Azhar Siddiqui
We will start with a document and Mashood, can you post this? I'm not sure if everybody has this workbook. But if you don't, then we'll post a link in the chat [of the session]. And you should be able to [download the workbook]. This is a complete workbook that we put together, we spend a lot of time and effort on it. It's got examples of job posts, some examples of videos of what these different virtual assistants should be doing for you guys, and lots of other stuff. Even on how to train these people and things like that, we may not be able to get into all the details today, but it's definitely going to be something that you guys can look at when you have some downtime and take it from there. All right! Obviously, how to hire the first virtual assistant for your digital marketing agency is the topic that we have today. But before we get into that, I think I would want most of you guys to go through that. This is why I asked this particular question: How many of you guys have more than one employee? So you know, like...even if you - before you start to hire people, the first thing you should be asking is a set of questions. Where do you even need a virtual assistant right now in your agency? So, depending on where you are in your agency journey, you may be able to start out with one virtual assistant in a set role, or multiple roles, or more than one, two, depending on how much you're doing, and sales and all of that good stuff. So we did a checklist together, which is linked to the bottom of the first page over here. I'll just quickly open this up. And if you're answering yes to more than three of these questions, then I think you guys are ready to hire your first virtual assistant. And some of these questions are: Are you making at least $10,000 in monthly agency revenue? Do you have at least two full-time employees including yourself? That's completely fine. Do you want to hire a full-time employee without thinking of long term contracts, w-2 etc? Are you interested in hiring a paid advertising specialist like social media marketing? and things like that…Are you looking for an agency sales rep, who can close deals like you're used to closing? and so on and so on so everything over here is routine, straightforward. I'm just going to pin myself here [in the virtual meeting]. Yeah. So these questions, you know, there are some really basic questions. But if you guys are saying yes to three or more of these questions, then I think you guys are ready to get started with VA. And some of the benefits of hiring the VA obviously frees up time by letting you step back from the day today. So this is huge, guys. And Mashood, Do you mind posting the link to the VA hiring guide, where we're talking about, I did the math on how much money you can save by hiring for these key posts. If you can just post that, I think that would be incredibly beneficial for everyone on the call [meeting]. So stepping back from the day to day as agency owners, you know, I understand and you know, as I mentioned that, you know, I'm a veteran, digital marketing agency owner, myself, it's so hard to step back from their day today and you know, we're in that vicious cycle, we're trying to do some marketing, maybe go to a local event and do a talk, you get some business coming in from that, then you go into that sales mode. Now you're closing some deals, as soon as you close a few deals, now you move into the account manager's shoes, and you're starting to do all of that stuff again. And then as soon as those maybe you're taking on some project work, and those accounts are being fulfilled now. And or maybe you lose a few customers in a month or something like that. And now you're back onto that marketing bandwagon again and starting all over again. So, you know, we do feel like we have a lot of control over this thing. But this particular setup has limitations to it, as I experienced, and I'm sure a lot of you guys experienced that as well, that, you know, you can make a good income, you know, maybe even $100,000-$150,000 in this particular setup by being a one-man band, and doing things yourself. But you just cannot break through that threshold of going to maybe a million dollars in annual revenue. And you know, continuing on a really steady growth pattern. Now, unless and until you decide to trust people and put people in the role that you are used to doing.
