MBA1635 Q&A Wednesday: How much do I need to pay my EA?

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Hey O welcome to the home $100 MBA Show Bite Size Business building nuggets every single day with 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 $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online and today's episode is a Q and A Wednesday episode. In our Q and A Wednesday episodes I answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you have a question you want to ask, just email me over@omar mba.net Today's question is from Frank and Frank asks. I'm hiring my first executive assistant. I'm looking forward to taking off a lot of tasks off my plate, but how much do I need to pay my ea? Any insight in this matter would be helpful. Thanks Love the show Frank. Thanks for the question Frank. We are here to answer it on Q and A Wednesday and congratulations on taking this step. Hiring an executive assistant is one of the best first hires to make because they're going to take off a lot of things off your plate like you mentioned, but a lot of things that take a lot of time, your time without really adding too much value to the business. You need to free yourself up to bigger tasks that bring in revenue, bring in sales and grow the trajectory of the business. But how much should you pay your executive assistant? You have many options, especially if you're hiring remotely. We're going to get into those options as well as learning how you can know how much to pay them. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. I want to start off by saying that an executive assistant, that position, that.

Job title is quite broad.

What my EA does in my business might be different from another company. So you got to get very, very specific about what you need them to do. Some people have their EAs do payroll, some EAs don't touch payroll because they have an accounting department and they do more like scheduling and note taking in minutes and meetings. So my advice, anytime you look to hire somebody new is to get started with a detailed job description. You literally just need to list all the duties, all the tasks you want this new hire to do. You got to get super clear on what you actually need so you can find that person or attract that person with a clean and easy to read job ad. Having said that, you're going to need somebody who is detailed oriented, is good with administrative tasks, and really has had some experience with this type of role before. With the tasks that you're asking them to do. There's also something else you need to make sure that they have and that's compatibility. You're going to be spending a lot of time working with your ea. They're the person that's going to be booking you in meetings, booking your interviews. You're going to be talking to them probably more than any other team member on your team, because they're going to be managing your work life and they're going to be asking many questions, especially in the beginning. So you need to make sure that their personality matches with yours. There's some sort of match. You just need to really make sure that you can get along. If you're somebody who likes to over communicate and message a lot and get on calls, then you need somebody who is like that, somebody who's okay with that and is used to that. If somebody is very introverted and doesn't really communicate with you, they're not going to be a good match. You're going to feel like you're not being supported. So make sure your personalities work well. So how much do you pay them? Well, of course you have to consider where they're located in the world. Many people like to hire their executive assistant in the same time zone or in a nearby time zone because they want to make sure, their working hours are the same and that makes total sense. But even having said that, there are many options. Even if you're in America, for example, you don't have to just hire within the US you have plenty of other options and you'll still be a time zone or two away from each other, whether it's in Canada, whether it's hiring in Central America or Mexico or Colombia or Argentina or Brazil. There are a lot of options in many other countries that have highly skilled, highly educated people that can do your job. They can do the job that you're hiring for. I mean, and I'm not saying this so you can save money. I'm saying this so you can open up the talent pool so you can get the best candidate. Now, obviously there is opportunity for you to save money if you're trying to keep costs down. If you're going to be hiring overseas for people that live in Europe or the UK, there are many talented people all across Europe, in Eastern Europe that are only a few time zones away. If you're in Australia or New Zealand, many people hire talent from the Philippines or Greater Asia. They're only a few time zones away. So you get a point. Everybody has an opportunity to, to reach out outside of their immediate locale, their immediate country and really open up the talent pool. And really what you need to do is you need to use some online tools to find out what the average salary is for this position in the country of the person that you're hiring. So say, for example, you're hiring somebody in Calgary, Canada, for this position. You can easily use a tool like Glassdoor. This is a website that actually helps you know, the average salary starting median and high for any position you can think of and you can put in the location in the world. And it's going to give you an estimate, it's going to give you some idea. Obviously we're hiring somebody a bit junior. You're going to be on the lower side of the scale in terms of the salary. If they're senior, higher, you get the point. But you could do this for any country in the world. Now, if you have a fixed budget, like you just can't pay more than X amount every month for this position, then limit where you're going to hire. Okay, where you're going to recruit out of. And Glassdoor is going to help you kind of understand what the salaries are in different parts of the world. So once you get the position in Glassdoor, you can just change a country and say, okay, how much is this salary in this country or this country and it's going to vary. You can hire an executive assistant in India for US$1,000 a month. You can hire somebody for 700 in the Philippines where you could spend 5, 6, $7,000 on a senior executive assistant out of the US or the UK. So understand what your budget is and go after the best talent in the regions that you can afford and glassdoor.com is a great tool to take a look at that. Also, if you just simply google the country plus the position you're looking for, average salary, you're going to get some information. Some countries publish these stats or this information publicly. So there's a wealth of information out there for you to research so you can get a good understanding. The good thing is that since you're working with an EA or trying to find an ea, you have a limited number of countries you're going to be looking for an EA because of you want to make sure that time zone is in the right time zone not too far away from you. Maybe one or two time zones away from you. You're going to end up maybe looking into three, four, maybe five locations to find this talent. Now there are specific job boards for many countries and this is going to require a bit of googling on your end. But for example, if you're hiring out of the Philippines, onlinejobs PH is a very popular job site where you can hire good talent out of the Philippines and this is a very popular site there and every country kind of has their own onlinejobs Ph it's gonna take a bit of time for you to just do a quick research on Google to find the best job boards for the countries you're looking to hire out.

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To wrap up today's lesson, today's Q and A question from Frank how much to pay his EA or the EA he's looking to hire? Narrow it down first to the regions, the countries you're looking to hire out of. Go to Glassdoor, figure out what the average salary is in those areas and this will allow you to narrow down even more which areas are within your budget and then go after those countries. Find their local job sites like onlinejobs PH for Philippines and post your job there and find the best candidates for the job. This is exciting. This is actually a huge step. You're going to start to feel a little bit more like working on your business rather than in your business. Working more on strategy, working more on growth, and being more of a leader rather than a doer or a worker bee in your business. That wraps up today's lesson. Thank you so much for listening. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe right now. By hitting subscribe, you get instant access to our next episode as soon as it drops. So whatever you use, Spotify, Stitcher Radio, Apple Podcasts, Himalaya, whatever podcast app you like to use, hit that subscribe button right now. It's absolutely free. It also gives you free access to our archive episodes, over 6, 1600 episodes. Plenty of lessons for you to dig into. So do that right now. It's absolutely free. Hit subscribe. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. It's really important for you to be on the same wavelength as your executive assistant. So establish a cadence, whether it's a weekly one on one meeting. So you establish the goals for the week and what needs to be done, along with a daily kind of online check in via Slack or Messenger or something like that where you just hey, what's on your plate today? Can you do this? Can you do that? So everybody kind of is on track and knows what to expect and knows when to be on and be ready to respond. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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