This Will Save You $100K A Year & 20 Hours Per Week

What is working in marketing today that our listeners can try immediately?

One thing that has just been crushing for all of our clients that costs absolutely no money at all is creating a high value lead magnet. So high value tool, resource template, webinar any of those things and posting it into Facebook groups for free for people to have access to.

Welcome to the Success School podcast. We're on episode 29. Sephora and I are super excited to give you guys this episode. We are so thankful for all the feedback we have been receiving. So keep that coming if you're a listener, if you're one of the 34 on YouTube, we appreciate you. If you're one of the many more on Spotify and Apple Music. Thank you. Steph, how you feeling?

I am also just so grateful. Guys, we are. We had a look at our stats last week and we could see that more and more downloads are happening and also that we actually hit 10,000 downloads which we are thrilled about. Honestly, guys, like and like Tim said, the feedback we've been getting, it's just been so phenomenal. So please keep dropping into our DMS and telling us what you're loving. It really allows us to support you so much more.

So this week we are talking about how to save 100k per year and 20 hours a week of work. And the way we accomplish that is by hiring a VA or a virtual assistant. So Steph and I are going to give you the four one, one on exactly how to do it, why to do it, how to do it, what to do it, step by steps, where to find them, all the management stuff that you might not be sure about if you have a VA at the moment. That's incredible. We can make that process even better for you with this episode. If you don't have a VA at the moment, at the end of this, you're going to feel very confident to hire one. So we're gonna kick off with a couple of rapid fire questions. I'm gonna hit Steph. As always, Steph loves to talk. So we're gonna give her a 60 minute time cap on these rapid fire.

60 minutes.

60 minutes.

That's very generous.

60 second time cap on these questions. So question one, Steph, what is working in marketing today that our listeners can try immediately?

One thing that has just been crushing for all of our clients that costs absolutely no money at all is creating a high value lead magnet. So a high value tool resource template, webinar any of those things and posting it into Facebook groups for free for people to have access to the Key thing here is that your lead magnet must solve a problem for the person who is downloading it. If you do that, you will get so many downloads, you will grow your email list so quickly. It's working so much now. What it also allows you to do is grow your email list, which is great. Yay. We can keep marketing those people, which is great. But the other thing that's really beneficial is that you can start conversations with every single one of those people as well, because they obviously have a problem that, that you know how to solve. And so you'd be doing them a disservice if you don't offer them the thing.

52 seconds. Incredible. Well under 60. Question two. What have you changed your mind on recently in business?

I once got told by a mentor that you can either have time or money in business. You can't have both. And he was really indicating to me that, you know, when you have a lot of money in business, you very rarely have time and that you will spend some of that money to be able to buy your time back by hiring employees or contractors or whatever that might look like. I actually have changed my belief system on that. I think you can have both. I think it just takes a little while to build. I don't think that in the first couple of years that you can have both. I think it does take some time. But I do believe, and I'm living proof and I think we are both living proof that you can have time and money. And so if that is something that you desire, please know that is available.

For you 100% possible. Question 3. What is stopping biz babes from growing that is unique to their industry? Kind of biz babe specific from what you've seen. And by biz babe, I mean females in business.

When you say stops them from growing, what do you mean?

So stops them from taking it to the next level in their business, stops them from making sales, stops them from getting out marketing, stops them from scaling.

Love it. Cool. Honestly, I'd say it's probably a fear of judgment. I think that a lot of the reasons why women don't show up on social media, why they don't do the marketing, why they don't do the sales processes or get on sales calls while they're scared of all of those things typically will come down to the fact that they are fear of being judged. Their fear that, you know, a fear of people seeing them, a fear of people saying something about them, a fear of people thinking they're salesy, a fear of like it's usually around a fear of what will people think. And I think if, if women based businesses can shift and can become utterly unapologetic in their approach to business in the way that they go after their goals, then I think that all women in business would crush at a much higher level.

So.

So Tim, rapid fire for you. Now I'm going to give you the same 60 second time gap.

Sweet.

Can you please explain the business dynamics and benefits of having a man and a woman in a business. So for example, how is it beneficial to have a man and a woman in a business like, like us?

I think that men and women have like a ying and a yang kind of relationship in a business. The man can be very logical and the woman can be, can at times be very emotional. It helps to have two like sometimes like the fire starter and the fire putter outer. Okay.

In other words, who's the fire putter outer up?

