A System To Hire And Train Virtual Assistants

Hey, it's Mark Podolski, the land geek with your favorite niche real estate website, www.thelandgeek.com. and today's guest I'm super excited for because it's just so near and dear to my heart. How to scale. But before we talk to our guests, I'd be remiss if I didn't properly introduce my co host, the brain, the professor, your flight school sherpa, Scott Todd from scotttodd.net landmodo.com learn anything about anything. Investor ninjas.com Scott Todd, how are you?

I'm great. How are you?

Pulse is normal, respiration is fine. It's weird being not being on caffeine. So hopefully at some point I just won't, my brain just won't stop and just. We'll continue doing with the podcast. But today's guest is Ravi Abuvala from scaling with systems.com. ravi had started a company that has been seen on ABC News, Fox News Inc. EO Fire ClickFunnels and it's just so near and dear to my heart. It is the service that every entrepreneur needs. Ravi Abu Vala, welcome.

Mark. Thank you so much for having me on here. Scott. Pleasure to meet both of you guys here. I have to say I love your guys. Kind of rapport and relationship you guys have together. It's pretty funny how you guys talk and discuss. I always enjoy the banter at the beginning and the end of the show. The ones that I've listened to for sure.

Thank you. Thank you. I wish I could scale myself in the podcast and have like two or three of me in just different jokes and barbs at Scott Todd's expense. Is that wrong?

Scott, let's just get on, let's just get on with the podcast.

All right, Ravi, let's rewind the tape. Why did you start scaling with Systems?

Well, it actually came up like a lot of other businesses, I think by accident. It was never really my main intention for it. I dropped out of law school in 2018. I started an advertising agency. Was pretty difficult. First eight months of business made almost no money whatsoever and then found kind of the power of virtual assistants, found the power of niching down into real estate. And then, you know, after eight months of not doing any revenue, the next three months we hit our first $50,000 month. The next, within the next six months we've hit our first hundred thousand dollar month and that was specifically in the real estate markets. And that kind of short time frame of growth attracted a little bit of interest from other people. You know, friends, you know, past clients, current clients, etc. Etc. And they said, how did you do it? And I was like, well, I mean, realistically, it was just these few steps here, right? The virtual assistant, sales funnels, automation, delegation, and just started helping a few of my friends out. They started referring other people. And I think what it really hit, like, ultimate takeoff was I was speaking on a stage in New Jersey at a real estate conference, and someone had posted in this Facebook group with about 65,000 people in there, just this long post. I had no idea they did it. One of my clients, about how, you know, we change our lives, how they hit these revenue goals they have been trying to hit for three years. They hit it in 30 days. And I came off the stage and I had like, I don't know, maybe 200, 250 Facebook messages from people that are like, how do I do this? How do I do this? And that's when I sort of like, I guess there's a pretty viable business here.

You know, it's very viable. And you've got two really big, compelling promises. The website. The first one is become the entrepreneur you always aspire to be. You'll use the exact A to Z actionable guide that we implement every day to systematize and automate, which are two of my favorite words, your entire business. From software guides to sales techniques, from pitch decks to proposals, and from hiring employees to time management. That's the first big problem promise. The second big promise is one that going to make Scott Todd's head probably explode. So, Scott, I'm just warning you, get your own virtual assistant in your business for less than $3 an hour. The secret sauce to our system is simple. Our highly trained overseas employees will give you the freedom to focus on becoming a CEO, not a freelancer. Ravi, what is going on here? How do you do that?

