The Outsourcing Game, Reinvented for the Modern Entrepreneur

2009 was basically dark night of the soul moment. I said, I'm highly educated. I shouldn't be in this position. Why I've been struggling. I've tried all these different entrepreneurial things and I actually contemplated suicide. It went to that dark place of like, would my million-dollar life insurance policy be the thing that would safeguard my family's future, even though it may not be mine? I picked up a knife and I was so angry with myself, Harry. I was just so angry at failing my family, my wife, my kids, my parents, you know, and ultimately myself.

Welcome to the Speakeasy Mastermind Podcast, where the real conversations happen behind closed doors with the boldest entrepreneurs, creators, and growth minds in the game. No fluff, no filters, just the raw strategies, personal stories, and mental models that move the needle. I'm Eric Berman. Now let's get into it. Today's episode, you're gonna meet Bijal Parmar, one of our leading experts when it comes to hiring VAs. And man, he's got some incredible systems and he's dropped some incredible nuggets today about what to look for when hiring VAs, what mistakes we entrepreneurs constantly make, and really share some of his amazing stories and entrepreneurial journeys. Talk about a guy who's won from rags to riches and been burnt out and blown up so many times, 4 or 5 times, moving from overseas to US, getting kicked out, making money, losing, going down to a dollar. Almost committing suicide because he was down in the dumps, but he's made it out and he's thriving now more than ever. So excited. Welcome, Bijal Parmar. Welcome to Inside the Speakeasy Mastermind Podcast, where today I'm so pumped and excited to have my newish friend. I'd say newish because I was fortunate to meet Bijal Parmar through Las Vegas at the launch of the Las Vegas Speakeasy Mastermind chapter. And since then, I'd like to think we've become friends and colleagues, and we've talked to each other quite a bit and formed a really good bond and relationship. And really he's been a lot of my go-to guy when it comes to all things hiring and outsourcing VAs, and he's been there for me all along the way over the last few years. Bijal, welcome to the show.

Eric, thank you so much, and honestly, it's been a pleasure getting to know you for the last— I was gonna say a year, it's actually been about 2 or maybe even coming up to 2 and a half years now. You brought Speakeasy Mastermind Mastermind to Vegas, and it's probably one of the best things that could have happened.

Thank you, appreciate that, and likewise, you've been such an amazing member of our community, and I think the first time we did awards, you won one of our awards, so thank you for that. What was the award for again? Which one did you get?

I think it was contribution to the Vegas chapter or MVP for the Vegas chapter.

Nice. The Vegas MVP. I love it. I love it. And before we get started, you know, we're going to talk about history, but for anybody who has not seen Bijal or is wondering who the guy is, just look for the color yellow. You know, you talk about branding and other things. Now you always have yellow. I know your company's called B-Epic and I imagine the yellow has something to do with the B and the yellow bee, but tell me through that and actually how that's, you know, I know we're going to get into some outsourcing and I want to hear your amazing story because it's some great stuff to share.

I don't know if you can see that, Eric, but this is the book I read right around my 50th birthday. I was actually working for another outsourcing company. I read the book on how to grow an organization based on the observation of a beehive and how bees function. And I thought, oh, that's kind of a cool idea. And slowly the yellow kind of emerged. When I started my own company, I felt like I wanna do homage to the bee, the mighty bee, you know, because bees are actually a symbol of productivity as business owners, we should be delegating ourselves out of doing the busy work. So the whole thing, the whole theme just came about and now I'm just kind of known as a guy with the yellow jacket, the guy in yellow. So that the branding worked, but I'm not a branding expert, just the color yellow.

Well, I want to dig into that because there's a learn there. Like I've seen people that do that. I mean, you know, you see, I think of Rudy Maurer, who I know, you know, I talked to recently. He's all in red, always in red. And that's like his thing. And that you're the guy in yellow. Like, has that actually helped? Has that got conversations?

You know, when you have a foreign name, it's not easy to remember, but when I connect the dots to them, 'cause I say, oh, what's your name? Bijal. So remember B, you know, my friends call me B, but remember B, the yellow and black. So I kind of anchor the color and then people will be out somewhere, they'll see the color yellow and they'll send me, hey Bijal, I just saw this yellow car or I saw this yellow, you know, this honeycomb thing and they'll send me messages. So people remember the brand. So that's been very helpful.

That's great. That's great. I'm sure your family and wife loves looking at your wardrobe. It's quite a bit of yellow. And then when you go shopping, is it like, you see, look for the yellow?

