Gina Horkey — Virtual Assistants - How To Be One & How To ROI From The One You Have

This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Float. Shark with your boy.

My boy.

Matt Wolf and Joe Fit.

Hey. Hi.

Hey, Joe.

Hi there.

How you doing today? Why did you beat me to the punch?

Because I know you always try to get the first word in.

Yeah, but you always get the first word in when we start the interview.

See, Matt takes tallies. He keeps tallies of Howie.

But you know, this is true. This isn't a tally thing. You just know. This is a fact that you always start off the podcast during the interview.

This is a known fact. I like to mess with Matt's head.

Especially when he doesn't take my damn job. I'm the one who says hi when I press record.

Well, in fact, I don't want a job. Take it, Matt. Have fun. Good.

I say hi from here on out when we press record.

Your job, bro. Have fun with that. Who are we talking to today?

I was going to ask you that question. Taking my damn job again.

You're too slow.

We're talking to Gina Horkey.

Good job.

All right, now, what are we talking about with Gina today, Joe?

We're talking about she actually created something pretty damn amazing. And it helps not only entrepreneurs like you and I and most of us listening, but there's also a lot of us listening who are looking for a little side gig, looking to make some extra money or break into becoming an entrepreneur for yourself. That's exactly what she helps you with. Yeah. So she has, you know, you have virtual assistants. Vas? Well, everyone that she works with has this very clear outline. She trains them up, she preps them to become just a total B a B A A VA badass. A B A V A V, A B A. Yeah. So if you want to become a va b A, this could be good for you. If you want to hire a va b A, she's your gal.

I think it's better the other way around. A B A V, a badass virtual assistant.

That's it. B A va yeah, we're going to trademark that. And no, we're just going to give that to you.

Gina, that's yours. Gina, you can have it. You can use the word bava as much as you want.

Bava. We already bought the domain, so we'll just pass it to you. It's cool. Bava.com, probably not.

Probably not. Don't go to bava.com, it could be a porn site or something.

Just erase that. It's not us, but, Gina, it's all yours. Go. Trademark It. Yeah. So she basically helps if you're looking at an odesk, even though odesk is around, but an upwork or something like that. You know that there's two sides to the equation. There's the marketplace of people workers and then you have the people wanting to hire this guest or gals and that's what she does. But hers is super trained, systemized. You're gonna get someone who's just frickin qualified their quality too. And you're paying a little bit more, slightly more, but you're going to get. I mean, this is exactly how we hired Shannon. This is how we hired a few others on our team. And you know, basically you cut out all the noise. That's why you want to talk to Gina.

Yeah.

And if you're looking to make some more cash, talk to Gina.

Yeah, we're gonna talk about like being a freelancer or a va as like a side hustle. And also if you're an entrepreneur who needs to hire a going to talk about that too. And I wanted to give a quick shout out. I want to give a shout out to Lee from Shake Shack.

Oh yeah, Lee boy.

Lee from Shake Shack. We had a great conversation with Lee the other day when we went to get a burger. There's like one Shake Shack in San Diego and the guy behind the counter was Lee. And he took a, he took a lunch break and came and sat with us while we ate our lunch at Shake Shack. And we just shot the shit about, about business models and you know, where the economy's going and just a wide ranging thing. And we said, go check out our podcast, it's gonna help you.

I think he actually will. I hope he does.

I hope Lee hears this. And when Lee hears this, you need to send us an email or send us something on Facebook saying that you heard the shout out. So Leeake Shack, I just want Lee.

To do some great things, man, make some more money, have fun with. And this goes for everybody, obviously. But if you feel like you're kind of stuck somewhere that you're not super stoked with, this is a way out. And Gene is here to help out. Obviously we're here to help out with any of these episodes. You're gonna learn so much, but just apply it and take some moves. And if Lee does not reach out, let's give him a month, Matt. We know where he works.

Well, for now, for now, let's hope.

He doesn't leave that fast before reaching out. I want him to, but Shake Shack's pretty good. Maybe he can hook us up too, but either way, I want to go there to leave. We haven't heard back in a month. After this thing releases, we're going to shake shack. And we're like, lee, here's a damn phone. Go take a break. Listen to the episode. You might have to put it on speed because it's like, you know, triple speed since it's like 30 minute break or whatever. Yeah, go help yourself.

Yeah. Or you know what Lee could also do?

Go get them notes.

He can read the notes. Because you know what? We got an awesome badass team member named Steven who runs the Hustle and Flow shorts podcast.

What up, Steven?

And.

And he takes notes on all of these episodes so you don't have to take notes while listening.

It's better than how we, you know, we would never be able to write them notes.

Yeah, I mean, typically I listen to podcasts while walking the dog or going for a drive. Those are usually my two modalities of listening to a podcast.

I'm working out or I'm just sleeping.

Yeah, okay, you sleep and listen to podcasts.

It's subconscious.

Well, any programming. You know what you can do if.

You'Re not sinking, if you didn't catch.

It all, or you want to like go back and be like, what was that link they mentioned? What was that tool they mentioned? What was that, like five step process they mentioned? Go get the damn notes from this episode. They're available for a limited time, so when these episodes come out, we make the notes for the episode available for a very small window. You can go download them, get them for free, and they're yours. But if you don't get them in time, them notes go away.

It's kind of your bad if you miss the window of opportunity. So go get them while they're free. Evergreen profits dot com. Go find it. If you. If you don't see it on the list, there's a little search bar on the right side.

You know what?

You just moved a little bit to the top.

I should put a big banner in the sidebar that says get the notes here.

That's a great idea.

Maybe I'll do that. Hey, look for a banner on the sidebar that says get the notes here.

This is literally how we run our business. That's a great idea. Let's try it.

You know what's a great idea? We should go talk to Gina. Oh, yeah.

Stop dicking around here. All right?

We've been talking about Lee too much. Let's go talk to Gina.

Gina, how you doing?

I'm great. I'm so excited to be here.

Yeah, thanks for hopping on the show. And. And we were just talking about how, you know, we don't know each other too well yet. But you know, you came over, you wanted James Schramko's buddies and his friends and I don't know, is he, I mean, you went to his conference what just last week or two weeks ago?

Yeah. So I'm in Minnesota in the US and the conference was in Sydney, Australia where he is based. And I'm actually one of his Silver Circle members. So that kind of high level coaching program that he does, which is phenomenal. And since he was having the conference and I got a free ticket, I thought why not make a trip out of it. And my husband and father in law came along and they did some fun stuff where I went to the conference and then we hit up New Zealand on the way home. Best decision ever.

What do you do with the kids? I'm curious.

Well, so my mom is retired and she lives on our property. So conveniently worked out that she would take them and they were in school too, so she didn't get totally burnt out. Although I think there were some long days, I'm sure.

Yeah. Thanks, ma.

Yeah, I've never been to Australia, but I've done New Zealand a couple times. Where did you end up going to New Zealand?

So we stayed downtown Auckland, which was great because we got to see like the.

City center, the really tall building that you can go to the top of.

Yeah, yeah. That looks like the Space Needle kind of there.

And it was probably one of the best meals of my life. I had this just amazing salmon that I've never had before prepared in that specific way, I guess. And so we got to see a really great view of the city and the island. And then one other day we took a bus tour and so we actually got to go and see kind of the outback area and get a lot of history and sightseeing and it's just beautiful over there.

Yeah, I love New Zealand. I've. I've spent about six weeks total there. Two trips, three weeks each. First one was the north island, the second time we did the south island. And it's one of my favorite places on earth. In fact, I actually am looking at a picture right now of me and my wife and my ex business partner in Queenstown that have got blown up on my wall. So beautiful.