Well, it's pretty interesting. So the first part of it, becoming the entrepreneur, essentially, that you've always wanted to be, you know, it sounds a little cheesy, but most people, when they get in business, you know, they want to be the boss, the CEO. And then they look into it at 12 months in, you know, 18 months in, and they just have a glorified job, right? They're working 80, 90, 100 hours a week. And even if they're making good money, if you divided that money by the, you know, amount of hours are working, it, it can come down to 12, even $15 an hour. And so that was something that happened to me. I was always much into Health and fitness. I became massively overweight. When I started my business and started growing it, I was very stressed out. And it wasn't until I started learning the power of like delegation and eliminating some of the things I didn't need. And niching down, just like you guys have a niche website, niching down your offer so you're speaking to a hyper relevant group of people so you can copy and paste your offer and over and over again. And that's the first part. And then the second part was just, you know, I've been a part of coaching programs, I've been a part of other businesses that have promised scale and growth. And one of the biggest issues with that was that me, I was the problem with that. They were telling me what I needed to do and I wasn't actually doing it. And when I kind of identified that, I was like, look, I can tell everybody, hey, you need to be cold calling these lists here, you need to be sending these emails out, you need to be sending these LinkedIn messages out, whatever it is. But at the end of the day, people would rarely even do it. They thought it was, they were too good for it. They just thought it wouldn't work. And so instead what we did was, for me, I just outsourced it to a virtual assistant and I paid a virtual assistant agency really similar to what we are, to find one, give one to me. And she's been credible. Her name is Mel Jane. I've had her for two and a half years now. She runs the whole operations in the Philippines for us now. And then when I was, like I said, teaching my friends how to do it, they were like, I don't want to do 500 cold messages a day. I was like, look, I'll find a virtual assistant for you. They'll do it for you for $3 an hour. And that just started happening. I realized that was a really big part of the success is having, you know, because just like anything, if you do it over and over every single day, you're almost guaranteed success or results in it. And so instead of having, oh, I did it today, then tomorrow I'm hungover or I'm sad or whatever it is, it just happens every single day. And so for our clients, what we learned to do was to, you know, we, we get virtual in the Philippines. We, they go through about a 60 day bootcamp with our team. We figure out their speaking capabilities or past experiences. They go through tests, trainings, and then we'll place them with our clients within seven days of them joining our program and then we curtail their exact activities to our clients need, which a lot of the time is like cold calling lists or email or LinkedIn or maybe backend work, Facebook ads, click funnels, etc. Etc. So now they have the business owner actually working on the business and then they have somebody executing the daily tasks that need to happen that the business owner didn't want to do in the first place.

Scott. Todd, what are your thoughts?

I mean, you know, ultimately I think that one of the hardest parts of this business, or any business you're going to build a VA team for is finding people to go do this thing right? You know, like that is really the hardest thing. And you know, one of the, there's two different types of companies out there. One is somebody that will assign me somebody and I know who they are. I have their email address, they're on my team. And then the other is here. You just email all the work to us and we'll take care of it. And here's your account manager. But yet you don't know who's doing the work. So for your company, like, how does that work? You know, like, and from your experience, is one better than the other? Because I have a preference, but I don't know if it's really one better than the other.

Yeah, that's an awesome question, Scott. So we actually, our clients, we're just placing them with our clients, but they become our clients full time employees. So they know their email, they're in their Slack channel. Like we have no nothing to do with our relationship after we pass it on. Because kind of what I'm assuming is probably your preference and, and for me as well is like whenever you're dealing with like a third party, when it's like, hey, here's the work I want you to do, they don't really get to know you, they don't get to know your preferences, what you like, what works and what doesn't work. And so it's like you're just handing it off to somebody else and you have no idea if the job's getting done or not, or if they're efficient or not. Where on our end we actually introduce you, you do the interviews, we introduce you, then you hire them and then they become your full time employee and we're able to help you and coach you and make sure they're working out well. And then on top of it, the kind of hybrid model that we do for both, Scott, is that if for whatever reason that virtual assistant didn't work out after they became your employee. We offer a lifetime guarantee that if it worked out for any other reason other than you not paying them their salary, then what we'll do is actually refine, retrain, and replace another virtual assistant for you at no additional cost for the lifetime of your relationship with us.

All right, well, let's get into the nitty gritty. Ravi. What can they do?

That's an awesome question. And like I said in the beginning, it's majority of our clients want lead generation. That's because the majority of businesses suffer from lead generation.

That's why my lead generation is number one priority.