Definitely me. So if someone's coming in with heat, it's always good for the other person to like dull the flames, so to speak. So I think that is a, a benefit of having both in a business. And we've seen, we know a lot of people that are at, at and over that seven figure mark and they do have another person in the business maybe behind the scenes running things, et cetera. And I think that works a lot better.

Yeah, we've seen it work really well with our business and also in, yeah, a lot of our friends businesses as well. Second question, what is your theory on money when it comes to handing it down to your kids instead of spending it now?

Yeah, so we've had this discussion a few times in the last couple of weeks, Steph and I, and we are kind of like if we hand down all of our stuff to our kids, which is great, and save up and yada yada, will it just fuck them up like long term? Because yeah, we know a ton of people that have super wealthy parents and they end up just being like a little bit ungrateful and they end up not working as hard because they know that they have that safety net to fall back on. So Steph and I have a bit of like a fuck it, let's enjoy ourselves mentality, especially with money. Not that we're not doing irresponsible things, you know, buying house and saving, etc. But we are definitely enjoying it more than we would. So if our goal was to build this massive legacy for our family, yeah, definitely.

And I think just on that, like we definitely plan on handing our assets down to our kids. But there's no point in our minds of giving our kids millions of dollars in cash to go and blow on stuff that they're not even going to appreciate because they haven't worked for it. And so, yeah, I love that. What are the main differences in your opinion between male and female small businesses?

Yeah, this is a great question. So I think the main difference is, from what I've seen is that female businesses definitely support each other much more to a greater extent than male and male businesses, which is. It's crazy. It's like female businesses, they would just go above and beyond to work with another female business, even if it is at their own detriment. Okay. Which is just wild because it's such a support factor where guys is a little bit more reserved, a little bit less supportive, a little bit like dog eat dog type mentality out there. That's what I've seen in my experiences in small business.

I've definitely seen that men are more competitive in every field, actually, and in every arena, both in the gym, at sports, in business and I. So I think that makes sense. I think they're a little bit more competitive or I think women are a little bit more collaborative. We more prefer to be in community together. But that can be also very limiting for women because if you're not, you know, not competing, but if you're not pushing ahead and, you know, you can get very stuck in that community and kind of not outgrow it as well.

Yeah, there are a couple of great questions there. So we're going to get stuck into the content, guys. We're talking about hiring a VA today. Okay? Okay. So we're going to give you the exact 4, 1, 1, as I alluded to in the intro of this. So first question for Steph. What kind of tasks can you outsource to a VA or a virtual assistant?

I'm pretty much of the belief that you could probably outsource anything to a VA at this point. And let me tell you right now, I actually did not believe that at the beginning when Tim. Tim was actually the first person who introduced me to vas. And I hired my first ever VA because of Tim, who's. Who's based in the Philippines. And I remember being like, oh my God, I can't trust them with anything. I can't give them my passwords. How could I possibly let them into my business? So anyone who's sitting here who hasn't hired a VA yet, I understand what you're feeling, okay? I have been there, done that and over the years I've been like, oh, that's just stuff that a VA can't do. You know, VA can't do these things. It can't do those things. And over the couple of years I've realized more and more as we brought more and more VAs into the business and you know, they've developed their skills, they pretty much can do anything that you need them to do. Probably not business coaching in our program, they probably, you could probably train them to. But they're sometimes not so good with like the, the marketing. Sometimes I find it's a little bit more tricky just because of, yeah, like copywriting. And that's just a language. That's just a language thing. Like you probably wouldn't ask someone Spanish to write your like Australian English copy. Right? So I think it's just, it kind of makes sense where their strengths lie. But the things that. If you're listening to this right now and you are thinking about getting a VA or you've got a va, but you don't know how to best utilize emails. And yes, even our VA right now, she does all of our client communications, all about billing. Things like payment fails, chasing up invoices, sending invoices, all could be done by that person. Admin tasks. So updating notes, sending out client communications, any kind of spreadsheets and reports which you guys all should be running. Absolutely. Getting reports every single month with KPIs on them. Social media scheduling, social media engagement are really, really great. Social media DMing, they're all really great tasks for a VA. Email marketing. This is the first thing that I actually hired my VA for was to help me out with email marketing. And she used to do all the automation on tech as well. So, you know, integrating things so that when someone sign up to my mailing list, they would get emails and they would get sequences and all of those sorts of things. Graphic design in Canva. I don't think I've ever not had a graphic designer as a Filipino va. Literally pretty much anything you can imagine they could be trained to do. Tim's even had some doing sales calls for him at some points in his business and, and yeah, they can literally do anything and usually around, you know, 20 to 30 hours per week.

