MBA2135 Q&A Wednesday: When do I hire my first executive assistant?

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Hey oh welcome to the $100 a show. Your better business workout 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 Webinar Ninja, an independent software company. I started my co founder back in 2014 and today's episode is Q and A Wednesday. On Q and A Wednesdays we answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you got a question you want to ask, go ahead and email me over at omar@100mba.net today today's question is from Adam and Adam asks, hey Omar, I've started my business and it's been about six months now and it's starting to grow and get some traction. My question is when do I hire my first executive assistant? I've heard from you before that hiring an EA or a VA is a good first hire, but how do I know I'm ready to hire them? I don't want to spend money that I don't need to be spending. Thanks so much for the podcast Adam. Great question Adam and congrats on getting traction with your business and also being fiscally responsible and not wanting to waste your money in today's I want to break down when is the time when do you know it's time to make that hire for your ea? My answer might surprise you. I'm a big believer on outsourcing your busy tasks, tasks that are taking and sucking your time, not allowing enough time for you to do the tasks, actually bring in the money and grow your business. You need to offload those tasks to somebody like an EA to clear your plate, clear your mind from the burden of things that don't actually make your business money. But it's kind of required to keep things running. I'm going to write down what those things are and how much it's going to cost you to hire an EA and when it's the right time. When you know it's the right time to make that first hire. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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So Adam asks when do I hire my first executive assistant just to make sure everybody's on board? An executive assistant is somebody who assists you by taking things off your plate, things that you don't necessarily need to do. I'm talking about scheduling, I'm talking about replying to emails, I'm talking about customer support, I'm talking about social media, I'm about marketing tasks, copywriting, taking minutes in meetings, all kinds of stuff. And traditionally, you know, an executive assistant would be somebody that works with you in an office. But in today's day and age, usually this is a virtual person or somebody who just works online remotely. This is why you also hear it referred to as a va, a virtual assistant. And for many online businesses for well over a decade now, it's become the go to hire as your first hire. And the reason why I recommend it as your first hire is because there are so many things that you have to do to run your business. At the start, you're doing everything yourself. You've built it, you're running, you're maintained it, you managed it. But once you can afford a first hire, it should be an ea because a lot of the busy work or what I like to call $10 tasks, tasks that don't really bring in money but you kind of have to do them because it keeps your Business going. Your job as the founder, the leader of your business, is to dedicate your time on tasks that bring in the big money. A thousand, $10,000 tasks. And the more $10 tasks you can get off your plate, the better. And I'm here to tell you, you'll be sur tasks. How many hours are you spending every week on $10 tasks? On things that don't really move the needle. This is where your EA comes in. So now I just want to address the elephant in the room. How much does an EA cost? Well, you can hire an executive assistant from the Philippines or a number of other developing countries between $500 US and US$800 US dollars a month. So very, very affordable. Now, my executive assistant is from the Philippines, and the reason why we hire from the Philippines is because we've had good experiences hiring teammates from there for several reasons. They're quite educated for a developing country. Their English language skills are quite good. They're not perfect, but they're not native speakers. It's their second language. So for somebody who's speaking English as a second language, it's pretty darn good. Teammates we hired from the Philippines are hard working, they're loyal, and for me personally, I work out of Sydney, Australia. The time zone difference is not bad at all. Now, if you're somewhere else, like in the US it doesn't mean it's a deal breaker. It just means that you're gonna have to work asynchronously, which is fine because most of the tasks that they're gonna do is asynchronous. And there's still a bunch of hours during the day that you can sync up on. I've hired a lot of our teammates off a job site called onlinejobs. Ph. Now Adam's asking, how do I know it's time? It's time to make this hire? Well, you're gonna have to spend some time listing everything you do every single day, every day of the week. This is going to be a little time consuming. It took me personally a little over two hours to do this because I literally have to sit down and go through my calendar and look at every task and really think in my new detail all the things I do on a regular basis and an irregular basis to run my business. That could be updating blog posts that be changing something on my website. This could be sending out emails, inviting somebody maybe to a event or dinner. This could be creating audio clips for social media, a whole bunch of stuff that I'm doing. Maybe I'm doing things in combination with other things, like, for example, attending meetings. But I'm also writing notes during the meeting so I could just focus on the meeting and have somebody else write notes. So I literally write down all these tasks, every single thing I do, and I just underline or circle all the things that I don't need to do, somebody else can do. Now, this is the key here. Just because they don't know how to do it now or they're not trained doesn't mean they can't be trained. So think about all the tasks that you can easily outsource or show somebody how to do. Shoot them a video, train them. They learn, and they just continue to do it from there on in. It's a little bit investment of time, but it's well worth it. So now you got a list of all the things you do, and you've circled or underlined the things that you can give to somebody else. Now, we're not done yet. What we're going to do is that we're going to look at all the things that we circled that we identified, we can outsource that I don't need to do. And you're going to ask yourself, do I need to continue to do these things? Are they helping my business? Or can I just cut them out altogether? Just eliminate them from the tasks I normally do. So we eliminate, then we're left with a solid list of tasks. And what I want you to do is to put a number beside each task that you circled that you haven't eliminated of how many minutes you spend on that task every single week. And this could just be an estimate. So maybe be 10 minutes, maybe 30 minutes, maybe. Maybe 60 minutes. Whatever it is, just write the number there. And I want you to total up your numbers. How many minutes? And let's say your total is like 600 minutes. Now, once you have your total, I want you to multiply it by three. Why three, Omar? It only takes you 600 minutes in a week. So maybe that's like around, what, 10 hours? Why am I taking it from 10 hours to 30 hours? Well, for a few reasons. Number one, you got to stop thinking that everybody's going to work as fast and efficient as you. That's just not going to happen. That's rule number one of delegation. Okay? Rule number two, they're not as motivated as you're going to be because you're the business owner. Your butt is on the line. You need to make sure these things get done. So you're working as fast and efficient as Possible you have some fire under you that they don't have. And that's just emitting the facts. Okay? That's just, you got to just come to terms with that. And lastly, they're going to be new to these tasks in the beginning and they're going to need more time to complete them. And this is why I triple this number. So I went from 10 hours to 30 hours a week. To me, that's enough. That's enough work for me to make a hire. Because yes, it's not full time, it's 40 hours a week. But I leave a little gap for me to add things to the to do list. Things that can expand my business. Help me as I take on new tasks that we're going to bring in cash to my business. I'm going to need some help with administrating those tasks, doing all the busy work. Maybe I'll be taking more sales calls. So I need somebody else to help me schedule those calls or set up those calls or communicate with the client prior to the call. You get the point. Have a little slack. If you can afford the five to eight hundred dollars a month comfortably in your business, this is well worth it because you're going to get back 30 hours a week. Think about what you can do, what you can sell, what you can build in your business with 30 extra hours every single week. That's incredibly powerful.

