Make Money Online

Welcome to Make Money Online. I’m Kai Davis. Today I’m joined by my colleague and co-host, Nick DeSabato. Hi. Welcome to Tea Chat.

I’ve actually I just purchased some new tea the other day. It’s small batch, it’s local. It’s delicious. It’s lemon. You might have heard maybe you’ve heard of them. You’re in the right circles. Lipton, I think is how it’s pronounced. I know. It hurt. The joke hurt. Kai, it’s not, it’s not small badge, Kai. I have a small tea. No, my morning tea today was a blend of dark forest chai and a mint matcha with as a latte with rice milk and stevia. And that’s my go-to tea at Townsend’s Tea, actually a chain now of tea shops in the Pacific Northwest, mostly Eugene, Oregon, and Bend, or Eugene, Portland, and Bend. But that’s been my go-to. It’s minty, it’s chai-y, it’s caffeinated, and it tastes delicious.

I have a lovely assistant, Jesse. We just had a meeting this morning. And yeah, and I could honestly say. I have had wanted to hire an assistant for probably two, two and a half years, and hiring an assistant was the single scariest thing. I felt I could do as a business owner. So suddenly I’m like, I’m paying somebody, I’m responsible for telling them what to do. Holy fuck, anxiety crisis out the wang. And Then I just didn’t do it. And finally, I decided, and we could get into the how of this later, but finally, I decided to pull the trigger. I hired an assistant and Just like everything in life, it turned out to be less scary than I was telling myself it would be.

It’s been the same. I can honestly say, like, once I got past, like, really, For a listener who’s thinking about hiring an assistant or hiring an employee, let’s equate them to be the same thing for the purpose of this discussion. There’s a feeling that, okay, I’m going to hire somebody and everything’s going to be that much easier. But I could say from personal experience, and I think Nick will agree on this, that no, it actually, it’s like the mythical man month problem. Suddenly, hiring somebody doesn’t reduce the amount of work on your plate. What it’s going to do is elevate the amount of work on your plate while you train the person how to do things, while you continue to do the things you were doing before. And then I generally think it’s a two to three month window. After that two to three month process, they’re at the point where suddenly they’re able to take work off of your plate. And you start recovering that time back. And we’re at around six months together, Jesse and I, and we’ve really hit a stride where she’s able to like take a point on projects, do an excellent, excellent, excellent job. I don’t worry or I don’t stress. And it never was that I was worrying or stressing about her. It’s just my anxiety being Jewish and my anxiety as a business owner and my anxiety at exploring something new. There was a sphere of like, oh God, am I doing this right? It’s taking time. Is it supposed to take time? But it does take time to get them up to speed. It does take time to get somebody else up to speed on like how your business runs.

Delegating is hard. Delegating is the hardest skill I’ve had to practice as an adult and as a business owner. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it’s very hard. And it’s a sign of maturity, right? So one of the like final fronts is when they’re able to like take control of your email. And she has a separate email address that most of Draft’s email goes to at this point, and then she just forwards me stuff. And being able to set up that system took like

Yeah, that’s what I’ve noticed the most as I’ve uh uh Gotten better at having an assistant is we’re lay like it takes work, but we’re laying down the framework for Processes and procedures that will pay off down the line. And suddenly, it’s that much easier to implement something new because we’re both speaking the same language, we’re both ironing out the kinks of the process. Like just this past week, we were having a conversation. Hey, great for communication. Like, does it make sense for us to use Slack or Basecamp or Trello or something else? Where do projects live? How do we communicate? What’s the best way for you to assign projects up to me so I can do the right thing? What’s the best way for me to have an eye on what you’re working on so I can make sure you’re focused in the right areas? How do you tell me when I’m doing a shitty job explaining what needs to happen or what projects need to be worked on next? And It takes a lot of communication and it’s hard work, but it really, really does pay off because suddenly you have somebody who Understands the way you think, understands the way your business operates, and has the necessary skills to execute on things for you.

