Episode 065 - STRR - The VA Advantage© : Free Up Your Time & Take Back Your Life

Hiring a Virtual Assistant is a Game Changer!  No.  It's a Life Changer!  You are pretty much buying back your time and time is a precious commodity.  We've got an amazing gift for you tucked inside this episode, so stick around until the end.  We created a course just for you so you can live a life of design, not of reaction.  Find your first (we know it won't be your last) VA using these proven strategies and methods.

Transcript of this Episode:

Hi, this is Michelle, the master of money mindset, and you are listening to BNB dash boss podcast.

And in today's podcast, it's Friday, Friday means I get the weekend off and you get a short term rental revenue replay. And in today's replay, we are going to be talking about the VA advantage. This is all about virtual assistance. You can go to B and B bosses, B N B B O S S E s.com or bnb-boss.com. And that will take you over.

And inside our website inside the store, you'll see the V8 advantage. We've got it on sale right now while I'm recording this. I don't know how long that will be, because I don't know when you're going to be listening to this, but hopefully if you Navid soon enough, you can get it for the great low price.

I believe it's like $29 or something it's super cheap and it will teach you how to grab your first virtual assistant and how a virtual assistant can just change your. So I want you to listen to this episode, learn, take notes, and then I might pop in during the episode, but I will definitely join you at the end.

So go ahead and take a listen to this episode. The VA. Enjoy, but really quick before we get started, I wanted to give two shout outs to two, five star reviews. We got miss Brel there on September 14. She left a five star review that says I began listening to this amazing podcast on August 26th. And I just finished the final available episode number 57 hashtag binge-worthy.

I am so grateful for the valuable information provided. And for all that I've learned so far. I am super ready to take action and get started with short term rentals. I enjoyed listening every day. Again, the LLC episode was my favorite until I listened to the ones with the attorney. My gosh, those were good.

Thank you, Michelle, for making this so thoughtful and easy to listen to time to go. And I love that. Oh my gosh. She's going growth. And also Collette Collette in Utah, I saw yours five star. You do, but Collette in Utah said this podcast is so inspiring. I started listening when I bought my vacation rental.

I'm so new to this. I didn't know where to start. Michelle has given me the courage to keep going. Even when I feel nervous about it. I even tell other people about it. When the short-term rental business topic comes up. I like how Michelle is willing to help everybody there's enough room for all of us to do.

Thank you so much, Michelle. You two are so awesome. Thank you. Thank you for the five-star reviews and Hey guys, you know what we're going to do. We went to this cool cool event with other podcasters and we got wind of this really neat way for you guys to call in and we can record you. And puts you on the show and we'd love to do that with tips and tricks.

And if you want to tell us little bits about yourself or leave information about yourself, we're going to have our staff go through there. And if you're doing really well, or you just got started and you have a really big. Anything you want to talk about, this will be a place where you can call in and record an entire message to us.

And by doing that, you're going to leave us permission to either call you back and maybe have you on the show or play the little blurp that you left us so that others can get that information directly from you. I think that's so cool. So we're in the process of setting that. And I'll have that information available to you as soon as I get it.

But I'm so, so excited because I think one of the coolest things is getting everybody into this and realizing that this is growing. There's a lot of changes going on. Especially in Arizona, we just had some laws come through because they don't like the parties and stuff that were happening. I mean, it's not all bad news.

There's some good news. But we want to make sure that we keep everybody going in the right direction. And if you have something you want to hear about, I think this is a fantastic way for you to leave us a message and we can get all that information and put it right on here right for you. So I think that's fantastic.

And I want to thank you guys again. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Brown, and thank you, Colette. You guys were awesome. And thank you so much for the five star review on taking that time. I appreciate it. Okay. So today, We're talking about virtual assistants. And let me tell you, if you don't know what a virtual assistant is, it's a person who helps you out just like a PA, right?

So some people have personal assistants called. And my son is in the movie industry. They have all kinds of PAs that help them out. They do all the running. Remember gopher on the love boat. He was kind of a PA anything you needed done, they do for you. Now. There's also VA's. These guys are virtual assistants because they're not there with you physically.

They're more virtual. They're just somewhere in the world, connecting with us through our computer and through the internet. So we call them virtual assistants and they can. Anything. So I don't know if you've ever been to Fiverr, F I V E R r.com. Fiverr is one of those websites where you can for five bucks, which is why they call it fiber.