Yeah, 100% always. Right. And that's how I ran an advertising agency called Prospect Social. We were so successful because it's like, look, you can sell anything in the world, but if you can make people more money and get them more leads, like, you'll usually do pretty okay. And so because that was kind of what my wheelhouse was and that's how I scaled my business, then that's mostly the main focus. Once they have the lead generation down, the virtual assistants can do other things. Like they can do Facebook ads, they can do click funnels, they can do admin work, they can do bookkeeping, they can do social media posting, they can do graphic design. But if you were like, you know, if I wanted to be really impressed by this virtual assistant, what were the things I need to put them on? I'd say you put them on lead generation, you put them on cold calling, you put them on email sending, you put them on LinkedIn messaging, you put them on Instagram messaging, Facebook messaging, and just watch your appointments in your calendar start filling up. And then we even train them how to qualify a lot of these leads for you. So, you know, once you start getting these people that are interested, your next biggest problem is that you're getting on the phone with a lot of unqualified people. That's just the deal with sales. And so we'll actually have the virtual assistant do like kind of pre call qualifications. Well, they'll figure out, you know, whatever it could be. Are they a buyer or seller, you know, are they interested in moving, you know, the next three weeks, or is it going to be the next six years? Or, you know, do they have any money in the bank, depending on whatever your industry is. And that way your calendar is not only full, but it's full of qualified prospects as well.

Scott. Todd.

I mean, look, Mark, we always talk about like the, the ability first to earn money, right? Like if you're earning Money, then everything else gets easy. And I always personally say that companies that file bankruptcy, they don't have an expense problem, they have a revenue problem. Okay. They just haven't figured out how to make the cash registers ring enough to match up to their expenses and you can go cut the expenses and then you have other problems. And so, you know, I think that that is probably one of the easiest things is lead generation, right? Like if you can get the phone ringing, get sales leads coming in, all of a sudden the whole thing shifts and you know what you have, you have energy. I think there's a big discount on energy. People don't put enough thought into energy. When you have leads coming in and you've got potential sales all the time, you get excited, you get energized from it. It's when things are dead that you're like, I can't take this, this is terrible, I'm gonna quit this.

Yeah, momentum. I think momentum is a big part of it. Kind of like what you're saying there is huge as well. And the other biggest issue I see, because we also work with service based providers and SaaS businesses, is that people will spend six months, a year, two years trying to perfect a back end offer that they think the market wants and then they finally start the lead generation process only to figure out that nobody really cares about what they're doing where. Instead, if you start with the lead generation side, you can confirm that there's a product market fit before you invest all this time, money and energy into this back end service. And then you say, hey, it'll be ready in seven days, it'll be ready in 14 days or 30 days, it'll be ready in 90 days. You take the payment up front and then you go build it. And kind of exactly what Scott said. You know, imagine the difference in building something that you've already been paid for and you know, people want versus building something that you have no idea if anybody's going to want it and you haven't been paid for it yet.

Yeah, absolutely. And if you're listening to this and you're posting your own ads right now on Facebook, craigslist, landmodo.com why, why are you doing that again? We can always make more money. We can't get more time. And we really need to be cognizant of where we're putting in our time. What, you know, dollar per hour we're working on, because we're never going to grow if we continue working on $10 an hour tasks. And it's just. I'm loving this, Ravi. I'm loving it. So I know Scott Todd's like, give him a tough question. Here's a tough question. Who's this not for?

