we're kind of a try before you buy too. It's, you know, work with us on a month by month, partial, two people and then if you do 12 months later want to hire one of them, it is an option.

This could be its own entirely separate interview, so feel free to just zoom us through. But it stood out on your website that you say you carefully select English educated, top of their class communicators and you hire them through a ten step process. Can you just give us the zoom edition of your hiring process? And then how long are they onboarding? You don't have to walk us through in detail the onboarding, but can they get up to speed with you in a month? Does it take three months, six months? Curious about that.

The onboarding is again, everyone's different, but we have two phases. We have a matching period which takes two to four weeks and then we have the first 30 days of service. That's what their first payment covers too. So really you sign up, you make a first payment, you're paying for six to eight weeks of us working with you. Will you be 100% up and running at the end of that period? You definitely will have the basics done. There may be the second month where you're really nutting out some of the more dynamic situations. Obviously every week there could be a new email that hits the inbox that we've never seen before. So that's always an ongoing learning process. All the documentation, the knowledge base with the SOPs, we're always growing that whenever new situations arise. So I like to say you will feel really comfortable after three months, but you will certainly notice the impact after that first period. That first month. Often what happens though is because we focus on email and calendar, we do that first and we get that really well covered in the first month, maybe two and then the third month it's like, well, we are an EA service, we can do everything an EA can do. So that Third month they might say, oh, could you take over our social media inboxes, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, all the messages coming there, we can treat that like another inbox and build a system there and reply for you there as well. Same with social media in general. Maybe you're running Facebook ads and you're getting a lot of replies to your ads. We can reply to those replies. You know, be like a customer service social media person as well and then everything else, even booking flights, not for me, but for other clients.

What about onboarding your team? Like if someone new is going to start with Inbox Den, how long does it take you to train them to get up to speed on how you work?

The hiring process is what you'd expect in general for like an EA position. So we're going to be checking background. We're going to be expecting a certain level of English to start with broad technical ability because it is a technical role. You're dealing with software and services and expected to be able to learn new things with tools quickly and easily. But what's maybe a little different is we actually test directly how to reply to an email. That's what you're going to be doing a lot of. So we have essentially like a dummy client situation where here's three emails. Claire, my co founder and our hiring team run this. So it's probably not exactly these details, but this is what roughly how it works. So there'll be like a series of emails. Each client, sorry, each potential new assistant will go through and reply to them. And you know, it's dynamic, it's how would you deal with the situation where the answer is not black and white. It's a skill set where not only you have to be able to be like a robot and give the right answer to the right question sometimes it's a very touchy kind of. You could answer this in many different ways. We want to understand your thinking, why you decided to write that way and are you always friendly, patient, customer service facing, considering the client and how they have told you to do something or how you've learned about their style, their company culture, you know, what's the expectations around that. So we're trying to look for that through a process of giving you some emails that are not black and white to answer and see how you deal with it. Then we're going through an interview process. There's an interview with, with our hiring team and then I think a final interview with Claire, my co founder, who's our CEO. And then we have a course. So if you make it through the background checks, the interviews, the actual testing of your email writing ability, then you basically graduate and you go into a paid training round. So you get paid to take our internal course, which is about 10 hours, created by Claire, my co founder, who basically she was the first ever assistant for our company and she's a guru at email management. She's based anything in every situation. So she basically created a 10 hour course on not just how to be an email assistant, but how to work with a client because it is such a close knit relationship. Like you said, it's like running your life. So you want to make sure that you're ready for all kinds of potential personality clashes, communication issues. The most important thing is managing expectations on both sides, like what the client expects. You want to treat the assistant well, the client should be patient as the assistant's learning how to do this job. So we want to train on both sides that we train our assistants through that 10 hour training. They get paid for that and then they graduate and then we'll move on to their first client.

I love knowing that Claire was the OG assistant and then did such a great job that she ends up co founding the company with you. That's such a cool story. We're going to have to have Claire on next.

She is a bit of a reckless when it comes to being in the public.

So yeah, that's a good balance. And I know, right as I said it, I'm like, I bet she doesn't even say yes to these.

No, there was a period where we could, but not anymore.

Yeah. Last question before we wrap up. If you could give fellow business owners permission to do something differently or drop something altogether, what would it be?

You know my answer to this question.

I know what it's going to be.

Do you want to answer it for me?

Release those meat hooks off your email inbox.

Yeah, exactly.

Release your tight strangulation grip of your email. No, you say it in your words. Within this realm of letting go of email, what would you give them permission to let go of?

I love that you use the phrase permission. I think that is such a good way to describe how you have to let go of the habit around email. Give yourself permission to no longer be the person responsible for it, knowing that you can still be involved with what you think is mission critical. The 5%, the 10%, whatever it is. But just imagine what handing over 90%, even like I said 80%, 70% of your emails would do for how much time you get, how much free time, which you could then choose to do whatever you like with as I know your evangelist for Jenny. So it is, I think, the best productivity and time hack for any busy professional or entrepreneur or business owner because it's where we spend most of our time. So if we can hack out some of that time there, there's a lot of potential to give yourself permission to break free.

There's absolutely. And I love how you said that. Permission to be involved but not responsible for your email. Ooh, so good. So good. Yara, where can people find you if they want to learn more and keep in touch?

So inboxdone.com if you do want to book a call and actually potentially get us working for you and doing your email. And for me, I still have my blog so you can Google Yarrow Y A R O and you'll find my blog that way.

Awesome. And we can all just email you and then Arman will write back or we'll know.

That's right. Ben and Arman will be there.

Ben and Arman. Yeah, we'll be in great hands. Thank you so much. Yarrow. I just love what you're building and I love the view. Just imagine the perspective that you and Claire have of seeing email handled behind the scenes at scale is so interesting. So thank you for the work that you're doing and thanks for being a guest on FreeTime.

Thanks for having me, Jenny.

Bye everyone.

If you've listened this far, you get a gold star.

Thank you.

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