MBA1059 Do You Need a Personal Assistant?

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Hey oh. Welcome to the $100 MBA Show. The podcast that loves business as much as you do. That's why we deliver our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online. And in today's episode you will learn do you need a personal assistant? Now you might be thinking a personal assistant one of my celebrity or some sort of royalty. I'm not Tony Stark. Don't worry, you don't need to be the Sultan of Brunei or Ironman to have a personal assistant. And in fact having one can be pretty affordable. As an entrepreneur, you know that time is your greatest asset. We often spend our time doing things that we don't have to time consuming tasks that can be done by somebody else. Somebody that could take that off your plate and take it off your mind. Talk about our stress reduction. And personal assistants can double as executive assistance. So in today's episode I want to share with you why you may want to look into getting a personal assistant and how to do so. Why am I doing this episode? Because hey, I've been thinking about getting a personal assistant for myself. I've been noticing I'm spending a lot of time doing A lot of time consuming tasks that, that I don't necessarily need to do. How much is that time worth? For me, a whole lot more than what it's going to cost me to hire a personal assistant. So let's find out. What can a personal assistant do for you? How much is it going to cost you? What are your options and how to hire one? Let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Like I mentioned at the top of the episode, your personal assistant can take a whole lot of things off your plate. And of course, they could double as your executive assistant. Somebody that's going to take care of your calendar, for example. And that gets me started. What are the major areas in your life that a personal assistant can take care of for you? And the first one is your calendar. Your time is important and managing your time actually takes time. Putting things in the calendar, making appointments, confirming appointments, knowing when you have to be where at every single moment of the day. Your calendar is really what runs your day. And if you've been doing business for a while, you know what I'm talking about. I always say if it's not on the calendar, it's not going to get done. So having a personal assistant is a great way to have somebody in charge of your calendar, the gatekeeper of your calendar. Basically, they're going to make sure nothing gets on the calendar unless it's super important and that you protect your time. It also makes sure that when you show up for appointments that that person is going to be there. You can have somebody follow up for that. How many times have I had appointments, a Skype call, a phone call and I will show up and the person completely forgot about it, didn't add it to their calendar or had their time zones screwed up. When you have a personal assistant, they can check your calendar every day and follow up with everybody who has an appointment with you and say, hey, by the way, just a reminder, you have an appointment with this person, they can physically call them if they want. It doesn't have to be an email and it prevents all this miscommunication and you showing up and having a no show, saving you tons of time and frustration. A personal assistant will make sure that the things that you want to get done get done in your personal life, whether it's doctor appointments, social events, time for an R and R, like booking a massage. We live in the day of the Internet. So even if your personal assistant is somewhere else in the world, you've outsourced them from a different part of the world. It's totally fine. They can make a phone call with voiceover ip, with Skype phone. It's so simple. They can make calls easily and it's super cheap. They could book your appointment, put it in the calendar. When it comes to your calendar, you can ask your personal assistant, hey, let's meet once a week on a Monday where we discuss the coming week. And they'll give you an overview. Hey, this is what's going on in your calendar. I've confirmed these appointments. This is what's happening. And they can ask you a question like, hey, what do you want to do on the weekend? And you can say, hey, can you find out for me what are some great things that are going on in my city this weekend? I don't want to spend more than $200, but I'd love to spend a great evening on Saturday night. And they can go ahead and find something for you, give some options, book it for you and put it on the calendar. Now you might be saying, well, don't they need my credit card information for that? Yes, you can give them your credit card information. We live in a day and age where we live in a world of transparency. You're hiring this person to manage your life. It's okay if they have your credit card information. If for some reason they charge your card on something personal, not only are they going to lose their job, they're going to lose their credibility, and they'll never get a reference from you. So, yes, there's a chance they can take your money, but there's always recourse. You can always go to your credit card company and say, hey, I didn't make this charge. In all my years of business, I've never heard of anybody's personal assistant using somebody's credit card for their own personal gain, for their own personal purchases. So I just wanted to get that one out of the way. So your calendar is great. So they can manage your calendar. That's great. You can even have your personal assistant call you every morning at a certain time and give you a rundown. Hey, this is the rundown for today. This is what you're going to do today. These are your appointments. This is what you have to be mindful of. They might even tell you about things that are coming up. Hey, by the way, it's your sister's birthday next week. Would you like me to send some flowers? Would you like me to do something like that? This is awesome. Why? Because you sending flowers is going to take at least two hours of you Choosing flowers, figuring it out, finding the website, signing up for an account. You think it's a five minute thing, it's not. And all you have to do on that call is say yes, order some flowers, spend X amount of dollars and it's a done deal. So you could see that personal assistants not only could take care of your calendar, but they could take care of mundane, time consuming tasks. Appointments, ordering things, planning your weekend. But they can also take care of some really time consuming business types of tasks. Like what? Say for example, you're asked to speak at an event, you're a speaker at an event and you've just been invited and you accept it. Okay, from that point on, you're about to get another 15 to 20 emails from the organization. Are you ready to spend that time to email back and forth to reply to 15 to 20 emails? We're talking about hours of time. Once you have accepted and you're going to be speaking at that event, you could just say awesome. From this point on, please CC my personal or executive assistant. He or she is going to make sure that you get the answers you need. Most of the emails will be no need to reply like, hey, the deadline for the slides for this presentation is this date. He or she could say, hey, no problem, I'll put it in his calendar. They might send you another email and say, we need your headshot. Your personal assistant can say, no problem, here's her headshot. She's great, isn't she? Right, so here you go. You're saving so much time by having an executive assistant take care of this back and forth, mundane task. We talked about tasks, we talked about scheduling, and we talked about emails. Going back and forth on email, what I noticed in my own inbox, 50%, at least 50% of my inbox are emails I don't need to reply to personally. Sometimes you just need someone to organize your inbox. So you just read the important stuff and then the other stuff, newsletters, updates you could read later on, not urgent. And a personal assistant can definitely do that for you. What else is super time consuming that you're doing all the time and, and you don't need to research. How much time do you spend on researching something you're looking for? It could be personal, it could be business, it could be like, hey, I'm looking for a new customer service application, a customer service software to handle our tickets. Can you research and give me the top three options? Easy peasy. They could do that. They could spend time, they can google, they can give you a report and a summary. And you just read the summary in five minutes and then you make a decision based on, you know, the benefits and the features that they've outlined in that summary. Instead of you spending countless hours going from website to website to website, you know, looking at so many different options and getting overwhelmed, you could do this in your personal life too. Hey, I want to travel to the Cook Islands for my summer vacation. I want to spend X amount of dollars. Can you give me the top three options according to TripAdvisor? How much is it going to cost me? How many nights can I stay with this amount of money? How much are the flights going to be? Give me a detailed report that I can read in one page. They go ahead, do all the research for you, come back and it's all done. Then you could just say, hey, I like option number two. Book it done and you just show up for your holiday and you don't have to worry about a thing. Doesn't that sound amazing? Now you might be thinking this all sounds great, but how do I find one and how much is it going to cost? Believe it or not, you can get a personal assistant for as low as $500 a month. I just mentioned a whole bunch of things that's going to take hours on hours to do, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 hours a month to actually do all these tasks. How much is your time worth? If your time is worth more than $5 an hour, then yes, it's definitely worth it. Now some really great talent out in the Philippines. You can go to onlinejobs.ph if you want somebody local like in the US for example, you can put up a job post in upwork or for example freelancer. You'll be surprised how many people have tons of experience as personal or executive assistants. And listen, it doesn't require a huge amount of skill set. It requires somebody with good communication skills, a can do attitude and are willing to learn, willing to find out. These tasks are not rocket science, but it does require somebody to have some sort of initiative. So these are great places to look and hire. And remember, you don't have to hire somebody that is in your neighborhood. You can hire somebody across the world and with the power of the Internet, they could do everything I mentioned today virtually.