You can go on and you can get logos made. You can get just a bunch of stuff, like whatever you think of that somebody can do for you. You can go on Fiverr and you can even post jobs. And people will do these jobs. And the bidding usually starts at like $5. If somebody who's really good at it, it'll probably be more, we've gotten a lot of logos made on Fiverr.

We've gotten some bar articles. We have some of our writers that we've gotten and hired full-time through fiber. They started on fiber. We picked them up for some stuff for the prosperity process, and then we had them forever. But virtual assistants, they can do the same types of things like anything, you name it.

And so let's say you don't have five properties left and you can't use a company like Guesty yet because you don't have five. And you want to have somebody answering your messages via text through Airbnb? Well, you can use a virtual assistant. You don't have to be doing it all the time, all by yourself.

They can handle whatever you want them to do. And we're going to have this really cool free download for you guys. I've got in my hot little hand right now, it's 21 tasks to delegate to your virtual assistant to help you grow your short-term rental. A virtual assistant. These are 21 ideas for you, but there are many, many more, I mean, as many ideas as you can think of, they can do.

So here are some of the things that we wrote down for you, and you can just print this up, guys. You don't have to write it all down. It's ready and available for you to print up guest communications. They can create templates for your guest emails and messages, send emails and messages with check-in check-out and checking on message.

Send door codes reset and change them if necessary handle any and all requests from your guests or request from potential guests. Correct. Make sure guests are verified or help them go through a verification process. Handle questions and friendly communications with guests, they can do tons of customer service.

So handle any challenges that come up or come up with a resolution. If something goes wrong, schedule necessary, fixes like maintenance or cleaning crews. Anything that needs to happen, bug guy has to come by, or the pool guy has to be. They can schedule all that maintenance, contact you with updates. They can do property management and scheduling.

They can schedule cleaning crews for reservations, cancel and scheduled cleanings. After a reservation cancels schedule general maintenance on the property. Landscaping pest control pool cleaning schedule repairs between the guests light bookkeeping. And some other tasks are update your listings, schedule photographers, update your photos, create an update house rules and guests book marketing.

They can create ads on social media or your website. They can order and or refresh property supplies, check security footage on properties throughout the guests day, search Zillow or Craigslist for properties that fit your criteria. That's when you're acquiring property. So your property acquisitions, correct.

And schedule viewings for properties that you may want to rent or buy, and you can use something like Calendly. If you want to do that, Calendly is a great place to schedule things. So we meet and talk to ours through zoom. A lot of people use Skype. Doesn't really matter what you want to use. There are services, and I'm going to talk about that here.

You can go to different sites and find people, or you can have a service pay this service and they find the people for you, but there's a lot of ways to get virtual assistants and keep them once they're yours. You're the one who gets to communicate with them. So most of the time you're going to do it through a messaging service.

You're going to pick one. So maybe you want. Facebook messenger, or maybe you want to use, so a text messaging, or you might want to use email, whatever is easiest for you is something that you check consistently. And you'll also want to do at least one face-to-face with them using something like zoom. I like to see people.

I mean, you don't have to, but here's the deal when you're talking to somebody face-to-face one-on-one you get to know them a lot better. And you can tell when people are not being, you know, on the up and up that there's something a little fishy about them and you get that feeling whenever you get that feeling, go with your gut, right?

Your intuition. Is always right. Your first instincts always. Right. So you'll be able to download this. We're going to put these 21 tasks to delegate to your VA to help you grow your short-term rental business. We're going to put that right in this episode and you'll be able to download it right from the episode link.

And there's also going to be something in there for you guys. Remember I said, you have to wait, but if you listened last week, you know, you've got that coming up too. There's so many things in this episode. But let's go over. So now you kind of have an idea what a virtual assistant is correct. And some of the tasks that they can do for you.

So your next question is probably, well, where are they and who are they? Well, virtual assistants can be from anywhere. You can have Americans, or you can have people from other countries. One of the biggest populations of virtual assistants comes from the Philippines. We get a ton of people coming to us from the Philippines, and what's really great.

About Filipinos. And I can say this because one of my best friends, she's amazing and she's Filipino and it's not just the food that I'm attracted to, or the funny, funny comedians that they have from there. Cause Joe's hilarious. Oh my God. But what I love about them is they're so incredibly friendly.

They speak English as well as I speak English and sometimes better. She'll correct me. But they are also educated in English. So they read, write and speak English just as well as we do. The fact is they're so friendly and so nice that they really do make great customer service reps. And we've also got another little tip that I'm going to go over here later on, but basically we, we do it one better.