One thing I found really successful in the SOP is standard generating standard operating procedures area is originally The way we did it originally was like we’d sit down, I’d illustrate the task, and like I do a first draft of the SOP, have her work through the SOP, and like make changes or ping me back. And it worked okay, and it worked well. And it made sure that we figured out like a standard operating procedure that covered a task. What we ended up migrating to, and what’s worked really well over the last three months, is If there’s a task or a project or a piece of software that I want to train Jesse on or train anyone on, I just record a screencast using ScreenFlow of like Cool, I’m going to show you like how to use. I use an outreach program called Quickmail. I’m going to show you how to add a new sequence to Quickmail. And I’ll record a 15-minute screencast of like, these are the steps I go through. And so creating the SOP suddenly is: I do it and record the screencast and talk my way through it. I pass the screencast over as a video, upload it to WISTI or YouTube or wherever. And then Jesse is able to work through that video and say, okay, cool. I’m making the SOP based on the steps you’re working through. So she’s able to rewind, scrub back, listen. And like, sometimes I’m like, okay, I just did something and it’s wonky. Let me break down why I did it. She’s able to reference that video forever. And so, not only so, like, if and when Jesse graduates to something else or is no longer my assistant and leaves her some other opportunity. We suddenly have this database of SOPs that are, here are the steps somebody could take to do this. And here’s a reference video that explains how to do it. And it’s been incredibly valuable where there’s been times where I said, hey, Jesse, like, remember that thing, that project we worked on five months ago? And she’s like, oh, yeah, totally. Let me dive back, watch the video. Okay, cool. I remember how to do it now. And it future-proofs ourselves against losing that knowledge since now. It’s so easy for me to help for me to start the process of creating an SOP. I record a video of me doing the thing. It’s easier for her to learn how to do the thing because she gets to watch a video that illustrates the process. She’s learning how to do it while she’s not so much transcribing, but breaking down the steps. And then we now have this asset of like, here’s a training video and the associated steps. Whenever either one of us needs to do it, great. We have it broken down one through X, and we also have a video to reference if we don’t understand one specific part of the process.

And I could say the topic for this episode comes from. I’m going to butcher your name. I’m so sorry, Josh. Josh. Garofalo, Sway copy on Twitter. He asked experience on our use of VAs and assistants and We’ve been talking about assistants for a bit. My first real experience working with an assistant was when I hired Jesse. Before that, I heavily used a service called FancyHands, fancyhands. com. It’s a American-based virtual assistant service. And I used that from probably 2012 through 2014. And it was wonderful just to get me in the habit of like. Delegating small projects or figuring out how I break down the scope of something, do something small and manageable. I wrote I don’t want to call it crappy. I wrote my first ebook on how I use the service. I’ll link to it in the show notes for people if they want to check out Kai’s first e-book. But I use the service heavily, like when I went to Spain, because I was able to email the service and be like, Hey, I’m in Barcelona. I have two days. Can you send me back a list of six vegan restaurants? Just using a service like a virtual assistant like that trained me into thinking, like, okay, I want to ask a specific question. I want to set out What the outcome I’m looking for is. I want to give the constraints. I want to give an idea of the timeframe. Like, obviously, if this is a task, like, hey, I’m in Barcelona for four hours, can you send me back a list of restaurants in the next 15 minutes? That’s much different than I’m here for the next two weeks. Give me a list of restaurants. But it taught me how to be better at delegating. And our friend Marcus Blankenship has a delegation checklist that we’ll link to in the show notes here. That just is really great for figuring out how you delegate a project to somebody, specifying the scope, the timeframe, the outcome you’re looking for. making sure to ask if they have any questions and just breaking it down into a repeatable process for delegating a thing.

Yeah, which I think connects back to the idea of there’s that three-month onboarding time for an assistant or an employee where They’re learning to, you’re both learning to think the way they think and communicate the way they communicate, and they’re learning to think the way you think and communicate the way you communicate. Just like when you So now I’m sure if you say like I need a dope place for a meeting with a couple friends. Your assistant is trained well enough in how you think and communicate to know, like, okay, cool. So, this is the type of thing he’s looking for. Here are three suggestions we could move forward. Where, if on day one you’re like, give me a dope place to get a client for dinner, they’ll be like, Okay, great, dope. The medical marijuana dispensary. That’ll be a dope place. And you’re like, Ah, no, what? Communication.

Eugene, Oregon. We have a meeting once a week at Townsend’s tea house, my favorite tea house. But no, she lives like a 10-minute drive from my house, maybe a 15-minute drive.

I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Drink some more of this tea. I’m okay now. But you’re absolutely right. When you have that transition, like And like that was that was one of the issues I faced when I used the service fancy hands. Like it was wonderful for one-off tasks, but I couldn’t build a relationship, or it was very hard to build a relationship working with the same person. Since there’s a bank of people behind that SaaS and they pick and choose tasks based on their ability. So I might like send in research projects, and it’s always the same person picking those projects up because they’re good at research. But there’s no relationship building with one particular person. There are services that do match you up with a VA, but the issue, just like you pointed out, is like, okay, when they quit. What do you do then? And that’s hard. And, like, I think that’s a challenge we face, even when you hire an assistant that you’re working with face-to-face or an employee that you work with face-to-face. Like, there’s always a risk of that person quitting, but Like we pointed out earlier, we spend a lot of our time building up these SOPs, not to insulate ourselves against an employee or an assistant quitting, but to make our jobs and their jobs easier. But a side benefit is If there is that type of transition, well, we have a knowledge base, we have information, and like we can even frame it as Suddenly, if I decide to hire a second employee or a second assistant, well, we don’t have to start from zero. It’s like, okay, cool, we’ve built up this library of information. Here you are. We want you to help with outreach. Here is our Bible on how to do outreach. Please read this and then we’ll answer questions. Like, we’ve insulated ourselves against the difficulty of hiring new employees by building up this library.

