Dan Martell - June 05, 2017


How To Delegate To a Virtual Assistant


Episode Stats

Length

7 minutes

Words per Minute

209.7911

Word Count

1,647

Sentence Count

68

Misogynist Sentences

1


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
00:00:00.260 I actually want you to come in frame, Jared.
00:00:04.300 Get over here.
00:00:12.540 What and how to delegate to a virtual assistant
00:00:15.980 in a way that doesn't cause you a lot of rework.
00:00:18.120 If you've ever felt overwhelmed,
00:00:19.680 staying up late at night, doing paperwork,
00:00:22.280 managing your financials,
00:00:24.020 dealing with onboarding new employees, new customers,
00:00:27.220 following up receivables,
00:00:28.660 and really just processing your inbox
00:00:30.460 and you know that there's an opportunity
00:00:31.800 to have other people support you,
00:00:33.140 but maybe you feel like you can't trust them
00:00:35.360 because it's like, well, it's gonna take me more time
00:00:37.260 to do the work than to ask them to do it,
00:00:39.180 or maybe it's even a sense of value,
00:00:42.240 like why would I pay somebody else
00:00:43.540 to do something I could do myself?
00:00:45.120 Well, I wanna share with you in this video
00:00:46.820 not only what can you get them to work on,
00:00:48.980 but how do you do it in an efficient way
00:00:50.940 that gets you the result that you're looking for?
00:00:53.680 And it's a beautiful nirvana
00:00:55.180 where you can literally have just a list
00:00:57.860 you drop things and it gets done.
00:00:59.620 You drop ideas, you drop projects, you drop tasks,
00:01:02.200 and these get done and it just magically happens.
00:01:05.660 It's crazy.
00:01:06.900 I mean, when I started my company Flowtown,
00:01:09.000 I had a co-founder, Ethan, and we got so busy.
00:01:12.040 We were a venture-backed technology company,
00:01:13.880 raised almost a million dollars in funding,
00:01:16.120 and we started getting really busy with administrative tasks.
00:01:19.480 And we thought, you know, like social media publishing
00:01:22.380 and HR type stuff and just scheduling.
00:01:24.980 We thought, you know, we could really use somebody
00:01:26.880 to support us and we went through the process of hiring
00:01:30.280 and managing and trying to have somebody else
00:01:32.380 that we could delegate to and the first few goes
00:01:34.720 were really tough, it didn't work.
00:01:36.460 We had some major projects that we outsourced
00:01:38.820 that came back not even done correctly.
00:01:41.220 We had things that just got dropped
00:01:42.700 and it was through that process that I realized
00:01:44.940 that there's a way to do it where it's gonna give you
00:01:47.760 the confidence and the courage to really just start
00:01:50.340 because I think most people need to start
00:01:51.940 and ensure that the work gets done properly.
00:01:53.940 So a few things that are gonna help the strategies
00:01:57.140 improve the process.
00:01:58.480 Number one is you need a password management tool
00:02:01.880 or I like to call it access control
00:02:03.680 because you probably have several if not dozens
00:02:06.520 of online SaaS cloud tools like Dropbox, like Slack,
00:02:11.060 like your email tools, like your bank accounts.
00:02:13.600 All these online tools and you might wanna give somebody
00:02:15.900 else access so they can follow through
00:02:18.060 and get something done for you
00:02:19.560 but you don't wanna give them your password.
00:02:21.600 There's literally several and I'm gonna link them below
00:02:23.940 in the description, tools that you can use to manage all of
00:02:27.380 your passwords in one place and select and delegate so you can
00:02:31.080 create a marketing group and delegate all of the marketing
00:02:33.920 tools over to this group, give somebody access and they never
00:02:37.360 see your password.
00:02:38.920 So if you have a spreadsheet or you have a bunch of sticky
00:02:41.400 notes or you've literally emailed people your password,
00:02:44.400 stop doing that and go sign up for an online tool.
00:02:46.900 Again, linked below but I call that access control.
00:02:49.600 It's step one in the strategies to really do this the right way.
00:02:52.660 Two is, what do I even delegate to other people?
00:02:55.900 You know, it's like, I get it, I wanna do it,
00:02:57.840 I found somebody, but I can't seem to keepin' busy.
00:03:00.700 I'm gonna suggest the gateway drug to getting into that.
00:03:04.080 And then finally, the right mindset to get in.
00:03:07.240 So number one is just think about purchasing.
00:03:09.440 Everything that you wanna buy, and it sounds trivial
00:03:11.980 because you're like, I could totally do this stuff myself,
00:03:14.240 but I literally start off if you wanna buy books.
00:03:17.080 Have somebody buy your books, have somebody buy clothes,
00:03:19.280 have somebody buy birthday gifts,
00:03:20.420 have somebody buy gifts for friends, whatever it is.
00:03:23.680 Maybe it's coworkers or recognition,
00:03:25.900 but just having somebody that you set up
00:03:27.600 that you can delegate with a credit card.
00:03:29.100 Again, they don't see the numbers
00:03:30.160 if you use the access control or the online tool,
00:03:32.940 and just getting those types of things done.
00:03:35.540 They don't add any value to your customer.
00:03:38.140 They're important, they need to get done,
00:03:39.640 and it's just a very clear and simple execution
00:03:42.600 that you can start with.
00:03:43.680 The second area I always recommend is research, right?
00:03:46.440 Think about all the things that you'd love to know
00:03:48.220 about your market, your customer,
00:03:49.920 the events that you could go to,
00:03:52.560 the people you should be talking to.