By using a little test to help us figure out who's going to be the best virtual assistant possible for our business. Right. So we're going to go into that. But most of the time we use the Philippines for one really good reason, because a small business like ours can get started. Pain of virtual assistant from the Philippines, very little money to us, but it's actually a really good working wage for them because the cost of living is so much less.

So I think the exchange rate right now is about 50 to one or 54 to one, meaning they get 54 of their Filipino pesos to one of our us dollars. And if you were to pay them four or $500 a month, that would be a great living wage. Now imagine us making that much an entire month. We couldn't make it, but there, the cost of living is so much less.

That income is so much greater to them and it's all relative. It's a win-win scenario. They're happy, you're happy. And you can get a small business started. That doesn't mean that you can't give them a raise there. Actually, when you pay somebody in the Philippines. It is a common practice in the Philippines as a bonus at the end of the year to give them an entire month's wage.

So if you're paying somebody 500 a month, you might want to, and instead of just thinking of it as $6,000 a year, you should think of it a 6,500 a year for a Christmas bonus or whatever. You're going to give them $500 an entire month's wage. It's just a common practice. There are VAs all over the place. I mean all over the world.

And a lot of people use VAs that are coming out of Israel because there's a lot of Americans who are moving to the country of Israel. And obviously they're educated here. They speak English. They're from here. They're most likely Americans they're just living in another country with a lower cost. And especially, it's really nice too, because as short-term rental owners, when you only have your first few properties and you are unable to use services that require a minimum number of properties, you're kidding.

Really busy, right. Because you're like, okay, you're running around with one property. And then two part it's like having kids, when you have one kid you're like, okay. And then two you're like, okay, Two arms, I can handle this, but then you add another and another and another, and it's just like, holy crap. I need help.

It's getting harder and harder to juggle all this work. So when you hit this number, There's a lot of services out there that don't allow you to set up until you have a minimum of five properties or a minimum of 10 properties or whatever the minimum is. And so meanwhile, you, as a small business owner have one property, two properties, three properties, you're getting really busy and it's really getting difficult to juggle.

As a motto says, spin all those plates, right? You're like the guy who's running around with the plates on the sticks and you're spinning them, trying to keep everything going. And it's really, really. That is when a virtual assistant comes in extremely handy, because you can give them tasks that will save you time.

Okay. Now let's talk about where, where to find them, right? Where, where to find them find virtual assistants in two different types of places. There are places where they can put their resumes online. Or there are online service companies and they find the virtual assistance and you pay the company. So do you remember way back?

I mean, if you're young, you're not gonna remember, but you can ask your mom and your mom will tell you they used to have a service called Kelly services. And I guess in maybe different states, it was a different service, but basically it was temporary. Secretaries who would go from place to place? Maybe a secretary was on maternity leave, but their temp services were very, very popular probably in the 1950s, 1960s, seventies.

So I was born in the mid sixties. And so growing up. Those services were very popular, extremely popular. So a lot of times when your mom couldn't go find a job job, she would go work for Kelly services and they would hire her out someplace. A lot of times, if they did a good enough job, they would be offered a full-time position at the place they were at.

But the whole point of that is when you are hiring a service, it's very similar to that. All the secretaries who are out of work would go to Kelly services. They would tell them what they could do, how many words a minute they could type. Um, back then they didn't have all the recording devices that we had in.

So they took shorthand. My mom was amazing at shorthand and she could type, I forget what her typing skills were, but she was like incredibly fast when it came to typing that water and go, wow, this woman is crazy. Again. Remember this is way before computers, so they still. You know, when you press on a typewriter, it was like pounding with your fingers.

She was really good at it. The whole point is there's a bunch of people who will go to these services and say, here are my skills. Here's basically my resume. Here's what I can do. Now find me someone. And so when you go to one of those services, you pay the company and then the company gives a portion of that payment to the employee.

So they go through the process of finding the employee and weeding out the bad ones and finding only the good ones. Correct. You don't have to go through a whole hiring process and that saves you time, but it doesn't necessarily save you money because a lot of times those services are more expensive.

Now when you go through a company like online jobs.ph, just spelled exactly like that. Online jobs dot P H because it's based in the Philippines. So it's not.com. And when you go there, you'll pay online jobs about $65. At the time we're recording this about $65 for a month. And then you get to list your job.

An applicants will apply for it. And that place is crazy millions of people who go on there every day. We have some ideas, some helpful hints to help you find people on there. But literally when we post a job on there, we don't even have to have it listed for two days because within two hours we'll have a few hundred apps.

