Why you should hire a Virtual Assistant with Tega Diegbe - Full Interview

What would you say from your experience, from everybody that you've helped, the ones that have succeeded and the ones that failed, what would you say are the types of Personas or the type of people that would would do best from hiring virtually?

With the exception of your specialist services like your doctors, nurses, lawyers, to some degree your bookkeeper and your accountant. Those are not positions that you want to hire out virtually. But if you have a business in this day and age, and let's say 70 to 90% of your business activity is done on the computer, in my opinion, there's no reason why you cannot hand the tasks off to a virtual team member.

Boost Hospitality Podcast My name is Mark Seeson, I'm the founder of Boostly and we are in season seven Episode seven and today we're talking all about hiring your first virtual team member. I invited On Tayga who has been helping small business owners solopreneurs for the past few years now figure out where in their business they need help and he helps people by then hiring team members from all over the world and then he helps manage the whole process. Him and his team do a fantastic job and I wanted to get him on this show because we wanted to scale back. What exactly is a virtual team member or virtual assistant? The pros and cons of doing it, which type of business owner should be looking to outsource and exactly what it is that short stay accommodation owners need to be looking at. Talk about social media, we talk about McDonald's, we talk about Big Mac, we talk about SOP and we've got loads of really cool tactics and tips for you in this. Before we get started I just want to thank you our podcast sponsor for this season. This is Hostfully. Hostfully are a US based company that helped design digital guidebooks for for your guests for pre post stay. I have been on Hostfully for a while and the guests that we use at the Granary have commented on how good the guest guide books are not only for our own family business, but Boostly Academy members such as Paula Butler use it for her business Cockington Cottages and again their guests are commenting on the guidebooks upon arrival. Really recommend that you check out Hostfully. Go to Hostfully.com if you go to Hostfully.com you can check out right now. If you go and put in Boostly 2M in the coupon code you'll get two months free of their premium service. But what I love most is you can get started today for free for one guidebook. So go and check it out before you Go and check it out. Please tune in to this Boostly podcast.

Good evening everybody in Boostly Land. Nice to speak with you guys virtually those live and those who happen to be listening. Pleasure to be speaking in your ears. My name is Tega. As Mark pointed out, I am based in Newcastle up on Tyne in the northeast of England. So pretty pretty cold winters and it's pretty cold today which is why I'm wearing a hoodie for those who may be watching and My business is helping self employed entrepreneurs go from being self employed to actually having businesses a business by leveraging the power of outsourcing and.

Systemization from all of the self employed business owners that you chapter take. What is the one mistake that you see people make time and time again when it comes to the running of their business?

The one mistake that I noticed time and time again is the fact that people don't tend to treat their business like a business. They tend to treat their business more like a hobby than a business. If you look at someone who is successful from the outset I can almost guarantee I can't guarantee it because obviously I wasn't there when they started their business, but from the outset I can almost guarantee they would have started and acted like they were running a business and not hobby.

Let's just delve right back to the start. And when somebody says virtual assistant, what does that mean?

When I say a virtual assistant I just refer to someone who is helping you run your business, but they are location independent. I I tend to find that nowadays the term VA is just being used without any real consideration. Perfect example of this is they are online business managers. So these are people who traditionally in a brick and mortar business would be business managers. The only difference is they're working online. But rather than call themselves online business managers, they call themselves VAs because they call themselves VAs and in reality they are online business managers. They charge online business manager prices. So when you say to some you need to get a VA in the traditional sense of the virtual assistant and not an online business manager because they know so many people that are online business managers that use the term online business managers and VAs interchangeably, they're usually put off because the fees are quite high. Traditionally, whenever you say virtual assistant, people tend to associate that with low level work. But from what I've done and the people that I've helped, the key mindset shift that I I tend to make people adopt is the fact that if you are running a business and you are going to get a virtual assistant, it's Better to think of them and treat them as a virtual team member than just a virtual assistant.

What would be the pros and cons, in your opinion? Let's go through the pros first, of hiring somebody that would be virtual, instead of somebody sat with you in the.

Office right out the gate. The pros of doing it virtually is you instantly, by doing it virtually, negate any tax responsibility you have for that person so your, your business doesn't have to carry the burden of payee and health insurance and all the other things you may have to pay if they're in the uk. The other thing is, as well as reducing the tax liability, hiring someone outside of the country that you're located in is usually very, very budget friendly.

Let's just move on to the cons. So what would be a potential downfall, would you say, in your opinion, of hiring somebody virtually compared to hiring somebody?

