What Held Me Back from Hiring an Assistant (and Why I Finally Hired One)

Hey guys. Matt Paulson here. In this video, I want to talk about how hiring an assistant has impacted both my business and my personal life. For the last year or two, I've wondered what it would look like to have an assistant at MarketBeat that could help me with some of the stuff that either I'm not very good at doing or just isn't a high enough value of a task for me to really get around to doing it. For quite a while, I was pretty hesitant and resistant about going out hiring an assistant because there just aren't that many executives in South Dakota that have assistants. And South Dakotans tend to pride themselves on doing work themselves. I wouldn't really want people to think, who do you think you are? That you need somebody else to follow you around and do all the stuff that you don't want to do or have time to do. This was a real hangup for me, my wife, we both grew up in middle class families and we're just used to doing everything ourselves. You know, my wife and I, we raise our kids, we don't do daycare, we don't do a lot of babysitters. So when our kids aren't at school or at therapy, they're at home or they're with us. You know, we're the ones changing diapers, we're doing snacks, we're cleaning up messes, we're doing the whole nine yards of parenting. We are just used to rolling up our sleeves, doing the work and not complaining about it. So with that mindset, you know, who was I to think that I need a personal assistant or an executive assistant? Why can't I just stop being so lazy and work harder and get the work done? I'm just a guy that's probably about 10 years out of college running a small business in South Dakota. Why do I need an assistant? These hang ups really stopped me in my tracks from hiring an assistant for quite a long time, probably a couple of years. But there were finally a couple of things that have changed my mind in the last six months that caused me to say, you know, it's probably time to hire an assistant first. There are some tasks that if I do them myself, it actually costs me money to do them. You know, based on the revenue that MarketBeat has made in about the last 12 months, the value of my work time is probably somewhere between 1500 and $2000 an hour, believe it or not. So there are tasks that need to be done in marker. Beat my personal life that are relatively low Doppler per hour. Tasks. If I do them, it ends up just prevents me from doing high dollar an hour tasks. For example, answering customer support messages, that's a $20 to $30 an hour tasks. So if I'm answering emails from our customers, resetting your passwords, setting up their watch list, all that stuff. I'm not focusing on the high value business strategy, marketing and optimization tasks that make my time worth up to $2,000 an hour. So if I'm working on these low dollar an hour tasks, I'm not doing the high dollar an hour tasks and that ends up costing me money. I have been able with hiring employees to delegate a lot of the lower dollar an hour tasks such as booking, advertising, campaign, doing the software development work. Customer service over the last couple of years, it's been quite a while since I've really had to answer a customer service ticket. And usually when that happens it's after Wolf, Maureen and Stevie have looked at it and then will always looked at it and they still don't have a good answer, then that's when I finally look at it. So in terms of most of the MarketBeat stuff, we were pretty set in terms of having other people kind of do the less strategic and less high value tasks so that I didn't have to do them, which has been good. But there was also a lot of non marketing stuff that I was doing that was sucking up my time and really preventing me from doing the high dollar per hour tasks that really grow the company. So I kind of finally realized that if I had somebody that would do some of the blocking and tackling with startups, who falls with Angel Fund and Mellie Cups and some of the other things that I've gotten myself involved with. You know, if I had somebody to help with these things, you know, I'd have more time to work on MarketBeat and then probably actually make more money. You know. The second reason I finally got over some of these hang ups about having an assistant was that I realized that having an assistant would be allowing me to be more effective and get some more stuff done in some of the startup community and volunteer roles that I have in the community. For example, we're in the process of launching a second falls angel fund and we need to have an informational reception from members of our first fund and potential members of our second fund. I also wanted to start doing events every other month for startups who follows. But you know, I'm definitely probably not the person that should be doing light work to plan events. I'm just not very good at event planning, I don't really like talking, going out and finding the vendors and talking to people and making phone calls. And also it's just not a good financial use of my time. So I thought, you know, if I had an assistant that was really good at taking care of details, doing research, making phone calls, planning events, you know, they could plan some of these events for me and I can just show up and be the stage guy or not even be the stage guy and just enjoy the event knowing that the details are taken care of by somebody else. I did end up hiring an assistant in the end of May and, and it actually came out because I needed to fill another position which was a half time customer service position. And I really wanted to make it a full time job because I didn't want to have someone on staff because I wanted somebody on staff that was