How to Hire a VA That Actually Helps You with Matthew Yahes

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Intro: Hey, everybody, welcome to Episode 208 of How I Built It, the podcast that asks, How did you build that? My guest today is Matthew Yahes. We’re going to be talking about hiring VA, which I didn’t intend to run, but it did. There you go. And our sponsors for this episode areTextExpander,Restrict Content Pro, andMindsize. You’ll be hearing about those fantastic companies later in the episode. For now, I do want to bring on Matthew Yahes. He’s the CEO ofExtend Your Team. Matthew, how are you today?

Matthew:Great, Joe. How you doing?

Joe:I’m doing very well. Thank you. Thanks for coming on the show. I appreciate you taking the time. I’m really excited because at the time that you were recommended to come on the show, I had just hired a virtual assistant. So some background is during the pandemic, my wife is a nurse so she was not at home, I am self-employed and my one kid at the time, my two kids now, are not going to daycare or school or anything like that. So on the days she works, I don’t work, which means I work about half of the time I normally do. And I wanted to keep my business going because I like being self-employed. So I decided to hire a few people, including a VA.

It sounds like you are the perfect person to talk to you about doing stuff like this. So before we get into the kind of what to look for when hiring, should you hire a VA, why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Matthew:Sure. My name is Matthew Yahes. I’m at this point a serial entrepreneur. Didn’t start out that way. Typical middle-class upbringing. This is my third business. I learned about VA’s through owning an eCommerce portfolio. I started there and through attrition otherwise started hiring overseas specifically in the Philippines, culminating with hiring someone to run the entire business doing 4,000 orders a month, millions of dollars a year, someone in the Philippines to run an entire business.

It was a little different than what everyone had ever done that I know, and it worked. I’ll say Angelica is phenomenal. And through the pandemic, she and I talked and we decide… and actually it was because our largest business is in weddings. So you can imagine how much smaller that got very, very quickly. It’s on pause. It’s on pause.

Joe:Right, right.

Matthew:What happened was I said, “Okay, that’s great. We saved the business. That’ll be great another day, but you know, for now, what are we going to do? Why don’t we find the best possible people, the highest quality people in the Philippines and connect them with US companies, people just like her.” Through that, we startedExtend Your Team. We started in May. We just hit 50 people at the end of the year with a goal of going to the 150 by the end of 2021.

Our sweet spot is we just find high quality, better people to make a difference in your business today. They’re not the typical VA from the Philippines that are more entry-level. But these are professionals that have 10, 20 years’ experience and are successful in their own right. You know, Joe, if you or I were in the Philippines, that retarget to make a difference in entrepreneurs and business owners businesses.

Joe:Yeah, that’s really great. Again, this is something that really resonates with me. I actually have a virtual assistant from the Philippines. She’s been really good. But this was my first endeavor hiring a virtual assistant. I’m pretty bad at delegating because I think if I want to do something, I got to do it myself, except for the case with my audio editor. Joel, you are great and a few other people. Like I have a video editor now and a transcriber. But as far as the research tasks and the kind of things I was doing that I realized I don’t need to do, I thought a VA would be good for that. So my process for that was kind of find a website. I used onlinejobs.ph.

Matthew:Yeah, absolutely. Everyone starts there, including me, by the way. That’s where I started hiring way backward.

Joe:Got you. It was a little bit overwhelming, right? Because I like found people that I thought looked good, but I didn’t know. And then I posted a job and got literally thousands of applications. With that in mind, let’s first talk to the person who’s hiring their first VA. What kind of research should they do? What should they look for? How do they know what to delegate? What are the basics?

Matthew:Sure, let’s bifurcate that into two things. What should you do? And then how do you figure out what to delegate? Two different things. So first step is divide your day in your week into two buckets. It’s actually very simple. It’s not that complicated. Strategic, not strategic. Strategic tactical, essentially.

Strategic is anything that requires Joe’s experience, his knowledge, his expertise or makes you money. That is strategic. What you have to be doing, because I can’t do what you do. Even if I came in to work for you, I cannot produce a podcast. You need to get on your great interview, you interviewed the guests. That makes you money. So great. Everything that’s not that, everything that’s tactical, not strategic, that gets outsourced.