Awesome question. Awesome question. So this is not for, first of all, people that, although we have worked with them, like, the people that don't even have product market fit. So if you don't have any clients, you don't have any customers, you've never sold one thing of whatever you're trying to sell, and you're still trying to. You're like, pretty green behind the ears. And we're starting, you know, we're starting out here and we're like. Because some of the most easiest ways to cut the noise in the marketplace is to have social proof or to have case studies or to have, you know, people that you can say, hey, these people have worked with me before. Nobody wants to be the first person. And so we're going out there to a total cold audience and try to sell something. And they're the first people. You can have a really hard time getting that kind of marketing resonance there. So that's the first group of people, people that, like, have no business and no idea what they're doing are the people that we're working with. They're usually making anywhere from 60, 70 to 120, $150,000 a year in their business. And we're helping them scale to high six, even seven figures in that aspect. And then the second person that this won't work for as well is we get incredible fast results. We get really fast results for our clients. I mean, some people are making their year's worth of revenue the first 30 days of working with us. That being said, you know, the front end of our stuff is all about, you know, our marketing is like, hey, we can make you money fast. This is what it is. Because that's what people want to hear and. And we can deliver on it. But as soon as you get inside of our program, we give you a book called the Slight Edge by Jeff Olson. Incredible book. And they talk about, you know, the compound effect and how it's. Every single day you're just, like, working. And it could be weeks or months before you see results, but then it's going to kind of hockey stick to the right and go up. And so the second person that I really just personally don't like working with is someone who's just like, shiny object syndrome, hopping from business to business, offer to offer lead generation to lead generation. And, like, they give something A week or two to see if it works and then it doesn't. So they hop to the new thing. Little they know they're just starting from zero again and again and eventually they actually go in the negative. So I guess impatient people or people that are looking for the immediate quick fix versus someone who's like really trying to build a sustainable long term generational wealth business is who we'd rather work with. Those people.

Scott. Ty, what are your thoughts?

I mean, he's hidden it, Mark. What else can you say?

I mean, I know, I know, it's really annoying, right?

It is annoying. That's right.

All right, let's throw him a curveball. You ready?

Ravi, hit me with the mark.

Okay. What do you see that the entrepreneurs do once they're working with the VA that make you want to stress eat and pull your hair out or maybe even choke them?

Yeah, I guess one of the biggest things that I've seen is, and I have a whole section on this, and I talk about this a lot with my clients, is just the idea of imperfect action. So it's the idea that, you know, you get the virtual assistant, but you can't have them start working yet because you got to have all your messaging 100% and you got to have all your websites 100%. Your color has to be the perfect way. You have to have all these business cards printed. You have to have like, you know, your mom's blessing and you have to, you know, have a thousand friends on Facebook. And this whole time they're just kind of coming up with excuses in their mind why they shouldn't take that first step, make that first cold call, or have the virtual assistant make the first cold call or whatever it is. And a lot of the times it's, you know, if you think about human psychology, depending on what you believe in, you know, our brains are, are morphed around literally trying to be comfortable and trying to stay away from fear. And so some of these things that you're doing, like working with a new virtual assistant, launching a business, starting to reach out to cold people in the business with most business owners don't do. They just stay in their, you know, sphere of influence, starting to reach out to cold strangers who might be, Hey, F off. Hey, leave me alone. Hey, stop calling me. You're going to come up with a million excuses in your head why not to do it. And so the things that make me go crazy is, you know, because we, as soon as they get onboarded, we have a one on one with them. We figure out where their biggest bottlenecks are and we say, hey, do these three things, do these five things. By the next time I get on the call, they should be done. Here are the action steps and we'll give them the templates, we'll give them everything. And then next week we come there and there's just nothing done. And then they have the excuse of, oh, well, I had to make sure this was right or how to make sure this is right. And so I guess the biggest kind of thing that bothers me and just because I know as a business owner that it'll never, nothing will ever be perfect and it'll never be complete and it'll never be exactly how you wanted it to go. And like, you know, your emails will never be perfect, your Google Drive folders will never be well organized and you got to just keep on kind of trucking through and kind of like what Scott Todd was saying earlier, having that momentum and kind of having that energy and just keep on pressing forward rather than waiting for everything to be perfect all at once and then deciding that you're going to start doing whatever the thing is you need to do.

I'm really shocked by the answer. I, I really thought that you were going to say that the entrepreneur doesn't train them well enough or doesn't explain clearly the task that that needs to be done and then, you know, just blames it on them.