fully committed to MarketBeat and not juggling two part time jobs. So I kind of came up with the idea of having someone do customer service emails for MarketBeat in the mornings and then doing executive assistant work for me in the afternoons. I wrote up a job description and never put it out publicly, but I did email it to a few people that I thought would be good candidates kind of as a first step. And one of the people that I emailed the job description too was Maureen Om. And she had previously helped out with the milling cups and she was the one that kept our group organized. So I really knew what I was getting when I hired Maureen. And I've been very happy with what Maureen's been able to help me with so far. And she's just doing a really good job. One of the things that was kind of an initial challenge for both Maureen and I was figuring out what kind of tasks that she could do to flu up my time and kind of make my life easier. Traditionally an assistant will manage somebody's calendar, email and do some admin tasks around the office. The problem is I kind of like to schedule my own meetings and keep track of my own calendar. I like to do my own email. Our company doesn't really have an office other than my individual office that I have for myself because my little kids are at home most days and I couldn't get work done there. So I have an office, but I don't need anyone else in the office with me to get my work done. So when I hired her, I kind of told, I told Maureen, you know, it's probably going to take us a few months to figure out the type of stuff that she can do. To add value to market beat and free up my time. And I kind of told her it's okay if you're not fully busy during the workday for the first couple of months. And just the permission for both of us to have time to take time to figure out what work best together was really helpful because it gave us time to kind of organically figure it out what the best task for Marie to work on would be. So her first job was learning how to do customer service and she picked that up really quickly. We also figured out soon after she started it'd make a lot of sense for her to do my daily social media postings. You can't really automate a lot of that with buffer nowadays because Facebook won't let you post to your personal profile with an API anymore. So really do have to post stuff yourself these days. So I kind of gave Maureen some instructions and you know how to do it. Now she kind of does all my social sharing for me. So if you see something sharing, you see me sharing something from like Stark Sioux Falls or my blog. And my Facebook account is probably not me doing it. It's probably Maureen. She's also in charge of keeping my downtown office here in order that I'm in right now. So she buys my groceries, she vacuums every now and then. She's hung up a bunch of stuff on the wall that was sitting on the floor. Like that ink 5000 sign over there that was hanging on the wall because I ran out of nails or I was on the floor because I ran out of nails and Maureen hung it up for me. So that's great. Lots of good stuff like that. Marina has also been helping with some event planning for me. She's taken the lead on our September Starburst. Who follows eventually. She's also going to do the follows angel friend reception. She's doing all the legwork for that. She also had us all over for lunch last week, so that was a lot of fun. And then the latest thing that I've had her start doing for her company is doing the day to day Bookkeeping and QuickBooks and she went out and proactively found a tutor to teach her QuickBooks without me telling her to do so. So I was really impressed by that. I think she's probably getting closer to full capacity. Probably don't pile a ton of new tasks onto her right now, but Maureen's been a great assistant and she's freed up a lot of my time which has enabled me to focus on the most important task for marketbeat and honestly spend some more time with my family as well. So you watch this video and you'll probably say, you know Matt, that's great, but I'm not a CEO that makes lots of money and I can't afford an assistant. I get it, most people aren't going to have or don't need full time assistance. But I would encourage you to think about what are some things that you do in your life that you could delegate or outsource to someone else. There's lots of ways to free up your time without having a full time assistant. You could consider hiring a part time virtual assistant 510 hours a week to do social media postings for you, book travel for you, answering your email or doing data entry. Who knows, whatever low end technology task that you have to do, a VA could probably do that for you. Just think about how much time you might have freed up if somebody else kind of did your Monday did the mundane task for you in your life. It could even be as simple as hiring a neighborhood teenager to mow your lawn and shovel your snow every week. Just think about the tasks that you do that you don't absolutely have to do and someone else could do in your place and you may find that there are things that you could delegate or outsource to someone else for a lot less money than you think. I think that's probably about it for this video. Hopefully the journey that I took from having a lot of hesitations and hang ups about hiring an assistant to thinking maybe I actually needed an assistant, to hiring an assistant and what my assistant Maureen has done for MarketBeat and me personally has been helpful to you. I also hope this video encourages you to think about. Excuse me? Encourages you to think about what you might be able to outsource, to delegate to free up your time for the most important people and tasks in your life as well. Thanks for watching.