Through that, then what you do is you could call that a task audit, some people call that, keep it simple. Just divide it and then write on a piece of paper, two buckets. From that, develop a real job description. The number one mistake that people make is that they do not treat a virtual assistant hire like a regular hire. It without fail will cause you to fail. If you just do it on the fly, like, “Oh, I just want someone to do everything.” There’s no person on this planet that is going to step into a job with no set of expectations and be able to meet expectations. If there are no expectations, then how do you meet them? How do you know what success looks like? So that’s the things that people should do.

From there, so let’s assume you’re doing on your own, there are places you can go such as Online Jobs to go put it out there. And from that, you have to start filtering. And just be prepared. So when you do it on your own, whether is… The reason you go for an agency, reason you don’t. If you’re an experienced person and you’ve hired a lot of VAs… You may be able to do it yourself. But I have a lot of experienced people or clients because they don’t want to deal with it. But if you’re not experienced, it’s your first time hiring a VA, be prepared for I would say a 12 to 18 month journey to figure out how to manage a VA and how to find the right VA.

Look it’s not hard to find someone. But to find someone that does not require you to manage them 30, 40 hours a month and constantly give people feedback and make sure that they are not just on task, but they don’t go down rabbit holes, that takes time. You’re going to have to hire and fire people. Now the advantage is you can do that without repercussions because they are contractors. But don’t expect to hit it out of the ballpark with your first VA. It’s just very rare.

Joe:Got you. That is super interesting. Because I may be treated it more seriously than most people. I don’t know that I made a real job description. I was just like, “I need research and I need data entry. These are the tasks that I don’t need to do.” So I did make a list of that. But that’s really interesting about a 12 to 18-month journey. I guess it’s just like when you come on to a new job, it takes let’s say three, six, nine months to really be comfortable in that job because you are learning along the way about how the company that you’ve been hired to work and things like that. And I guess it’s the same for your VA, right? You’re trying to figure out what works for them and things like that.

Matthew:And works for you. You’re a podcaster, right? You did a couple of hundreds episodes. How long did it take you? How many months did it take you to actually kind of get into the rhythm, to figure it out, to find your groove? How long did that take?

Joe:I mean, really feeling comfortable, it took me… I’m an entertainer so it took me less time to be comfortable in front of the mic. But as far as getting all my processes down, it took I would probably say 18 months for me to know exactly how things worked, what I could automate. I’ve automated a lot of my podcasts at this point, and that’s what makes it like a viable thing for me. So you’re absolutely right. I had to kind of look at what my processes are and how they work and document so that I knew what I can automate, for example.

Matthew:Exactly. So it’s no different when you’re hiring or VA. First of all, you’re learning two things. One, how to work with a remote worker. And you’re learning how to remote work with a Filipino remote worker. How I work with my engineer in the Ukraine for my eCommerce business is very different than I would work with a general virtual assistant or project manager out of the Philippines. Different countries, different culture. And you just need to understand.

Now add to that you’ve never hired a VA before. If you’re optimizing for costs, which is what I call the myth of the $5 an hour VA, meaning you’re going to find someone for five bucks an hour that’s going to change your life and run your business, it’s just not really the way it is. They can be very successful at a narrow focus of tasks, but don’t expect them like mine did, like Angelica did for me, to run a multimillion-dollar business and start a company with 50 people. You’re not getting that level of talent, which is fine. You just have to understand that.

But you need to learn how to manage someone at that level, you need to learn how to hire someone at that level and just recognize you’re going to make mistakes. I fired and hired a lot of people before I figured it out. And then when I hired someone from the Philippines to actually do my hiring for me, Angelica, and now I have a recruiting team, but the quality goes up dramatically for the same price because it’s not an American talking to them, it’s a Filipino and they know how to sort through all the BS. They know what the market is because they’re really thinking in pesos when we think in dollars. They know if someone saying, “Oh yeah, they’re asking for twice the rate because you’re from America.” And there’s some of that as well. Right? Good for people for trying. But there’s a market and you just need to learn. Just learn in the market.

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Joe:One of the reasons I went with a Filipino VA is because I’ve heard good things about them with respect to the tasks that I needed. At this point, I don’t think I can hire an American to do the things but also like it’s a lot of data entry and stuff like that. This may be a loaded question.

Matthew:Sure.

