Episode #558 - The Power of Role Playing with Trivinia Barber

Welcome to this edition of the million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell.

There's a certain amount of maturity that you get to as part of growing up to where you get the confidence in yourself to say to yourself, this is what I want to do, not that other people want me to do that. I've been told I should be doing that, my friends are doing that, but I don't like that and I like this. And so that's a certain level of. That's a big transition point on becoming a mature, standing your own two feet adult, don't you think?

I absolutely agree. Yeah. I think Glennon Doyle said that sometimes we find what we want to do by figuring out what we don't want to do. Right. And so sometimes you have to go down a path and that's no. So you go down another path and that's no. And each no will eventually get you to your yes. And we just have to not give up. And I think that's what sets entrepreneurs apart from the everyday sort of human. Right. I was on a show with Justin Breen, who is an author of a book called Epic Life, and he said that there are four things that he has found that entrepreneurs have in common. Not all of them, but at least one. But in many cases all four, he said bankruptcy, extreme levels of anxiety, some sort of trauma, and I think some sort of like mental illness or something like that. That he said. Right. But what sets entrepreneurs apart from anyone else who has those sort of challenges is that entrepreneurs don't use those as an excuse.

Yeah, right.

We have these issues, but they still continue to drive us instead of hold us back. I can't do that because we say I do it because.

Yeah. And why do you think that is?

In some ways, I think it's. Well, I can say from my own personal experience. For me, it was me being a young girl wanting Keds tennis shoes, right? These little shoes that had the blue label on the back called Keds. And us not being able to afford them. My parents could not get them and I had to buy the Kmart version of them. And it was a decision that I made in my mind that if my kids ever wanted Keds, it's Nike or Adidas or Puma or whatever it is, but. But that they would be able to get them. And so for me, it was a little bit of bucking the system. Of I'm not going to be that I'm not going to be eating government cheese. And not to say there's anything wrong with it, it, it kept me alive. But I, I made a choice. I didn't want that for my life.

How tasty is government cheese?

It's actually pretty good. It's kind of like Velveeta. It's like it's got a little more sustenance than Velveeta, but pretty good. Now the powdered eggs, not so good. Powdered milk, not so good.

Who, who, who makes this? Probably, you know, Mills or something. Yeah, we do not want to know.

I'm not sure. But I'm glad I'm not there anymore.

Well, yeah, the thing is you go through tough times. And when I got out of the construction business and I made a conscious decision to go into financial services because that was the one industry that was not destroyed during the Great Depression. And I was sick and tired of being an industry where it was seven year cycles of boom and bust. And I just didn't want to do everything. You can't do everything right, but I didn't want to do everything right and then get wiped, have my knees cut out from under because oil, oil embargo in the Mid east and then the banks tighten up and nobody could give financing. Now I'm you know, on the streets or something and so I like that'll happen to me once. But I had to learn, you know, first of all you have to go through the search to find, figure out what industry should you, you know, is most appealing for you. And then you got to develop the skills, you know, you got to find, find a home for yourself. You got to develop the skills. And so as you, you're going to go through times and I went through the time where, you know, I can remember months of cashing $5 checks for gas. And the reason why is I knew the $5 check would clear the bank $10. Probably not. And then that would be a $20 charge which I couldn't afford. So $5 check for gas. And there were times, not forever, but there were a few weeks in there where we got the food stamps. And of course I tell the story with my older son. He was like three years old so he was able to go with me. So we'd go in there and buy all the things since my wife wouldn't do it, we would go in there and buy potato chips and chocolate milk and all the goofy things like treats. Yeah, like free food. We get what we want. But it was still, it was still food stamps. But, you know, you don't have to stay there. The point is you don't have to stay with the cheese and the food stamps. And there's other bankruptcy. Yeah, you know, you don't have to stay there. But it's an, it's kind of an important lesson to learn that you're not too good to where it can't happen to you. Right. And I think we've got a guy in, in the news right now that even though at one time he was worth supposedly on paper, $43 billion, now he's in jail, penniless, and has a different future in front of him. So the cart can get turned over to anybody. You never fly so high that things can't tumble down on you. So you got to stay on the alert, especially if you're living your dream. Yeah, that's true. If you're living your dream, you're grateful for it, you want to keep it going on. And so as you. How are you surprised that you're in the role of running this company? What got you in this slot? You know, where early on did you get the idea that decisions I make can impact where I wind up?

You know, I started this business nine years ago, really, just like I said, as an effort to kind of just help people. I was serving some top level entrepreneurs and my Facebook messenger would blow up or my LinkedIn would blow up every once in a while with like, hey, can you be my assistant? Hey, I'd like to hire someone like you. And really the entrepreneurial light bulb went off for me in that moment, Larry, that I, I realized it wasn't for anyone that they wanted Trevenia. They just wanted an assistant that they could trust. Right. And so I took really skills that I had learned in corporate where I would onboard physicians into hospitals as an executive assistant for a medical group. And I was like, well, it's the same thing. I'm just placing executive assistants in entrepreneurial companies instead. And so we developed a concept called the Momentum Method to help figure out who a leader really is and what their ideal teammate avatar was. Right. We all know our ideal client, Avatar. We can talk about those until we're blue in the face, but then we spend 30 minutes in an interview picking the person who's going to be on our team for the next few years. And so I developed a methodology to help leaders get real about who they are and about who they want on their team. And then we just deployed that.