It makes it very easy for them to shop for me.

That's right. Any holiday present, it's let's look for something yellow. It's great. Easy to gift at that point. How many pairs of yellow shoes you got? You got a couple?

I got two.

All right.

All right.

Well, cool. I know we're not here to talk about yellow all day, but you got an interesting story. Now remind me, I think you said you're from the UK. Is that right?

Yeah, so I'm from the UK. I got a background in aerospace engineering. I came over to the US in '97. I lived 3 years in Chicago, and then a friend of mine said, hey, come join me in San Diego and we'll start a company together in automotive recruiting industry. And so I left my job of several years. We moved to San Diego, got into automotive recruiting, and about a year into that relationship, I found out he was kind of lying to me, misleading us, and subsequently we pretty much lost everything. So we got to our dream. San Diego was a dream of mine, right? Backpacked right after graduation across America. I remember coming to San Diego and I said, I wanna move here. This is beautiful. And we finally made it happen. But there's a kind of a short-lived fairy tale. Again, about a year into our San Diego move, found out he was lying to me. We basically ended up losing our home. And the next several years was really challenging. But that's also the entry into entrepreneurship too.

Wow. So, well, I mean, how'd you get through that? Okay, so you come out here. Well, first of all, let's back up a sec. You came out from UK. What prompted you to come out here?

You know, I grew up having a fascination for flying, NASA. I was going to be a NASA engineer. And so that led me to come to the US. I was very young, actually 7 or 8 years old. We went to visit NASA, Disney World. I grew up American TV. So it's always been a childhood dream to get to come to the US.

Wow, that's great. So you made it out. You get to San Diego, you're thinking you're on a great path, went from NASA to auto, but to the recruiting side, and you get screwed over. Now I'd love to do lessons of sharing too. What about that experience? Can you share, like, I mean, without maybe, obviously we don't need to name names today, but you know, as far as like, what was the thing that you got screwed on? How could you have identified it sooner? What lesson would you share on that?

At that time period, quite a lot. I kind of made peace with it. I'm like, you know, what's happened has happened. Ultimately, I kind of had a feeling very early on that something wasn't right. But you, as entrepreneurs, you kind of look for the positive. You don't want to often believe the signs, right? If I looked at the data, and I'm using the word data very, because you know, there was times where checks that would be written would just bounce for no reason. At least, you know, and I was like, why is this bouncing? So the data was there telling me something was wrong, but I wanted to believe, you know, that couldn't be true. I wanted to believe in the positive outcome. You know, he was the one who introduced me to Landmark Forum. For those of you who don't know, Landmark Forum's kind of in the personal development realm. So, you know, I overlooked the signs and ultimately that it cost me a fortune. I mean, it literally cost me millions of dollars, peace of mind. I mean, it took me to a very depressive state. We had to leave the country multiple times, you know, because we don't want to ever become illegal, but we had to kind of go back to the UK, apply for a new visa, come back. Ultimately it cost us, you know, literally almost $65,000 to finally get our green card. It took 20 years from that point to get our green card. $70,000 odd in legal fees and stuff, not to mention the lost opportunity. But the signs were there, Eric. And here's the thing, I didn't ask for help. I was so caught in the headlights. If I just asked people, hey, what do I do? All we had to do, we had a home back then. We bought a home, it was about $450,000 or whatever. If we just had the peace of mind, so Bijal, just move out, rent the home out and just downscale your lifestyle and get yourself back on your feet, right? But in that moment, like panic sale, gotta get out. You wanna go into debt. And ultimately that home today is about $1.4 million, right? So yeah, a very expensive lesson to learn on multiple fronts.

Wow. And so part of when you say you didn't ask, I mean, is it seems like a lot of questions you didn't ask even along the way when you saw those signs, you didn't know where to go to. And then afterwards when you're going through that whirlwind, a lot of energy, a lot of panic probably set in and you didn't have a community or anybody. To reach out to, to ask for guidance? Is that—

So here's the funny thing. One thing we've been very privileged, we've always had friends, we've always had community, but you know when your back's up against the wall, you, instead of reaching out, we tend to kind of go in. We almost do the exact opposite of what we should do when we're in trouble. And bringing this kind of full circle a bit to Speakeasy, it's one of the things I really appreciate is whenever I've had a challenge, I've posted it on the Speakeasy forum and somebody's always reached out with a little tip or even an offer, hey, let's meet and let's see what we can do. And I do that. I ask, you know, even if it sounds silly, because someone out there is gonna have an answer that you haven't thought about. And that's the importance of not just having a committee, but being able to share in the committee and not feel that fear of being judged. I think one of the reasons that we don't ask is what will people say? You know, as business owners, I think every single person, every single one of us has gone through some kind of challenge, right? In different flavors. And being part of this community, all I find is support from other members, not even people I've met, it's people who are part of other chapters as well. So that's why I'm such a big, you know, fan of the community and of what you're building here.