I on the VA well, we actually do the training. So they do 60 days of training with us. So we do about 95% of the training. So even if the entrepreneur can't speak English, there's a good chance we're still going to get them to generate them leads for our clients. Because we do. That was the other thing. In order to control our client's success. Instead of just saying, hey, go do these cold emails where you got this virtual assistant to the cold emails. And then instead of having them tell the virtual assistants send these cold emails, we tell the virtual assistant to send a cold email. So that's why like my whole, the reason I was able to be successful my advertising agency was just because when I worked with real estate, I took away all the responsibilities of the real estate agent. I used to say, hey, call the leads, qualify the leads, put them in your CRM. They never did that. So instead I hired a call center to call and qualify the leads for them instead. They passed over live transfers of pre qualified buyers and sellers. And that lesson pretty much taught me like the more you can do for somebody else, the More success they're going to have. And whether they attribute it to you or themselves, it doesn't really matter. As long as they're happy clients. That's all that really matters. And so that's why we literally make it. It's like, you know, Vas for dummies is pretty much what it is. It's like, even if you've never worked with a virtual assistant before, we're gonna do most of the work for you. So that's why. Although it does happen. But that's why that wasn't the person that came to mind.

Scott. Todd.

Don'T overthink it, man. Like, that's the thing is don't overthink it and just get it going.

No, yeah, it's so true. So Ravi, in the world of virtual assistants, you know, the big one is upwork. Then we got fiverr, hire my mom. You know what's going to be the competitive edge of scalingwithsystems.com compared to these other places that we could go and hire a virtual assistant?

Yeah, and it's pretty interesting. I have a whole video on my website called where to hire Virtual Assistant. It talks about really like the three different sources. So number one is going to be those third party websites. Number two is going to be some kind of friends or family or personal network. Someone knows a virtual assistant. Number three is going to be like a virtual assistant placement agency. Like what we do at scaling with systems and you know, each have pros and cons. But in reality the biggest one that I see, whenever you're looking at these larger websites or working with a VA placement agency is number one, the larger websites. You're not hiring an employee, you're hiring a contractor. You're hiring someone to do something for you. And you know, I know you have employees. I'm sure Scott has employees as well. And you kind of understand the difference between just like what Scott was saying earlier, someone who's just working on your company, you don't even really know who they are. And they're just as outside contractor versus someone who's buying into your vision. You know their kids names, they know your kids names. You know they, they know what you, your goals are in life. You know, you know what their goals are in life. And you're both working towards this like vision and this future that has both of you together. You know, that's when they're doing extra work. They're going way above and beyond what you had expected them to do. You know, they're not even charging you over some Certain hours. And they're focused solely on results. Where in my personal experience, some of the websites like Upwork or Fiverr or these other ones, you're one of 10, 20, 50, 100 different clients that these people have. So your success, you know, they could really, I don't want to say care less, but if you go under, they're not that worried about it because they have these other clients that can kind of float them. Whether you have somebody who's like your one on one employer, employee relationship, you both almost have this like duty to perform for the other person so that your business stays alive. You both have a job, you both have a place to show up to tomorrow. And then just on top of it. The other thing that puts us at the competitive edge is the guarantee. So it's like you can get someone from Upwork, you can spend time working with them, training with them, finally get everything up, ready to go, and then they leave, they get sick, they have a baby, whatever it is, and you don't work with them anymore, they leave. And so you're back to square one. If you're going kind of these third party websites versus with us, we're documenting the whole process, we're understanding what you're doing with your virtual assistant. And if that ever happened, we can take all that training, place it with a new virtual assistant, and within 48 hours you have a brand new employee at no additional cost for you.

Fantastic. Fantastic. Well, in most cases, I overpay compared to Scott Todd for everything. So once I hire you, I know Scott's going to will I get a better deal?

Of course. Well, if you overpay, then shouldn't I just charge you more so that I can make the overpay? Or you're saying that I should charge you?

No, you charge me less than Scott because in this one instance then we can actually say, oh yeah, finally, Mark's not overpaying.

Got you. Okay, for the, for the, just for the story, we can, we can work.

Out a deal vis a vis Scott. Right, Scott? That seems fair, right?

I'm not laughing.

So, Robby, we're at that point in the podcast where we're going to put you on the spot one more time. We're going to ask you for your tip of the week. A website, a resource, a book, something else actionable for the art of passive income listeners to go improve their businesses, improve their lives. What have you got?