The biggest one and the one that most people tend to hang their hat on is the fact that it's virtual. There's no. They would say that there's no way for you to monitor their output. There's no way for you to make sure that you're hiring a real person. There's no way for you to make sure you're not scammed. I have an argument against that. I'm sure we'll get to that in the call. But that would be one of the cons. And then another one is because it's virtual. If you don't know how to manage people, just mere fact that they are virtual, that would actually throw a kink in your plans because you don't know how to manage, because you don't know how to manage people, that then filters into everything else that has to happen in the business or about the business.

What would you say from your experience, from everybody that you've helped, the ones that have succeeded and the ones that failed, what would you say are the types of Personas or the type of people that would do best from hiring virtually?

With the exception of your specialist services, like your doctors, nurses, lawyers, to some degree your bookkeeper and your accountant, those are not positions that you want to hire out virtually. But if you have a business in this day and age, and let's say 70 to 90% of your business activity is done on a computer, in my opinion, there's no reason why you cannot hand the tasks off to a virtual.

Team member, what would you say would be the best way, way of somebody getting started in this process of looking to outsource? Now there's going to be a lot of people listening to this who are really busy hospitality and short stay accommodation owners, they're trying to do everything themselves. Now, you know, we're not going to say go and outsource your ironing, you know, because there's some things that you need to do and there's some things that you don't need to do. But have you got a sort of a foolproof way? Have you got like a little checklist system that you can just sort of quickly walk people through on, on how they can go about discovering what tasks they don't need to be doing to be running?

I have an elaborate way and I have a not so elaborate way. Let me go over the not so elaborate way. The not so elaborate way is if there's something in your business that you're doing that you don't like doing, I can almost guarantee you again, that if you go on the Internet, you'll find someone that's willing to do that for you for a price. The price depends on what your business can manage to pay that person to get that job done. And if that person can get it done to the level that you're satisfied, you're satisfied of the output. That's the not so elaborate way. The more elaborate ways. It's from a guy who I watch on YouTube called Alan. I'm gonna butcher his name, Alan Shielinski, if he happens to be listening to this and I've just destroyed his name, I profusely apologize. It's basically just journaling your everyday. So for me, for example, using myself as a case study, today I woke up, there was a whole bunch of things that I had to do. Some of them vital in that I had to do them. No one else could do them, some of them not so vital in the days gone or in the years gone. It's been years now since I've been using virtual team members. I would have done everything myself. I would have done everything myself. So what Alan's method is is for you to make a note of everything that you do for a period of about seven to 14 days. And in those seven to 14 days, you grade things according to how essential it is. Essential being this task brings money into the business, or this task is one or two notches away from bringing money into the business. And then the other grades are, this task does not bring money into the business. For fun, you can say, I really hate doing this task. And it doesn't bring money into the business. Right from the jump, if you see a whole bunch of Tasks going in that last column, which is, I really hate this task, and it doesn't bring money into the business. That would be where you actually want to look to start outsourcing things, in my opinion. But before you go ahead and outsource or bring anybody on board, you need to make sure that your. You need to make sure that your SOPs are all on cue. When I say SOPs, that's just standard operating procedures. Back at the start, whenever you asked me what's the number one mistake people make, I said they treat their business like a hobby and not like a business. If you go to any McDonald's in the world, I'll use McDonald's, because everybody knows McDonald's. You can say with nine out of 10 certainty that what you get in one country is what you're going to get in another. And the reason that is is because of sop and the fries are cooked a certain way. The fries are cooked for exactly the same length of time. They use the same kind of fries. Some may argue that's bad environment because the type of potatoes that they use for their fries are quite difficult to produce. So they use the same kind of potatoes the world over. Burger buns are toasted the same way. The burger pops are toasted the same way. Everything is. It's almost like everything is built on, like a. On a production line. What you want to do is you want to look at how you can actually start building that production line for your own business. So rather than thinking, I'm gonna get Sallie Mae over here, who's a virtual assistant to help me do my social media, you need to think, what do I need to do on social media? And when you. When you say, what do I need to do on social media? That's how many times do I post, how do I create my social media images? How do I create my social media captions? Where do I find images if I haven't got images? Am I doing video? Where am I finding music for my video? Am I using stock footage for my video? So when you answer all those questions and you have that documented, when you then find Sallie Mae, who has to do your social media management, it's easier for you to then give that task to Sally and make Sally responsible for doing your social media as opposed to if the SOP was in there, what.

Are you doing then, Tayga, to help hospitality owners or just business owners? Anybody that's tuning into this, what are you doing? What have you seen a gap in the market and what have you created And. And what are you doing to help sort of match tasks to potential virtual team members?

The biggest opportunity point that I see right now is so cheap. And with most businesses going online right now, there's no reason why you cannot hire, for lack of a better term, like a number two or a number three who's just one removed from your number two and have them do the things that you don't want to do. So we're using the term outsourcing a lot. I prefer to call it delegation because when you delegate things in the business, you maintain responsibility for it, but you don't have the need to be the one actually doing the drama.

