Steven Alvery on Active Duty Airforce to Successful Internet Entrepreneur

Stop everything. Stop everything that you're doing and go hire a VA at least to handle your customer support and stuff. Life has never been the same since then.

Hello, and welcome to this case study with Stephen Albee, who I am super excited to have today. His story is really cool, and I think a lot of people will really identify with what he has done with his story. Just so we know, Stephen is right now in Topeka. Is that right, Stephen?

Yeah. Yeah.

So he's. Let's see, today is Tuesday, the middle of the day, and you're away from home, away from whatever you're doing. Picking up a chicken coop.

Yeah, exactly. Yep.

Which is so sweet. I love that you get to do that during the week. I'm super similar. I try and do everything during the week, not on Saturdays.

Sure, yeah. Let's get.

Let's get into this. I would love to hear, like, let's start with your backstory, because I think so many people feel like, oh, you have to start when you're young or you have to have graduated in computer science.

Absolutely not, man. I'll tell you, I am the ultimate case study in the. If a nincompoop like me can pull it off, anybody can, no matter what your age is. You know what I mean? So I'm the ultimate proof of that. Basically, I was active duty Air Force for a while, and that was around 2013. I was just looking to sort of augment my income a little bit so we could buy things that I wanted to do with me and my wife and my kids. And I started. It's a very stereotypical Internet marketing story, Internet business story, where I started looking up, how can I make some money online, you know, and then that slowly turned into being bitten by the entrepreneurial bug, and I got consumed by the idea of actually having an online business, like a no kidding business, and quitting my job or, you know, quitting the Air Force when my enlistment ended. Anyway, I was sitting there and I want to say early 2015, maybe late 2014, and I was sitting at a playground while my kids were running around playing around, and I was listening to John Lee Dumas, Entrepreneur on Fire podcast, and you were being interviewed. And that's the first time I was introduced to the concept of hiring a virtual assistant to replace yourself, you know, the whole replace yourself concept. And I was just. I was. I was totally locked into that interview, listening to everything, because it basically had solved all of the problems I was having, which was I knew what to do. I just didn't have the time to do it, you know what I mean? And so I started checking out your website, I read your book, all that good stuff. And I actually, before I even left the Air Force and started a business, I hired two VAs on Onlinejobs ph to help me start my business. Sadly, that was like Q1, Q2 of 2015. That's when ISIS was flaring up out in the Middle east. So I had to go to war and I, sadly, I had to let them go and put the whole business idea on hold for a while. But that was my first interaction with the idea of hiring virtual assistants and outsourcing.

So you're toying with running online business or not toying with doing it while active duty deployed?

Yeah, exactly.

You have to stop crazy. Okay, keep going.

Right? Yeah, I had to put it on hold. It was kind of a bummer. But, you know, so I got back to the United States, that that was my third and final deployment of my career. Came back to the US and I was like, I was 100% sure at that time. No, I'm not going to reenlist. I'm getting out. I'm doing this business thing, you know, because I, at the time we had four kids and I think we had a fifth on the way. I've got six now. And we just, I just wanted to live a small town farming lifestyle with my kids, you know, wanted to have fun, freedom, you know what I mean? And so I said, I'm not going to reenlist. I got out. It was scary, boy, I'll tell you what. And the business barely got off the ground. We launched a lead generation app, pretty cool little software tool. A few months after we launched that, we were finally a somewhat stable business. Life was still incredibly difficult, man. Like I was having, you know, anxiety attacks about the level of customer support I had to handle because we got like 700 customers in like one go, you know what I mean? I wasn't used to having to deal with running a business and having customers. And so then my mind went back to that initial experience, you know, a year or two prior. And I remembered, oh, John Jonas, online jobs. Ph, right. I was at, oh, I remember it was 2017. I was at one of those marketing conferences, it was called the Warrior event. And a guy on stage, he was given some business advice and he said, stop everything. Stop everything that you're doing and, and go hire a VA at least to handle your customer support and stuff, because that's what's given, that's what's going to give you Anxiety attacks. That's what's going to pull you away from actually running your business and stuff. And that's when I remembered online jobs. Ph. So I went that weekend and I sat in my backyard and I pulled up your website, man, and, and I hired my first permanent full time employee at that time in 2017. And dude, life has never been the same since then. There's, there's so many good things that come from bringing on a permanent team member from the Philippines. Yeah. Not only are they great and they do great work for you, but something happens up here, you know, like the mentality changes. You're not just a struggling guy trying to make money. Suddenly you have a CEO mindset. You know what I mean? It's just phenomenal. Everything since then has just been totally different because I've brought on full time team members.

You know, can you, can you talk about that CEO mindset? Like, what's do you, what's the shift that happened?