Nice. Well, earlier I was eating some wood taker chocolate from New Zealand and that is also very amazing. So another good thing that they bring to the table. But two or three weeks would be amazing. We were only there for like three or four days. We need more time. We'll go back for sure.

Oh yeah, yeah. It's always in reach. Even though it's a very long plane ride. We just talked about. You can do a lot on those plane rides.

Well, I mean it's 13 hours from, you know, flying out of LA, so you know, add a few more hours onto that for you.

Exactly.

It's a long haul.

I want to dig into you, your story and kind of what led you to the point where you're at now with everything you're doing with VAs, team building and your horky handbook, which I love the name, I love your branding too. Everything's super on point.

But just curious how you got there. My team will appreciate hearing those things, especially Darren. So thank you for that for sure. And the name is so creative. It comes from my last name which I was married into. It's German actually. I was blessed enough to go on a trip to.

Prague late last summer and my husband got to come along and it was a client sponsored trip so he got his virtual team together. It was so amazing and just a great place. But we took a day trip, just my husband and I to Germany and we actually saw like our last name, they added the Y when they came over here to the United States. So over there it's just H O R K E. But it was so neat.

Yeah, that's, that's, that's. I have like a whole bunch of German roots and even I think in Prague actually you know, my middle name, my last name, haven't been there but I know a ton of great.

You have to go. It's like huge. Tourism is a big part of their business. But again, so much history, so much beautiful architecture and great.

That's what I've heard.

Yeah. I want to, I want to get to Germany. I want to get to Czech Republic. I actually have family that lives in the Czech Republic kind of.

Are we brothers?

I don't know. We act like brothers probably.

My name is actually German too, but my family in Germany, their last name was actually Wolfgang. And when they moved to the US they shortened it down to Wolf.

Wolfgang sounds so much cooler. Wolf is cool too.

So how did you get into the entrepreneurial world? Like what first started, sparked that bug and what was your journey?

Yeah, so I think I've always been entrepreneurial, always been a high achiever, type A personality to an annoying fault, especially to myself. So, for example, when I was 10, 11 years old and we had the whole summer out before us, I was one of these people that would take lined paper and I would plot out my schedule for the day. So I would plot in when I was going to do a little exercise or go play with my friends or watch a certain show on tv, because it worked that way back then.

I guess that was just kind of ingrained in my personality from an early age. I actually started college early in the state of Minnesota. They have this great program where if you go, you can get it paid for. And so I went for my junior and senior year actually on campus at a community college. And then I graduated with my bachelor's when I was 19 years old.

Wow.

Yeah. The funny part is I totally turned 20 the next week. So I like to say it because it's impressive.

You put it right under the.

Right under the. So anyways, from there I moved into a career kind of in the weight loss industry. I managed a weight loss center and I was able to like really turn around their revenue and had like month over month growth. And I was like the center director of the month every month and then the year. And. And there was this really capped ceiling that I ran into very quickly. And so unless I wanted to move to California, that I couldn't go any further. And so I. I changed gears. I got into personal finance, which is another sales position. Right. Building business. And I did that for about a decade. And that's kind of the transition. Then into this virtual space is I worked for a really great small practice nearby and I was doing part support work. And then I had my own small client practice as well that I would service. And I was kind of the go to person. So they were all family members at the time. They've expanded their team since then. But they would go to the lake of the woods, which is in Canada, where they have a cabin, and they would leave me with like the front, which was totally fine. I could totally manage it. But it was a great way to learn a lot of the skills that I'm putting into play these days. I was basically kind of unfulfilled in that career. We had started a family, even though it was a small business, and there was flexibility. I only actually worked four days out of the week at the end because I had negotiated that. It just wasn't what I wanted to do for the next like 30 years. Because 10 years in that environment, I mean, that's, that's solid, right?

Sure.

But because of my Weird personality issues that I was mentioning. Early on I felt that if I changed careers I was like admitting some sort of failure to all the clients that I had taken on. And just everyone in my sphere that knew that's what Gina was, she was a financial advisor. And at one point my brain just got tired of thinking that way and I thought, well, what else? What's more, you know, why am I limiting my potential here? And I started reading great books like the four Hour Workbook Week. And I read some stuff from John Acuff, like Start and immersing myself in this kind of online space. And I happened upon freelance writing for the web of all things. And I thought, hey, I like to write for fun. Anyways, I had written a couple first drafts, mind you, of some fiction novels and I'm pretty, you know, put together when it comes to communication, especially in the written form. And even though I didn't have a journalism background, I thought, I'll give this a shot. And so I started to get up at like 4 o' clock in the morning at this time. My husband had quit his job the year before and so he became a stay at home dad. So we had like a maybe 9, 10 month old and then our kids are 19 months apart, so whatever the math is on that a two year old and I used like two hours in the morning to really just start this freelance writing side hustle. And, and that evolved then into me taking on some more virtual assistant type clients, doing some customer service and email management. And then I started to do some teaching because everybody was so excited about kind of the way that I was living my life, which was against societal trends. So you know, we have a non traditional family anyways with the husband being the one that raises the kids. And then I had started this online business and I quit my job and sold my little practice and I was working from anywhere. And that's kind of the sum of it. Sorry if I went on too long.

No, not at all. That's amazing. And I love the fact that you, well, you have this flexibility. Your husband's there to support and support you as well. Obviously the family along with you. And the fact that you're up at 4 in the morning, Holy crap, not my hour.

Hey, you have to work when you can. And my brain awake in the morning. It's definitely. I'm not a night owl type of person. But one of the greatest things about our journey so far is before we went to the Australia, New Zealand, New Zealand trip, we had spent half of January and all of February for the fourth year in a row going down to South Padre Island, Texas. So we're just north of the Twin Cities in Minnesota. Winter sucks here. Like I feel like we had a second winter even when we got back, you know, March 1st.

Right. It was weird weather this year though.

Yeah. And so we go down there and there's all these retired people and then us. And so they have all of these grandparents and my parents actually go down there too. So they have their real grandparents parents and we spend our day swimming and going to the beach and doing that fun stuff.

I love it. I can relate with you on that fact that my wife and I, we were barely even dating. We actually bought a timeshare when we were like 20 or something. It was super stupid and bad investment, but we made it work. And still. Yeah, we still, when we travel, it's always like, you know, 70, 80 year olds or whatever. And then there's us, we're like, hey.

But they're good people.

Conversation without a smartphone and it's good to go.

Well in the wisdom there too. There's a lot of entrepreneur like or different thinking type individuals. Doesn't matter the age, but the wisdom, that's where we have fun with it. So it's yeah, great conversations, but it's always funny. I'm like, wow, we live a different life and I think it's like we're in our bubbles a lot of times but until you kind of go into the public, you're like, oh yeah, we live differently.

The rest of them live.

Just kidding.

It's great though because like I now, I'm five years in now have people for my real life that are like, okay, obviously what she's doing is legit. Like how do I get involved? How can I have something similar? And I have all these resources at my disposal to help them on their journey and really taking control over their career future. That's what it's all about. So our tagline for our websites, I don't know if this is explicit or not, but it's helping people to find or become a kick ass virtual assistant. So if you have to bleep that out, go for it. Great. Awesome. Whatever word we can replace it with.

You can say whatever you want on here.

We've definitely had much worse words.

It's wonderful because literally the target demographics for us are people that want to become virtual assistants. Although we really help entrepreneurs and small business owners get connected with them. And we'll talk about really lot of how and why here in a little Bit. But our audience tends to be stay at home parents, mainly women, because the male thing isn't quite as popular yet. They just want to bring in some additional income for their family and, you know, be able to be home and raise their kids. We also have people like myself that are career changers that want to do something completely different and realize the freedom and maybe more unlimited income potential that comes with online business and providing services. And then military spouses are great, too. Again, this can be man or woman, but typically it's women. They're moving all the time. And can you imagine trying to hold down a career and every two, three years, you're having to move somewhere across the country and start over, Right?