Joe:I saw an hourly rate from like 2 American dollars an hour to 7 American dollars an hour. Certainly, they’re different skill levels. But I feel almost guilty because I feel like I’m getting way more value out of my VA that I’m paying her every two weeks.

Matthew:Sure. There’s no reason to feel guilty at all. First of all, you’re providing them a work environment that ideally, unless you’re a jerk, is a very good work environment for them. Two, you’re providing income to their family. Three, all you’re doing is playing salary arbitrage. That’s it. A house in the Philippines does not cost the same as a house in San Francisco or a house in Manila or all these other locations. It’s not remotely the same. You can buy a house for 20,000 US dollars.

When you start looking at it like that, they’re making an equivalence in their country. So lower costs of living. Food doesn’t cost as much. Vacations don’t cost as much. All these things don’t cost as much. Now, that being said, $2 to $4, $5, $6 is really entry-level segment. It could be. It is really an entry-level. It’s people maybe with a few years’ experience, who don’t have a broad scope of things. There’s no one on my team that makes $2, $3 an hour. I mean, that’s just…

Even for the Philippines, by the way, that’s not a lot. So, you have to recognize there are still market wage you should pay. As long as you’re paying market wage, there’s no reason to feel guilty. In my point of view, you’re putting food on people’s table.

Joe:Got you. I mean, one of the things that I did was I looked at how much in US dollars, it would cost to spend a two-week vacation in the Philippines. And it was like 1300 to 1500 bucks. And I’m like, geez, like my computer costs more than that. Actually, my computer I’m recording on right now cost way more than that. That helped me feel a little bit better. But as you said, $2 to $5 an hour is entry-level.

I assume the tasks that I just mentioned, data entry, doing research are fairly entry-level tasks. Before we get into the real nuts and bolts of this, I’ve been told that you need to be pretty explicit in your instruction. I’ve seen it happen a couple of times. Again, my VA has been really good, but there were a couple of times where I left out something that I assumed was implicit. For example, I asked her to find virtual conferences for me to speak at, but each conference she listed didn’t have an open call for speakers. It was like the speaker lineup was already set. And I assumed that that was like an implicit thing, but it wasn’t. And so I adjusted kind of my description. What’s the best way to approach defining tasks for let’s say entry-level VAs?

Matthew:Sure, for an entry-level VA, to define a task, you need what’s called standard operating procedures. SOPs is what you’ll hear everyone talk about. Now, you can actually buy… There are companies that just sell SOPs for VAs. So you don’t even have to think about it right. Just standard things for customer service, for lead generation. Just checklists. Will just tell you a checklist then. Many of these people have had VAs themselves and have been very successful.

But for you, let’s just say it’s something different. Use a product called loom.com. And what it does is record your screen and talk through it. It can take a video of you as well. Use that and walk through every single task you need this person to do—your entry-level VA. This way they could actually watch it 100 times if they want or every time they do the task. And there’s really they don’t have to ask you any questions. You have to be very, very explicit.

Using your example, they may not realize. They may just think that you want to find virtual conferences to speak at, not necessarily now. It could be next year. So you also have to get yourself to work on the level of specificity for each person. It’s going to depend on who they are, how smart they are, and what their level of skill is. You also can take those recordings, and let’s say this is what I do for customer service, I’ll string a few together, and a Google Doc where I provide some text explanation.

So in my case, let’s say for my eCommerce business, we’re talking about corporate uploads. So we sell a lot of corporate gift baskets and the process for corporate ordering. I’ll do some text, I’ll throw in some video. I’ll do some text and throw in some video to give a full explanation of process and other things or problems that need to happen. Now I have a document that explains the entire corporate upload process or corporate ordering process and there are no questions.

If there is a question, you answer it with a Loom video, and you add that to the doc. So there’s something you missed, you know, they say, “Well, how do I cancel?” Let’s just give an example. How do I cancel a single item? Great question. Create a video add it to the doc, title the video “how do I cancel part of a corporate order.” And through that, over time, you’re going to have a great set of documents or recipes for people to follow.

Joe:Wow, that’s really great advice. I’m using Airtable to pin board manage tasks. But it’s very similar. I have the document, I’ve got Loom videos. Well, I made a Loom video to show her how to use Airtable and I haven’t made one since. I’ll definitely be more generous about using Loom videos because I think you make a really great point there.