I realized that I need help. I really want to go about delegating and finding a virtual team member. Do you have a website? Is there anywhere that people can go where they can find out more? Obviously, we're going to have a talk about a link or a blog post, but where's the best place for people to go to find out more about you and what the work that you're doing?

That will be my website, simply my first name and my last name, takeadiego.com, if you can't spell that mark is going to be nice enough to put this in the show notes, I assume.

Yeah.

So that will be the best place to. That would be the best place to go. I mean, right now, on, on the website, there is a blog post which I put out, which breaks down my entire process, actually, how I hire people. The next blog post that I'm working on is how to manage people virtually. Because whenever people talk about outsourcing, they tend to sell you the sizzle in the sense that when you outsource, you free up your time. When you outsource, there's going to be people working for you for like between $2 and $4 an hour. When you outsource, you're going to have the freedom to actually live the life you want to live whenever you started your business. But what they don't talk about is how do you manage the people that you've just brought on? So with what I'm doing and the content I'm going to be putting out, it will be mostly to answer those questions. As I said, the first one is how to find someone reliable. Because that's the process that I use from deciding who I want to hire to actually put in a job post out to interviewing the person, to getting the person onboarded as part of my team. And then obviously the next step after that is what happens when they are part of your team, how do you give them tasks, how do you communicate with them? So that that's the next step.

Whether you are watching this on YouTube, you're watching this on Facebook, whether you're watching the full recording in the replay or you're watching little 5 minute chunk on LinkedIn, on Pinterest, Twitter, you name it. I am not doing any of this. All I'm doing is recording this. I'm going to go into a Dropbox call and then through Tega's guidance and through the blog that we're going to send you all to and from. You know the latter part of what Taeger was saying there, the next steps. This is all the key part because it's super easy to hire somebody. It's really tricky to keep hold of the good ones and to find the good ones and keep hold of them because unless you do things properly, unless you've got the processes in place, then you might as well just be creating an extra job for your yourself. And this is what, like I say, this is why I really wanted to get Tayga on. I really wanted to talk about these things because I find that so many people when it comes to getting started on all of this, they'll jump on upwork or they'll jump on fiverr and then they'll just get bombarded and they'll get overwhelmed and then they'll just go, fuck this, I'm not doing it, I'm gonna go and just do something else and then they'll never come back to it. But realistically, if it was just broken down in simple steps, easy steps to follow, which Tiger has done on his blog and you can go to boostly.co.uk Taytega and you will go to it. Sorry, I've been trying to teach Alfie how to sound out words and I've literally got baby talk in my head. So I do apologize for that. But yeah, you go to it and it'll all be in the show notes. I really recommend you go on and check it all out and keep in touch with Tega because it is key to everybody in here, key to your business. I have been able to free up so much time in what I do with Boostly and I'm able to now focus on all of the important tasks where in the past I was trying to do everything and I was never getting anywhere since doing all of this and since hiring the progression has been has been massive and I can only thank you Tega personally again for doing this. So thank you very much. Is There any final thing, anything you want to say to anybody that's thinking of maybe now getting started before we end the podcast?

The only thing that I would say is nowadays everybody's trying to show something in your face, especially as a business owner. Facebook ads and we'll have you telling you this is what you need. You need to have this funnel. You have to do xyz. I don't want to be one of those people and not wanting to be one of those people. I'd be remiss if I didn't say outsourcing may not be for you or delegation may not be for you. If you have a business that you are happy with and you're happy with the amount of work that you're doing and you're happy with the amount of money that you're bringing in, by all means go on and keep doing. If you are in business and you have a vision to grow your business or you think like, I want to see how far I can take this, then I guess the message is no man is an island. It takes a village to raise a child. And just as it takes a village to raise a child, it takes the team to build a business. And if you want to build a business, you need to start building the team, virtual or otherwise.

We're going to end it. Really appreciate Tega for taking his time out to go through this. I just want to quickly thank the sponsor of this podcast which is Hostfully. Hostfully will give you digital guidebooks that you can wow your guests pre and post date arrival. If this is the first time that you have tuned in to a Boostly podcast, then you have got seven seasons and nine more episodes that you can.

Go and check out.

Simply go to boostly.co.uk podcast. It's available on itunes, Spotify, even now on Google, Google Play as well. So if you go onto Google type in Boostly Podcast, you can listen to a podcast right there in Google Search, which I think is pretty cool. As always, please go and rate, review and subscribe. And I will be back for another episode of the Boostie Podcast very soon. But thank you very much for tuning in and we'll speak to you all very soon.