No way. No way.

And then our last group was kind of the group that we just talked about. They're recent retirees that are a little tech savvy, that have some time on their hands and want to supplement their retirement income.

Trust me, I'm like, my parents are about to retire and I keep talking, talking to my mom. I'm like, hey, so, like, you're smart lady. But she doesn't want to, like, feel like she has to be obligated to something, but.

Right?

Yeah, it's. A lot of folks feel like when they retire, it's like, okay, well, I don't. I just have, you know, this one income. It's not going to change for the rest of my life. It's like, no.

Well, there's a lot of fear there. You know, being in the previous position that I was in personal finance, I had these conversations with people all the time. So not only, like, do I need to supplement my income? Which is an easier thing to figure out, but the other thing is, like, what am I going to do with my time if I went from spending 40 to 60 hours in a work environment and commuting and all that kind of stuff, and now I don't have any other hobbies or things to take up that time. Like, people still want to be productive. And you can look at research that shows that they're healthier for it as well.

Yep. They'll live longer, better brain health, stay, you know, kind of new at the time. So, yeah, so maybe I can turn my mom into like, hey, when you retire, I got a plan for you. Listen to this episode in a couple years.

So what is the Horky Handbook? Can you kind of quickly tell us what it is?

Yeah.

So it evolved and it started really as just a place for me to house my own freelance writing samples. And it was great. Because not only did I have an online portfolio there, I started blogging and growing an audience. But the cool thing is I learn all these new skills. So learning the back end of WordPress is like a no brainer for a virtual assistant because most of the blogging platform is on there or website platforms or whatever and it's just a good skill to have in your own tool belt. But yeah, so I started growing this audience just sharing what I was learning. I did the whole income report thing for the first couple of years and that was really helpful to other people that were starting their own journeys. And then it evolved in there into teaching free freelance writing, into teaching virtual assistant stuff and we've really doubled down in the virtual assistant space because remote work is just such a huge thing. So we have a blog that has lots of great information both on freelance writing as well as different services to offer as a VA and how much to charge and all of the things. And there's a lot of actually content geared towards the entrepreneur, the client side of things and how to choose somebody and how much to pay somebody and what types of tasks they should take off your plate. And so really great resources. And then we have a slew of online products that are in the way of courses where we teach.

So this is cool because I want to. You do a lot and it seems like you help with the processes and all that stuff as well. So VAs and the common virtual assistants, it seems like a lot of people will associate that with, oh, offshore workers or Philippines and India, whatever. But I think most of yours are US based, right? Everyone you work with.

And there's nothing wrong with that. There's great. We actually have a couple of students that are from the Philippines that ponied up enough money to be able to join our course and are working with more US based people and charging higher rates, which is kind of fun to see. But the majority of our audience and our student base are people that are in the United States and Canada. We're Western Europe, the UK and England and then actually Australia and New Zealand. We have a fair amount of people that are from those areas. Areas as well. It's amazing because you'll get a woman in our community that has her master's degree and is again, you know, needing to go back maybe into the workforce after taking a couple of years off. Like she's obviously very educated and has some skills and experience behind her, but she's wanting to do something different and supporting other businesses and their growth in all these various ways. You guys Know, like, this environment is extremely challenging, but in the best way possible because it's so interesting. Everything that changes and gets layered on and improved over time. Like, we can talk about everything from email service providers to marketing funnels to, you know, doing paid advertising. Like, it goes on and on and on, and it's just really interesting, I think.

Yeah, I mean, that's. That's exactly why we have a podcast, is because we find all of those topics fascinating and we just want to talk about them all the time.

Yeah. So it seems like with your service and just everything you do, you almost have like both sides. So you really help folks who are looking to, like you were saying, a lot of these folks who move around or they're retired or whatever and looking for a gig at home. And then at the same time, you're helping business owners like us to find someone who's, you know, kind of trained, systemized and specialized, reliable, smart, can be.

Proactive, a lot of great things. Right. So if you were to look at our revenue, where we actually make money, it is on the PV that decide they want to become virtual assistants or further their education in that way. So we kind of help the entrepreneurial small business owner crowd for free. Which is cool because I run in the same circles and I know people need good help and they want to scale by building a team. They don't necessarily want to manage a team, and we can get into that in a little bit, but it's also a win all around. So I know that if I can make my students as successful as possible by teaching them skills, teaching them processes, setting them up for success, and how to manage a client relationship and communicate and all that good stuff, and if I can then come aside beside them and help them actually get hired by clients that come in through our VA Lead, or VA Finder, I guess, portal, which is a free service of ours, then it's just they're going to be more successful, they're going to talk more about it, they're going to be happier. Like, it's all just going to come back to me in different ways. So my favorite emails to get are, you know, from people that are like, gina, I just quit my job. Omg. Like, I'm super nervous, but even more excited because I've been able to achieve this level of success already.

That's cool. So let's. Maybe we start. Well, actually first, let's. So what was it called? VA Finder. For, like, entrepreneurs, business owners to reach out to you and check out.

Yeah, we just have a Great form that really encapsulate all of the questions and information we need from you to put basically a lead doc together that we put in front of our premium community.

Got it. Very cool. So where can we direct people? Because we can link this in the show, notes and stuff.

Sure. It's just if you go to the homepage on working handbook.com, there's find a VA in the top menu bar, click there and it'll provide you the information to get started again. Free service, no pressure, you don't have to hire anybody. But it's great to get a dozen or 20 qualified applicants and that honestly is usually the amount that we just hired within our own team and we always put it out in front of our community. So if you look at my own team, it's people that I've taught and I mean that's so rewarding for me as well. And like I said, they're a great group of people, super smart. So typically you're gonna get somewhere between 10 and 20 people that are gonna pitch you. They're hopefully gonna pitch you via a video because that's one of the methods that we train on. We want them to set themselves apart from the competition. And it's great to get to know somebody in a one or two minute video because you learn so much more about their mannerisms and their energy level and all the things.

Yeah, makes sense. So now on the other side of it, we could talk about how listeners here or even others, how they can maybe get started with just becoming a VA or maybe some of these qualities that you think are super important that these folks should know about if they're looking to make some side cash or maybe kickstart their own business.

Yeah.

Not sure to where, where to start there, but.

Well, you want to go with like the traits like who makes for a good va, maybe start.

Yeah. Okay.

I mean I think that you have to be entrepreneurial minded to some extent. We talk about in the course different ways to market yourself and I think there's a dozen or so options, both online, offline, in person. We kind of go about it from all angles. And one of the reasons why is because of my experience. So growing up in the financial services industry and even before that in a sales kind of management environment, like I learned all of the things when it came to marketing and then when I got into online business, it was able to enhance it even more. So so I get to share all of that. And there's different things that work better for different people and personality types. But Basically you have to realize that you're starting your own business and so you're responsible for finding clients. And if you never go about putting yourself out there and putting yourself out there for hire, you're probably not going to be very successful. Right. So what I had said is that we have like a section on like working with an agency within the course. That's probably my least favorite way to get clients because you're not getting paid your full worth. An agent, owner, and they're not bad people, love them, is going to take a, you know, a cut of the earnings of what they charge the client and then they're going to pay you less. And that's how they profit in their own business. Now the upside is that you're not out there beating the pavement potentially for your own clients, but you still have to be good enough to get hired and stuff by the agency.