Yeah, I had a, I hired a VA to do sales course for me. So we used close IO and I gave them a list of 600x clients and they just went through and just dialed all of them and made them an offer. I think out of 600 they got.

About 8 so that's what a VA can do. Tim, what has your personal experience been with VAS and how, like, have they been worth it?

Yeah. So obviously the first time you do anything in business is pretty awful. Okay. The Same is with VAs, but like anything in life and business and investing, etcetera, the gains come with compounding. Okay. So it gets better over time. Like, you're going to be not great at managing them. You're going to be. They're not going to be great because they don't have the skills because they haven't been trained, but it's something that you just need to work at. So I've hired about 40 through all the different companies we've had over the last 15 years. And I've had some epic vas and I've had some not epic vas. Okay. And that's just, you know, I usually hire for personality and I hire for work ethic, and I hire for those things and then I train the skills. Okay. Big mistake people have is they go out looking for the perfect VA for $5 an hour. Okay. Which just doesn't exist. Okay. Like, this type of VA that you're looking for is 20, 30, 40, 50. So my strategy here is, is hire cheap, train them, invest in them over time like you would any good employee, and then eventually you're going to have a savage, like we do. Okay? So we have a savage in our company that runs both at the moment. So she does multiple companies at a really reasonable rate. But I have invested the time in her over years. Okay. I didn't expect her to be five star, amazing, run customer service like a boss, like all the things in her first month. Okay. And that's where so many people go wrong. Their expectations are like, you know, $100 an hour employee and they're willing to pay 5. And there's just a massive mismatch. There's.

Yeah, and I love what you said about, like, you know, you've hired some great ones and some not so great ones. And I think, like, that hasn't just happened with Filipino VAs, it's happened with Western stuff as well. And so, yeah, like, guys, if you're in a small business and you're hiring for your first time, you're, you know, it's your first couple of years and you're gonna have hiring fails. Like, this is how you learn. It's not that. Like, I think what a lot of people do is they have a va. It doesn't work out. It wasn't the right fit and they go, oh, VA's just don't work. And like, it's kind of like saying we use this analogy all the time, but like, you know, you put a Facebook ad up and it doesn't work and be like, oh, Facebook ads don't work. Even though, like, the entire world uses Facebook ads, it's kind of like saying, oh, well, you know, I had a boyfriend once and he was an asshole. So all men are broken. You know, it's like, it's like it's unfair to place that one experience as 100% of, you know, truth. So, yes, I really, I really think that if you guys haven't hired one perfectly, that's okay. And that's just part of the process.

Yeah. Lastly on this point, like, they have Filipino VAs, have a different culture to us, but they are very grateful. Okay. A lot of people are just thinking like, you know, filipino vas, it's not gonna work. There's a cultural difference. They don't work as hard. I have a funny story about this as well. We had one of our clients that was suggesting to me on a group coaching call that their Western admin or virtual assistant was better than a Filipino. And I said to her, I'm willing to give you a thousand dollar bet that my VA that earns 6 times less than your Western VA will work the socks off your Western VA. Like if there was a, an output or a, you know, something that we could measure it by, because I'm so confident in her ability to get the job done, even though she is in the Philippines. Usually it's a limiting belief. You want to hire the best person for the job, not just because you have a bias to a certain type of person or where they're from.

Absolutely.

All right. So Stephen, what are the differences between overseas VAs that we've been talking about and Australian VAs?