Oh, I really, really appreciate that. Yeah, no, that was a big part of the vision is to create a place where we could be vulnerable and scared sometimes being an entrepreneur and going through these big lessons and who can you turn to and who can you, like you said, you know, the fear of how are people going to feel about it. And we've all been through these tough times and, and I'm glad the community has been there. So that, that's been a big part of the vision. And so, and I appreciate you being vulnerable and sharing and reaching out as you have. So let's go down the journey here. So now, you had to go back.

Right around 2003 was when we first had to leave. So basically we sold the home, we went back to the UK, got a brand new visa. We came back, started a new business. This time it was kind of in the health and wellness space. I was one of the first people to kind of start doing what was known as brain state training. We'd be hooked up to electrodes and basically through the brain patterns, we could basically do personal development work and actually see the brain change real time. So we had a center in La Jolla. I got approval from the US immigration in the US, but in 2000, I think it was end of 2006, went back to the UK to get our actual visa and they denied it because there's no prior concept that they could model this off. And literally, I kid you not, this was the words from the immigration officer in the window. He goes, you've been better off opening up a Dunkin' Donuts. And so our investment into this wellness center, which will be at all high-tech therapy beds and Tesla coils. I mean, it was state-of-the-art stuff back then. Went down the drain. So again, we had to come back, fire, sell everything like a, you know, 10 cents on the dollar. We left, got a brand new visa. We came back at the end of the year, about September of 2007 now. I worked for an engineering company for about a year. Then we hit the crash, lost that position. We had to leave. Anyway, so 2009 was basically dark night of the soul moment. It was February 2009. I said, I'm highly educated. I shouldn't be in this position. Why I've been struggling. I've tried all these different entrepreneurial things and I actually contemplated suicide. It went to that dark place of like, would my million-dollar life insurance policy be the thing that would safeguard my family's future even though it may not be mine? Anyway, thank God. Well, it never went further than, well, here's what really happened if you want to know the truth. I picked up a knife and I was so angry with myself, Harry. I was just so angry at failing. My family, my wife, my kids, my parents, you know, and ultimately myself. And, but thankfully I like literally I saw the look on my wife's eyes and I came to my senses. That was the start of the turning point, you know? And ironically, the very first event I went back to, to kind of build something out of this was called Turning Point with Marshall Silver. And went through a series of courses with him. And eventually I was in one of the workshops and I was thinking about, okay, what do I do next? Like I was in a lost place and I just read The 4-Hour Workweek and I thought, you know, maybe I should kind of play around with this idea. And the very next event I went to, the very first speaker— oh, here, here's the funny— so I basically decided to get into the outsourcing space. I didn't know anybody. I knew a friend who had hired a Filipino, so I offered that connection and I started with 3 VAs. So I got my new business cards and I was all pumped up and I was gonna go to my first event, gonna, you know, make all these connections and start my business. But the very first speaker on stage happened to be in the outsourcing business. Like, I was like, are you F-ing kidding me, right? This is my big moment, my big relaunch in life. And the very first speaker was there. He has been a successful entrepreneur. He's built a team of about 100 VAs at the time. And I was like, he just stole my thunder. But one of the things I'd learned, it was all, you know, ask for help. So I went up to him out there and said, look, I'm in the same business. I'm trying to get started. Would you give me some advice? Long story short, we had a coffee the following week and he offered me, hey, to become an affiliate. I became an affiliate, master affiliate, eventually said, look, why don't you just join me? And for the next 10 years, I helped grow that agency from 100 to about 500 VAs. So that kind of brings us up to kind of about 2019. But that's how I got into the industry. So I picked up 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss, fell in love with the idea, and here we are.

And one thing that I would commend you on is, you know, you've learned along the way too. You're not, I mean, I could see you've been out, what, 5 times now? You came in and out. You try to get out here to stay.