Now, of course, in our pre-recording conversation, you mentioned a few things about the truth about hiring overseas, but you also mentioned why you should not hire a VA, hire your next business leader instead. I suspect that this is really where your service comes in, right? Because we talked about the entry-level VA, but maybe there’s something better that we as small business owners can do.

Matthew:Sure. In my opinion, virtual assistants that are entry-level do not help most businesses. Unless you’re really have everything down and understand that part of the hiring spectrum, it’s going to cause managerial overhead. Simple thing that people need to remember. If someone is $5 an hour, you’re at $100 an hour, when you manage them, it’s $105 an hour for that given tasks.

Now, if it’s 25 hours a month in managerial overhead, let’s just assume that’s how much you interact with them, now you’re spending $2500 for someone who’s $5 an hour. An alternative is you go upmarket, hire someone with 10, 20 years’ experience, who let’s just say was a project manager, elevate them to your chief of staff and give them the ability to oversee your entire business for you. Whether that’s invoicing, manage other contractors, or just give you a report every single day of what’s going on with your business.

Now you’ve elevated yourself to focus on growth, to have a beer with your friends compared to the kids and you can actually now let them run the day-to-day. They will run everything and you just wake up in the morning, get a report as to what’s going on the last few what do you need, you know, here’s maybe a couple of things that they need from you, and then you go back to your day and focus on what you need to focus on to make more money. You let the day-to-day ops of their business be run by someone else for $16 to $18 an hour.

Joe:Wow, that’s great. So what we are going to talk about in the members-only portion of the show is the psychological hurdle of letting go of the day-to-day, which I’m sure a lot of business owners struggle with. So if you’re a member, great, you’ll catch that conversation. If you’re not you can sign up over abuildsomething.clubto get that conversation, which I’m really excited to talk to you about.

But the managerial overhead part is something that weighs heavily on my mind because I don’t think I spend that much time managing my VA. But I also know that I could be getting better data if I spent more time managing her, which is like a six and one half a dozen in the other, as my old man says. It’s do I spend the time to get the good data or do I just let her do her thing and then cherry-pick the things that do work for me. I think that’s really interesting. Going upmarket essentially saves you money.

Matthew:It saves you a ton of money and it saves you time. And time is more valuable than money because you can always earn more money, you can’t earn more time. I didn’t make that up, it’s true. But think of it a little differently. Right, Joe? So in your business, let’s just say you spend six bucks for VA. The difference with the additional costs from $6 to $16 is $1800 a month. If you cannot make more than $1,800 a month by getting a better person to offload almost everything, you have a fundamental problem in your business.

Everyone’s like, “Oh, but it’s 20,000 more a year.” That’s not the way to think about in my opinion. The way to think about it is, no, I’m paying someone $1,800 more a month. Now, in 120 days, if I’m not growing more because I’m focused on growth, then there’s a problem. You got to really think about actually your business and the VA is making you have a crutch. If you got a great person and you can’t grow by $20,000 a year, you can rethink your business

Joe:That’s absolutely correct. I’ve certainly seen it with, again, my audio editor and my video editor, those are two things I can do, but they save me hours and thousands of dollars a month. Because what they do is way more efficient than what I do, and they have more trained hands at it. I send them raw video, and then I get a raw audio and I get a finished product back.

I think a little bit of a mental hurdle for me is like, how do I find a person I trust enough to let them into my invoicing system or let them into my email? There are some things there that, again, we’ll have this conversation later, that you need to let go of a little bit.

Matthew:We can talk about that offline or in the club. There’s a lot to unpack there. There’s a lot to unpack there. You just have to deal with it. There’s strategies we can talk about but at the end of the day, what you have to realize is incentive to seal versus incentives to stay.

Joe:Got you. Got you. I like that.

Matthew:What’s people’s incentive? And if you treat people right, what’s their incentive?

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Joe:For now, let me ask you the title question, How did you build it? It in this context will be… Well, let’s talk about how you build your business a little bit because I think that will inform how I or one of the listeners, many of the listeners hopefully can figure out okay, how do I take the leap, how do I build a process to hire a partner instead of just an assistant?

Matthew:So do you want to talk about how I build the business or how do I actually build a process to hire?