Okay? Does this happen to anybody else? You sit down with a juicy QPC, some McNuggets and those golden fries from McDonald's. Then you take a long sip of your Sprite because you can still hear your mama saying, don't fill up on that drink before you eat your food. But you're grown now, so you do what you want.

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To wrap up today's Q and A, Wednesday's question from Adam. When should I hire my first ea? Well, once you've done this exercise, you'll know you'll have enough hours. I think if you have between 20 to 30 hours of solid work that you can outsource that you can give to your ea. It's time to hire. Now. I got a bonus task that I want you to give your first EA and that is creating standard operating procedures or SOPs. So all the tasks you just gave your EA, all 30 hours of them. In addition to doing those tasks, their job is to create documentation to Document the operating procedure to do these tasks. This is valuable information. This is intellectual property that has value in your business. And you should have a document or documentation for everything that's done in your business so that, hey, if one day somebody else steps into the company, they can just follow the steps and the procedures. If somebody buys your company one day, they can easily have a manual to know how everything works and how everything gets done. Get them to start to do SOPs for their own tasks, those 30 hours of work, and then they can continue to do sops for other parts of your business, things that you do, things that other people do in your business, other departments, and you basically build out a training manual or even it could be considered a user's manual on how to do things in your business. There you have it, guys. Thanks so much for listening. Thank you, Adam for asking your question here on Q and A Wednesday. If you got a question you want to ask, go ahead and email me over at omar100mba net and I'll make sure to answer right here on Q and A. If you love this show, the best thing you could do is share it. Share with other people on social media right now. Tell them to go ahead to 100 MBA net to listen in and subscribe to daily business lessons. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. If you need an EA to sit in your meetings, help you with your coaching clients, take minutes, remind you of things, maybe even book local things for you, it might be helpful to hire somebody that has a close time zone. For me, the Philippines and Australia are about two or three hours difference depending daylight savings time. So that's pretty close. If you're in North America. Some other options are places like Ecuador, Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina. There's some really good talent you can find in these areas with similar time zones as in North America. Another option is Europe or even Eastern Europe. If you're early riser, you'll have four or five hours. If you wake up early enough that you're in sync with that person across in Europe. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

Okay. Does this happen to anybody else? You sit down with a juicy QPC, some McNuggets, and those golden fries from McDonald's. Then you take a long sip of your Sprite because you can still hear your mama saying, don't fill up on that drink before you eat your food. But you're grown now, so you do what you want.

Share and share alike with the 20 piece McNuggets from McDonald's for just $6. Limited time only. Price and participation may vary. Cannot be combined with any other offer.