For a job. The thing is now you have to screen them. Now you have to go through all those applications, make sure that the applications are verified. Find out the work, talk to the people. You have to go through the whole hiring process yourself. So those are the two differences either going and finding a company that does it for you.

Or going and finding a website that allows people to list the resumes themselves. So those are the two ways you can do it. We're going to have a whole bunch of links to a bunch of different places. I mean, Upwork, there's a bunch of them guys. There's so many out there. Literally, if you were to Google virtual assistant Philippines, wow.

You would find an incredible number of Filipino virtual assisting sites. There's a ton of. Just be really careful what I suggest when you first try looking for virtual assistants is talk to other people around you and inside forums that are doing the same thing that you're doing. So if you're doing it.

Obviously your short-term rental. If you're listening to this, go inside other short-term rental forums and see if there's somebody using a virtual assistant that they would be willing to share, because sometimes they don't have them for full time. Right. They can only afford to pay them 20 hours a week instead of a full-time 40 hours a week.

Correct. So, because the people aren't working full time, they might be able to share them. And if you can't find them that way, then go and look up all the different ways you can do it. You just have to decide what you can afford right now. Now what's really cool. And I wrote this down for my people, because I was like, you know, this is the best, absolutely the best quote on this James Wedmore said, if you can't afford to outsource it's because you haven't been outsourcing.

And that is so incredibly true. What that means is look, once you start hiring somebody for the things that you do every day, you're doing all these MWS. Remember I talked about minimum wage activity. Most of us spend so much time every single day on minimum wage activities. These are busy activities, shit that we're doing every day that is really putting no money in our pocket.

And that's what we're doing. If you sat down for an entire week and you decided I'm going to write down every single thing I do every minute of every day. You would sit down and you would see the things that you had to do. And next thing you know, you'd be distracted. You'd be opening your emails. And you're like, I'm just going to check these view.

And time goes by and you clicked on one thing, and then you went to another and you went to another, it's like going on to Facebook or something. You're like, I'm just gonna check the messages here. Oh, but you see a post and oh, I better respond to this. And then boom, you get distracted. And next thing you know, an hour and a half of your life.

Sucked away never to return. That's literally what's going on with your life. And we're so distracted by so many things in our life that in order to get things done, we really need to start to focus on them and not waiver. And the only way we can do that is to get her time back, really take control of our time back.

And what a virtual assistant does is you can give them those times suck activity. And I don't mean like sucky activities. I mean, time-suck activities, the activities that you spend a lot of time on that aren't making you. So for instance, I hired somebody to help me with my emails, because my emails at one time, at the beginning of this year, there were thousands.

I mean, seriously, like tens of thousands of emails in my email account. It was incredible. I just could not, I, every time I even looked at my emails, I was so overwhelmed because there were thousands and thousands of them. I couldn't even think about answering anybody's or going through them. There were so, so many, so I hired an assistant to go through and she wiped out like 13,000 emails for me right away, like in that first week.

And I was like, oh my God, this is so great. What was so good? Cool about that was, it was such a time sucking activity. If I got in there, I would get lost. I would do my best to go in and go, okay, I'm going to remove myself from as many of these as I can, but then you would see something and you're going well, I can't really remove myself from that because I mean, the kids do eat Domino's so I do need those coupons, right.

Or something, something stupid like that. Or you would see something and then you would go, oh, the tagline will get you. So you would go in there and you're like, I just, I'm just gonna read this one. And again, you're down the rabbit hole of the time-sucking activity. So what was really cool about hiring aria is she went through all of those for me and she handled all of those.

She also did some of our social media and the social media stuff was really great too, because there's always so many messages in there. And I can't be in there all the time. I mean, it would be really great, but it takes so much time. And to be really honest with you here, I had no idea that doing a podcast would take so much time away.

My businesses, because I just thought as a mom, it's just another thing I can do. And it sounds like fun teaching everybody and doing this thing. Right. Well, as soon as I started doing it, I started to know little things. But now that it's been a year, I mean, we've had major cracks in our business and things happening to different rental properties that if I weren't doing this, I would have been right on top of, but I was incredibly distracted.

And I didn't, you know, I, I wasn't as proficient as I used to be in my business. And so now I've learned to hire people, but sometimes I've hired the wrong people and I'm not as quick to fire as I should be. So you have to be slow to hire and quick to fire. And I need to practice that too. I'm pretty good at it, but not as good as I possibly could.

