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Welcome to our first podcast episode of Stamped Staff Virtual Assistants. We have created this with the aim to provide helpful insights to small business owners and entrepreneurs on how to utilize virtual assistants best within your business, how to hire, train, what they can do for different businesses, how to communicate with them. Also, lots of different helpful tips for you. Yes, And we want to go over kind of like the trends, what's going on, because like pretty much every business now, big business, small business is using somebody virtually. We want to talk about is give you ways that maybe you didn't think about that you can take and you can apply to your business. And because we're knowing the cost of everything is getting so high, the cost of employment, the cost of office space, like everything costs more than it did three years ago. So we want to give you some ideas and lead you and be a resource for you to always come back to when you need to help you find something. We're going to talk about it first with Chris. I want to talk to you about how did you get started. You were at Keller Williams when you first started, right? Yeah, I was at Keller Williams and I ran an office about the size of a refrigerator, right? Correct. Okay. And so one of the big issues you had was there wasn't room for two desks. I mean, if you know, with Keller Williams, you pay per square footage. They have all these offices and then however big the offices you pay based on their square footage for that, correct? Yeah, but and also they only have so many offices, so they didn't have more office space for us to even have assistants. Nor did I have the money to really hire an in-house assistant at that time. So it just became a thing of necessity. It was more so that you wanted to do it. And so you, like, I don't have the space, I don't have the money. And so then how did you come across virtual assistants? So I was actually at a Keller Williams event and I saw a virtual assistant company there. And that kind of gave me the idea of, wow, I don't need to hire an in-house assistant. I can actually do it virtually. So I talked to the company at Family Reunion event and I talked to them and they explained to me how virtual as And Kurt was your first virtual assistant, So what were some of the things, if you can remember what Kurt did 13, 14 years ago? Yeah. So Kurt, basically when he came and he was the first assistant that did everything, he made fliers and presentations and he did some marketing and tracking and all sorts of different things. So basically he took the $10, the $12, the $15 stuff off your plate and allowed you to do what was like going on listings, selling properties, working with buyers, stuff that's worth thousands of dollars per hour. ed it, you know, basically taking all the $10 stuff off first. And then did you go to the $12? Like, how did you decide what to give off to? So I basically went and looked at everything that I did every day, made a list of everything that I did every day and said, wow, from for me to grow, there is no way I can do it. I was maxed out at where I was. The capacity of working in the business and on the business at the same time. So I started writing down everything that I did, and then I went back through it and said, Hey, do I need an in-house assistant to do this? Do I need to do this, or can I get a virtual assistant to do this? So I went through and I started circling everything that I personally didn't need to do myself. And that's how the job description was made for Kurt. I did a lot of things wrong when hiring Kurt as well. And what I did is I had Kurt kind of do a lot of everything, which that was not his skill set. His skill set actually was a creative marketing assistant. So the things that he was doing that were more administrative or tracking and things like that were not his strengths. And you could definitely tell when he was doing those things. So I quickly took those. It's just like hiring somebody, whether they're in the United States, Canada, wherever there are, like they're going to have a skill set. And then when you give them stuff that's outside of that skill set, can they get it done? Yes. Can they get it done well and efficiently? No. Right. So it's the same thing with that. And so, like, what's one things that people misunderstand with virtual assistants is they think they're a catch. Yeah, right. And they think that they're just going to I'm going to give them something and it's like they're going to catch everything they do. And then it's like, Oh, I don't know how to do it, But here's the other problem. So your second virtual assistant hire was what? So that was more of an administrative person and that was a person that could really help with more administrative tasks, such as even CRM management, reviewing emails, answering emails, anything that a administrative assistant could do that was, you know, analytics, you know, just a lot of different things in the business. That was the second hire. So I could split the positions because, yeah, you were stretching her too thin on stuff that he really wasn't really his strength. So you brought in somebody to help with his weaknesses. And also, again, it's ten, $15 