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Thy ticket lady Jennifer of Coolidge. Well, many thanks, good sir. Here is my Discover card.

They accept Discover at Renaissance Fairs?

Yeah, they do here. Discover is accepted at the places I love to shop. Getith with the times.

With the times.

You're playing the loot. Yeah, and it sounds pretty good, right?

Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide, based on the February 2025 Nielsen report. So you might be thinking, hey, this personal assistant stuff sounds interesting. I can really offload a lot of things. Well, here are two more things that you can really leverage. The power of having a personal assistant, having somebody have your back even when you are off. So say, for example, you do go to the Cook Islands for that vacation, instead of having some autoresponder that says, hey, I'm not available to answer your email, you can get your personal assistant to answer your emails. They could simply reply with a personal reply, hey, I'm Marty, Omar's assistant, and he's not available right now or he is traveling at the moment. He's not gonna be able to get back to you until this date. But maybe I can help you in some way. Do you have any questions? Or maybe they could just directly help them, like give him that headshot they asked for. This is gonna make you feel awesome because one, when you're on vacation, you're not gonna have to worry about a ton of email not being handled. People are getting answers. Number two, when you come back, that list of emails you're going to have to get to, you're going to find that list is a whole lot shorter because your personal assistant took care of most of them. And the last little tip I want to share with you is your personal assistant can take care of uncomfortable situations, situations maybe you just don't want to deal with. And this is where they can be sort of like a manager. Say, for example, somebody comes and says, hey, I want to work with you. And you say, great, awesome. I'm going to get you in touch with my assistant and they're going to help you, walk you through it. And then the personal assistant can give that person your rate, your quote, and if they get back to you, say, hey, listen, I can't do this. This is what I can do. This is a price that's lower than what your quote is. And if you don't Want to take that money. If that's just too low, your assistant can do the negotiating for you. Or it could just say, hey, listen, that's not the rate. That's acceptable. This is our price. Unfortunately, if you're not able to do it, we're not going to be able to do business. That's okay. And it separates you from the negotiation. Another example is, hey, you have to say no because you can't make an appointment because you are fully booked. Your calendar is booked. Your personal assistant can just get back to that person and say, hey, very sorry, but you know, Omar's booked. It's going to save you time and it's going to save you that awkward feeling of having to say no. And it's coming from somebody who's just doing their job. Hey, this is my job to handle this person's calendar. I'm telling you that they can't make it. And there's countless of other examples I can give you of somebody else taking care of situations you just don't want to have to deal with all the time. It's time consuming, it's brain consuming. It's emotionally draining. Well, there you have it. Take a look. You may want to save yourself some time and have the luxury of having somebody who has your back as a personal assistant. Thank you so much for listening. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. If you're wondering, this sounds good, but I don't know if I have enough work for this person. What am I going to get them to do? Well, a good place to start is to list all the things you hate doing every day. Personal life and business life. Make a long list. We are very good at writing things down that we don't like. So let's do that and then take a look. What can I get my personal assistant to do? What from this list can I just give them as their first tasks, what are some things that I have to do regularly? Renew my insurance, pay my bills, make sure some information is up to date on a regular basis. These are things that, you know, they could take care of for you so you don't have to worry about it anymore. All right, thank you so much for listening. I'll check you in tomorrow's episode Q and A Wednesday. I'll see you then. Bye. Bye.

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