So the roles that you know, all of you guys are used to doing. In most cases, I can probably guess them. And I'll talk about them just on the second page [of the workbook] here. But this is huge that you really all need to step back from these day to day activities in order for agencies to grow. And yeah, so if you do hire a virtual assistant in these key roles, this is actually a cost-saving or that you're going to be doing just think of it and the VA hiring guide that Mashood would have shared by now that's going to do some math for you guys in there as well. So you know - Just for example, if you are an agency owner, you're making $150,000 in a year, and you're doing sales, marketing, and maybe some account management could be a little bit more of something else, you know, everybody may have a different situation. But you know, if you were to just hire a full-time account manager, for example, for $20,000, or hire a full-time sales rep for $19,000, would be up and down in that range, I'm talking about offshore employees right now, say, $150,000, you actually save money by hiring the for these key roles, because all of a sudden, you're not paying yourself $150,000 to do these three things. Now, you've actually saved around $90,000 by hiring these three people for $60,000. And, you know, you're-obviously you take money home, and things like that, but now you have all of this time available to do so much more with your agency, grow it. And then these people that you put in these strategic positions, they're taking massive actions for you on a daily basis, the salesperson is massively on eight hours basis, every single day, reaching out to people booking new appointments, maybe for you, or for the head of sales, marketing person is taking massive action, that account manager is constantly caught in contact with your clients and things like that. So even if you just did this and step(ped) back, I would say you know, the work off of your shoulders and things like that is worth it, and saves you a ton of not just money, but in a lot of headaches as well. I think your clients would probably thank you for that as well because you're not doing everything yourself with a scale your business definitely like, you know, again, if you're doing all of these things yourself or you know, part of these things, then the scale is not going to be there unless you try and offload some of these responsibilities over to virtual assistants strengthen weak areas, again, you know, we were you may be good at sales, you may be good at marketing, but you can tell me that you're good at everything over here. And inside an agency, I'm sure you guys are all great leaders, you know, and as part of running a good organization, I think being able to delegate and find the best people for the right job should be our primary responsibility. So again, you know, let's identify our weaknesses areas, we're really, really good at maybe some of these areas, you still want to continue, maybe you want to continue being the head of sales at this point, but maybe that person for the marketing and account management and just get that off of your plate. So those are some of the advantages: And then you know, 24/7 customer service might be a little bit off there. Some people do that, depending on the type of agencies that they're operating. They have weekend operations as well. So with a virtual assistant, you can definitely take care of that stuff as well. All right, so the three key roles that you guys need to hire for: So, is everybody with me right now? Any questions so far? Am I making sense so far? Just Yes or No will be okay at this point? Yes. [reading from the comments] Awesome!
All right. So the three key roles that we kind of identified and you know...we have just over 100 people right now in our organization working with mainly digital marketing agencies across the US and Canada. And almost all of them have fit into one of these three roles. And number one, and there's a reason that I have this order in place. Number one is the marketing assistant, number two is your appointment setter or the sales rep. And number three is account manager. So depending on where you are, in your agency journey, any one of these people or you know, could be multiple hires (s) that you may need as well, depending on where you are. So if you're doing maybe $50,000-$60,000 in monthly revenue, then you may need to get an account manager and a marketing assistant or all three of these roles fulfilled as soon as possible. But a marketing assistant usually is the best place to start out with, just because, you know, as agency owners, I think the first thing that we-you know...as soon as we get busy with the day-to-day of our agencies are marketing's marketing campaigns and things like that. They just get we're doing marketing for so many of our clients, but you know, our own gets neglected. And so you know...so as soon as we realize that almost no...there's no more, you know...sales inquiries or no more inquiries coming in. All of a sudden there's a marketing 911 and we're back to marketing again. So, wouldn't it be amazing to have a marketing assistant who can help you out with running your marketing or outreach could be a cold outreach campaign could be your Facebook ads could be your social media presence, doing your sales presentations, maybe even so many activities, the marketing assistant can do you know, videos for the client is giving you a testimonial, directing that video testimonial, publishing it on different social media platforms, running the marketing department eight hours a day, Monday through Friday would be such a great blessing, I promise you that, you know, what this is going to do is that within, you know, 30, 60, 90 days, you guys are going to start seeing a regular flow of leads coming in into your organization. And usually, this is the first place that I would recommend that each one if you don't have these positions filled right now, the marketing assistant is the first person you want to place in, in these key roles, it's going to take some of your burdens off, you don't have to and you-you're still there, you're still strategically guiding your marketing assistant, you know, what works, where most of your leads are coming in from, and you get these guys to focus on those things. And then also, these guys are able to do some of those things that as agency owners, we may have some, you know, short attention span. And you know, that's just how we are as business owners, we go from one thing to the next thing to the next thing, and hence, we're really the agency world. But our marketing assistant is a completely different breed. And they should be able to focus on some of these mundane tasks. Like for example, I'll give you an example of email outreach. For example, if you can figure out a way of getting an email list