I think that both have their place, and I think it really depends on your level. I think there's a couple of things here. One, risk tolerance. You know, obviously when you're hiring someone from Australia, there's a lot of safety nets in place. There's a lot of things they can't do that, you know, can be punished by Australian law. Obviously, when you hire somebody in the Philippines, Australian law has no jurisdiction. So it really is quite hard to get anything, you know, back. Personally, I've never had that experience. But at the end of the day, it is a risk that, of course, that you take. So it depends how well your risk appetite looks like. The investment is wildly different so in Australia, looking at at least $50 an hour for a VA. If you're looking for a good VA in Australia, probably looking more like $65, $70 an hour. And you know, for, for a Filipino VA, the average rate is between 6 and $10 an hour. So it's a vastly different price point. And I think that is, you know, it might take you a little bit more time to train somebody up, but in the long run it is incredibly beneficial to have someone like that in especially a small business guys, because, you know, let's be real, you don't have a lot of extra income left over at the end of the month and I think that you would rather be able to give something to your family and reinvest it back into your business if you had the opportunity to. And last but not least, I would say the quality of work, I think that there are some tasks that are better done onshore than offshore. So offshore be in the Philippines. I do think that copywriting, you know, social media creation, like especially when I saw my social media creation, I really mean like, you know, the actual. If it's, if it's, you know, a carousel post or content that was created with your tone of voice and those sorts of things really important. I probably wouldn't task my VA out to do like email, you know, writing, email marketing, writing or sales copywriting. So I do think that there are some things that probably are better done onshore, especially if they rely on Australian English. And so it just, I think that you have to use your. I think a lot of people think one of the first things that people want to get off their plate in small business is social media marketing. I don't think that's a job for your. It's, it's, it's a really hard thing to task somebody who is in a completely different culture with a completely different language. Like it's, it's, it's really hard to out task that. If you really want to get that off your plate, do that in Australia or get everything else off your plate so you can learn and do that really well yourself. That would be my piece of advice. But yeah, they're the three main differences that I find.

Yeah, for sure. I think if you're going to outsource social media, it's probably going to be pretty bad and people are going to tell that it's written by chat, GPT or someone not from where you're from. Okay. There's, there's massive obvious differences and then that just brings a lot of distrust in your brand. As soon as someone else is doing social media for you, it doesn't sound.

Like you and most of you just want to outsource social media because you find it hard and you just haven't found a way to make it easy yet. Because ways that we teach and like last episode we spoke about the content waterfall and like, there are so many things that you could be doing to make sure that social media actually gets to be easy for you. It should take you no more than a couple hours a week at absolute maximum to be able to be across all platforms and, you know, have constant stuff scheduled and going up. So it doesn't, it shouldn't really be a task that needs to be outsourced. And it is a skill that regardless if it's this business or the next business or a business after this, or you work in somebody else's business, it's a skill you're going to want to have. So everyone tries to get rid of it. My advice, stop trying to get rid of that task and focus on getting rid of other tasks so you can actually learn that task properly. Tim, can you walk us through. So we've talked about what you can hire a VA for. We've talked about the difference between overseas BAS and Australian VAs. Can you walk us through the hiring process and how we would find a good va? Because you said that they're not all kind of built the same.

Yeah, for sure. Great question. And it's cool to go down this path because I've seen this go wrong so many times. So a lot of times people hire a VA and then they'll just get them off a job website and then they'll be like, my VA sucks. Okay? The VA doesn't suck. Generally your process sucks. Okay. And I'm going to give you a process here on how to make this not sucky. Okay? First thing you need to do is you need to have a scorecard or a position description. So scorecard is like mission for the role, what tasks you're going to do, values as the company, all the stuff that they need to have a successful recruitment process with you needs to be on a document. Once you know exactly what is going to be required from this va, then you can go out and hire them. That's a logical step, wouldn't you agree? Rather than just going to market, hiring a VA and they're like, what do I do with them? Like, it's just, it's.

It's super logical, which is logical, but apparently doesn't feel that logical. Because most people do it that way, which is crazy.

Yeah, yeah. And then second, you want to create a job ad, then on this point you can use ChatGPT. So what you do is you copy and paste your position description into Chat GPT and you say, make me a job ad for this. Okay? Then it will spit out one, edit it, make sure it doesn't sound like an AI trying to take over the world or Skynet or whatever it is. Make it sound like actual English and the way you would type. So it's going to give you like a really good foundation for that. Third, you want to go to a website called Online Jobs. Ph. Okay, so this is the secret that only the listeners of this podcast get what you can do. It's 99 USD for a month. You can just sign up for a month and then you can put out a bunch of ads, hire a bunch of people for different roles. I'm going to give you guys a warning here. You're going to get at least 100, 200, 300 applications for this role, okay? And I know if you're thinking, if you put anything on, seek in Australia to hire a new employee and it's fucking crickets. This is not crickets. It is crazy. Okay? But what you want to do to filter this is you have to have an application form in your job description on online jobs. So when they're reading it, they need to click through, fill in the application and then you're going to filter it from there. Okay? So you're going to want to obviously filter people that come through rather than just every. Every Dick and Harry that presses that. I'm interested in this job. So an online application form is key. If you want one, maybe swing me a message, I could send it to you. So this application form, a really key component in the application form is a typing test. So what you're going to do in the application form, you're going to say, go to this link, do the typing test, and then send me a screenshot or upload a screenshot of your score and then you're going to filter them by that. So the typing test will filter for English and how many words per minute they can type. You want to get a really high score. After you've done that, you're going to look through the hundred or 200 applicants, you're going to go through the highest scores and then filter them from the other questions that you ask, then go through the interview process, etc. Etc. If you want detail on this, it is in success school so go to www.successschool.IO apply for the program. We would love to get you on a call with our team and see if you're a good fit.