4 times. 3 or 4 times. Yeah. And that moved the whole family because my kids, my wife, you know, Yeah, I mean, last time, 2009 is when I joined the agency. 2010, my immigration lawyer screws up our immigration paperwork. So I've got this newly found relationship, you know, working with somebody I just met several months earlier. My lawyer says, you've got two choices, Bijal. Either you leave the country or become illegal. Well, we don't become illegal. So I had to break the news to him. I said, hey, I'm really sorry, but we have to leave the country. And he goes, look, well, we talk about the laptop lifestyle, so, you know, just as long as you can do your work, we're all good. So he left the US and it was basically, we started to sell all of our stuff July 4th, 2010. We called Freedom from Stuff Day. We sold pretty much 99% of all of our things. And we packed our, you know, we always say packed 4 red bags, 3 laptops, 2 kids, 1 wife. And in September we left the US and we thought we'd be away for around 6 months, maybe a year, get a new visa and come back. We ended up traveling for about 5 years while building the outsourcing agency. If it wasn't for the VAs supporting that journey, you know, just we wouldn't have been able to travel, enjoy the travel, you know, build a company had I not cut my teeth on learning how to work with VAs.

That's amazing. And clearly, I mean, the message too is, I mean, when you're pushing that hard and you're going through the kind of scar wounds and the battle wounds you've been, I mean, you're hungry. You weren't afraid to go approach that guy on stage and ask and just be curious and say, I'm going to figure out a way to make this work. And, you know, if there's a will, there's a way, right? You just keep going and grinding. And that's such an incredible story of how hard you've gone and how you persevered. And congrats on that. And, you know, here we are today now, you know, running your own. You learned a lot from that, obviously that experience. And so now you must have broken off obviously at some point and tell us through that moment what happened.

So, you know, eventually the CEO said, hey, Bijal, can you come back to the US? We want to scale the company. I would grow the company, you know, from where we had been around 500. Well, I think at the time it was around 400-ish or whatever. I said, okay, yeah. So we basically got a brand new visa. We came back on an H-1 visa and I started to, you know, help grow the business. But around 2017, '18, right when crypto was really kind of starting to make a buzz, the CEO was kind of going in one direction. I wanted to take the company in a different direction. We were not seeing eye to eye and turned around. Right the day after Thanksgiving 2019, I said, Abhijal, we gotta part ways. And initially it was like another shock. It's like, oh my God, like what am I gonna do? But honestly, he gave me a favor. And I always remember, 'cause when we first started to work together, he said, Abhijal, look, I'm gonna teach you everything about this business. And he did, you know, he taught me a lot. I got to go to the Philippines with him, but I also learned a lot about what not to do or not how I would do things different. In 2019, as I mentioned, I just picked up this book and I was kind of inspired by some of the stuff I learned about. B's and the behavior. So how do I do, if I had to reinvent this industry, how would I do it differently? So some of the things that I did differently is I didn't wanna charge our clients markup fees. A lot of the clients that we were servicing were really kind of early stage entrepreneurs or entrepreneurs who kind of just didn't have big budgets. They were not your big, you know, 7-figure businesses. They're people who were kind of trying to scale from the kind of sometimes the low 6 figures upwards. So they were very cash tight. And that said, well, how about we don't focus on profit per hour, which is how most agencies work through a markup fee, right? And most clients don't realize if they hired somebody through an agency, it's typically a 2 to 5 times markup. Instead, we focus on performance, kind of like a coaching program for VAs. So rather than clients pay us this markup fee, they pay us to help support and course correct their VAs so the VAs can actually perform better. So I took the membership type model, almost like the coaching membership type model, applied it to this industry. We don't charge the VAs anything, but the clients pay us a very nominal fee. We use that to basically do online trainings, in-person gatherings, and I use this concept of a hive, which is where another bee analogy comes from, where we hire in clusters. So that means that every 3, 4, 5 months, VAs can actually get together just as we get together as a community, Eric, you know, for Speakeasy Mastermind. They get to train each other, they do some fun events. I go over once a year, we do a big party, we did a Harry Potter-themed training event using AI. Last year we did Rockstar where everyone got dressed up as rock stars. We had to use AI to write songs and do promotional campaigns and stuff. So we try to make being part of this community fun, even though they're actually getting paid directly by the client. So apart from my internal team, all the VAs get paid by the clients, but we look at them as part of our community. So it was kind of, we try and incorporate that aspect for our VAs and our clients.

