MBA1301 How to Hire a Great Executive Assistant

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Hey oh welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA Show. Strategic Business Lessons on the daily every day with her 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 how to hire a great executive assistant. An executive assistant can be incredibly valuable to you and your company. They're basically a clone of you. Many entrepreneurs leverage the power of an executive assistant to get so much more done. Spend their time more on bigger picture leadership tasks rather than time consuming administrative tasks. Reduce their stress, increase their productivity, increase their output. So much so I know entrepreneurs that have two EAs. But in today's episode I'm going to share with you how to find a great executive assistant to hire. It doesn't matter if they're going to be a local, hire a remote, hire full time or part time. Get ready to feel better about your workload and your life. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Full disclosure, I do not have an executive assistant. I know it's embarrassing. I'm doing a lesson about it and I don't have one. So how am I going to share with you how to hire one? Well, I'm actually in the process of hiring an executive assistant for our company and I thought to myself, let me share what I've learned in this process. I've done a lot of homework. I've asked a lot of other entrepreneurs that I know in my coaching groups and my mastermind groups asked them how they found their ea, what they looked for when finding a great one, how they Created their job descriptions. What do they actually do for them? So instead of keeping all that info and research to myself, I'm going to share it with you and take you along the journey of hiring an EA that we're going through right now. So first, let me talk about why we're hiring an ea. Well, one of the concepts that we have learned recently, Nicole and I, as the leaders of our company, is that it's a great waste of our time to spend it on tasks that are quote, unquote, $10 tasks. This is a term that we learned from our business coach, Dan Martell. And what's a $10 task? Well, it's something that would generate, you know, $10 for your business. And this is just a figurative term. And you can see things as like $10, $100 and like $10,000 tasks. A $10,000 task is strategically planning your marketing. That can really generate a lot of money for your business versus managing your schedule. Yes, you have to do that to run your business, but it's not really going to generate a lot of money. But unfortunately, these tasks need to get done and they take a lot of time. And for the longest time, you know, I've been resisting getting an EA because I thought, hey, I, I'm not that important that I need an executive assistant. But over the years I have really realized and truly believed that, you know, my biggest asset is time. And I only have 24 hours in the day. And if I want to leverage my time better, I need help. I need to get people that are better at these tasks that can do them for me so I can focus on other things. So many people, they hire an ea, an executive assistant, to help their lives be more efficient, more productive. They do things like manage their email and schedule their travel. And often they focus on helping one individual. But when I did a little research and dug a little deeper and asked other entrepreneurs, many people hire an EA for the company, which is interesting. I thought that was really interesting and I really gravitated to the idea. Nicole and I were like, this is a good idea to have somebody that can help, not just Nicole and I, but also other team members. So they would do tasks like taking minutes at meetings and compiling, you know, the notes and summaries, help organize off site retreats, be a point of contact for HR matters, organize rewards or gifts or things you want to send in the mail. So they can not only help you manage your own tasks, but also be at the disposal of the team, which is a great idea. I thought, like, wow, not only can I use help, but there are other areas in the business that can help, need their help, not only help you, but also can help other areas in your business, other people in your business. So like with any hire, the first place to start is a job description. Nailing down a good job description is going to allow you attract the right people. People read these job descriptions and see if they see themselves there, they see their experience in that job description. So take the time to do this. I know this is the boring part. No one wants to do this, but, but a job description is gonna let people know, hey, this is what I'm looking for. If you do these things, you win. This is how you succeed at your job. This is my end of the bargain. This is what I'm looking for in lieu of the compensation. Right? And one of the ways to get started with this is to create a list of all the tasks you would want your future EA to do. These are tasks you just wanna offload, things that take too much time, things you're not interested in, things that you're not particularly good at. And even if you're not looking to hire your EA tomorrow, a good exercise is just to have a Google sheet. And you and your leadership team can add to that Google sheet every time you come across a task that you're doing that isn't particularly a good use of your time. So for example, I got an email where I had to schedule a call to speak to somebody. As soon as I started doing that, I got on the sheet and wrote down schedule calls for Omar. A few months ago, we were working on our team retreat. I was scheduling flights, I was buying insurance, I was doing all this stuff and I was like, this is too much, I need some help. I'd write down those tasks in the sheet. So as you go through your day to day tasks, so you're on alert, you're top of mind when you're doing these tasks. You're jotting these things down so you can remind yourself, hey, this is who I need. These are the things I need them to do. Another way to fill this list is look at your previous to do lists from last week or last month. Look at all the things you had to do. What are the most time consuming things that somebody else can be trained to do? If you could teach somebody how to do it, it should be pretty straightforward. Whether it' creating blog post images or scheduling your podcast or replying to emails. Having a long list allow you to create a fantastic job description. And again, we're Gonna keep our ears open how we can add things to this list to help our team. Take minutes in a meeting, remember staff member birthdays, and send them a little something, things like that. Next, when it comes to an executive assistant, yes, it's admin, but it's high level admin. It's people that are gonna be responsible for some high level ST appointments, your reputation, your brand, your travel, all that kind of stuff. So you're gonna have to really try your best to not go cheap. You want to hire a good person, highly qualified, and you're gonna get what you pay for. So make sure that you don't just discount this as like an admin job. And I don't need to pay much for this. Obviously it's gonna depend on where you hire and where the person's located and all that kind of stuff. But just keep in mind that if you're gonna get somebody great, be willing to pay a little bit more than the going rate for that job. Now, I know one of the apprehensions people have when it comes to hiring an EA is the trust factor. Hey, how do I trust this person with my credit card numbers and my travel itineraries in my inbox? Well, you don't have to trust them all at once. You know, you can progress to that level of trust. So, for example, your first three months could just be about doing certain tasks that are very low security, very low on having access to personal data. As you start building trust and start seeing this person really do a great job and really having a pivotal role in your business. You can start with one thing like your credit card so you can say, hey, book my travel using this credit card and the credit card information. If something goes wrong, you can always, you know, call a credit card company. Reverse things. Not the end of the world. You know, most of us have had a card number stolen at one time in their life, so they know how to deal with it. But of course you're going to get to that step when you're ready. A great way to share passwords and things like that for your logins is LastPass. You know, they sign up for LastPass, you give them access via their email. You can give them a company email via Gmail suite, very easy to use. And then from there they can have access to all your accounts without having to know the actual password. And again, this is your EA for your business. They're going to be looking at your business email, not your personal email. If you want them to do that as well, that's totally fine. And at the end of the day, we live in the age of the Internet where everybody's information is out there. Obviously you want to get to a level of trust, but you know, understand that, you know, the repercussions are not that bad. They're going to have other information down the line that, you know, it's pretty personal. So you got to be able to trust this person. At some point, you know, they're going to have your credit card information, your passport information, all that kind of stuff. But when I spoke to the CEOs and the companies that have EAs rely on EAs, they can't live without them. They can't even imagine their life without the ea. And it's made their whole business work so much more smoothly, outsourcing and offloading the tasks that were taking them so much time and taking so much mind space as well. We only have so much time and attention, so we want to make sure that we focus those minutes and hours and attention spans that we have throughout the week on the right things in our business.