Joe:Let’s do a little bit of both. Let’s get some background more on your business first, and then move into the process because I think one will inform the other.

Matthew:Sure. There is a quote by Steve Jobs where he says, “If you look hard enough, you’ll find that most overnight successes took a really long time.” And I think that’s really the truth. I was working in eCommerce business, not a really long time—five years—till I figured it all out and then made a pivot to start this company. How I actually built the company was that I had an idea that I could get better people. That was my idea. Talk to my team, they said, “We can do this.”

I talked to people I knew, and this is about idea of validation, “This is what I want to do. If you need someone, let me know. I’d like to try to get them for you.” Got one customer who was my accountants and a bookkeeper was my first customer. Then I shook the trees in my network for my first 10 people, I do every single one of them well, and they all gave me a chance because they had this lead. So I just kept on working at it till finally, the scariest part is you go outside your network and you get that first customer you don’t know. Then to me, that’s real validation.

But if 10 people you know were going to buy it, the one person who you don’t know… there are many people you don’t who buy. And then I just one foot in front of the other. Boom! So all of a sudden, it starts to gain momentum. The last week of the year, I was working one day, I had five new customers. The first week of the year, I was working all week, I guess. And I got another seven. And it’s about one foot in for the other.

Now I have to hire my four more internal people right now just to handle volume, because I can see what’s coming. But it all starts with people you know. So if you have never started a business, and you have all these ideas, that’s great. I mean, have these ideas. But if you go to all the people you know, and not one person will buy it, and you’re not starting like a nuclear power plant, which just not people are going to buy. But if you have an idea that is, let’s say, a consumer product or a business, and you want to do this, and you can’t get one person you know to just say yes, even at a cut rate, I mean, I don’t do it for free… Obviously, I started out at a cut rate. I just want to validate this, can I do this for you and add value. If you can’t get one person, you probably do not have a solid business idea. As much as you like it. I mean, I have a lot of ideas I like but it doesn’t mean they’re worth anything.

Joe:Right. Right. I love that. I love that idea. Because I mean, it’s true. I think that with investments, they say you go to friends, family, and fools first.

Matthew:To the triple F round they call it.

Joe:Yeah, exactly. Not that I would call anybody a fool, but the people who know and trust you are going to be your friends and family. So if they can validate the idea and trust you to do it, then you have some ammunition to go out and say to strangers, “Hey, I can do this.”

Matthew:Exactly, exactly.

Joe:I love that. So you built this business while working on your eCommerce business and then you decided to pivot. What does your ideal customer look like? Because, you know, it’s probably not the freelancer who’s just starting out who doesn’t really know their processes, right? Is it like somebody who’s been in business for a year, two years, 10 years?

Matthew:I think it’s all about workload. So there comes a point in every entrepreneur or every team where it’s holding you back—the tactical tasks. For solopreneurs, it’s at the point your tactical tasks are stopping you from making money because you’re so focused on the busy work, or you’re so focused on managing the projects or anything like that, that is for solopreneur, the prime time. That’s solopreneur.

If you have a team or you have an agency, and you’re growing and it’s so many things going on, you need someone to just orchestrate it all, you are my ideal customer there too. And if you just need slot players, let’s say like a customer service person full time, because you have a growing eCommerce business, you need appointments of this full time, we can help you as well. So it’s really about workload and taskload. So if you have too many customer service tasks taking up your time, let’s talk. If you have too many tasks overall that’s taking up your time as an entrepreneur, let’s talk.

Joe:Man, you all listening can’t see the video. But if Matt saw my face there, he saw a very pained look on my face. Because as he said, if you’re at some point… I doubled over a little bit. If you’re at the point that your tactical tasks are preventing you from strategic work, I kid you not this morning, before my kids woke up, before my wife woke up, I was sitting at my dining room table just to writing down all the things that I’m learning fall through the cracks, because I’m focusing on minutiae. Like it hurt me a little bit when you said that.

Matthew:Wait. Think about this, though. You’re typical though. You have a VA right now. Instead of say, “I’m going to get someone who can just do what they’re doing, plus all the other things.” So we’re not talking about a more senior person that is not going to do everything else but they’re going to do that and all the stuff that your VA can’t do.

Joe:Got you.