I think first of all, there's the ability, the sudden ability to delegate tasks. That's one of the things that sort of triggers that CEO mindset. Prior to that, you're literally relying on yourself. And in many cases, especially if you're not a, if you're not naturally disciplined, like, you know, I'm not particularly naturally disciplined or organized, that's the worst person to rely on. Suddenly having someone who you can delegate tasks to triggers that you have the realization that your livelihood depends on the, the company. Suddenly it's not just you who has a horse in the, in the race. So that sort of gives you that little bit of drive as well. You know, CEO wise, you're able to step away from some of the standard, you know, day to day rigmarole and start thinking big again, you know, instead of, instead of doing what I remember you saying in one of your videos many years ago, staring at a logo on WordPress and pounding your fist for three hours because you can't get it to move 10 pixels to the right. You know, that kind of stuff.

I love it, dude. So, and there's, there's two things in there. I'm going to add to one of them. So the one thing is you're now working on your business instead of in your business, which is such a big deal. And that's what CEOs do. The second thing is, you said.

It.

Lets you delegate things, which is what, that's what a business owner does. That's what a CEO does.

Right?

It lets you delegate. For me, it was more than it let Me, delegate. For me, it forced me to delegate. Like it wasn't an option anymore. Like, I have this dude who he works for me and I have to give him something to do. And I think that that's kind of what you felt too, like, oh, like I gotta give him stuff to do because I hired him full time, Right?

Exactly, yeah.

How many people do you have working for you today?

So I have two permanent month to month team members and I have a bunch of people who I tap every month or so for freelance work, but two permanent people. And I'm currently in the process right now of hiring a software developer, a UI designer, and I'm toying with this idea, John, of bringing on a manager to do project management for that kind of stuff. For me, you know, it's, it's kind of a scary idea because that's like one of the hardest things for us to do as entrepreneurs is go off and let someone else manage. But I'm toying with it. I'm going to interview some people and maybe try it out.

Okay, so let me give you some advice on that because I've tried this too. Oftentimes I think when we try and hire a project manager, we think that that person is going to run, like run a piece of the business or run the business. And that's all good and fine as long as you're still involved. Like you're not going to just walk away from that. Maybe you find this, but I haven't yet. They don't want to make business decisions. You hire someone, you still have to make business decisions with them and for them for sure. But then like, I have a girl that manages all kinds of stuff for me. She manages the process of it happening where we've laid out a process and she even helps the process, like she improves it. She comes up with ideas, but the process is pretty well laid out and she's pushing people like, hey, you got to get this done. Hey, you got to get this done. And often she'll come back to me for, what do you think of this? Like, we did this, what do you think? And yesterday I finally said, they're editing videos. And finally I said, look, I don't need to approve this from you guys anymore. You guys have done this enough now with me being involved. You guys are good enough at it. I don't want to approve these anymore. I trust you guys. But that took a while to get to that point and there was a lot of like, okay, like you, you guys are good at your jobs, but there's some stuff here that's like clearly not right. You're hiring a programmer. Awesome. You're hiring a UI designer. Awesome. You have, you have the customer support person, who's the fourth person.

So the fourth person is videos. She makes tutorial videos for us.

Oh, sweet. Okay. All right. So you have tutorial videos going on, you have customer support admin, you have software people that you're creating. I love it. Talk about kinds of things that you do in your business. What work do you do and what work do you not do?

I'm basically thinking big picture stuff where, you know, what's the next product we're going to launch? You know, what's the next topic that we're going to sell tutorials about, you know, because that's like our main business. Actually, this kind of happened by accident. The market, the market told me this is what they wanted. So we started doing it was. We created a licensable courseware about various online business topics. And we sell those out to agencies, we sell those out to private entrepreneurs with white label rights. Right. So we're basically a wholesaler of E learning in the, in the Internet marketing niche. And so what I'm doing is figuring out what's, what's the next topic going to be in that portion of my business. What's the next topic going to be? Okay, we haven't done one on Facebook ads yet, so we'll do a tutorial on Facebook ads. How big is the course going to be? I'll. I'll maybe type up a description of how the course goes. I'll hire the actors to do the introductions on Fiverr, you know, but then after that I pass it on to my va. They'll take care of the tutorials, they'll take care of editing the audio once it actually launches. And we've got customers buying that. My main sort of. I call. She's. She's my customer support person, but she's also my executive assistant. She handles dealing with all the customers. We've got a freelancer who I use. Like I said, not everybody's permanent, you know, so one of my folks will create an E cover or an illustration for the E cover. You know, the, the packaging of the actual product itself. It's all digital. So I say E packaging. See, what I do not do, what I definitely don't do is customer support. I don't touch that at all. In fact, we've got a Slack channel where you can actually send me. If she has a problem with the ticket, she can put the ticket in there and say, hey, I need an answer to this, and I'll answer it for her, but she has to go. And it's just a matter of principle. I learned that in 2017. I don't want to touch customer support at all unless something, you know, catastrophic is happening. And nothing catastrophic ever happens. Affiliate management. Most of my traffic comes from affiliates, so affiliate management recruitment is something I do myself. Although I'm thinking I'm toying with the idea of outsourcing that as well. But that's. That's probably about 80% of my business is right, is what I just said.

You know, do you have a specific training method or do you, like, you. You hired this customer service person. How did you train them?