And I think all of us need to do that. We need to block our time. And especially if you have more than one iron in the fire, and that includes if you're a stay at home mom or dad, or if you're somebody who's working in their own home and around your kids, when you are surrounded by distractions, you have to do everything you can to be productive in the cracks of time and the spaces that you have.

So when your kids are gone and they're at school, that's great. But what if you have little kids? I mean, who's watching them. So if your office is in your house and you have little ones when they're taking a nap grape, but they don't sleep all day. Right? So you're, you're obviously going to get distracted and every time you are, you go back to what you're doing.

It takes you so much time to get back on track, right? So it's much better to take these cracks of time in the very early morning. Or in the late evening, when you don't have to call people, obviously make your phone calls during the day, but use those cracks of time wisely and where a virtual assistant can help is they can be doing a ton of stuff for you and give you your time back.

So you can be spending time with your little ones, because nothing makes you feel more guilty than having to get stuff done. When there's a little one right next to you, because when they're pulling on you come play with me, come play with me. I was listening to some of our members and their little ones saying, come play with me and come play with me.

And I remember my kids doing that, and I remember all the times that it was so. And I felt so sad because man, there's nothing else that you want to do as a parent, then drop everything and go pick up trucks and Barbies and whatever you got you. I chose whatever they're playing with cars in the dirt. And you're like, I just want to play with you.

But you know what? There's so many responsibilities. That's why you're going to love it when you're a grandparent. Because once you're a grandparent, you learn that that time goes so fast. That when you're a grandparent, you drop everything. You're like, screw it. That'll still be there when I'm done, I'm going to do this and just play and have fun.

So I'm a much better grandparent than I was a parent. And that's the truth. I'll admit that my kids will agree too. I'm sure because I was never able to just drop everything and be a kid with my kids. And I want you guys to be able to do that. And be a parent and be a grandparent, and this will help you do that.

Hiring a virtual assistant will help you buy back your time, especially when you get rid of those minimum wage activities, because what can you do with that time you're buying back? What would be the most important thing you could do with it when you have those other cracks? Spend that time on money making activities.

Right. Remember I said that some of those people could be doing acquisitions for you, or maybe finding landlords, finding places that are for rent in your area for you. They can look up the Craigslist stuff and the Zillow ads, just like you can, it doesn't matter if they're not in your country. Right. They can look them up and get them all lined up for you.

And then you can take your time, that small amount of time that you have left when you're not with your kids or when they're sleeping or whatever you're doing when you've got a be. Crack of time and you can spend it on finding another property and that will make more money for you that will bring in more income.

But instead, if you were just opening your emails, checking your social media, doing all this stuff, or even checking the messages from Airbnb, communicating back and forth. How many times have you been stuck in a communication? Some stupid ass, excuse my French. Some stupid ass communication with a guest, whereas just going back and forth.

And you're like, this is seriously a waste of my time. Like I really, I get time sucked into those communications. Sometimes when my people aren't available and I'm taking over and then I get a communication, I think it's going to be something quick. Like, you know, I need the passcode and it's like, here you go, boop.

And then they're going and another thing. And then you're like, okay, well we've got that picture. You send that over and then boom, they're back again. You're like, oh shit, what the hell are they saying to me? And then they say something else and they just keep it going and going. It's like, dude, I don't want to have a conversation on my phone with you.

This is wasting my time. I'm like, oh my God, I'm getting old. And I just don't like to waste. And so communications with guests, they need to be handled by my team because I do not have that patience anymore. I really, really don't, especially for the little small talk or, you know, the game plane, I don't like game playing with people.

And you guys want to hear a story about game playing. This'll make you cry. So we have a property right by the university. And we have an Arizona. A lot of times our washers and dryers will be on back porches of the older houses, not the newer ones, obviously, but the older homes, sometimes they had like a utility closet or utility room that was off of a patio or something in the backyard, even then the houses in Scottsdale.

And so we had a lady who was staying just for a few days and. It states inside of our house roles, that if you have a longer stay, that you will be given the code to the utility room, then you can use the washer and dryer. And so this lady, obviously he didn't read the house rules very well. And so she had texted the VA.

That she wanted the code to the room and they said, well, or they texted her back and said, we don't normally give out the code for short stays. If you look in the rules, you know, it says that it's longer stay. It's been, the lady got so angry. So then obviously they contacted me and Michelle, you got to smooth this out now, remember I know the communication cause they've showed me, here's the communication we've had so far.

Here's when she blew up, blah, blah, blah. So I just texted her back and I said, well, the reason why. We don't usually do that is because we have an agreement with the owner of the house because we don't own that house. We do rental arbitrage. We have an agreement with the owner of the house. He pays for all the water.