So this is. I'm just going to break that down so we have a scorecard or a position description. We're going to throw that into chat GBT so it spits out a job ad for us. We're going to go to onlinejobs. Ph. We're going to advertise the job. We're going to put an application form and a typing test in that process to make sure they have great English, they're quick and efficient, and they filled in all the application forms. And then from the application form and the typing test, you will pick your best candidates to interview.

Easy.

Nailed it.

Okay. Five steps. It'll take you about 60 minutes.

Yeah, well, it would take Tim about 60 minutes and he is the most efficient person on the face of the universe. So if it takes you a little bit more, don't bray yourself, but it should take you around 60 to 90 minutes at most. Tim, can you talk to me? One thing that is written here on Adorates that you didn't mention, but I would love to talk about it because I think it's really interesting. The IQ test. Have you IQ tested many of your VAs?

Yeah. So we had a digital marketing business that we sold last year and I hired about 20 VAs in a really short period. And I thought to myself, this would be pretty funny if I made them do an IQ test because I'd love to see, like, what the scores are. So we had a few of the VAs actually score a much higher IQ than Steph and I. Yeah. Okay. Which was wild.

One of our KVA that was in that business, she was like. She was like almost Elon Musk. Levels of intelligence.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like, very smart.

Yeah.

So there is this notion that they may not be intelligent because they are from a third world country, which is completely false. Okay. There are some smarter people than you and I or anyone listening to this podcast that are willing to work for $10.

She was so smart. Like, honestly, ridiculously, it blew my mind. Mind. So, yeah, I just thought we'd touch on that. You guys don't have to IQ test. You can if you want to. Again, if you want to do a type of test IQ test, go to Google, type it in. You'll find some also highly recommend doing an IQ test yourself. It's really hard. I found it really challenging. Tim's smarter than me. In case you didn't pick up on that.

Steph's better at talking and social media and also looking pretty in shit.

Looking pretty in shit.

All right, so, Steph, any tips for managing VAs? I know management is your strong suit, so let's go into that.

So, Sorry, Alicia, cut that out. That was a dig. Because I'm not better at managing.

Do you want to do that again?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fuck you.

All right, Steph, so do you have any tips for managing a va, moving into the next section? Because they're going to have one now, and then they're like, well, what do I do with this person?