Yep. No, I love it. And it's an interesting model to me because I'm a customer of your model. I always found it interesting because you— I tend to remember the hourly rate I'm paying the people I hire through you. I'm like, damn, there's a good rate, getting great quality people at this rate. And I know there's an ongoing service fee as well, but I attributed that to exactly what you said. I look at that and say, well, I know Bijal's doing great with that, that money that's going to make them better. It gives them the culture and all the other things that I don't have to worry about. You're taking care of all those other things, which Like you said, that's some of the stuff that if I was paying you, let's say $5 an hour for an employee, you know, oftentimes that might be $8, $9, $10 an hour through other agencies. And they're using that money in theory to do some of that stuff, you hope, but you don't know what they're doing, you know, kind of thing. And I know you're doing good by them. Well, I'm going to go back one second on that flip over. You were working, you know, you had that job forever, you know, with him and you learned a lot. Tell me through your fears, what's the emotional state And then I want to dive back into your business today because it's a great model. But what's your emotional state when, like, was it like no-brainer, you're going to go do your own business? Because all these other times you were working with somebody else, yet now you're an entrepreneur running it yourself. And so walk us through that journey of, okay, I'm on my own now.

We met for coffee the day after Thanksgiving 2019. We met for coffee and we had been going through a bit of a challenging time. The agency had been going through a bit of a challenging time. Part of it I felt was because of lack of focus, right? Instead of trying to focus on one thing and do it well, we've kind of been doing a little bit of this and a little bit of that and kind of dabbling with AI and stuff. So this was kind of like, hey, this is my vision for the next kind of 6 months to get us back on track. We had this conversation. I was feeling really good about, you know, having delivered this kind of strategic plan. And I remember saying, hey, Bijal, I'm sorry, I just, I gotta cut you loose, right? We gotta just part ways, cut it loose. So I was like, first it was a shock. I didn't see that coming, right? And I say that, but I think in my heart, I kind of felt it was sooner or later it's gonna happen, right? We had kind of, we had a decade together. We did some great stuff. We did live events together. But the time it had run its course. But in the moment, the first 24 hours was like panic, right? What am I gonna do? You know, we didn't have, you know, a lot saved up 'cause the move back from India back to the US cost quite a bit. The first few months, the first year or so of being back, we were really tight. So a lot of money was going out, not in. And so I was like, oh my God, what do we do here? But everything I'd learned from the previous experience of, you know, kind of hitting that deer in the headlights, it was like, okay, pause. Okay, what are the assets that I have, right? I've got my reputation, I've built a good network of people, and I just started to ask Eric. I just did exactly what I didn't do the first time around, right? I said, hey, how can I help you? What can I do? Here's some of my skills, my talents. A few people who I knew needed some help from an operational perspective. I started to help them out, got a little bit of money coming in at the time, and I started the new company, Be Epic Outsourcing. There was no VA, there was no clients. It was literally the idea. And again, you build it back up again. And as I think, you know, you have, you could have that faith, hope, whatever's the right word, that there is light somewhere, but you just gotta keep working towards it and not stay stagnant. But yeah, that's kind of how we started. So we started really, I would say January of, I always say December of 2019, but that was Christmas month. I don't think I did anything in outsourcing back then apart from content. But the really the first VA was placed, I think January of 2020.

Wow, that's great. And now you're an entrepreneur making it happen. And as we said, you have a unique model. How's it been? And tell us about the ups and downs of what you've learned the most now being an entrepreneur. And really, I would say, let's talk a little bit more. And within that, within the space that is now, I think, clearly gotten more competitive as more and more people go out there to try or hire overseas. What do you see in the industry for those that are listening? What kind of tips do you have for people looking to hire?