within the target market or a niche that you guys are focused on, and get them to do this email marketing campaign for your day in and out, you know, send out maybe between 80-100, 150 emails a day, and then track how many people are opening, and then even get this person to maybe make 20 to 30 phone calls for you on a daily basis. You know, for as a mark as an agency owner, it might not be the best use of my time. But for my marketing assistant who I'm hiring for, say between $12 and $15 an hour, this should be a no brainer. And they should be spending their time taking massive action on a daily basis. Just imagine, you know, as soon as somebody opens an email, your marketing assistant sends them an SMS through your CRM saying that I saw that you opened your email or you clicked on our appointment link, but you never booked the appointment? Is there a question I can answer so that you can talk to our Director of Sales, or maybe you can just jump on the phone (call) and talk to that? Hey, Joe, I saw that you clicked on you know, calendly link, but you never booked the appointment. Can I answer a quick question for you to maybe help you book this appointment? And you know, just push that hot lead over to the sales department which would be probably you in this case, but not for long if you continue on this trajectory so so marketing assistant, number one, appointment setter is number two: So, appointment setter and account manager, I think you don't have to kind of do two and three, I think they go side by side. But the appointment setter is really important. But you have to keep the appointments that are busy as well. So unless and until the marketing assistant gets the marketing department off the ground, and starts bringing in a regular flow of leads for you, the appointment setter, you know, the days of cold calling and things like that. I think those are in the past right now. You are-some of our viewers are doing that on a part-time basis. But the most successful appointment setters that we have in place are in agencies who have really solid marketing pipelines and who have to opt in funnels that are coming in. Even like I said that just cold email outreach. Imagine, you know, having 30, maybe 50 people opening up your emails, they're not taking any action. They're just opening up your emails. And they're just reading them, you're sending them a sequence of emails, and this is where the appointment setter would come in. And first of all, they'll call the people who replied back to you guys or clicked on some critical links. And then they start calling people who are regularly opening your emails. And that's going to be a very different conversation. You talk to Joe, you say, Hey, Joe, I noticed that you've checked out three of our emails, can I have five minutes of your time? Or you know, start building those relationships and things like that. And especially if you can afford some money and have some of these opt-in leads coming in as we do right now. We have maybe five to 10 people download our hiring guides and things like that. And we have these hot leads coming in people opting in. So Zoya, who's on this call right? Now is our appointment setter and sales rep. She simply just calls these people up, she says us calls them up says, Hey, I saw that you download the VA hiring guide, does a little chit chat, and then sees if they qualify and box them on to our Director of Sales calendar for a discovery call. And they come into our pipeline. So this is a very simple process. But I think a marketing assistant is a prerequisite to this, if you can afford both of these people I would recommend starting out with a marketing assistant if you can find a person who can do a bit of board marketing assistant and has a bit of inclination towards the sales side. And you know, to be honest, if you hire a person who is a marketing person and does not understand sales, then I think there is a bit of a problem there, anybody who's on the marketing side should understand that sales go hand in hand. And if they have to make 20 to 30 phone calls on a daily basis, even as a marketing assistant, then that's the type of person that you should be looking at. And the last person, I think, for you to completely step back from what you're doing on a day to day basis, is the account manager, I can't tell you how much time it took me to kind of step back from this particular role. Because, you know, I thought that you know, all of my clients are working with my agency, because of me, and you know, they need to have access to me at all hours of the day. And, and night sometimes. And, you know, so my life has been so, so much easier, so much, you know, without pensions and thinking about what's going on with this line and things like that, since I had my account managers in place. And depending on how many clients you currently have, usually, we recommend for every 20 to 30 clients, you should have at least one account manager. And depending on the type of agency, you're running, maybe even 10 to 15 clients for that account manager. But even if you want to step back, from the day today, and you're at 10, maybe 15 clients, getting that first account manager, I think will be such a huge blessing for you guys. Because now all of a sudden, you are not involved in the day to day of your agency, you don't have to answer those phone calls, your account manager takes care of them. And they can probably take care of them a lot better than you can. Because as agency owners, we're doing so many different things, you know, sales, marketing, all of that stuff. And then account management on top, having a dedicated person doing just account management, taking care of your clients, getting their feedback, doing that monthly check-in calls, with your clients getting, you know, we with RepStack we have quite a few account managers too. And we do a monthly check-in. And I think we have over 20-25 video testimonials right now, just by these guys regularly checking in and those video testimonials are such a huge impact on your business. And those video testimonials go directly to our marketing person. And he, you know, starts running ads on Facebook and Instagram and things like that using those testimonials. So, so the account manager and then also another thing that that account manager, if you have the right person in place in this particular position would do for you guys, is that they're also going to retain business and then also grow business. We add rep stack our clients average to VA’s with us right now, you know, and part of the reason is that you know, as soon as our account managers, if it's one month and our account managers constantly checking in with the clients, when they go on those calls with the client, they ask how things are going if things are going great, they ask them, Hey! What's your next need?