an hour work. I mean, I'm sorry to all the administrative assistant out there, but it's $10.10 to $15 an hour work what they were doing. And so you were able to take that off your plate. And then so she was able to handle was that Angelique? I believe it was Angelique. Angelique was able to take the stuff off of cards, plate and your plate more detailed. And then Kurt could focus on his creative. So you have somebody kind of like administrative detail oriented, and then you have somebody who's got a creative mind to go from there, help with marketing, help with everything else. So that's usually where we tell most people to start, right, is the first person you should hire as a marketing assistant. Yeah, and we're going to get into our third episode and really get into all the details of what a marketing assistant can do, because I don't think people realize how much they can assist you, help you that you don't need to pay necessarily 50, 60, 70, 80,000 in-house for a marketing assistant that you can do virtually. So watch our third episode. We're going to get into a lot of details of a marketing virtual assistant from there. So you've gotten two assistants and then like, when did you hire a color woman, etc.? So that's a great question. So now we have two virtual assistants that are helping me so I can do more sales, I can make more calls, I can focus more on being the lead as a team leader or owner CEO. But it's my job to be in charge of the marketing. Yep. And nobody else's. It's my job. And so I could really focus on what I needed to do in the marketing because we started to get so busy. I hired my first team member and that was an outside sales agent to help us with the buyers that the overflow of buyers that I was generating. Right. So I also hired a company to generate more leads as well. Yeah. So that was commissions. And so you had commissions and they were generating more and more Google pay per click leads. Yeah. So we went from getting X amount of leads per month to now basically putting three or four times that amount of leads and you couldn't handle them all. So you brought in another agent and said, Hey, you know, I've got this. These people here, you're basically not that they weren't doing well, but like they needed help because they didn't know how to market and they didn't know how to generate leads. So they joined our team, joined our team, brought them in. And then you expanded their. But when did you desire to hire, you know, an outside somebody to call? So basically, you know, we were generating maybe 100 leads a month or so on our own through other avenues. They were good leads, hired one agent and hired two agents and now hired the third team agent that we set appointments for. When we did that, we hired commissions that brought on another 300 leads a month. So now we have 350, 400, 500 leads a month, and there was no way that I could do that alone. So that was when I hired my first inside sales agent. Now, all of these were through the same company. And the reason why I used a company as opposed to doing it myself is because I knew that they could spend the time to go and find the people for me. Yeah, that's the biggest thing that business owners struggle with is the most valuable commodity they have is time. Yeah, and they will jump over dollars to save pennies. Yeah, because that's literally what you're doing when you're going to fiber, when you're going to online jobs is you're literally jumping over dollars to maybe save pennies or even even when they're trying to hire the virtual assistants on their own. That's my point. They're going to find a lot of them are per project basis, you know, the VA's, but the ones that are actually going out to hire part time or full time VA's and we'll get into that on the later episode as well. But to save a couple bucks an hour, which I knew right away, I felt that was not where I wanted to spend my time. So we had up to seven Vas through one company. Yeah, but the big thing with the when you're hiring an appointment center is if you can't set appointments they will not set appointments. Yeah, that's, that's one thing where people miss the biggest thing is I understand that you're taking the 10 to $12 or $15 stuff off and really that's what callers nowadays are paid is know to set appointments is if you don't understand it and you can't do it, how are you going to expect them to do it? So they're going to come in and do it better. And it's one thing that we run across all the time where whether it's CEOs, CEOs who whatever the title is, you want to give them as they just want to abdicate. Yeah, Everything. So going to abdicate the appointment setting, they're going to abdicate the marketing. They're going to abdicate the lead generation, whatever it is they're going to. They just give it away. Really. They should still be involved in understanding now they don't have to do the day to day. They don't have to do the graphics, they don't have to do the calling. But you need to know, hey, what's going on? Because it in the end of the day, it's your business. Yeah, absolutely. And the thing is, is that, you know, that's a great point. So I remember when I also tried to hire callers that that weren't our own through a company. And when I was tracking and