So it's a very competitive space. I mean, it was back then. I mean, you know, we do things a little bit differently, right? So we're not an agency and we're not exactly, you know, hiring direct. So we're kind of this hybrid model where, you know, in a way we're assisting people to hire directly, which have a very nominal fee for that, the hiring part. But as I said, where we make our money is this ongoing course correction. So I know that people who hire through agencies are paying about 2 to 5 times markup. So a lot of their money is going into that markup. And the other people I know who I've hired directly are not getting what I call a 5-star performance out of the VA. We're looking to bridge that gap. So even though it's a very competitive space, you know, we've carved out a brand, we've carved out a niche for ourselves there. But ultimately when I look at, you know, how do we help our clients become more successful with their VAs, there's a few things that we've done a little bit differently. So first of all, we talk about a system-first delegation. Most people when they, finally come around to the idea of hiring a VA, they're often thinking about their laundry list of tasks that they want to delegate, and they often take their ADD list and pass it on to their VA and hope for miracles that the VA is going to immediately take care of this list, which is great. Ultimately, that's why we want to get stuff off our plate to the VAs. But what I coined is what I call system-first delegation or system-first outsourcing. What I mean by that is every business has some specific goals or issues they are looking to achieve or resolve. The next question is, what is the system that's going to help you achieve that goal or overcome that issue, right? And this is not my original idea. I got the idea from several books, one of them being How to Fail at Almost Anything and Still Win Big, and the other one was Black Box Thinking. I think that was the very first book that really tuned me into how to think about this as a system problem, not a VA problem. And then Once we can identify the system, now underneath the system are your SOPs, your processes, your, the software that might be part of the system. And today, of course, AI integration is part of the system, the assets such as your websites, your media kit, your brand, your book, et cetera. And then the final part of that is the system operator, the VA. So why is this relevant to this conversation? Because if you are assigning the system responsibility to your VA, you don't have to wake up every morning and think, oh my God, what task am I gonna delegate? That can be overwhelming in itself. Now the VAs are trained in a system, they own the system. I often say delegate your thinking, delegate the responsibility of the system being run by, to the team member, not just the tasks, right? Their job is to look at, track the KPIs, report the KPIs to you. You can make a decision whether the system is functioning, the system is not doing its job. Is it a system problem? Or an operator problem. 8, if not 9 times out of 10, it's usually a system problem. You can take a mediocre VA. What I mean by that mediocre, I don't mean that they're low quality. I'm saying, you know, a fairly, you know, a decently skilled VA, but not like a rockstar or exceptional or whatever. But as long as they're running the system, system is working, you can get the ROI you want out of that system, right? You don't have to go hire rockstars every single time. You just need to hire somebody who's got the qualifications and ability to run a system. The same way McDonald's has a system for building burgers. They don't need a 5-star chef. They don't need a Michelin star chef to build a burger. They need somebody who can basically put the burger on the grill and put it in a bun and close the thing, put it in a box and hand it over. Right.

So it's a good analogy. So I mean, if they don't have that SOP or that system in place and you're hiring people to work, you know, flip burgers, they may not do it right. They may not do it exactly you want. You never taught 'em the system and you didn't have your system together. Yeah. And obviously there's a lot of people that fail when they come to you in the first place because they're like, well, I don't have systems. I don't have time to put systems together. So what do you recommend in those situations?

We basically, we have a library of SOPs, but in this day and age, it's just as easy to go chat and say, hey, build me a system to accomplish this task. It doesn't have to be a perfect system. Start with something that works. Sometimes most of the systems are actually locked up in a client's head, in which case we can do a little bit of a deep dive and then we basically extract the systems or create the systems. And I say part of the VA's, of the system operator, VA's job is ongoing system improvement. Once the VA's been onboarded, they've been given the system, they know how the system runs. Part of what I call every Friday we have in our company called think time. I got the idea off Keith Cunningham. So we meet with the whole team and I'll go back to the weekly meetings in a second cuz it's important. But every Friday is think time. I ask the VAs, hey, so how's your system running? What are the issues that are coming up? How do you think you can improve it? And then I say, great, next week I want you to explore what tools or softwares or methodologies can we do to improve that system, right? So we're always a system-first company. We're looking at every single VA now owns systems in the company, and it's their job to kind of suggest ideas of how to improve that system. So another thing, talking about meetings now, so that's our Friday meeting. Before, we'd have 3 like team meetings a week, and you know, these meetings would kind of ramble on and go in different directions and everything else. 2 months ago now, we switched that model to every meeting has a very specific purpose. So Mondays is like our HR meeting, right? It's all about hiring the VAs. Tuesday is finance and admin. Wednesdays is lead gen. Thursdays is matching. And Fridays is think time. That means that everybody who's going, who needs to be on that meeting, knows what the meeting's about. We can keep the meeting shorter, stay on topic. We save time. But more than anything else, it saves mental energy because we're not going all over the map, you know, during these meetings. And one of the biggest things when people say it's not working out, they don't meet with their VAs. They don't take time to meet with the VAs, have conversations. They hire VAs and just basically hope that the VAs are magically going to figure out their business and do the right thing. It doesn't work like that. We've got to be as kind of the partner in the 5-star performance. We have to do our role of showing up, giving that feedback, looking at what the VA is doing, apply some course correction, And that's where we help. That's where basically a lot of people say, like, I just don't know how to do this.

That's a question I have because I imagine you're getting clients who just keep turning over VAs and the end of the day, it's not the VA problem, they're the problem. So at what point can you identify that and what do you do to those customers? Maybe again, what kind of suggestions do you have for us? Or maybe many of us are the problem.