00:03:54.320 Maybe you've heard my concept of a Dream 100 list
00:03:58.300 of all the peers and mentors and advisors you need
00:04:02.540 in your business to really scale.
00:04:03.860 And you don't even have time to do the research
00:04:05.740 to find out who those people would be.
00:04:07.340 You can give the criteria to somebody else.
00:04:09.000 They can do the research and pull you back a list
00:04:11.440 to finally do the final processing.
00:04:13.420 I really think that even BPM, Business Process Management,
00:04:16.780 all the back office, okay, from the accounting,
00:04:19.320 the financials, things that don't touch the customer
00:04:21.820 could easily be outsourced to a virtual assistant.
00:04:24.560 So that is the what in step two.
00:04:26.520 One is access control, two is the things
00:04:29.120 you can get them to do.
00:04:29.860 Now three is how do you do it?
00:04:31.300 You gotta use an online project management tool.
00:04:33.560 And again, I'm gonna provide you the tools
00:04:35.000 that I've used or used today because they would
00:04:37.440 probably change, so I'll just update them there.
00:04:39.900 But you need to have something online that provides
00:04:42.340 the ability to see a list of all the things
00:04:44.380 have outsourced or out-tasked other people to accomplish so
00:04:49.020 that you can monitor it, so that they can leave status updates,
00:04:51.560 so that you can see if something needs your review or that
00:04:54.120 a move to done because if you don't have it in one place then
00:04:57.220 it's just your inbox and your inbox becomes overwhelming and
00:05:00.200 you don't feel like you're getting a lot of value.
00:05:01.900 So definitely use your online project management tool to
00:05:05.500 manage everything you ask somebody else to do.
00:05:08.140 But I know you're thinking, why would I do that?
00:05:10.240 The email comes in and then I gotta forward it to somebody
00:05:13.000 Then I gotta go to my project management.
00:05:14.300 It's gonna allow you to scale.
00:05:16.200 I'm all about process, repeatable, scalable.
00:05:18.840 This is a big one, so online project management tool.
00:05:21.440 And then finally, the way you outsource big projects,
00:05:24.840 where I got in a lot of trouble where, you know,
00:05:26.640 we were updating our website and there was literally
00:05:28.640 150 pages to be updated and instead of doing a small batch
00:05:34.020 to big batch, that's the fourth step,
00:05:36.020 I just had them do the whole thing.
00:05:37.360 And they literally, like, done, after four days.
00:05:39.500 It's like, done what?
00:05:40.400 You did everything, okay?
00:05:41.160 I checked it, it was wrong.
00:05:43.260 That was my fault because I should have started
00:05:45.540 with a small batch, say look, go do 10 pages,
00:05:48.100 follow these instructions and let me know how that looks
00:05:50.800 and I would have discovered, oh, we need to tweak,
00:05:53.080 we need to iterate, okay, tweak this, do another 10.
00:05:55.540 Then tweak it and do another 10, good,
00:05:57.080 let's process the 120 left over.
00:05:59.480 So the fourth step is small batch to big batch.
00:06:02.680 Now, most entrepreneurs get in trouble
00:06:05.520 because they don't use this one tip and strategy
00:06:07.760 to get everybody to understand the goal,
00:06:10.920 the end point, the result that you're looking for,
00:06:13.620 and it's called the DOD, the definition of done.
00:06:17.800 So as you're asking anybody, and this could be internal,
00:06:20.760 this could be external people, define what that looks like
00:06:24.700 when this project or task is done.
00:06:26.860 Being clear about who's notified, where the documents live,
00:06:29.580 how you're gonna name it, how you're gonna feel,
00:06:31.700 how your customers are gonna feel in the definition of done.
00:06:34.080 It could be one or two sentences.
00:06:35.480 We'll just give so much more context and clarity
00:06:38.340 to the people executing those tasks to hit that mark for you.
00:06:42.940 So again, starting off with number one,
00:06:44.780 make sure that you have an online password management tool.
00:06:47.920 But it's not more on password because it's information
00:06:49.780 that's locked up like your credit cards.
00:06:51.520 So I call that access control so you can delegate
00:06:53.680 and give different groups of people in your company
00:06:56.060 access to those tools online.
00:06:57.760 Two, make sure that you delegate the right types of work.
00:07:01.600 Things like the business process management
00:07:03.660 of the back office of your company doing online research.
00:07:06.900 and the gateway drug is purchasing.
00:07:08.940 Three is make sure that you use an online tool
00:07:11.400 to list all the different tasks that they need to work on
00:07:14.480 so that you have a place to review and move things forward
00:07:17.420 if they're stuck and they can communicate and collaborate
00:07:19.220 that's not your inbox, put it on there.
00:07:21.620 And then four, make sure you always start with a small batch
00:07:24.160 before expanding it to a big batch.
00:07:26.960 You're gonna save yourself a lot of rework.
00:07:29.060 As per usual, I wanna challenge you to live a bigger life
00:07:31.700 and a bigger business and I'll see you next Monday.
00:07:34.020 If you like this video, be sure to subscribe to my channel
00:07:36.360 to get other tips and strategies
00:07:37.600 on how to start and grow your business,
00:07:39.220 I'd also invite you to join my newsletter
00:07:41.300 where I send out exclusive invites to events,
00:07:43.900 free entrepreneurial training and other community contests
00:07:46.540 and if you're ready to keep going,
00:07:47.880 I've got a couple videos queued up.
00:07:49.800 I'll see you next week.