Yeah. One of the biggest issues I see for small business owners that are using VAs is that they all try to be too nice to their va. And I'm not saying be mean, but there is a line. You have to be firm. At the end of the day, any employee anywhere is going to take as much as you give them. So if you give them an inch, they'll take a mile. And, you know, that is just the reality. If you're like, super lacks and never check things, it's really hard to step up your management rather than going in a little bit more firm and stepping it back as they prove themselves. Okay, so again, you don't have to be mean, but it is really, really important that you are firm. Okay? So it's like, if you want your VA to do well, you want to give them as much information as you can. So tell them the task, tell them when it's due, tell them the minimum expectation, or give them an example of the standard that needs to be met, and then make sure they get it to you on time within the standard. Like, that's. And if it's not met, then obviously we need to do some retraining. And if it doesn't get met three times, I personally would prefer that person and start again. In order to be able to train them on the way that you do things, and on this standard that I just recommended, you have to have processes built out. Now, people freak out when they think about processes. And I know what you're thinking, because I used to work in corporate, too. And you'd be like, oh, you know, a process and procedure manual like, that's, you know, 900 pages long, and it says step A, you know, section B and all these things that you don't need that stuff. All you need is that the next time you actually do the task, you just want to download a little app called Loom and you want to record yourself doing the task and talking through how and why you're doing it. So if I was, let's say I was filtering my emails and I was putting things into fault folders and, and filing things away in my emails, I would be like, cool, this email's from so and so. She's a client. So I'm going to drag this into this folder and I would just explain how and why I am doing that task. And then I would add it to a list of processes which you could keep in a Google Doc. You keep it in a G drive, you keep it literally anywhere that you give to them so that they can watch those videos, so that they can learn. Know your standard, know your process and be able to execute completely. So have your processes built out. Have them on a document that that person can reference and be really clear about what days and times those tasks need to be done. So, for example, if I need her to do emails every day, I. I know that I want them done in the morning and probably in the afternoon, right? So that every day I start with inbox zero, every day I end with inbox zero. And every day I know that the first thing in the morning emails are getting tended to. So in your business, you have to figure out, like, you can't just hire someone and hope they're going to magically figure it out. Like, what is the best cadence for them? When is the best time of day for them to do it? What would their ideal week look like? Like, how could you map it out? Like, on Tuesdays, I'd love for you to have the social media content done. On Wednesdays, I'd love for you to, you know, put this in, you know, to your calendar. Or I'd love for you to be organizing this. Or I'd love for you to be, you know, replying to, sending our invoices, you know, replying to this. Get really clear on what days and times you want them to do things. Have processes built out. My advice would be to start slow as well. So, you know, maybe start them off with three or four of those processes per week and slowly build up. You might start at five hours a week or 10 hours a week, and then slowly build up over time. And then last but not least, but treat them as a Western employee, we reward our VAs just the same way that we reward our Western employees. They get bonuses, they get Christmas presents, they get birthday presents, they get time off, they get all of the same benefits as somebody here would get because they're a human being and we really value the human being on the other side of the computer. Just because we've never met Sai doesn't mean that we don't absolutely 110% value her. It doesn't mean she didn't get a whopping Christmas bonus and that we don't want to, you know, support her when she's sick or her kids are sick or something's going on in her life, you know. So treat them the same as anybody else. Tim, do you have anything to add?

Yeah. So that's a big hint. So people ask me how I've kept a VA for five years because that's unheard of. You just got to treat them well and you got to be firm with them. Okay? So they respect that just like any other employee would. So if you want to have a long term VA like I do, a fucking savage and absolute superstar in our company, then you need to treat them well.

Yeah, absolutely. It seems pretty simple, but it really, really matters. The last thing I'll add to that is give them opportunity for progression. They're pretty like by culture, by nature. They're pretty driven. And so they do like to progress and they like to know that there are, you know, additional milestones. They're very driven by money at the end of the day. And the reason they're so driven by money is obviously because they, they live in a third world country. And so, you know, they want. And if you know a lot about their culture, what you'll actually come to learn is that they actually, a lot of them support their entire family, not just their immediate family. So they'll support their brothers, their sisters, their mothers, you know, their elderly will come and live with them. And so there is a huge family culture. And the more money they earn, the more that they can give back to their family. And that's really important to them. And so what we always do is we make sure that we have bonuses and chances for all, chances for salary increase incrementally over time. So maybe every six months you do a review and you know, if they've been doing a great job, you might bump your hourly rate up by a couple of dollars here and there. And that really allows them to know that if they're doing a good job, there's opportunities for progression and that's when you'll get someone for life. Okay, so, Tim, I have some final questions on VAs just so that we can make sure we've covered off on everything on this episode. How will I know my VA's capabilities?

So my management style isn't for the faint of heart. Okay. So finding out my VA's capabilities after I've gone through the initial period of just working out if they can do it or not is I throw them in the deep end and see if they can swim. Okay. So I will just load them up with weekly tasks. I'll ask them to do stuff that's well outside their capabilities, and then I'll provide resources, YouTube training, mentorships, whatever they need to do to accomplish the task. Okay. Because a lot of the times the limited capabilities of the VA are not down to the capability. It's your mindset around what they can do. Okay. They are very capable to learn and grow and get better. But a lot of the times we're scared to give them tasks because we think it's outside of their wheelhouse, when in reality it's just outside of our wheelhouse in our head.

Yeah, I love that. How would I hire a. No, like, so should I hire a novice or an experienced va?

My opinion on this is always to hire a novice VA to start with, especially if you're in the, like, initial periods of starting your business or it's your first couple of hires. I would suggest hiring a team player that you're going to be with for a long term and I would train them up from a novice level and then obviously keep them with you as long as you're in business. In terms of experience, va, they obviously come with a lot more baggage. They come with a way of doing things and they come with a higher price tag, which is fine. We're happy to pay for work quality, etc. If we need a specialist for it. But the way Steph and I operate, we have generalists in our company and our current VA is a generalist across the board at everything.