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So you've put together a great job description. All the type of tasks you want this person to do. Where do you advertise? Well, there are plenty of job sites out there. There's LinkedIn jobs, there's WeWork remotely. If you have a remote team, there's onlinejobs.ph if you're looking to hire out of the Philippines. But one thing I highly recommend is to post a job on a page on your website. On the jobs page on your website. Funny enough, a lot of job sites will scrape websites with job postings. I've noticed this with our own site and post your job automatically to their site. So you'll get lots of people discovering your job post simply by just putting it on your website. I highly recommend having a Google form in the application process so on the bottom of the job description, ask them to fill out the form, obviously giving their personal information, their name or email, you know, their Skype ID or phone number, or how you're going to contact them, along with a series of questions. These are preliminary questions. Ideally, they're example situations that they might be in, how they will deal with it. You want people to do a little bit of work, a little bit of effort to apply for your job, and so you can learn from them before you get on a call. It's a good way to vet them in addition to having their CV or resume. This may take a while to make a hire, but it's an important hire, so don't rush it. One of the things I love about Google forms is that they can be exported to Google sheets and you can make a spreadsheet. And therefore when you go through the interview process, you can kind of make notes and see who passes round one, round two, that type of thing. Remember, this person is going to be working with you very closely, working with your team very closely. So you want to make sure it's a good cultural fit as well. You want to make sure that they're a likable person, somebody you enjoy their company. You're going to be spending a lot of time and you're going to be working with them a lot. So keep that in mind in the interview process. An added bonus is if this person's strengths are your weaknesses, they will cover your weaknesses because they can do things that you can't do very well. If you're not an organized person, if you're not good calendars, if you're not somebody who's fast to reply to emails, you want somebody who could do all that stuff. Keep those tips in mind as well. Well, that wraps up today's lesson. We can't wait to make rea higher and I would love to share our results in a few months once they've been on the job for a bit. Thank you so much for listening. If you love the show, leave us an itunes rating and review. And there's two more ways you could support the show. Number one, hit subscribe right now. By hitting subscribe, you say, I like this podcast. I want more. And it helps us get found on search engines and apps like itunes and overcast and stitcher and all that stuff. Number two, support our sponsors. If you come across a sponsor doing one of our episodes, use the link that we provide. Get a discount. We always vet all our sponsors to make sure they're good people, great businesses, and they're going to serve you right because you are our community. You are our listeners. We got your back. Thank you so much for listening. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. If you want to grow, if you want to expand, if you want to scale, you can't do this alone. You need help. You need people by your side. You need backup. You got to see this as a marathon. It's a long road ahead, building a great business. Start building your team. Start realizing, hey, I gotta last. I gotta have some longevity. And I can't just burn myself out. I'm gonna need some support. I'm gonna need some help. And an EA is a very easy way to alleviate a lot of the stress. Trust me. I am looking forward to it. Thank you so much. I'll check you in. Tomorrow's episode, Free ride Friday. I'll see you then. Take care.

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