actually commissioned zinc, had a calling system and I hired them through their and other companies and I tracked it. It was costing me like 500 bucks an appointment. It was crazy. So I'm like, okay, we cannot be advocating this calling system. I've got to learn it really, really well. Learn the scripts really well myself so that I can make sure that I know what the results should be on their end and I can help train them. And so that's where that started. And once we did that really well, we hired another one because we saw it worked. And then with our Commission Inc leads and because we were able to make the appointments, we were seeing every dollar we spent, we were making 18 bucks. So that was huge. But that was because of the callers in us learning that part of the business ourselves. So that you had a VA tracking. So where most people miss is they just guess Yeah. And so or I like. So my biggest pet peeve is that if you want to get me upset real fast as be a marketing person or be a CEO or a CEO and say when you look at a piece of marketing and you say, Well, I like this. Yeah, because nobody gives too, you know, what about what you like? It's what the consumer is going to look at and what the consumer clicks on, what the consumer enters or stuff like what you like is what the consumer likes. That's right. It should never be what I like. You know, one of the things are, is the challenges that we face and still face today is that a lot of people out there, they want to say that virtual assistants can't do everything. But we run all of our business through virtual assistants and we successfully do that. So do you agree with that? Yeah, Like it's it's because one thing COVID started like the only good thing that basically came from COVID is you figured out that you don't have to be in office. And so if I don't have to be in office, then why am I paying somebody eight, $9,000 a month, $10,000 a month to work from home, which I know. And then as you find out that they're not really working 40 hours a week, so they're doing other stuff, you're spending so much money. And what that does is it takes away your profitability. Let's get into that a little bit because the challenges. Right. So profitability. So since COVID salaries have gone up a lot, it seems like. Yeah, in the last three years, I mean, at least I don't know if they doubled, but they've gone up a lot and it is harder to convert leads and it's more expensive. You agree with that? Marketing everything going up? Yeah, just like your groceries. So as anything as being a business owner has gone up a lot. So to be a small business owner and to be able to have profitability, I feel that you really, really have to look at virtual assistants in your business because your profit over the past few years, since COVID, if you are really tracking it, paying attention to the leads, how hard it is to convert them, how much more expensive it is and how your profitability has gone down. I don't think business owners really have a choice but to learn more about virtual assistants was the only way to be profitable. Now, like you, I don't know if it's the only way to be profitable, but it's I think, one of the best ways to be profitable. So if you're a new business or you're a relatively new business, small business, and you're going like you can be a great business and go out of business by hiring that person, that could be your right hand man. Run everything. They're going to be my my rock and pay them 100, 120,000 because that's what it costs to get them maybe more. In your other areas, you're going to pay that person and then you can actually have a great business that goes out of business. Yeah, because think about your cover. Like if it's $120,000, that's a $10,000 every month before you start making any profit. That doesn't include your rent, It doesn't include your marketing like you're paying ten grand a month so well. And I see business owners today struggle a lot more than they have in the past few years because of what's going on in the economy, and especially because we're involved heavily in the real estate business. Realtors are struggling a lot more than they ever have that I've ever seen since I've been in the business as far as profitability and expenses. And the other thing I see is most realtors do not track at the level that they should and they actually adjust a lot of the time when they don't have any money. So cash flow is an issue. Well, yeah. And also one of the biggest problems with realtors that run and quote unquote a business is they don't pay themselves as a realtor. So they're just like, oh, there's money in the bank because their checks are large. Like, you know, they may not make money for three months, but then they when they do make money, it's usually a large deposit. And they're like, oh, well, there's money in the bank. I'm making money. And they're not actually keeping track of what's going on and then paying them like an actual employee. They don't set up an AC corp, they don't do any of the stuff that tax accountants tell you to do and they just keep taking the money. Yeah. So we're kind of getting off of how it started with virtual system. So when I started in real estate didn't have any money. I was working actually at the restaurant