That's. I don't know. We've been there. We've been on both sides of the coin being the agency owner and also working for an agency, as I know I have. And yeah, it can get a little stressful. And you're like, I can make so much more money if I did.

My virtual assistants that do go that route, that are really successful, like the entire entrepreneur, the client ends up having to like buy out their contract, which isn't the most positive experience for anybody if they want to keep them, you know.

Right, right. What kind of money can like a VA make?

Yeah. So besides being entrepreneurial minded, if I can just finish answering that question.

Oh yeah, definitely.

I think organized, it's good if you have a great communication skills, whether it's verbal written, all the things, let's see, reliable, like when people are saying what they want from somebody, they want somebody that they like, that they trust, that will show up, that will communicate with them and keep them updated on what that project is and where we're at and what they need and when it's going to be done kind of thing. So those are pretty basic skills, but some people lack them, unfortunately.

And so the next question that you.

Asked was again, how much, how much could somebody make as like a va?

Yeah. So the limited research that exists that we still cite on our sales page and website is 25 to $40 an hour in the North America space. I can tell you from our student pool, though, the lowest that you'll probably find is $15 to $20 an hour, at least in the domestic United States, Canada, the areas that I was talking about earlier. But it can go on up to over a hundred dollars an hour. And that's going to be more specialized skills and services that they're offering. I made more than that myself. And it was because I was transitioned and positioned myself on more of a retainer model than an hourly rate. So a lot of VAs will start at an hourly rate. It's a good way for them to get their.

Foot in the door as well as figure out is this worth it, you know, or ensure that their return is worth it on both sides of the fence. And then many people go to package pricing or a retainer model. And that's a good way that as you get more efficient as a virtual assistant that you can increase your own income.

Yeah, that's super smart. It's almost like test it out with the hourly and then have, have the mindset or the idea or maybe even agreement with the potential client you're working with. It's like, okay, in like a few months we're going to turn this into a, a retainer model. You know, if everything checks out, we all like each other. After this test period, would you suggest something like that?

As long as the scope creep doesn't come into play where they're asking to do more and more things and not offering any additional pay, it can be a beautiful thing because the client knows what to budget for and what they're getting in return. And the VA has some sort of secure income. And when I was building my business, I was totally focused on long term consistent clients because I had this family to feed and I wanted to make sure I had this base income to at least cover our minimal expenses. And most people are that way. And then you can always fit in one off projects, you know, when you have extra time or want to make extra money, which is great too.

Gotcha. No, are you, are you teaching most of the VAs to go and like kind of work with like one person or should they be like kind of diversified and working with a lot of different clients?

We've had a few people that have like ended up getting hired as employees and that ended up being a good route for them. But the majority of people are working with anywhere from. And this is based on the time that they have to dedicate their business. Probably two to 20 clients in any given period of time. Like it's hard to really hone in on that. But for example, one of the kind of case study student success story profiles I was putting together over the last couple days, she works full time and she works for four clients offering Pinterest services and makes over $2,000 a month. So just as her part time gig, that's what she's able to earn working with just four people on the side of her full time job. And when I started my business too, I was up to $4,000 a month within six months of even looking into it. And that was on the side that was utilizing that time. The morning that I was talking about, it was utilizing some evening hours and I had that Friday on, so I would work then and sometimes on the weekend too. Like there's a tipping point, right? You're working for people and you're basically still to some extent trading time for money. And so you can only work some so many hours before they're all gone and you're divorced and your kids hate you.

Well, I imagine too if you're like entrepreneurial, it's a great way to sort of test the waters in a bunch of different niches and industries and you know, you know, business models and marketing strategies. And you, you kind of get this opportunity to test a bunch of stuff.

You get paid to learn is basically what it comes down to, which is amazing. I mean, if you're working with successful entrepreneurs, you get to be the person behind the curtain looking around and it's amazing what you can apply to your own business and to other people's businesses. Obviously not any proprietary information. Like we're going to be completely confidential and have this agreement with our, our clients that we're not going to share their secrets and things like that. But yeah, that was a huge perk because the business I have now was not the business I started out with five years ago. But I bet if I didn't work with the clients that I did, I don't know that my business would look the way that it does right now.

Yeah, that's same as ours.

Now are there any like skills that a VA. Are there any skills that if VAs learn, like these handful of skills, they're going to set themselves up to make the most amount of money. Like, are there any really sort of specialized or specific skills where you find that somebody could really make great money doing it?

Yeah. So the interesting thing about how we define a va, it might be a lot different than how other people might define it. Well, first of all, if you're in the United States and you hear the term VA for the first time, you might think about the Veterans Administration before you think of virtual assistant, because that's what we constantly are referring to, like the VA hospital or whatever.

Right.

But how we define it is really just threefold. It's that somebody is trading time or services in return for pay for a client who needs those services from afar. So it's pretty basic and a lot of things can then fit underneath the the VA umbrella, writing being one of them. And that's kind of why we made the move and focuses that we did with with in the last 18 months. Writers don't like to be called VAs though. And honestly, more women will classify themselves as a virtual assistant than men. Men tend to specialize and then take on a new title pretty quickly. And that's just one of those male, female things that they have figured out a little bit sooner than we have.

Interesting.

So like I'm the CEO of Content development at Matt Inc.

Right. And I have one client and I am bestseller.

Do you guys actually have a lot of writers on your. In your team there or.

We do so for our site. Like I haven't done any content writing beyond newsletters, which I love writing. And that's because I'm a little bit more personal about what I talk about for our blog. So Miki is our blog manager. She was my first hire and we have a paid community that goes along with our VA course, which is the flagship product that we offer. And way back when she said, hey Gina, going to be a point where you're not going to be able to like moderate all of this stuff, maybe hire me to help you. And so I'm pretty sure we agreed to $100 a month and she was my very first virtual assistant hire. She was in Philadelphia at the time and now she is over in Europe and she's our blog manager. And so I pay her a retainer on a monthly basis and she creates new content and we'll do formatting and stuff if we had a guest post or right now we're trading posts with this really company to get some some SEO link juice back and forth as well as referrals from one another as audiences. And so she's going to be managing that. So our community, because I started teaching freelance writers and I started in that industry myself, is a lot writing based. But you know what, virtual assistant work can be a lot writing based too. If you're doing Facebook ads, if you're doing email management, you might be helping somebody ghostwrite an ebook. Like there's so many things, sales funnels, emails, all of that kind of ties in. But you don't have to be the best writer out there because not all of the tasks will go underneath that writing umbrella or Require those writing skills.

It's all content at the end of the day.

Right. So we have a designer on our team, her name's Erica. She's amazing. And we have a lot of like templates and different PDF tools to help people to put things into action as they're going through the material. And she just revamped and read it, all of those. And they're so pretty, I love it. But they also look way more valuable. Even though it's similar content, it's just displayed in a completely different way.

Yeah, yeah, I know it's, it's content and then just kind of molding it to however. Yeah. Is most appealing.

Yeah. No, people have asked before, like, you know, I'm sure you've heard the question a lot, like, if you were starting all over again, what would you, what would you do if you were, if you had to start from scratch? And my kind of stock answer that I always tell people is I would probably go and be a freelance writer, try to get as many gigs as I can doing freelance writing while trying to build, you know, some sort of business on the side, you know, be it like a software company or a information marketing business or something. But I would start by generating my money through freelance so that you, you know, you have that time freedom, you start to get explore different skill sets, different topics, different niches. You start to build a network real quick of the people that you're working with. Like that is a great foot in the door. It's a great sort of proving ground and it's a great way to make money.