What is that? How'd you get it?

Well, really I just took it based from the concept of the ideal client avatar. Right, right. It was like, who is this person? How do they show up? What are they passionate about? What is their purpose, what is their proficiency? What are their cognitive skills, their affective skills, their conative skill sets? Right. So we just, we just looked at a whole sort of map of what would make sense and what a leader needed in an executive assistant. And we developed questions to ask leaders as we're onboarding them and, and we went and find those humans and match them up with them.

Now how different is it when you're getting. Entrepreneurs have all kind of different size companies and they go through all kinds of different size or stages of growth. In the beginning, when you're starting up, very few people, in fact, you can get a whole, I mean I know people that are making tens and more of millions and they've got like a secretary and one or two assistants. But when it comes in to putting on an event or to doing whatever it is they do, they can pull the circus together, you know, for. It's kind of like if you're a musician, more or less, you know, you have a small band, then you go on the tour, you bring in the lighting, the sound, you know, the road crew, the caterers and you know, you go out and march on your war there for the summer. But then you come off of that and it's like you're back at the house by yourself with one or two people. You call and you say, how did you think that went? And very small circle. Can most people have a very small circle anyway? But when you have lots of employees, that executive assistant needs to have different skill sets than when it's a, you know, they're going to be a one arm paper hanger, you know, more or less, you know, they're going to have to have all this computer skills and the, you know, the photoshopping and the this and the, you know. So how different are there different levels of skill sets for these executive assistants? And is that one of the things you try and find out right from the beginning when someone contacts you?

Yeah, for sure. I mean we're looking at a whole bunch of things. We're looking at how the leader is going to establish trust with an executive assistant. Right. Like what that looks like for them. A lot of leaders hold on to their calendar, their email, their projects, like with this iron fist, right. They will not let go of anything. So that takes a certain kind of assistant to be able to build trust and Break through with them. Others are really, they sort of have this necessary abdication of their responsibilities because they're so overwhelmed, they're just like, yes, take it, get rid of it. And so we've got to figure out really, if we think of a triangle. Right. We've got to figure out what level of a leader they are. Are they in a toxic leadership situation which happens. Right. Most people don't stay there, but some leaders have been there at least once or twice in their careers. Or are they in this sort of upper level where they're busy, they're getting stuff done, but it's always sort of flying by the seat of their pants. Then we can move up the triangle into a driven leader. And driven leaders, they tend to, they're getting stuff done, they're hitting their deadlines, things are happening. But what happens is they sort of settle for this kind of good enough line. Right. There's like, eh, it's working, it's good enough. We're growing, we're at least not in the red. But there's something beyond that which really requires the ability for the leader to be centered. And if a leader is centered, then you can challenge your team and you can go well beyond any of your own expectations. But that requires a centered leader at the top. And that's a lot of our stuff works to figure out is where people are on that spectrum.

Yeah. And why do you run a separate website? I'm sure you have a website for priority va. Yeah. But why do you run a website called teams you can trust.com?

Yeah. Teams you can Trust is our mentorship for executive assistants. And that. Or actually that is Momentum, Momentum headquarters. So that is for the Momentum method. That is a do it yourself course for entrepreneurs who want to hire. They want to figure out what they're doing in their lives and in their business. And ultimately it gives them our playbook for how to hire teams on their own. So that is our sort of do it yourself version for leaders who aren't yet at the price point or the need to be able to hire a service like ours.

Yeah. Ideally you bring people in and train them. You know, it's kind of like college. You know, I had a friend at college, one of these brainiacs, you know, straight A's. And then he. Civil engineering or whatever, electrical engineering. He gets a big high paid job at a corporation. And he said, you know what? He said, here's what my education got me Nothing. He said, my education got me a coupon for the interview for one free interview. And so I could make them happy and they would give me a job. But when I got there, they gave me things to do that any sixth grader in the country could do. After three hours of training or two hours of training, he said, what a waste. And so the deal is that a lot of functionality comes from doing specific skills in any one office. There is going to be a limit to those specific skills. In spite of the fact that occasionally we got something new here, something new there, but the core, you know, flow of day, week, month, year type things settle into a pattern of skills and everything. How do you. Why, why is it impossible for. At what level does become impossible for you to train your own people?

Oh, that's great. My goal is to have an assistant who will onboard themselves, who comes with the playbook ready to go. So what they're getting out of you, they're sitting down and they're saying, all right, Lar, I need to know this, this and this from you. You give them that information, right? Your passwords, your preferences, the things that are most important to you, and then they go build. Instead of them going, hi, Larry, what do you need me to do today? Can you help? You know, that's a different type of relationship than I'm trying to cultivate with an executive assistant and their CEO. Yeah.

And so you're looking for people who can help you make money right from the beginning, become more productive, streamline things, take pressure off.

Three things. Yeah, three things that EAS that come from us do they help give you leverage, leverage of your time, your effort, your energy. They help give you speed, speed of your action, speed of your decisions, speed of your reaction time when something goes wrong. Right. And then they give you calm. And that's the calm and energy coming out of your office. Because a calm leader is a calm team. Right. And so that's really important. And that's what the type of EAs that we work with provide.

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