to afford to pay for coaching and marketing and things like that. And when Mark came in afterwards, when I got busier and busier, we needed leverage and we needed assistance. And so that's where the virtual assistant came, because I knew that we had to invest the money that I was making back into the business. But I really didn't have enough money to hire assistants, plus to pay for marketing and coaching, which I knew were both important and pay $50,000 to an assistant like that. Just I couldn't do that. I couldn't invest that kind of money. So virtual assistants definitely for a couple different reasons. Virtual assistants is where we started. And like Mark was saying at the beginning, the first thing was we didn't have the space. The other thing is, is we didn't have to pay payroll taxes, US payroll taxes, because they're not an employee of the United States. Okay? So we didn't have to pay that. We didn't have to pay for technology and computers and all the things, all the cost because we didn't have the space, nor did I have the money to invest in to my first assistant at that level of pay. So that's kind of how. And then went to the family reunion event with Keller Williams, met an owner of a company, a virtual assistant company, learned more about it, said, wow, let's check this out. And that's how it all started. So basically it was 2017. You started stamped staff. Stamp staff. We started stamp staff in 2017. We've been open just six years. So one of the big issues with I think where people miss is they hire somebody and chances are that person has stopped learning. When you're with a company like ours, it's constant learning. Every month we're bringing something, every day, we're bringing something. We take video training from probably the top video short form video creator in North America. Right now we take marketing from one of the top marketing people on branding yourself and everything else from, without a doubt, the top marketer in the United States right now, and even maybe even the world. And so we learn this stuff and then we go to whether it's Google business profile and whatever it is, you look at these companies, oh, we do the same thing. They don't act like they don't. So we had gone to the to the Philippines a couple of times to see our staff that were working for us through another company, right? So we could really get to know the Philippines and get to know all of that. Then people kept reaching out to me and saying, you know, you guys do such a good job with your virtual assistants. Have you thought about opening up a company yourselves? And that's kind of how stamp staff evolved. Six years ago, we looked at it and said, okay, how are we going to do this? While we didn't have anything to really follow or copy, so we had to create it ourselves. So what I did is I took everything that I liked over the last six years, previous that the virtual assistants did or, you know, different things that I liked or didn't like and how I could utilize my skills in hiring and everything else. So that's how it evolved is because of the need and people saw it. Then the first six months, it was just having a couple of clients and really figuring out what we could do. We made a lot of mistakes when we first started because it was one virtual assistant, so every virtual assistant we hired, we said, okay, they can do marketing admin, all these things, and you only had two subcategories, everything in calling you. It was like everything in college and that was it. And that that's not what you should do is right. And so we made a lot of mistakes along the way, and then we figured out how to get better and better. And I think what makes us different and everything else is over the last six years when people have hired us, I have felt, number one, that sometimes they hire us too soon and we tell them not to. So we ask a lot of questions upfront to make sure they really need us at the time, because a lot of people like to advocate, like you said, you know, they want to give everything to somebody else. You know, they'll hire us and say, I want you to do my marketing for us. Well, first of all, we have a marketing assistant. But you should be, no matter what business you're in, you should be in charge of your own marketing, and then you can have somebody actually implement it for you. But you should be the one that are making the decisions on your own marketing and seeing what's working and what's not. The thing is, is you and I have five different coaches and mentors in different parts of our business and we roll all of that back into the virtual assistants every week, month. You know, we're bringing more and more back into our business to help us stand out over anybody else. So anyways, our next episode, we're going to talk about how we figured out what virtual assistants could do for us and you know, where all of that goes. But that's how we started. And and we've learned a lot, you know, through the last six years. And we're growing every single month. And we are focused on making our virtual assistants better and making our company better through virtual assistants. What do you have to say? I think that's it. I mean, that's a good episode and I just wrap it up.
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