And so therefore less wear and tear on his appliances. We promise that only longer stays we'll get those. And, you know, I said, but I'll give you, I'll be happy more than happy to give you the code and being by the property. I knew that she had said something too. I could see that she was visiting her daughter.

I'm like, shoot, she's just going to have her daughter come over and do laundry. That's what she's going to do, but that's okay. Whatever makes them happy. Right? You got to keep your five stars. So the lady kind of went off and said it wasn't in there. And then she threatened to leave. And I said, look, I'm allowing you to do it.

You don't have to leave, but whatever, I'm totally goal. And she, so she decided she did. And then she went in and she saw it and she goes, well, you don't really say what a longer stay is. And I said, do you consider three days a longer stay? And she was like, no reply. The Hudge. Why did I say that? Because I was like, what a smart ass thing to say, but duh is three days along stay.

No, it's not, but here's the deal. Those communications are usually best held by my VAs. They handle them most of the time. This was a newer VA. As soon as the lady freaked out on her, she went right to me. And that was a good thing for her to do too, because she's not used to handling the customer service.

And she didn't know what to do. So most of the people who have been doing it for a while, they know that they'll just give them the code, just give them the code and make them happy. It's not hard. And I give all my VAs that much room, but she was newer, so she didn't know what to do with. So she called me right away and, you know, sent me all the messages and everything so I could catch up.

But the deal is. All of that gets to be handled by a virtual assistant almost all the time for me, which is really, really great because I love people I really do in small doses in small doses. So we talked about the kind of tasks that we can turn over to our virtual assistants. My suggestion to you is to do exactly what I mentioned, write everything down.

I know it sounds boring and tedious. I don't care if you record it and then jot it down at the end of the night. But every single thing that you do write down what you're doing, doing emails. And I started at this time and I ended this time. I'm answering customer service. You know, I'm doing customers.

With Airbnb, I'm calling the cleaning crew. I'm scheduling the cleanings, I'm scheduling the maintenance guys. I'm paying the bills, whatever you're doing, write it all down and how much time you spend doing it and just do that for a week or even a few days. And you'll start to see a common pattern. And you'll see how much time you're spending on those.

M w A's minimum wage activities. Now wouldn't it be better if you could just pay somebody to do those activities and keep you away from the time, suck, give those activities, just someone else so that they don't take away all your time. And you want to spend your best and golden time, the blocks of time that you have.

On the activities that are making you money, and this is going to be a game changer. It really is a game changer in your life because you'll feel your time is freed up. You'll suddenly, you know, there's times when I got a new virtual assistant or two, and I walked out into my kitchen and I was like, holy crap, I don't have anything to do for a whole five seconds.

Somebody else's answering the email. Somebody else is doing this. Somebody else is doing that. Like every single thing that I usually did, somebody else was doing, and I literally was like, holy cow, I'm going to get myself a cup of tea. I almost didn't know what to do with myself. It's like, I just got out of a cult or something.

What do you want to do? And you're like, I don't know somebody telling me what to do. Cause you're so young. You see your life dictating to you, what you should be doing and suddenly that's gone. It's such a great feeling. I mean, you will absolutely love it. There's a good site called bottleneck online.

It's bottleneck.online. Do you know what a bottleneck is? It's something that slows everything else down. So let's say you were one of those people who just loves to torture themselves and you wanted to do your website with your property. I'm just kidding, but not okay. Because if you want to be the person.

Who has your own website and you go through all that trouble kudos to you, man, because it's just a lot of work for me, but people will want their sites done, but then they don't know how to operate WordPress or code it. They don't know how to make a page look the way they want to or how to upload their PayPal to it or whatever.

Want to do. They don't know how to do it. So then the next thing they've got to do is go out and figure out, find a class or something. That's going to tell them how do I plug my PayPal into my WordPress? How do I get my website to look like this? How do I list each individual property, one at a time so that they can click here and then they'll find all the ones in Arizona and then they can click and find all the ones.

How do I do this stuff? So if they don't know how to do that, the simple fact that they don't know how to do it, create something in their work called a bottleneck, because everything behind it stops. So if you were like moving in traffic and one person stopped, everybody else goes, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, all the way back.

Did you get it? And it creates a huge bottleneck, but what it got me thinking was. Bottlenecks, anytime you have a bottleneck in your business, you need a virtual assistant for that. That would be something you could just hire somebody else to do. And if you are one of those people who want to have a website for your house, honestly, kudos to you because I've seen some gorgeous properties like that super hard to market.