Matthew:You’re the ideal customer with your pain phase doubling over talking about your list.

Joe:Yeah, amazing. I’m sure I’m not the only person who just heard that, who’s listening who feels the same way as me. My friends, you’re listening to this, I know we’re in the same boat. How do we build a process to get to a better place where we can focus on the strategic work?

Matthew:I think what everybody needs to do is go get Loom, and for everything you do, make a single recording of what you’re doing, all these tactical tasks, nonstrategic. All of a sudden, within a week, really. I mean, it’s that quickly. I mean, a video, it sounds like it’s a big thing to make. You’re not producing a Hollywood Motion picture. You’re just talking and recording. It takes 120 seconds, 30 seconds. All of a sudden, after a week, you’re going to have a library, two weeks, you’re going to have a catalog with everything that needs to be done. Just title it, hire someone, have them do it. That’s it.

The other thing you do need to do is start organizing yourself with a task manager like Asana, Monday, Trello, whatever works for you. Our clients talk with all different things, and we help our clients implement this. It’s not very difficult. But you cannot expect people to prioritize. So you’re the boss. Filipino culture is I’m boss, I’m God. But here’s the reality, that’s the culture they’re coming from.

So you give them 15 things, you expect them to be able to prioritize, they can’t. They don’t know what’s important. Yet, they will. Like Angelica, I have something that she just put to the bottom of the pile to implement a Chabot for me for the VA business, and she has a lot more important things to do to staff up, it’s fine. She knows how to prioritize. I’m not even upset, right?

Even though I want it done, I’m not upset because all the other thing she’s prioritizing are exactly what she needs to prioritize until we staff up. So once you do that, using your Trello well in these things, you can just easily prioritize by drag and drop, and then away you go. Then now you have your SOPs, you have your prioritization.

You can also put a time monitoring software on the VAs computer, which we do for everybody. People think it’s because we want to be big brother, you know, make sure they’re working. Kind of sort of not really. What really adds value is when there’s a problem, you then to say, “Okay, oh, you’re timing all your tasks. Why is this research on about open speaking positions taking 15 hours to get to.” Now you can see, well, maybe they’re not working. That’s what you go to instinctively. But no, what actually happened. You start looking at recordings, you talk to people, you see what the timings are. The reason is there’s something broken in the process, and they’re trying to go around it. So when you build the SOPs, use task manager and record what they’re doing, through that you can be very successful. And that’s how you…

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Joe:You mentioned time tracking for the VA. I suspect it’s probably also pretty important to time track for… Do you time track yourself as well?

Matthew:No. I should practice what I preach. Truthfully, what I do for myself is I would… now at this point, I just sit back every month and I look at what I’m doing, and I just say, “Okay, I need to hire that out.”

Joe:Got you.

Matthew:That’s what I do. So the example is like managing my LinkedIn, a lot of outreach. We’re hiring someone next week to take over all of that for me plus a lot of other things I do for social and just manage it all as me. Any of the larger social media personalities are actually in smaller ones, they don’t do this on social media. right? You think Gary Vee is actually posting everything? No, his team post. He may be doing the video,but when it’s text, that’s not Gary. Maybe it is. I don’t know. I mean, that guy’s a maniac. But any normal person, anyone besides Gary Vee, if you’re not Gary Vee, you’re not doing that. It’s just too hard.

Joe:I think that makes sense because we’ve already established that it’s not necessarily how much time you’re spending on a task, it’s the type of task. It’s the strategic versus the tactical tasks. So it doesn’t matter. If you think you’re spending too much time on a tactical task, because it’s tactical, it’s something that you should hire out.

Matthew:100%. I have this thing I tell people. Mind share is time share. And what I mean by that is, if you’re thinking about it, it’s as much a problem as if you’re doing it. And it sucks up your time because you’re thinking about it in your head. Once you free up that space, wow, you have all this time to do other things. Once I freed up for myself 11 hours a day that I was working when I first saw Angelica, or 38 hours a week, or 60 hours a week, when I freed up from what I was working to now on the eCommerce business, well, I’m able to start a new business. I don’t think about that business for most of the week. I don’t have to.

So you’ll see all these other things that you’re able to do simply because you’re not thinking about the task anymore. It’s just getting done.