And she also has no problem in putting herself through upskilling. Like, when we change, we moved to a new platform that is a really highly technical platform. She spent 10 hours learning it and understanding it and watching the guides and on the phone, help desk and all those things so she could understand it. So give them the space and time to actually go and learn the systems as well. Last but not least, what if I don't have time to train my va?

Yes, I'll flip that and say you don't have time not to train your va, because this will eventually turn into the best employee in your company if you let it. The other one here is if you don't have time, just obviously throw them YouTube videos and links and stuff to watch. If you don't have time to record videos and processes because it's probably been done out there. So take advantage of the Internet. Take advantage of what is online at the moment, and then obviously give them the best ability to succeed in your company. Those that don't invest the time in their VAs usually have bad VAs. Okay, hint, hint. It's not the VA's problem.

I really just want to do some quick math, which, you know, fingers crossed, I could do this quick math really well.

Pray for us.

Haven't been off to a great start today, but if you. I've done it in round numbers, so I hope that I can get it right. If you have a task, if you have a few tasks that you're spending an hour a day on, and let's be honest, you have a lot more than that. But let's say you have a couple of admin tasks that are taking you an hour a day, and you're doing that five days a week. That's five hours a week. That's over 250 hours a year. Is that right, math?

Yeah.

Yes. That's 250 hours a year that you are spending on that one hour a day task that you could give over to somebody else. It might take you 10 hours to train them, but that will still save you 240 hours a year. It's actually insane.

Can we give a round of applause to Steph Smith. Let's fucking go. She got it. That's your first ever math equation. Did you do math at school?

No, I didn't do math at school. But also the whole time that Tim was answering the question, if you watch the YouTube, my head was like, you know that meme? You know that meme where there's all the numbers floating around the person's head? That was my head. I was like, five hours a week times 52 weeks.

We should just do a podcast episode of just all your math fails those hilarious ones.

Okay, we are going into listener just FYI, guys, you don't have to be math to be good at math to be good at business. Listener questions from Beth C. I'm gonna ask you first, Tim, what is the best place to start with a sales system? We don't have one. We definitely need one, but I've got no idea where to start.

Okay, Beth, I actually went full stalker ex girlfriend on you as well, and I couldn't find out what you did, so I'm gonna give a generalist answer, not a specific answer to you, and exactly where you're at right now. So I would recommend anyone selling anything for I would say over $300 or 400 or 500 or whatever it is, whatever number it is for you to do a sales call, okay? Because, you know, especially these days this time, there's so much bullshit on the Internet, no one really knows who is legit or not. You want to show people that you're legit and you know what you're talking about, okay? Because you have to overcome that, that trust factor which is so prevalent online now. So I would be getting on a zoom call with someone or a phone call at the very least. Zoom call so they can see face to face and they can see who you are, what you're about, and they can watch your body language, etc. We have like the primal brain that we need to obviously trust and get over. Like, when we're making sales with people, it's just the easiest way to do it. So, number one, get on a zoom call with someone. Number two, if you can't get on a zoom call with someone, phone call is next best. Number three, if all that shit is not good for you, then I would be doing a landing page with a video and they can still see you talking in that video. You just really want to overcome all the barriers that are going to come up. So sales call. On the sales call, you want to go through building rapport with them, finding out their goals or what they want to achieve. You want to find out the roadblocks. After the roadblocks, offer the solution and then the offer after that, in that exact order. Build out that process, Beth, and you are going to be closing sales like it is Christmas step. Anything to add?