So I already know what yours is going to be, so I can't say yours, but for me personally, I usually Just tell people. This is going to be a little broad for a lot of people, but for some reason, you know, you don't have to come pay me. You don't have to go pay somebody else. Majority of your answers can be found on YouTube. YouTube's my favorite. I have a pretty incredible YouTube channel. Majority of answers can be found on YouTube. And I spend probably at least one hour a day learning something new on YouTube. Usually on my lunch break when I'm just like sitting there. Today I was watching how the YouTube algorithm works. And so you know the issue, the difference in that and like working with somebody is usually it's a little more tailored when you work with somebody. But I just challenge everybody here. Whatever question you've been like thinking in your head or what to do, hiring someone, firing someone, lead generation, before you pay anybody, just look it up on YouTube and see if that answer is there for you. And a lot of times you might be able to get the answer that you're looking for.

All right, fantastic. Before we get to Scott Todd's tip of the week, I just want to let our sponsor get a little shout out. Our sponsor this week is flight school. Learn how the next 16 weeks can literally transform your life. Start building that passive income machine. It's a one time sale. You get that recurring income every single month. No renters, no rehabs, no renovations, no rodents. Go up that mountain of land investing with someone who's done it thousands of times. Go up there with Scott Todd. You will take massive action with your class, with your group. We guarantee that the tuition that you invest into flight school, you're going to make back in 180 days or less, either in cash or terms deals. There's no risk. Start building that passion income machine today. Learn more. Just go to thelandgeek.com training thelandgeek.com training schedule a call. Scott Todd, what's your tip of the week?

Mark? My tip falls right into line with what we're talking about today. And it's a book. It's a fairly new book. I love this book. I love the concept. It's a book called who not how the formula to achieve bigger goals through accelerating teamwork. And basically the gist of this book is this. Too many times as entrepreneurs, we take it on ourselves to figure out how to go do something. I want to make money doing land investing. We kind of have to know some foundations. So then what do you do? You actually go through the whole process and you get the foundation and then you want to start doing It. And you keep thinking about, how am I going to do it? How am I going to do it? How am I going to do it? But what happens in large companies is when the CEO sets a vision and says, we're going to go create this new product line or we're going to go launch this new service, the CEO doesn't say, how am I going to do this? The CEO says, who within our organization going to do this? Who not? So if you're focusing on the how in your business, you're focusing on the wrong approach. You need to start thinking about who. And this book lays out a foundation and a framework to help you go do just that. It's not how do you do it? It's who am I going to go get to go do this? And you need qualified people. And there you go. That might tie right into your tip of the week, Mark.

Yeah, absolutely. Because where are you gonna get these people? They're trained and they're ready to go. Just go to scaling with systems.com scalingwithsystems.com and just get to that next level without having to spend hours and hours, weeks, months in frustration, hiring, firing, training people that you know may or may not work. They're already there for you. They're already trained. Again, we can always make more money. We can't get more time. Know the value of your time. And nobody becomes an entrepreneur because they want to work 80 hours a week. They want both of those big things in life to be solved. They want their money problem solved and they want their time problem solved. Scaling with Systems can help you do both. So go to Scaling with Systems and learn more. Ravi, are we good?

We're awesome. Thank you guys both so much for your time. I really do appreciate the opportunity to be on here. You guys have an incredible podcast and I wanted to give a shout out and say thank you to everybody who tuned in for this whole thing. I hope you guys got some value out of it and I hope I might get to speak to some of you in the near future.

Awesome. Scott. Todd, are we good?

We're good, Mark.

All right. I want to thank the listeners. Remind them the only way we're going to get the quality of guests like Aravi abu Vala from scalingwithsystems.com is you do us three little favors. You gotta subscribe, you gotta rate, you gotta review the podcast. Send us a screenshot of that review to supporthelandgeek.com we're going to send you the $97 wholetailing course, how to double your money. Three days or less for free. So please do it. Sky. You ready? I am. One, two, three. Let freedom ring. All right. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, Robbie.