And usually, if they had a marketing assistant, then now they want an appointment setter or an account manager. So similarly for you guys, if you have these dedicated people in place, they're not only going to retain your clients, they're also going to grow those accounts for you guys as well. And I can guarantee you if you have the right person in the role, they're and they're going to do a better job than you can. Maybe, don't hold me to it, maybe you guys are really really good at it. But that would mean that then hire somebody for your marketing and appointment setting. And, you know, take control of your account managers but still have to start having people underneath you. So, over here we have some sample job posts for marketing assistants, you guys can, like I said that you guys can take this and then we also have these documents. I'm not going to go into details of but these are like details of what a marketing assistant can do position overviews, for example, job posts that we are currently using to hire for these positions. So you guys can go ahead and you know, feel free to use the job descriptions and just post away if you guys are planning to do the hiring yourself. And everything that these guys should be doing for you guys. We also have benchmarks here for a marketing assistant, for example, leads generated five to 10 per day 25 to 50 per week, 100 to 200 per month. So this is a full-time marketing assistant, then this is the amount of activity they should be doing. And then on the sales side, it should translate into three to five booked appointments per week, and at least 15 per month for you guys, we also have our hiring process, this is a rep stack process will you guys can obviously just kind of wanted to outline this for you on how we kind of do the hiring for our clients. But we'll also talk to you guys about how you can do it by yourself as well. So we go through multiple interview processes. One is round one, round two, round three. And then there's a dry run, which is around four, and then there's a meet up with a client, usually, we have around by the time we get the VA in front of the client. And we have around 90-95% approval rate on that last call, just because of this process. And we've kind of laid out the entire process for you guys over here. And then if you guys are really new to this, and you don't know how you're going to keep your marketing assistant busy, then we got some fundamental things that you guys can learn over here. And start out over here, figure out your messaging, marketing, and who the market is, what the messaging should be, and get started there. And I just quickly want to play one of our virtual assistants, who is Rija. And just kind of give you guys a peek into the day of Rija’s life, I think this is going to be exciting, it's going to kind of open up on what some of our VA’s are doing and then how you guys should be able to use say a marketing assistant Rija is a marketing assistant, we'll quickly play this video for you guys.
Video Playback
Hi, everyone, my name is Rija and I work with Polianna, I'll be giving you a peek into what I do throughout my day as a RepStack VA, the first thing that I do is that I make sure that my time doctor is up and running to log all my work hours and my work. And based on the importance and urgency of a particular assignment, I take on that project and I started working on it. So it depends if I have to work on Google Docs or Google Sheets. So for example, I have to come up with a new script, I'll open my Google Docs, I'll write a script, I'll add my manager and I'll add my boss to it so that he can directly make changes to it. And just you know, make the process very streamlined. Currently, I'm working on a four-week outreach campaign with Polianna for about 100 prospects, through which we cold call, email them, we reach out to these prospects through social media platforms. For social media, I have access to my boss's Facebook Group, and Facebook account. From here, I reach out to different businesses, and just let them know that hey, we're Polianna. We do this- would you be interested in taking on SEO for your page, my business, I do the same for LinkedIn. And the same for Instagram. So once I'm done with the social outreach, I move on to my calling outreach, and I use the platform is called go high level for this purpose.
And it lets you call prospects from my country to any country specifically for this project, we're targeting US citizens. So yeah, just from sitting at my home, I can call up people and I can tell them about the awesome things that Polianna is doing for them. And if they would be interested in becoming a part of our legacy. Once I'm done with the cause during the social outreach, going through their emails and letting them know about our offers and our prospects, I move on to a few training (sessions). If I have the time in the day, I log on to my members dot Seven Figure agency account. And you can see that we have, you know, availability of this awesome resource of lots and lots of training about how to land clients, and how to basically excel in your business. Once I'm done with everything that I do throughout my eight hours of work, I'm back to Basecamp. And I fill out an end of the day report. So an end of the day report entails everything that I have done in one single day. And all the targets that I've met and it also gives me and my bosses and the rest of the employees of Polianna, look...into...a...peek-into what you know could be expected in the next couple of days. So this would be it from my side. I hope you all have a good day. Take care bye-bye
Video Playback
Josh: Hey what’s up Henry? Just wanted to shoot a quick video to say thank you, you're crushing it, you're such a great addition to our team, we appreciate you so much good a great job, Frank only on the ball is following up on high-level booking appointments and helping us grow the business. So thank you.