Love the energy you just got into with that. So, so passionate. Yeah. Okay. So, um, Beth, I did actually answer this in our Facebook group, but I'm gonna go through here for everyone else's benefit. So where would you start with the sales system? Tim's just gone through the sales call process, which I love and is so necessary. Like, you like the sales call matters, guys. Like, it really does matter. Um, but before that, a. A full sales system build out will be like, from the minute somebody engages with your company all the way through to when they sign the contract and pay the money into your business, there is a process that's been process that's going to happen. And the number one problem I see with small female business entrepreneurs, but even just small business entrepreneurs, is that they don't have a singular process for this. They have lots of different processes. Like, you can email me and I can sign you up and we can jump on a call, and I can send you my calendar link, or you can DM me and I can send you my price list. And sometimes I email my price list, and sometimes I just send people to my website, and sometimes I take phone calls. And then sometimes, you know, somebody meets me in the street and I'm selling them. And sometimes, like, it's, like, so overwhelming. You need one process. So our process, to give you an example, is you will come into our world however you do, whether that's a lead magnet, whether that's, you know, as an Instagram follower, whether you vote in some stuff, whether you join our Facebook group. From there, we will usually have a conversation with you of some sort. At the very least, regardless of whether we converse with you or whether you land on our landing page, it all goes to one spot, and that is a calendar booking for a call with our team. That is the only way that you can join our program. There literally is no other way. There's no. We don't dm. And then, you know, I send you a price point, and then you sign up. You have to have a call. You have to have a call. You have to have a call. You have to have a call. So every single thing that we do drives to this one position. From there, there is a process that happens. So after the sales call, what happens when we send an email has a price, that has a payment link? Okay, they sign up the payment link. Then what happens? Well, there's an automated email, give them access to the program. The T's and C's are in that first payment link. So, like, there is a process that happens every single time. And when you have a process that is repeatable, you have a business that is actually scalable because you're not having to think every single minute, every single day, like, how do I do now? What do I send? I've got to send the contract. I've got to do this, I've got to do that. You got to simplify it into one thing.

But, yeah, so to get this stuff dialed in, it hasn't been an overnight thing for us. Okay? We're up here on our high horse being like, yeah, where the fucking shit? Like, we know what's up. Like, we've made all these mistakes as well, and that's why we've come around the other side. We're like, cool, this works way better. I suggest you do it.

Yeah. Yeah, guys, we're teaching you because we had to do it the highway. So you don't have to. Yeah.

All right, next question from Nathan M. The question is email marketing. I currently have a very small list under 100, but I am building. I currently send weekly emails typed out and sent at a set time each day. At what point is it worth investing in software? I think there's a load of question, a couple of answers here that we could probably jump into. Kick us off, Steph.

I just want to say congratulations, Nathan, for having a list of 100 and sending out weekly emails every week. I'm proud of you. Like, that level of action makes me so happy because we know the math. Again, math. Gosh, it's my day for it today. Well, we know that it's a round number. He's got a hundred. Let's say it's 100. Only 20% on average is going to open your email. So 20 people are opening his email and only one to 40. Yeah. Yes, usually 20 to 30. But we're going to argue with you. So let's say 20 people are going to open his email. 1 to 3% of those people are actually going to take any action, which means that, like, you know, maybe two people are going to take some action on his email. No, wait, it's less than 2, isn't it?

Way less than 2.2.

0.2 of a person is going to take action on it. So what is going to be happening is that Nathan's going to be sending these emails to a list and nothing's going to be happening. And so he's going to be like, oh, I wonder why nothing's happening. Well, Nathan, if you're wondering why, it's because 0.2 of a person is actually going to be taking any action in your emails. So the answer is, let's focus on growing your email. The second thing is just get a system now. Like would be my piece of advice. Like, mail. A light is so cheap. Flow desk, they're so cheap. Mailchimp. I don't care which one you get, they're all cheap. At your size of business right now, with the amount of emails that you currently have, it doesn't matter which one you get. Whichever one feels easiest for you. We use mail, it's easy. It's up to you which one you want to use. Get the system set up now and focus on going hard on growing that list because the numbers don't lie.

The biggest constraint in any business is acquiring clients. Okay? Because a lot of people are like, I need to do this crazy stuff. Hire this person, do this. Look at this system, you know, insert X, Y, Z. The number one thing you should be doing every single day if this is your problem. Nathan is working out how to get more leads, get more clients, grow your email list, okay? We can get into the minutiae of all the fancy stuff and the software and all. Like, I had a group call yesterday and someone logged on and asked some super irrelevant question and they didn't have any clients. And I said, how about we just focus on getting clients because that's the number one thing we need to do right now.

Yeah. And I guys, I didn't really believe in email marketing as. Because I didn't have a big enough list. The minute my list got big, email marketing, I was like, whenever we need clients, emails, perfect. This is the best. Like email marketing 100% works. But the tipping point will be once you get really. The tipping point starts over 2,000 emails. That's when it starts to get really easy for you to be able to make some cash on emails.

All right, guys, as always, if you got some value from the show, don't forget to follow and subscribe. That is the main metric we're after. The second one is leave us a five star review. We love every review that we get. We appreciate it a lot. Until next Monday, guys. Thanks for coming. We appreciate you and we love having you on the show.

See you later.