First of all, look, when you're hiring VAs that they're from a different country, different culture, they may even speak the same language, but if they're from the Philippines, they may process and think differently. So there's going to be breakdowns. So first of all, it's the knowledge. If you're going to work on a budget. there's gonna be things you're gonna have to work through, right? For that matter, you can hire people here locally for $100 per hour. There's still gonna be issues. So you're never gonna get a, like a no issue hire. So then the onus is on us. Like when we use kind of systems and KPIs, we know when things are not kind of working out the way they should. We're gonna see behavior. So I have something called, I call it FLAG. So FLAG stands for falsifying information, lying to a client, The A stands for attendance and attitude, and the G is like gross negligence. It's kind of a little bit of a catch-all, but I teach both the clients and the VAs this. I say, look, you're going to be okay working with your client, but if you violate any of these kind of 4 criteria, then you're going to be issued a yellow flag. You think, hey, Bijal, why wouldn't you just— if someone lies to me, why wouldn't you just kind of fire them on the spot? The reason being is that most VAs have worked in environments where they've been basically told to lie to their clients, right? For various reasons, right? Lying about their name, lying about the hours, lying about who's working on what projects. So I have to acknowledge that sometimes it's not that they want to be liars, is that that's how they protected their ass. So I give them a little grace, right? And so the first offense is a yellow flag. The second offense is a red flag. And the third time is dismissal. So that way you set up the parameters of, hey, this is when you're going to get let go right from the beginning. Right? As long as, you know, these things don't happen, as long as you can do your job and you don't violate this, we're golden. So clarity of what it's going to take to keep the job and what's going to happen if you violate these things. Most people never put these, you know, these lines in the sand. It's just basically they hire them and then one day the client might say, you know what, it's not working out. We've just gone too far on this tangent. And they just say, hey, we know we need a new VA. And what I like to do is like, if we check in regularly and what we do is we send out kind of a survey and that allows for what I call instant feedback. And what happens is if we allow a VA to go this far off course, it's almost, it makes it more challenging to bring them back in line. However, if they go off by a couple of degrees, now we can basically say, look, here's the recipe or here's the prescription for bringing them back in line. So we built something called actually the outsourcing model. And like the outsourcing model is built on ownership of the role, understanding the job, understanding instructions, et cetera. And what the clients do They basically answer, they basically rate the VAs from 1 to 5 star in these parameters with a little of kind of input of what the issue is. It runs it through an AI brain built on our kind of decades of experience, and it spits out basically a course correction playbook for the VAs.

Nice.

And our human performance managers check in, do you understand what the course corrections are? Can we help you? What resources do you need? And that's how we kind of bring them back online. When we were building this, I said, well, hang on a second, who knows better than your VA how you actually show up, how we actually show up as business owners? And now not every business owner is open to this, but they should be because the insights you get from this feedback from somebody who's kind of really seeing this into a human-to-human interaction can be invaluable, especially if you're If we aspire to improve our performance too, because it is a two-way thing. You can't just hire a lifestyle VA and expect the best outcome.

Totally. What would you say is the number one tip you have for any of us who are looking to hire VA? And then I'm gonna get sort of a two-part question. I think most of your VAs in the Philippines, if I'm not mistaken, right?

Well, today, well, the most of them are in the Philippines, but we have a growing Hive community in Nairobi, Kenya. Great EAs coming out of there, highly educated. They're raised in English schools, South Africa and Colombia.

We had a kind of a growing request for Latin VAs too.

So we've now expanded to these 4 countries.

I was gonna ask you where else you're seeing them pop up. And so you just hit that question. So, okay. So you're getting some good pockets, good hives out in those areas. And so then first part of my question is what's the, probably the one tip takeaway you would give to us that are looking to hire VAs to make sure we have the most success?

Yeah. So the tip is clarity of what the role is. I have something called ROI. R is reclaim time. So where do you need somebody to come and help you reclaim time from busy work, right? So you can do, spend more of your time on the higher value work. The O is overcoming task resistance and procrastination. So what are the things that you are avoiding doing? And the I is basically how do you increase leads and sales and ultimately profit, right? So for 90% of our clients, So the reason to hire a VA is gonna be in one or multiple of those categories. Now for say more mature businesses, it might be scale. There's scale going on. They wanna onboard customer support, customer onboarding type things, but that's probably about maybe 10, 20% of our business. The rest are what I call solopreneurs, micropreneurs, small mom and pop teams that are kind of, you know, growing out of their $100,000 range up into maybe a quarter million range, but they still have cash flow challenges and want to keep the budgets super tight. And they're the ones who that we can kind of specialize in serving. Yep.