But if you want to attack that, you go for it. I'm I'm with you. But if you want to do that in, you're not sure how to do it. Go to a site like Fiverr. And find people who are willing to help you or find a virtual assistant who is really, really good at that. And they can help you build that and you won't have to go learn everything.

You can pay somebody else to do it. So anytime you're doing an activity in your business that is creating some kind of bottleneck for you, it's really good to go and get a virtual assistant to do. So let's say that you're not going to use a company's service to hire somebody. You're going to create a job description and put it into a website.

So the first thing that you would have to do is what create a job description, right? You've got to create a really good job description. And this task usually takes, probably takes me the longest to create because. I know exactly what I'm looking for. And so I'm going to be super, super clear, but there's a bunch of different places online where you can go and find out how to create a job listing or a job description to place online.

And there's some really good articles all about it. You can find out relatively easy online how to do that, but basically when you're picking out the jobs you want, or you need to delegate, just ask yourself, is this a moneymaking activity? Or is it losing money and sucking out my energy, then those are the ones you want to give away.

Right. By doing this myself, what is it costing me? And does it really have to be done by me? Like, do I have to do this? Or can somebody else do this for me? So those are three really good questions to ask yourself. Then you're going to go and create a whole job description and you're going to list it online.

You're going. The ad out there and you can put the ad out. There there's even a Craigslist in the Philippines guys, so you can put it on Craigslist. You can put it on online jobs.page, wherever you want to put it, put it out there and you'll start to get resumes back. Right? So post your listing, wherever the heck you want.

And then you're going to have to start looking at all the applications that you get. Some of those applications might not be real inside of our job descriptions. We put like a little test, basically somewhere in there. We'll say, okay, if you're interested in this job, you're going to do this, this and this.

Right. But one of the things is send us back your favorite viral video, or send us back your favorite quote. A lot of times we'll get, you know, we saw your ad, here's our resume. And here's like some copies of the work that we've done, but they don't have the quote or the viral video that we had in there.

So James Wedmore's said, if they don't look at all the detailed, if they aren't detailed oriented, then pass on that resume. So put a little test in there and make sure you get the test back that, you know, somebody passes. And then put them through your entire process. Figure out the person you want to hire, hire slow, right.

Fire fast, but you might want to do a zoom call with them or Skype. If you don't have zoom, get face-to-face in front of them and do like a little chat. Most of the questions and stuff that you'll have will be in your job description. And they'll probably have answered them before. But don't worry. Just talk to them and see how they're doing.

See how they fit in, see what their hours are, see what the time difference is. See if you'll be able to meet once a week or if they want to meet more often, you'll be able to ask a bunch of questions and get more information out of them. With a zoom meeting. You'll get a better feel for if they're going to fit in with your lifestyle or not, and then narrow it down to your three favorite candidates.

And give them all three, the same type of job, but a little bit different. Right. And it's going to be paid, tell them you'll pay them whatever you're going to pay them. So if it will take them a few days to do, you might want to pay them like $50 to do it, right. You don't want to waste their time and you need to tell them ahead of time that it will be paid.

But you just want to see Holly handle it and then give them a quick description of what you want them to do, and then see who does a better job at doing it. And then you get to pick your favorite. Now don't knock the other two out yet, because if that person gets a job in the meantime, or if something comes along later, you never want to throw everybody away.

You want to keep them there and just say, Hey, look, we have found somebody who fits our company, but we're going to keep you in mind. In case we have a friend who needs you, because you can do that too. Right now. You know, who else helps once you have a virtual assistant helping you for a while, they'll come to you and they'll ask you, Hey, do you need any help with this?

Or any help with that? Because I have a friend who needs stuff, so you'll be able to get more and more. It's just like finding apartments and condos and all this stuff that we do. Once you start doing this business, you'll notice there's an entire network that goes. All the different ways, but you pay it forward on your end and they can pay it forward on their end.

And you'll do a lot of sharing activities. Like I said, when you notify the other people, contact them and let them know that they were one of your two top choices, you know, let them know too that you're going to give you their name to other people and you will constantly keep them in mind. Okay. So don't let them off the hook right away.

So, like I said, this is probably going to be the first part of being a business owner that a lot of you have had because when you are on the, your S side of the cashflow quadrant, you're, you're exchanging your time for dollars, right? Just like an employee works 40 hours a week at X amount of dollars per hour.