So I did not train her for customer service. I made sure that she had experience in the past, which is great. Online jobs. PH is great about that, you know, as far, you know, being able to see. See where they've worked in the past and all that good stuff. So the only training I've had to give really is general, broad training about our niche, our industry, how our products work and stuff so that she can understand what the customer is talking about, that kind of stuff. So stuff very specific to what we do. But as far as teaching them skills that they need for the job, I haven't actually done much of that. Most. And I understand this is not always the case. You know, you can bring on a fresh, you know, vanilla va and have to teach. Teach them and train them in the skills. In my case, we've kind of lucked out, and the people who I've h are already really, really good at the things that I needed them for, you know, Sweet.

Okay. Okay. Do you have any specific recruiting or hiring advice? Like, do you have a process you go through in your hiring, or do you have any things that you've done well or things you've done poorly that you can improve on?

My process is basically, I put out the job application at the same time that I'm waiting for applications to come in. I go out and I browse, you know, and I'll message individual people who meet, you know, certain criteria, and I'll send them a link to that job posting and say, hey, would you like to apply for this? Once we've got, like. I mean, in the case of some of the jobs, we get like a ton of applications, man. Like, you know, 60, 70, 100 applications, we'll basically go through a process. I need my wife on this, because I can't. I just. My Head's going to explode when I look at all these applications. So I need my wife's help here. We'll basically sort of categorize them. We'll, we'll, we'll rank them, you know, yes, maybe and no. You know, so we got those three piles on the, on the, on the computer there. And then we'll take all the yeses and the maybes. We'll ask them a few questions, right? And then, and then hopefully we'll end up with like a dozen that we can interview. You know, that's what we've done so far. Here, Here's a good one for the video person. We actually asked them to do a trial video for us so we could see what the content of their work. Not every job is like that. They can't, you know, not every job has something where they can produce something for you in advance and then throw out some, some general questions to get, you know, some experience. Questions?

What kind of questions?

So basically, how long? Well, it depends on the job, but how long have you been doing the, the job in question for, for other jobs, like the developer stuff? I specifically want to know what type of programming languages they speak. You know what I mean? So I want to know that somebody knows php. I want to know that somebody knows, you know, how to do, you know, the, the MySQL database kind of stuff. And I barely understand that stuff, but I need to know that they speak those languages. I want to know that they have a, an archive of past work in those programming languages that I can look at. So those are like the baseline things. And then we bring them in for an interview. And in the interview we ask, I mean, I've got a big list of questions that I actually got from someone else. We basically go through. We say, hey, have you ever done this? Have you ever done that? Have you, you know, what's, what's the longest project have you ever had to work? Have you. Can you communicate with a UI designer? Well, you know what I mean? Then you get into the uncomfortable questions, like, you know, what was your last job? Why did you leave it? You know, that kind of stuff. You know, so it's, you know, we ask as many questions as we can, and hopefully what that does is narrows down or filters out that pile even further.

You know, anything specific that you would want to tell people. Like, I love that you've got yourself an overwhelming situation, and then you figured out, oh, wait a minute, let me hire someone to help me. And you did exactly what you should have done is gotten stuff off of your plate and get the right help in your business.

So I would say do the reverse of what I did. And rather than get yourself into a situation where you realize I need help, you know, and suddenly you're scrambling for go, go do business with John Jonas and onlinejobs ph at the beginning of that journey, rather than waiting until you're in a, you know, an anxiety ridden, you know, state a successful business, but a very tough situation, and then you have to hire people and bring them on board, you know, so figure out the outsourcing or at least the potential for outsourcing before you start your business. That would be my first advice, which I didn't do. You know, like I said, I tried to go it alone for almost a year before I hired my first permanent va. Guess be willing to let go of things. And I'm referring here specifically to something I was in Orlando with John Maxwell. He said, if you can find someone who can do things at least 80% as well as you give it to them, let them have it. Doesn't mean go hands off. You know, you got to critique a little bit, but let them have it. And, and that takes, that's. That's hard to do as an entrepreneur. You know, as an entrepreneur, you want things done 100% as good as you can do them or better, you know, you know, 90% of cases, it's just not going to happen, you know, so you got to come to the realization that your business will grow faster and better if you get people who can do things at least 80% as well as you can. You help them out a little bit along the way. If you can do that, you got to make yourself comfortable with, with passing that on to someone, you know what I mean? And that's, that's a struggle for me. But I can tell based on what I've done over the last year with virtual assistants, that that is an absolute must. And it's true. Your business will grow if you can let yourself just let it go a little bit. You know what I mean?

I love it. That's something that I realized a long time ago. Like, and I love that 80% rule. For me, it's a matter of, like, I'm doing this or I'm not doing this. There's not enough time for me to do it. Then why do I care if someone does it 60% or 90% of how good I could do it? I'm not doing it. And getting it done. Just doing something is more than half the battle, right? Stephen this has been awesome. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for sharing from active service, which thank you so much for serving to running a successful online business and supporting your family. And you know, I got five kids and I love that you're taking care of your kids and spending time with them. It's so great. So thank you for being here and I hope this is helpful. Come join us again. Talk to you later.