Yeah, I think leveraging skills that you already have and experience that you already have and a lot of people will think they don't have as many skills as they actually possess. And so that's one of the things that we do in the early part of the course is really unearth what services would be a good fit for them and what services exist and target markets and all of that kind of stuff. But I started with writing because like I said in my story earlier, like, that's what I knew how to do or at least enjoyed. I actually didn't start writing in personal finance right away, which is interesting because it's a very lucrative field. My first few articles were around gluten free couponing. I ghost wrote them. I was not gluten free and I did not coupon. It's a lifestyle practice. And then my next ones were doing reviews of WordPress, WordPress themes. I did not know what a WordPress theme was when I took that in. But it paid $7.50 per 100 words or whatever it was. So, yeah, I think it's great to challenge yourself to start with the skills that you have and then to challenge yourself into other niches. And then again, that's just. Just such a learning experience. So I agree with you there. Definitely. Offering services online. Easiest way to get started in online businesses.

Yeah.

No, it's funny. Our first blog content was about personal finance. Yeah. Our very first blog we ever released was a blog in the personal finance space because that was my major in college.

And then after that, there you go.

You started with what you knew. Yeah, I was. I think I had some other complications because I was licensed and still had a practice. And so I think. I think when I had sold my practice and stopped practicing, then I was freed up to do more because there's different compliance elements involved and all that. Good stuff.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, we don't even talk about it that often, but Joe and I actually started as freelancers.

We did.

I basically got my start by installing WordPress blogs for people. They would hire me on a flat fee. They charged 50 bucks ahead. And I would go and install WordPress to set up like. Like a theme and like three or four plugins for them and invoice them. And I would do three or four of those a day. And that was my business when I started out.

Oh, yeah, you can keep it super simple. I did video production for a lot of people and yeah, just. Just crank out the project invoice and it's the referrals that come from projects like that. Yeah, like, that's usually the main driver for new business.

Yeah.

As long as you're a good worker, you can communicate well and present yourself nicely to people, then you're doing all right.

That's a good kickstart, 100%. Where did you guys find your first clients? I'm curious.

Forums, like niche forums back, you know, this was 2000.

What's that, like Reddit or before that?

I mean, it wasn't before Reddit, but it was like niche forums. Like. Oh, are you familiar with, like, the Warrior Forum? There was like a big marketing forum called the Warrior Forum. I think it's still around. I haven't visited it in seven years or something.

Like Internet marketing focused forum. We were also a part of a coaching group that had a forum aspect. So we like, networked with the other members, but the other members had different styles of businesses. So that's how I got video clients. I know, Matt.

Yeah, that's how I got WordPress clients.

You got WordPress clients. We found partners there eventually too, but it was all networking. Yeah.

Yeah.

Is it fun to look back and just be like, is it like, oh.

My God, yeah, I really got here.

But I never planned to get here in the spot I am right now. And I bet you anything in three or another five years, I'll be somewhere completely different. Hopefully it's along the same vein, because this is. I'm really passionate. I don't know if that comes over the microphone or not, but.

You are. Yeah. No, it does. No. Your business will prop. I mean, I would bet on it that it'll change. I mean, ours have over the last 12 years. And it's exactly what you said. We just constantly. I don't know, we've always just. It's a new evolution, every business. And, you know, being the agency, like going back to that talk like hiring people like your VAs, we and ourselves, like, we were kind of learning while getting paid for it. But then we realized our. Even as an agency owner, even though we were hiring other people, our income was capped. We're like, shit, why don't we just do this stuff for ourselves? Then we started selling affiliate products, but using the content marketing skills that we built over the years and as an agency. But we exponentially grew our income with way less work, no headaches to clients. So it's like that was our evolution. And it's interesting, you know, now on.

The, on the flip side of the VA equation, for entrepreneurs who are looking to get VAs.

When do you think is a good time to like to start bringing on team members before you're maxed out?

So when most people look is when they realize they can't do it all on their own anymore. The downside to that is that they're too busy to train somebody in properly and find the right fit. And so sometimes there can be some wrong decisions that are made and there's not enough communication and training offered, and then both parties are kind of frustrated. So if it's possible, just like you set aside money for taxes and money for reinvesting in your business, if you can start setting aside money for hiring your first team member before you're really ready, that will help you to scale faster in the long run and make it a more enjoyable process overall.

Yeah, no, we actually, when we had a guy by the name of Mike Bakalowitz on our show, he wrote a book called Profit first and more recently a book called Clockwork. And he actually basically, the Same concept. He said, figure out what you would pay if you were to bring on a VA. Figure out what you would pay that VA. Let's say maybe it's $200 a week, $300 a week. I don't know, I'm just making up numbers. But let's say you were going to pay this VA $300 a week. Well, start paying a savings account $300 a week. Like they're a VA. Yeah. And then, and then, you know, after three months or something, now you have three months worth of that VA's pay. So you know, you have at least a little bit of a Runway to work with them.

Takes the herd away. Yeah.

I think you guys asked about earlier, like how many clients? Like, I think a big news misnomer is that a business owner needs to be ready to hire like a 20 hour a week person. And that's not at all true. So the great thing about offering the VA finder service is like, I'm really in tune with the needs of my peers and it's great because I can convey that information to the audience that I teach to become better at what they do. But I'll see that the majority of gigs out there are people that are looking for less than five hours of help a week. Their budgets are somewhere between two and four hundred dollars a week and they're looking for various services, whether it be social media, project management, email management, WordPress management. There's a ton of different services that they're looking for for sure. And we address most of them. So yeah, it doesn't have to be as big of an investment to get started working with someone. And do you want to talk a little bit about some of the ways to make a positive ROI in hiring somebody like a virtual assistant?

Yeah, that sounds amazing. So basically like quick wins. Yeah, let's do that because that's curious. And I had another question, but I think it'd be better probably after this.

Yeah, I was just gonna make a comment real quick that I feel like most of the entrepreneurs we talk to, they wait too long to hire. They don't. You rarely find people that claim that they hired other people into their business too soon. You always hear people saying, once I hired people, I wondered why I didn't do it sooner. So most people hire and that's why.

It was really fun for me that somebody was like, hey, you need to hire me. And I was open to the idea. And then I realized that I could do that with other things as well.

In order to scale well Actually, you know, before the ROI thing, how are. I don't know if you coach or what have you seen, like, the biggest roadblocks for people actually hiring someone? Because I feel like as entrepreneurs, you feel like you kind of do it all or it's my baby, or I'm the best in the world at this thing. How do you break that? Or how do you. How have you seen people break from that?

I just talked to my bookkeeper before I was talking to you guys, and she had put out a call for a position to our audience maybe six months ago, three months ago, at least. And she's like, gina, I have to tell you, I'm really struggling. I have two really good candidates, and my son keeps yelling at me for not having had hired somebody already and started implementing. I just don't want to make the wrong decision. And we just got done with tax time, and I was so busy and overwhelmed that I didn't have enough time. And so it's the same excuses why we don't do things like more marketing.

Or whatever or working out or whatever.

