Dan Martell - September 28, 2015


How To Manage An Assistant

Hosted by
Dan Martell
Mentioned
Lisa
How To Be A CEO： What Should the CEO's Day Look Like？ Finding a Mentor Is Easier Than You Think

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

222.52

Word count

1,341

Sentence count

60

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged


Summary

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

If you are a CEO that can t find time to even breathe, then this episode is for you! When I started off in business, I was always doing everything myself. And really, the straw that broke the camel's back was when I was 26, and I was working 100 hours a week, and every Sunday I would go into the office by myself for 3-4 hours just to process frickin' mail. Piles of mail would come in throughout the week and I had to sit there and triage it. So I hired an assistant, and her name was Lisa. And she tried to help me, but I always felt like there was always more work to do. And I could have got it done faster if I did it myself.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.280 How to manage your assistant.
00:00:01.680 If you are a crazy busy CEO that can't find time
00:00:05.520 to even breathe, then this video is for you.
00:00:08.280 You know, when I started off in business,
00:00:10.240 I was always doing everything myself.
00:00:12.360 And really, the straw that broke the camel's back
00:00:15.240 was when I was 26, I was in the office.
00:00:17.280 I was working 100 hours a week, and every Sunday,
00:00:20.080 I would go into the office by myself
00:00:22.400 for three to four hours just to process frickin' mail.
00:00:26.120 Piles of mail would come in throughout the week,
00:00:28.120 and I had to sit there and triage it,
00:00:30.220 and I just, after like months of this,
00:00:32.260 I just thought there needs to be a better way.
00:00:34.260 So I hired an assistant, and her name was Lisa,
00:00:37.400 and she came in, and she tried to help me,
00:00:40.180 but I always felt like there was always more work to do,
00:00:42.520 and I could have got it done faster if I did it myself,
00:00:44.380 and this is where things shifted,
00:00:45.600 and I wanna share this with you guys,
00:00:47.060 is I decided to start videotaping my process
00:00:51.560 and talking about it out loud
00:00:53.000 so that she could just watch the video without me,
00:00:55.600 and then what was cool is if something happened to Lisa,
00:00:58.120 If she was sick or she didn't work out long term,
00:01:00.260 I already had the video to train the next person.
00:01:02.620 But that isn't the strategy I wanna share with you guys,
00:01:04.660 it's just the first beginnings of me even understanding
00:01:07.600 that working with an assistant was a good thing.
00:01:09.440 And then recently, I was at an event,
00:01:11.500 and this guy presented, his name was Tim,
00:01:13.740 and Tim shared, and he challenged all of us,
00:01:16.880 and this is the first thing I wanna share with you guys,
00:01:18.800 he challenged all of us to give our assistants
00:01:20.940 access to our inbox.
00:01:23.480 And I gotta tell you, for 15 years,
00:01:25.440 I have treated my inbox like it's a sacred location
00:01:29.140 of information and just wouldn't even think
00:01:32.500 like that was a possibility to have somebody else do that.
00:01:35.040 I didn't want somebody responding to my emails, et cetera.
00:01:37.800 And then he showed us a really great framework.
00:01:39.700 So I wanna teach you guys this.
00:01:41.340 So not only do you give access to your inbox
00:01:43.960 to your assistant, but what you do is you create
00:01:46.280 a special tag or a folder, depending on what system you use,
00:01:49.620 that your assistant puts emails into for you to review.
00:01:53.660 So that means check it out.
00:01:55.060 All the new emails that come in your inbox,
00:01:57.400 you never see, you should never ever, trust me,
00:02:00.220 slap you on the hand if you do this,
00:02:01.880 never check your inbox main area.
00:02:04.960 You should only be checking where your assistant filters, 1.00
00:02:08.000 based on conversations you've had,
00:02:09.660 the right emails that need your attention
00:02:11.620 and everything else should be hers.
00:02:12.600 I mean, think about this.
00:02:13.780 Would you let anybody walk off the street
00:02:15.920 into your office and just interrupt you?
00:02:18.140 No.
00:02:18.980 Why do you allow yourself to be like that
00:02:20.680 or get treated like that with your inbox?
00:02:22.680 Every day your inbox is probably a public to-do list
00:02:25.740 of other people's tasks or goals or needs of you
00:02:28.960 and you don't even think twice to allow people to do that.
00:02:31.280 So I'm gonna challenge you.
00:02:32.300 Not only one, give your assistant full access to your inbox
00:02:35.980 but then more importantly, triage those emails
00:02:39.320 and only have one folder or a tag,
00:02:41.660 depending on what system you use,
00:02:42.980 that is just for you to review.
00:02:44.840 Everything else is up to her
00:02:46.540 and then if you need to set up time to review that,