Joe:That’s fantastic. I’m going to remember that because it’s like… I’m on my basement. Kids are upstairs. If something happens where it’s a problem I need to solve and my wife’s like, “You can do it later,” I tell her, “I literally have to do it right now.” I will not think about anything else until I do it because it’s taken up the brain space. It would be faster for me to just do it in five minutes than think about it for like two hours and then do it because it’s distracting.

Matthew:But it’s also collection of these things that everybody does. I do. My wife said to me the other night… It was something with billing. Like it takes me five minutes. She goes, “Right, but it’s five minutes of this, five minutes of this, five minutes of that. Now you have 15 minutes. Guess what? Not a good use.” I won’t tell her to her face she’s right, but she’s right. I don’t want that leverage.

Joe:I totally understand. Of course, I’m pretty loud so my wife probably just hears me. This has been really great. As we kind of come to the end here, we covered a lot of ground. Let’s say our listener has never hired a VA before. What are one or two tips you recommend for them to get started getting from never hiring to getting to the person who is a partner in your business? What’s like the first couple of steps they should take? I guess you kind of mentioned a few but two takeaways.

Matthew:Yes, sure. Two takeaways?

Joe:Yeah.

Matthew:Figure out what they’re supposed to do by dividing your day into strategic and tactical. So strategic, Joe level tasks, tactical, anything that doesn’t require your experience or your presence. Then second thing, write a job description from that. I’ll send it to you Joe, and you could send it to your listeners, if you would like, and put it in the podcast as a link. Just here’s what a job description form looks like. Write it out, think through it, treat it as if it was $100,000 hire.

Joe:Awesome.

Matthew:Put that level of attention. Those two things will make a world of difference and start you on the journey to a [inaudible].

Joe:That’s fantastic. I will link to that and a few other things, Loom, and things that we mentioned in the show notes over atstreamlined.fm/208. Matthew, this has been great. I do need to ask you my favorite question, which is, do you have any trade secrets for us?

Matthew:Trade secrets. I actually would have said write a job description as nobody does it. Honestly, nobody writes job descriptions, and nobody treats it like a real hire.

Joe:All right. Love it. That’s the third…

Matthew:Oh, one thing.

Joe:Oh, yeah, go ahead.

Matthew:Not a trade secret but if you have never gone to this website, it will save you a ton of money. I don’t own it, because otherwise, I would be a bazillionaire.AppSumo.com. It’s highly, highly discounted Software as service tools that it’s going to blow you away what’s on there. It’s a lot of companies that are just starting out. What your listeners can do is go there and just buy a lifetime subscription or something for like 60 bucks. It’s may be just like a competitor to very popular tool. But my God, I probably save 5,000, 10,000 a year just using that site, and spending, you know, 600 a year. I mean, it’s just incredible.

Joe:I keep a spreadsheet of lifetime deals I’ve gotten off ofAppSumo, how much I paid versus how much it would be a year. I just picked up Publer over Black Friday.

Matthew:I have Publer.

Joe:I paid 50 bucks. I was paying Buffer $15 a month. It’s so good.

Matthew:It’s great. I mean, it’s great. I picked up like an LMS over Black Friday learning management system. I picked up so much stuff and my team is like, “Where are you getting this like absolute about?” Anytime you need something, you want a tool, go there first, let’s monitor it, rather than go paying for something. Because it adds up. It’s amazing how quickly it adds up to real money.

Joe:Yeah, absolutely. I’ve always wondered why companies would do such thing. We’ll talk about that in the club, too, though, because I think we both probably have answers. For now, Matthew, thank you so much for your time. If people want to learn more, where can they find you?

Matthew:Sure. So you can do two things. You can go toextendyourteam.com/freedom, you will be redirected to an assessment that lets you know where you are on your outsourcing journey. And you can book a call with me after that. Or you can go toextendyourteam.comand contact me through there and book a meeting. But I highly recommend the assessment first.

Joe:Yeah, that sounds fantastic. I will link again to that in the show notes over atstreamlined.fm/208.Matthew, thanks so much for joining us. I really appreciate it.

Matthew:Thanks, Joe. It’s been a lot of fun.

Joe:And thank you to everybody listening. Thanks to our sponsors for this week:TextExpander,Restrict Content Pro, andMindsize. Until next time, get out there and build something.