You do have to realize that it's an upfront investment thing, so not only in some sort of pay, but also in time. And that's where, again, if you get started before you're ready, you will have that extra capacity in order to go through that process. But it is. You got to pay a little bit now to get bigger payoff in the future. So the easiest way to do that is to review your to do list. I actually learned this marketing technique from Noah Kagan from a podcast interview that he had done, I believe. And it's when you're prospecting as a virtual assistant and you're talking to people, ask them what's been on their to do list for over two weeks, what are the things that remain important yet haven't gotten done. And so that could be a good strategy for yourself when you're analyzing, okay, I know I need some help, but I'm not really sure what I should outsource first. I would take a note from James and I'll recommend his book a little bit later. But measure your effective hourly rate. Know where you're at first, and then know, okay, if you were freed up for two hours a day, what could you be doing with that time in order to increase your revenue? And then if you can pay somebody less than what you would be making, you're making a profit. Right? So one of the ways to scale is to increase your. Your ROI through team and support. But that's not the only reason that people hire help. They hire help because they don't want to do certain activities, like the mental energy that it requires in order to do customer service for their business. And constantly feel like they're defending themselves or, you know, feeling bad because somebody requests a refund or a failed payment or whatever the case may be, that's valuable. So if you can keep in your zone and you can keep focused and, you know, churning out the good stuff that makes you the money, like that is worth it alone too. But it usually will come with some upside monetary potential. It also could be that you just want to buy back some of your time. So I know that people are looking to lead different lives now. And a 40 hour work week or 60 or an 80 depending on the career that you're in, isn't acceptable anymore. Like they want to be able to work maybe 30 hours a week. And so if they need to buy back 10 hours of their life by being able to outsource some tasks, that's a great option for them as well.

We're actually, this is brought up and this is totally random, but remember the guy Matt that we're at Shake Shack just yesterday. This is like super random. It just hit me because we met this. Matt and I were wearing the same shirt. It was called Closing Table. It's one of Roland Frazier and the digital marketers, like masterminds. We're not part of it, but we spoke there last week and we were both wearing the shirt yesterday, Matt and I, and went to Shake Shack. The guy's like, I have so many questions. Like immediately looked at. I'm like, whoa. Okay. And it was interesting. This guy actually went on his lunch break and sat with us and he might actually listen to this because he said, I'm going to check out your podcast.

His name was Lee.

Lee.

Hey, Lee from Shihuacu. If you're listening, if you're actually listening.

That would be amazing. Reach out to us. But he was talking about, you know, just looking for jobs and jobs in general. I'm just thinking, I'm like, this is like a no brainer job that, that pays way more than a company like.

That or probably your own hours and.

You set your own hours. Your location doesn't matter. Like I'm like, more people need to hear about opportunities like this because most people think of like Uber. Oh, well, I gotta drive like 20 hours a day to make.

Barely make any money too.

Right.

And they have to deal with drunk people.

Yeah.

Uber's largest business model is to face is to phase out the human element. Their business model is to eventually have autonomous cars driving people around so they're not in it to, to, to, to create gigs for people. They are now, but that's not their long term vision.

Yeah, yeah, I don't know, just thinking of that, I'm like, man, that was a prime. Like that was a dude that has a lot of smarts, has a lot of smarts.

I'm like, this is, know how to leverage them.

Totally.

This opportunity exists and then it's not a scam. Cause I think that's where a lot of people get caught up is they're not familiar with this world, which is amazing, and they think that everything is a scam because there are scams out there. Um, but you just have to be smart and intuitive, right? Like if somebody asks you for money in order to get a job, I mean beyond doing training and education, like if they ask you for money so that you can work for them, that's a red flag. Don't hate them. Or if they like refuse to pay a deposit or give you certain personal information that you would need in order to conduct something, or if it seems like it's too good to be true. Like LinkedIn is a great place to connect with clients, but there's that, that's where one of the scams is pretty prevalent, where people will contact brand new VA profiles and be like, oh, we have this gig, it's like $4,000 a month for like 10 hours a week and we think you'd be perfect for it. And I don't know what they end up trying to do on the back end, but that's kind of like that over promise under the deliver. And people get their hopes up and then they get their hopes demolished and then they're like, well, is there any real clients out there?

Yeah, I want, I want one of the listeners in this show to like troll one of those LinkedIn people and just see what they're doing. Like if this ever, if anybody ever, like, I'm just curious, like you said, it's like, what are they doing on the back end?

Like, is it, what's, what's the scam basically?

I don't know. Yeah, I'm just now I'm just curious. It's an open.

I bet it's something like they, they reach out and say, hey, we've got this opportunity. Oh, by the way, you know, you have to pay in to be a part of it. And it's now that person's like in their mlm downline or something, right?

Yeah. So can I tell you a story that was kind of like an aha moment for me when you're watching the beach in Texas?

Yeah, please.

Okay. So I was collecting the. They have these beautiful. I call them butterfly shells, but I don't know what their real name is because I don't look into things like that.

They're multicolored and they're really small. So think about like the size of your thumb. And that would be both sides. And they stay connected when they're open. Right. So what lived in them assuming something did is no longer the.

The proper term is horseshoe fly orange. No, I don't know. I'm just talking.

I thought you had it for me. I was so excited I would show them to you. I wanted my little shell jar this year because my mom had done that last year, and every time I go over there, I'm jealous of her shell jar. I wanted one for my office because it's got, like a little beachy feel. And I'm out there picking them up and this gal walks by and I think she had walked by me the one time, and then on her way back from, like doing an exercise walk, you know, I'm piddling around because I'm digging up shells. She was like, asked me what I was doing, and I told her I was trying to get this jar for my office. And she was like, oh, yeah, so you can remember the good times. And I was like, whoa. Like, that's a really effed up way to think about vacation and life and work. And I didn't say anything because there's no room for this conversation. Sitting there on the beach, you know, she's passing by. But no, like, it's all the good times, right?

Yeah. Heck, yeah.

It totally struck me because in her mind, this is my assumption, mind you. She was here on vacation for like a week. We were there for like, you know, six weeks. She didn't know that either. And then was going back to, you know, some dreary 9 to 5 corporate environment.

Yeah. And it has you. I've had moments like that. But that's a perfect representation of like, how, hey, the moment, like, live in the moment. So difficult sometimes to get caught up in all the weeds and all the crap noise out there. But yeah, no, I remember. Well, ideally, there's something awesome in every day, every time you spend.

I think for me, the thing that makes me realize how lucky we are all the time is, you know, Joe and I, we both work out of the house. He works at his house. Normally I work at my house, but when we do podcast days, we're together, but we normally work from our homes. And every once in a while we'll go out and meet somebody for coffee or go meet somebody for lunch that's in town or whatever. And you see rush hour traffic and you always like, we don't think about traffic anymore. Like, it's not something that's on my radar. So we'll go out and then we'll try to head home at like 5 in the afternoon. And we're like, oh, I forgot about this.

Oh, bummer.

I have to listen to this really good podcast. So I'm sitting here in traffic.

That's the best thing I do when I drive in traffic.

No, you guys take that and then add snow on top of it.

Oh, God.

Realize how motivated I am not to have to drive to Minneapolis every day, man.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, hey, before we get too late, I wanted to hit on that thing you brought up. So, like a quick roi, like a quick win after.

You know, like a contractor or someone hires a va, basically.

Some ideas on how to ROI off the vas once you hire them.

That's it.