And even self-employed people, they make more per hour, but if they stop working. They stopped making money. This will be when the first times as a business owner, where you have an employee, who's actually going to allow you to have time of your own. You're buying back your time. So you are now moving to the other side of the quadrant.

How cool is that? As a business owner, you have employees. That's the big difference between a business owner, somebody else's doing the work. And if you have enough employees that they can cover all of your work, then you no longer have to be there all the time. You can take a little vacation, you can go away for the weekend and have all your bases covered and you should be absolutely fine.

And that is a glorious, glorious thing. Because virtual assistants are incredibly, incredibly hard and complicated to find what I've done is inside of our membership. We created this virtual assistant module to help everybody find them. We put it out there for everybody and everybody was going through it and they're like, this is great.

Can you add more too? So I started adding more and more and getting more and more detailed about all the different steps in between the questions that we ask, the things that we do. And finally, I said, holy crap, I've got enough in here. We could make an entire course on it because it's that complicated.

And it's that thorough? Why don't we do that? We should just do that and we'll give it to our members. And so you can go right inside our website, you'll see a store button. If you click the store button and you look down, you're going to see that program. So we're so excited that we can give this to you and allow you to see some of the things that are inside of our courses and our membership and our programs, because I'm telling you, this is what they call a needle mover.

Most of the time. There's a lot of things that we do in our businesses that, yeah, they move us forward. But not that far, this is a game changer. It's a needle mover and you need, this goes into great, great detail of everything that I've talked about in this episode, and it will get you where you need to.

Having a VA is absolutely wonderful. I hope you enjoyed that episode. I wanted to remind you, episode 48. I didn't interview with John Jonas. He is the owner of online jobs, pH, which is absolutely the best Wii go-to site for grabbing yourself a virtual assistant from the Philippines. And John has some excellent training.

So if you don't get our program, I would highly, highly recommend John's program. He has a seven day challenge. And I think right now it's going for about $49 for the seven day challenge. And it's absolutely phenomenal. It is absolutely worth it. And he knows the people. He knows the business really, really well.

So John's the go-to guy. I mean, he is. He's the guy that Wayne and Garth would be bowing down to. We're not worthy, we're not worthy. And that's exactly what I would do when I, when I meet him is his program is by far the best outcome. Um, and he's, he's definitely the go-to guy. I mean, you just don't want it.

You can't get any better. We're not worthy. We're not. So we are definitely a good, uh, starter place to go. But if you are going to get into hiring a bunch of virtual assistant. Or hiring, you know, you're like super serious about this. You'd want somebody to be there forever and ever in your business. You want to hire, well, John's the guy that goes here.

He's really great at this. No, I'm just shooting myself in my own foot for our program. I love our program. It's honestly a great program, but I'm just saying that John. He's the guy, he's the guy, he's the man. And, uh, I can't promote his business any further. I mean, I just can't tell you how great he is.

He's a good guy. He's a good guy too. So it's very seldom that you meet good people in this business. It seems like everybody's out to, you know, just get themselves ahead and they don't care about anybody else. He genuinely cares about people on both sides of his business and, uh, it's just a good person.

So I want to thank you for listening today. Have a great weekend. We'll see you on Monday with a brand new episode. And, um, that will be our last episode until I get back from my break. So I'm taking the entire month of September and October off. I know, I know I get to do it every single year. I used to just take one month off, but now I'm taking two and that's my prerogative.

So that's my prerogative. Right? You guys need to know that. It definitely is my prerogative. And, um, I'm looking super forward to heading down to my properties in Florida. My husband and my kids will be back and forth, uh, to Florida sometimes when I'm there. But I want to find, I'm thinking I'm going to be looking for a long-term home down there this time.

I'm thinking I might want to go long-term in Florida and be saying more than more than half the year, more than half the time. I want to be spending a little bit more time there. This summer was brutal in Arizona, but I'll tell you, I got to admit this monsoon season was a monsoon season. So we actually got rain here and I was loving Arizona through the monsoon.

It was beautiful. I know everything is flooding. Trees were coming down. For somebody who misses the rain, the desert can be a hot, dry place. And I, I've not enjoyed it for many years. And, uh, I miss Florida, I miss having a little humidity, a little rain, you know, I know it kinda curls your hair and some people don't like it, but, you know, I really enjoy it.

I really enjoy having soft supple skin and nice hair rather than drying out like a piece of leather left out in the sun. Right. So have a great week. I'll be talking to you live on Monday and then we'll see you again in November. All right, God bless you. Have a great day.  Go and Grow!