There are a couple other questions that people ask that I’d love us to move through. I’ll just ask them and we can both answer. So when you were hiring, how did you vet your candidates?

So, so we’ll we link to this in the show notes. I set up a I actually advertised on Craigslist for my assistant and I had them email me in. And I responded by review the, I said, like, hey, email in, answer these questions, tell me a bit about yourself, link to something interesting. And From there, if somebody was interesting, I’d respond back. I’d say, like, okay, cool. The next step is to book a time, you know, pick a time on my calendar, and we’ll meet face to face. We did a face-to-face meeting. I wanted to, really, it was like a human test: like, can we communicate well? Are we both interesting people? Do we jive well together? And I said, bring some questions for me. I’ll bring some questions for you. From there, I said, Cool, I have a standardized paid test project that I’d like us to do together. I’ll send you a link after this meeting. It was a Google Doc and it was three different phases. And I think in my case, it was like A research thing, find some bloggers. Another research thing, find their contact information. And a third thing, write an outreach email to promote a hypothetical product. Since a lot of what I do is digital public relations and outreach. I wanted to see how well they could follow instructions, and B, how well they could think on their feet, and me give them like an abstract, like, here’s the outcome I’m looking for. Do this thing and show me the results of this thing. And I use that to vet the different candidates. Giving, I think, let me rephrase this. I will never. Hire somebody without giving them a paid test project first because it shows that I have skin in the game and I value their time. And it also motivates them to do a good job because, like Hey, I’m paying you for this thing. Like, good job or bad job, you’re going to get paid for this. I’d much rather you feel well compensated for your time and not doing work on spec to potentially get a position as An employee or an assistant or somebody within the organization. So that’s my big rambly answer about how I vetted people, giving them a paid test project and having a face-to-face meeting.

Nick, I was at your wedding. Great, you’re hired. Thank you so much. No, don’t hire friends. No. Oh, yeah, I guess that segues nicely into the next question: when to hire and when not to hire. And I’d strongly say, don’t hire friends. Don’t hire friends. I put a caveat on like occasionally subcontract with friends since like I do that. I have a couple of friends where You use this reference or this language once on a landing page of yours. You’re an independent business, but occasionally you’ll pull together like the superhero team up of consultants who help with larger projects. I do the same, like if I have a design thing. I have a buddy who’s a great designer, and I’ll be like, hey, buddy, do you have some time? Would you like a project? Here’s the spec, here’s the scope. And so I’ll do one-off projects or small retainer-based projects, but I wouldn’t hire a friend just because. Suddenly, you have to make the decision on which this person is. Are they more a friend who is also an employee, or are they more an employee who’s also a friend? And that could fuck up relationships hard.

Yep. Yep. Yeah. And it’s it. It takes time. You might not get it right the first time. Like one I guess I’d like to end on this thought. When I went into the process of hiring an assistant, I went into it saying, I am willing to risk, let’s say, $1,000 a month for three months. For it to work out incredibly poorly, but me to learn so much as a business owner on what to do right the next time. And it’s worked out wonderfully. But I went into it with that mindset of: I’m okay with this not working out because I am paying for the education and the knowledge and to improve my processes and improve my communication. And I think if you adapt or adopt that mindset. That will put you in the best position to hire, to delegate, to explore what it means to have an assistant that you could trust and rely on. You have to go into it eyes wide open and say, like, you know, it might not work out. It might go poorly. And that’s okay. That’s just part of the process.

And just a reminder, if you have not yet backed Nick’s project on Kickstarter, link is in the show notes. go back it right now. If you have already backed Nick’s project on Kickstarter, thank you so much. Back it a second time. Think of three friends. Go email them. Tell them they are no longer your friends unless they go back it right now. Make some napalm, write draft evidence on your football field. Yes. Really, any of the above options, preferably ones that involve backing the project. Would be much appreciated.

It was a good 12 episodes of the podcast and a good humanity. Oh, no, I meant I’m going to burn my house to the ground.

Out of anger. You have upstairs neighbors. I’m so sorry. Not anymore. But yes, please back at Nick’s project, and thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much.