00:02:48.980 you can do that.
00:02:49.820 So that's number one.
00:02:50.880 Give your assistant access to your inbox.
00:02:53.840 Number two is build a system to process your email.
00:02:57.280 You know, to me, this is really important.
00:02:59.740 It's not only good enough to just talk to them,
00:03:02.260 but actually write it down.
00:03:03.640 Talk about emails that have unsubscribe in it.
00:03:06.840 Those go in a certain folder called Newsletter.
00:03:08.700 Whatever it is, you can start thinking about
00:03:10.880 automated systems for emails, for managing your calendar,
00:03:14.120 for scheduling travel.
00:03:15.680 Whatever it is, you wanna sit down and work with her
00:03:17.760 to document the way you think.
00:03:19.420 Again, back to that example I gave you with Lisa,
00:03:21.420 videotaping what I was doing with step one.
00:03:24.260 But after that, it was quickly documenting,
00:03:26.340 because again, you will sleep so much better at night
00:03:28.900 knowing that if, God forbid, something happened
00:03:30.920 to your assistant, somebody else could come in,
00:03:33.200 follow the procedures, and get 70, 80% ramped up
00:03:36.120 by themselves.
00:03:37.200 It's really important that not only do you do the videos
00:03:40.320 or document the process, but ensure you're doing it
00:03:43.180 for them, and then what's great, and what's happened
00:03:45.000 over the years for me, is it allows you to scale out
00:03:47.700 your assistant so you can have virtual assistants do
00:03:50.060 essentially work for your assistant.
00:03:51.640 She becomes the manager of all these other tasks.
00:03:54.080 So that's really important.
00:03:55.040 Now the third thing I wanna share with you guys
00:03:56.880 is to have a weekly meeting.
00:03:58.920 You know, every week you should be sitting down
00:04:00.820 with your assistant so that she can talk to you
00:04:02.620 about the different aspects of travel or your calendar
00:04:06.860 or conflicts or emails that you don't really,
00:04:09.020 she doesn't understand how to respond.
00:04:10.760 You need to give her that space, 30 to 60 minutes,
00:04:13.660 where she can come to you and you don't even have to think
00:04:15.700 about it because you know that it's scheduled
00:04:17.360 and nothing will get dropped.
00:04:19.340 Having that weekly meeting with your assistant is key.
00:04:21.860 And again, the outcome of that is to improve the systems
00:04:24.980 that she's documenting and be more responsive.
00:04:28.120 Sure, things are gonna happen
00:04:29.380 where they respond a certain way and you're like,
00:04:31.140 oh my God, I can't believe you said that.
00:04:32.800 But that's okay.
00:04:33.640 For the very few times that happens,
00:04:35.840 the bandwidth increase that it gives your brain
00:04:38.940 to think about new ideas and strategies
00:04:40.620 and frees up your time to spend with your family
00:04:42.740 or other coworkers or work on your business
00:04:45.200 is gonna be invaluable.
00:04:46.480 So the key, again, I want to wrap up by just recapping quickly.
00:04:50.180 One, give them full access to your inbox,
00:04:52.080 and you can do that through different ways.
00:04:53.580 But more importantly, have them put the emails
00:04:55.720 that require your attention into a specific folder,
00:04:58.320 and that is the only folder you look at.
00:05:00.140 Two, make sure that she's creating processes for you
00:05:02.480 to make sure there's longevity and training long-term.
00:05:05.780 If something should happen to that assistant,
00:05:07.180 you need to bring somebody else in.
00:05:08.320 Or even for her to scale out her abilities 0.98
00:05:10.680 by hiring other assistants that work for her. 0.99
00:05:12.640 Yes, this is a real thing.
00:05:14.340 I have that, and it's amazing
00:05:16.120 because it helps alleviate a bunch of pressure and time
00:05:18.740 on my primary assistant.
00:05:20.400 And then the third thing is to have that weekly meeting
00:05:22.420 where it's scheduled, there's an agenda,
00:05:24.440 you're reviewing things that she doesn't know how to respond,
00:05:26.520 you're talking about travel,
00:05:27.740 you're improving the systems or processes,
00:05:29.780 and that to me just allows you to have some clarity
00:05:32.160 and some peace of mind knowing that it's there
00:05:34.360 for that purpose.
00:05:35.340 So those are the three things I wanna share with you.
00:05:36.800 I wanna ask you guys to leave a comment below.
00:05:38.460 If you don't have an assistant, or if you do,
00:05:42.060 what would you ask that assistant to do today?
00:05:44.280 What could she help you with in your business?
00:05:46.540 There are things I know I'm guaranteed that you're doing
00:05:49.160 that you should not be doing in your business,
00:05:50.880 that somebody else could be supporting you.
00:05:52.540 What are those activities, what are those projects?
00:05:54.580 List those below as a comment.
00:05:55.720 Please like this video.
00:05:56.900 I wanna challenge you guys to live a bigger life
00:05:58.980 and a bigger business, and I'll see you next Monday.