Yep. No, I love it. I mean, for me, my tips on that, having been on the other side, is like everything you said. Plus I just, you know, be patient. I think you said it earlier. If you don't have the systems and yourself in place, you're going to fail. Like you've got to be patient. As much as we want to just delegate everything and say, okay, they're here, let me just throw everything in their way. It's going to fail. You got to do all those daily check-ins and figure out a way to put them in. I always say like, That daily check-in or check-ins, you know, 1 or 2 a day, almost becomes, in my opinion, your most important meeting of the day despite everything else, especially when you're in that mode of delegating off and teaching them. Otherwise, you're just missing such great opportunity. And once you can get everything off your plate, then you get that time back. But you can't— this doesn't happen magically. You got to mentally prepare for it. And I've seen too many times, I've watched too many times people failing to do that exercise. And I think the other thing that I could tell you that I've learned as well is it's like anything else. It's like Right butts, right seats. You know, we've had somebody in our team who was passed over, and I worked with this person on some projects, and she's been amazing. And it's just like somebody else, and I'm like, well, I don't think you guys spend enough time with her, or perhaps you were pushing her to do a skill set that she wasn't great at. So find the skills they're great at, and they'll thrive in there because they all have the right attitude. I've seen they're hungry, and it's been amazing to work with. And I certainly encourage anybody listening If you haven't done it, do it. Like, just go learn it, figure it out. It's not a high cost, especially $5 an hour for some of these people. And I'm just like so shocked at what I've gotten. You know, even today I could share, you know, my Speakeasy Mastermind Mastermind right arm who's been with me from beginning. I'd be so, you know, in trouble without her. She's doing such an amazing job and she's been incredible. And, you know, somebody out here in the States for that kind of salary is significantly more than what we're getting, you know, we're paying, and I'm paying her well for Philippines wages. But, uh, absolutely. One last question I was going to ask you is, what do you see— I like that you're a tech background guy, so you're obviously nerding out like the rest of us in the world of AI— what are you seeing with respect to how AI is going to affect the overseas hiring, you know, Philippines, Colombia, anywhere else?

And I would be lying if I say it's not going to have an effect. I think a lot of VAs are going to probably lose a lot of their jobs. But what it's really doing, at least for those who are willing to stay up to date on, I'll say, I wouldn't call 'em AI experts, right? But just AI technology is it's allowing VAs to be far more valuable to businesses. I mean, the VAs can do things today that you may have had to pay somebody, you know, $100 per hour for not more than 2, couple years back, right? Yeah. So right now is, I, I don't know if saying it's the honeymoon period is the right word even, but right now AI is giving VAs an ability to do things or perform at a higher level. All right. Now, as AI changes, I think, you know, a lot more VAs are going to struggle to find work as some of the things that VAs have typically done get replaced. I think there's going to be a lot of VAs sitting on the sidelines, you know, hoping to get work. So, you know, any VAs that happen to listen to this, basically, you know, learn AI, learn how to be a That's another reason, Eric, that we say system-first delegation and system operators, because when I say system, a system in this day and age typically will include AI as part of that system. So turning our VAs from VAs to becoming system operators means, and technically they're AI operators. So they're the ones who are still operating the AI and managing the AI, driving a lot of businesses, because again, our role should not be in that. Our role should be the visionary role, staying on top of steering the business and not having to be the ones learning all the AI, right?

Yeah.

It's again, what's the goal? What's the system? Who can operate the system?

Yeah, I mean, I kind of see it the same way because I'm watching that again live real time. It's like I'm watching those that are same way, just being more efficient. They're using AI, you know, they're taking the task off my hand plate instead of me asking the prompts, digging in there. They're doing the same things that I would do and that they know the system or what needs to happen. So I like the way you say that. I didn't think of it that way in the System First Delegation, which is brilliant. Well, thank you for dropping all those amazing words of wisdom and for being there for myself, for my needs for hiring and for people in the community. You've been so great at engaging others. And I think anybody who, uh, should definitely reach out to you if they have questions on the things we talked about and other. I know it's Bee Epic Consulting. That's B-E-E, of course, Epic Consulting, and get a chance to meet Bijal. And I look forward to seeing you when I hit Vegas next, or I'm sure at the next conference. And thank you so much for joining us today.

We'll see you soon. Thanks so much.

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