Yeah. So I talked about like picking things that maybe are highest ROI activity activities that they can do on your behalf, but again, it would also be what can they take off your plate that you have to do anyways that you can go out then and do more higher ROI stuff, which is usually creating for people. Right? Like you guys creating podcast episodes or I don't know what you do for content and all of that on the other side of it. But whatever it is that you're really getting paid to do is what you should probably be doing more of which is usually working with clients, customers, sales, that sort of thing. So figuring out your own effective hourly rate, what your high value activities are, and then again, what are the things that can contribute to that, that you can scale by hiring somebody else that has a skill set there? Or what are the things that are holding you back from doing more of that? And then realize there's a little bit of a Runway when it comes to onboarding someone. But we specifically train virtual assistants to take a very proactive approach with their clients. Because when we talked about challenges before, not only is not making a hiring decision a challenge, but also not knowing what tasks to give to the VA is a challenge or how they should go about starting to do them in their business. And so if you have a virtual assistant that will take kind of the driver's seat in the most professional, nicest way possible. And they tell you, hey, like here's my onboarding process for new clients. Here's all the information I need to collect from you in order to do my job. Here's the agreed upon like tasks. And by the way, while I'm familiar with this software, I don't necessarily think that I have performed this task in that tool before or the way that you do it. I loved a screencast of you doing it once. So I can reflect back on it as many times as I want during my time and make sure that I do it the right way. It could be also just a conversation to that kickoff call, the onboarding meeting. Right. Where they just learn a lot more about that business owner. And the business owner can kind of just brain dump a bunch of stuff that the VA is astute enough to take notes about and mentally file for later as opportunities arise for them to work more together. And again, it's starting small. Start with one or two things. Don't take your entire to do list and put it on somebody else's plate and expect for you guys to have a great working relationship over time. I mean some people can do that. They can, you know, pick it all up, especially if maybe they have a similar background or something. But it's usually the happiest working environment if you start with a couple of things and you can trust that person because of the work that you gave them and their delivery and product on the other side of that. And then they're just going to get to know your business more and more which enables them to take more and more off of your plate if it's what you need.

I like that. It's like bite sized chunks. Get to know each other, make sure you're a good fit. I like the. It kind of sounded like your approach is similar to James's. Matt. You always remember it's basically it's. It's recording videos. Was it do it with me or.

Watch me, show me, do it with me, then you do it. But I don't remember his exact wording, but it's something like that.

Yeah. Where it's like a tiered approach to passing off a task, showing they do it but they send you the review and then. Yeah.

And basically it's like onboarding great for that.

What's that?

I don't know if you guys use that in your businesses, but it's a chrome extension all the time.

Yeah.

And then you can just record your screen. You can be in the little Window on the bottom corner if you feel like you're ready for the day or you can not be on screen at all. And just try and keep it bite sized, you know, for the person that's watching it, if you can. More short videos are better than fewer longer ones I think for most learning styles these days.

Sure, yeah, we love Loom. We use Loom Loom pretty much daily. Speaking of that, are there any other tools or like, you know, software or anything that that you can live without now that you use in your business all the time?

Yeah, and a lot of them are free and come from Google.

Nice.

We were joking about this earlier actually. James and I had a coaching call yesterday and he was like, well, maybe we were using Google Meet and he's not familiar with Google Meet. Google Meet is the newest version of Google Hangouts which is enabling you to be able to do a video call. The only bad part about it is that you can't drop images in the chat. That's my only complaint. Google, if you're listening. But beyond that, there is a chat. You can share URLs and you can screen share and it's free and you just have to have the Google profile. But I use Google Tool Suite religiously. So Google Docs, Google Drive sheets all of the components that most people who grew up using Microsoft, there's a version of it and the best part about it is that you can make real time changes and have two people or more working on a document at the exact same time instead of emailing files back and forth. They live in the cloud, accessible from anywhere. Saved my life. You should see my drive. I also have a Google Phone number because I don't like to give out my cell phone number to random people. And, and so it works as a cover and it's free and it's going to be a part of their.

Offering going forward. Like if you pay for a domain email address and you get the higher amount of drive space and stuff, a Google phone number will be a part of that, which is cool. Slack, we use Slack every day for our team and I think it's a great tool for bas to learn. And any entrepreneur that has has a team to use as well because it's just like a living, breathing conversation, right? And we have different channels for social media versus for content on the website or maybe testimonials that we're collecting, that sort of thing. And then you can only alert the people that really need to know and that really takes the place of a lot of unnecessary meetings. That might have happened in the past in corporate America.

And email. And email. Email. Joe and I used to go back and forth with email between me and him and me and our team. And, like, we've almost all but eliminated email, at least internally in our business. Because of Slack.

Definitely internally, yeah.

Yep. And for customer service. So for. If you and I have an exchange, you actually have a domain email that's connected to Gmail. And I love Gmail because then I can launch all the other tools, whether it be Calendar or the things that I just mentioned, off of that. But then for customer support, ourselves. So one of the roles that I used to do as a virtual assistant was to do customer service. And both of the. Well, all three of the clients that I started working with had an inbox, basically a Gmail inbox that we would do that from, and I would log in on their behalf and have access to all of the stuff that I never pried on, of course. But then they moved over to a tool called Help Scout. Do you guys use that at all?

Help Scout. Is that what that was?

Help Scout.

Oh, Scout.

I've heard of it. Never used it.

So it's amazing. We use it for working handbook as well. So if you were to email us@contactorkinghandbook.com, it comes in to Help Scout, and it's this amazing email management tool that you can also do customer service with. So it comes with the ability for everything to come kind of into the inbox, and you can have multiple inboxes within your one account, and anyone can then reply that you have set up on your team. So for our business, Davey is our point person, and then she will assign conversations that need to go to me or to Darren. You can make internal notes, you can tag things. You could just see if the customer has viewed it. You get to see history of past conversations. You can integrate things. So we actually integrate Drip and we can see the lifetime value of the customer and we can go and click to their Drip profile from there. Like, I'm so old. I love their tool.

We use one called Live Agent, which I think does a lot of the similar stuff. I don't know if it does all that, though.

It doesn't do the Drip thing. I don't think it does integrate with a bunch of stuff, even. Even some live chat type things on the website. In hooking up with Facebook messenger, that's why we use that.

Yeah, we mostly use it because we do a lot of support through Facebook Messenger.

Yeah, yeah. Chatbots.

I can see how that would be helpful. Helps go out has a beacon, which is a chat feature, but I don't think there's any Facebook integration at this time. The drip thing was custom coded, so.

Cool.

Okay, I'll put a developer in on that one.

How about for your project management? I'm curious about that.

We use Slack and Google Drive.

Believe it or not, that's project management too. Interesting.

Yeah, I mean, we're really, really, really in deep with all the Google Drive tools. If they ever started charging us to use them, we'd have no choice. You know, like on my wall right now, now we actually have a TV. It's like a 50 inch screen and on it it's actually got a Google Drive document open with all of our notes for the show. So Joe and I are like staring at this TV to get all of our notes for what? Like where to take the conversation.

That's perfect. Yeah, I love that.

And Joe's got a laptop next to him, so as like, he gets ideas for like other things to talk about in the conversation. He's typing them on his laptop, but then they're showing up on the big screen TV in front of us.

It only took us like a hundred to figure out. Oh, this is actually very helpful.

Yeah, we used to just use a whiteboard. Old school.

You know what I learned just yesterday and I'm so excited about this. It's the dumbest thing, but it's the dumbest things, the smallest things anyways, that can make your job so much easier. So just like keyword shortcuts can do that. I have a Mac desktop and laptop and I take screenshots a lot, but I didn't know that I could resize the picture without putting them into a PicMonkey or Canva. And all you have to do is have that screenshot open on your computer screen and then you can go up to tool and then resize the image. And that was just like my friend taught me that and it was a head explosion moment.

Yeah, you're probably going to say the same thing I was about to say.

Go for it. We use an app. I've used this thing for like five years now, since they started. But cloud app, it's all one word. And that has been. That's just amazing. It has a loom type element, but all the screenshots automatically upload to their cloud server. You can edit, you can annotate, you can resize, you can reshare even animated GIFs. We're starting to use that on content pieces now. It's all done with that one cloud app.

Yeah. Basically like the way you take a screenshot on a Mac, you would hit. What IS IT, Command Shift 4 or whatever. With Cloud App, you'd hit Command Shift 5 and it screenshots it, it saves it to this app's cloud, and then it automatically copies the URL of that image to your clipboard. So I can take a screenshot and there'll be a little ding on my computer and I can paste the URL to Joe and Joe can see the screenshot I just took, like immediately, like in a second.

I'm have to check that one out.

You could do that too, if you still wanted like a copy on your computer. And it still syncs it up too. Which.

What is that one called? Snagit.

We have Snagit too. Snagit cloud app is like, is real quick Snagit. You know, it opens up the little Snagit browser and stuff. I use them both, but for different things.

Yeah, Snagit has higher quality annotations and stuff. I feel like it just takes more time. It's like more clunky than cloud apps. Just like, bam, bam, get it done. Share, share, go.

You literally take a screenshot like you would anyone, and then within half a second you hear a ding and then you can paste in the URL to the screenshot you just took.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that everyone's going to be trying that out after this episode.

And I think it's free too. I think like there's some tier, but.

I think there is a free account.

I think that like, for most people's use, it's probably free.

Yeah, yeah.

So a lot of our people do end up using Trello and that's something that I have used in the past. And we've managed our project management on another free. Great tool. I don't know anybody that invests in premium with that, but it's super cheap. Anyway.

With Trello.

Yeah, we used Trello for a little while. Didn't really suit us that well. I think we have like a free Trello account for life because we referred so many people over to it. And if you refer people, you never have to pay, apparently.

Yeah, we use Notion now as our project management tool and it is free up until, I think a certain amount of users. Yeah, okay, that's been great. It's kind of like a Google feel. Very lightweight. But has the sauna. Trello features all this stuff. Good for team management.

Nice. I'm gonna check that out too. I'M always looking for new apps myself to make our lives easier.

Cool. I want to get you back to your kids. I just noticed, I'm like, it's 305 here, so that means 405 your way or 500. 505. 505. What? We always like to wrap it up with the books. You knew that was coming, though, so you already kind of seeded that. So what are some books that you always refer to slash, he's gotta recommend.

Yes. So one of my favorites, I actually convinced James to buy a bulk amount off of Amazon and he sent him to my house. The Work less, make more. So that's the James Tramco, that guy we've been talking about for half of our interview, who's amazing. And again, I'm a part of his Silver Circle program. One of the reasons I love this book so much is how he sells without selling. So if you looked at it from only the perspective of trying to understand his sales funnel, it's just fascinating. But beyond that are some extremely effective strategies to put in place to help you to scale your business.

EHR being one of them. Knowing your ehr, your effective hourly rate.

Exactly.

That's exactly what you were talking about, the VAs and everything.

Yeah. And so that's my gift to my peers and stuff. But you guys already have that book, I imagine.

Oh, it's a great book. And the thing I love about it is you can read it in one or two sittings. Right. I mean, it's like maybe a two, maybe three hour read, depending on how fast you read. So it's great in that way.

And we've had James on the podcast a couple times. I'm sure a couple more or more later. So if anyone wants to hear all about it. And I think the first episode we did with him, he broke it down in great depth. That was right when it to came came out.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, you guys know that publishing a book these days is a really big credibility factor. And it can be an entry point to a sales funnel where you actually can make some money as well if you have a quality product. And I think he's just a great representation of that model in the most authentic way possible.

He's definitely one of our mentors.

Really like. And I also like his blog is Derek Sivers. He was creator of CD Baby and he wrote a book, Anything youg Want. I think it's like 40 lessons about entrepreneurialism. I don't know what the second part of the title is, but he has just a great attitude as well as far as like life and work. And he realized after building a very successful company and trading in all of his time and energy that that's not what he actually was meant to do, was just become more and more successful and make more and more money. And he sold it. And that's probably not the only reason that he sold it. But then he put it into some kind of trust and he actually travels the world, but then gets to still work on his music. And if you read his blog too, I think it's Derek Sivers.org it's D E R E K and then S I v e r s.org I think.

I think his blog is actually just sivers.org.

I think it is Sivers. Yeah.

I think it's just his last name. Dot org. Yeah.

Awesome. Thank you for clarifying that. But you can Google him and you'd find it very easily. But he reads the book. Most the shortest posts in the whole wide world, yet they have a level of deepness to them that you just couldn't create otherwise. Like, he's just very.

Philosophy. Yeah.

Oh, yeah, he's.

He's great.

You know, he's been on Tim Ferriss podcast. Probably my favorite episode of Tim Ferriss podcast ever was the one where Derek Sivers came on. And Derek's YouTube channel, he hasn't updated it in like years. But that. That book, anything you want. He basically took chapters from that book and then read the chapter and had it animated. And that's. His YouTube account is like chapters from that book, but animated.

Yeah. That's awesome. I got an audiobook on that one. And I just love his voice. And you feel like you get to know somebody so much better when. So I actually was painting my office and I was listening to that book at the same time probably three years ago.

You must have painted really quick because the audiobook's only an hour and 30 minutes long.

Listen to something else while I was doing it.

I'm just joking. No, yeah, but anything you want. Yeah, yeah, anything you want. I actually. I listened to it on Audible again for like, probably the fifth time just a couple months ago or a month ago. And I was like, I forgot how short it is. It's literally just an hour and 30 minutes. It's like, get the book. I think it's even cheap too. And it's.

Him and James are able to do that. Where you're getting so much value at the same time, but you're investing both monetarily as well as your time investment. Isn't huge. And that's kind of the philosophy that they take to life as well. So it's good that they're practicing what they're preaching for.

Sure. Make less or read less and make more. Don't make less or no, don't do less. Sorry. Work less. All right, I totally butchered that title. Sorry, James. Work less and make more. There you go. All righty. Thank you, Gene. Where is the best place? I know we mentioned a lot of different things. Where should folks go Check out more of what you got going on?

Yeah, you just go to our homepage, which again, is my last name, Horky H O R K E Y handbook dot com. And it's pretty user friendly, so it should guide you to getting more information about becoming a virtual assistant or finding one pretty easily. And you get to see my smiling mug up on there as well.

Love it. That's awesome. Now you have a great site. It is very easy to navigate and it's great for both sides. Like we were saying. So the business owner and also folks that want to become VAs. So check it out. Horkeyhandbook.com, we'll link everything in the show notes as always as well. Thank you, Gina. This has been super fun.

I know. It's like, do we really end up making money off of something like this? That we get to time and laugh and get to know each other? That, to me, is insane.

Surprisingly, yes. I would not. I have it no other way.

Lifestyle design at its finest.

That's true. You're doing it right.

Thanks for having me on. No pressure. Anybody in the audience that's listening, like, if you know that I'll end with this and then I'll stop talking. A third of the people you probably heard this before will love you. A third of the people don't really care, and a third of the people just are never going to like you. So if you're one of the third of the people that doesn't like Gina and you're listening, like, you don't need to check out my website. You can just forget that this whole episode aired. But if you're in that first bucket, then definitely hop on by. I do love getting to know new people.

Heck, yeah. No, I loved how you in that. So, yeah, the 30%, 33% that love you, go check her out. Now the other thing, just don't worry about. Go to the next episode, I guess. Not a good fit.

Yeah, right.

All right, awesome. Thank you, Gina. Have a good one.

Thanks, everybody, for listening to this episode. Of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast for taking the time to listen. We want want to give you something a little bit special. Every single episode that we do, we actually have somebody on our team take notes. We basically have a Cliffs Notes version of every episode where you can go and find all of the tips and tactics that they laid out, all of the resources that they laid out, all the good stuff from this episode. We actually have a nice, simple notes version that you can find on our website. So go to evergreenprofits.com find this episode that you just listened to, and and give us your email address and we'll send you the notes. Thanks for listening.

Go get it.