Henry: Hey guys, this is Henry Adams, I work for Josh Nelson in the Seven Figure agency as a sales assistant. I make outbound sales calls and take inbound sales calls as well. Now we use the go high-level CRM, this one and Seven Figure agency to make outbound calls and take inbound calls. And my job is to call each person one by one in our funnel and see if they're interested in setting up a strategy session. And if they are I moved them into my strategy session tracking sheet. Now in the last three months, I've made close to 2000 goals, for which 500 calls were picked up and I booked 92 of them to be exactly right here. I blocked out the names and numbers for obvious reasons for the client. And apart from that, this is what my day end report usually looks like. So as you guys can see I tattooed it in photos that are used in this. And that specific day is called outreach fun. And our book funnel. And from here you guys can see that I've made 37 calls in the cold outreach funnel or which one call was picked up. And I sent him the link to the calendar because he was busy at the time. And in the other funnel, I got 15. I made 15 calls for which 1 was picked up and I booked one. And lastly, this is a pre-pre-booked one that I had scheduled to call with him. And he was qualified for a program so I booked him onto my coaches on all those calendars. Now in a week, I get an average of about five bookings and 20 in the month. And this also, this is our Time Doctor application that each website VA uses, it monitors our time and productivity and takes regular screenshots, so you guys know where you're spending your money on and definitely, it's not being wasted. Alright, so that's pretty much
Azhar Siddiqui
Similarly, the account manager, an account manager is the most important role that you guys need to look at. Again, we have job post example job posts, everything that you should be looking at, in your next account manager. Some benchmarks that we've set out over here for you guys, a couple of key benchmarks for the account managers are the number of accounts they are maintaining and growing current accounts. So you know, so ours if you have the account manager in place, these are really really important key factors to look at that are they maintaining because you know, obviously, you want To have this person in thereby, they can be dropping off clients. For you guys, the whole idea is to perform at the same level as you were or maybe better than you. So the number of accounts, marketing assistant Mashood is fixing this for me as we go. So the number of accounts they're maintaining is huge over here. And then also, like I said that you know, our clients are averaging two views right now. And part of the reason is that we have a strong account management team. And they go in regular follow-ups with the clients, and they bring us more orders. And so you know, your account manager should be able to end their bonus structure and things like that should be focused around how many accounts they're maintaining, and what are the growth levels they're bringing in from the current accounts that you guys have in place. So this is a very in-depth document, again, feel free to use it as you guys want. And then we have an account manager over here, a couple of them that you guys can go through, I won't play the video right now. But you guys get a gist of how these guys work. But feel free to watch these videos when you have some time.
Azhar Siddiqui
So, (an) exciting day for Rija every single day. So, imagine a marketing assistant, doing something similar for you guys, eight hours a day, Monday through Friday taking this massive action. And you know, Rija is working on multiple different campaigns and, and also in this particular document, we have few others, we have Rabbiya's video as well, so feel free to take a look at it. We have Sanya's video over here as well. So they're all doing a….slightly different as all of you guys will have slightly different needs as well. So take a look at it. But this is basically the marketing assistant role. Take a look at that. So the appointment setter roll, as I explained earlier, this along with your account manager are kind of parallel. Both of them you can hire for depending on where you are in your journey. Again, we have the example job post over here, the duties of the sales assistant, what they should be doing: job requirements, and some benchmarks that we've given you. So calls and connections 30 plus per day, some of our viewers are doing 80 plus, if they're just strictly doing phone calls, 150 per week, 300 per month, and then appointments booked again, you know, between three and four per week and minimum 15 appointments booked for the director of sales on a monthly basis. And I think those 15 calls should easily turn into three to five new accounts opened up for you guys on a monthly basis and get that sales process going automatically on a monthly basis. And as agency owners, you guys won't have to worry about going back to marketing and then sales and then account manager Matt being an account manager, our hiring process for RepStack is very similar in this, we have this for the interview process and then the client interview. So we'll talk a little bit more about this stuff. And then we're talking a little bit about inbound lead flow, follow up. How this person should be utilized. As I said, if you have a funnel already set up, the appointment setter is just going to crush it for you guys. And I'm just quickly going to play one of our VA’s [video] who is an appointment setter, and start out with his client as well. His testimonial. So sample job posts over here, again, sales assistant marketing assistant and account manager, some of this stuff is repeating from some of the inner documents there, I'm going to move into the pre-screening process. So when you guys decide to hire for these roles, by the way, obviously, we are a placement company for digital marketing agencies, we'd be happy to take care of these roles for you and, you know, provide you pre-screen candidates. But if you do decide to hire them yourselves, we recommend a couple of three different platforms, which would be Fiverr, Upwork, and online jobs.ph. So obviously, rep sack is one of them, but Fiverr, Upwork, and online jobs.ph. So everything that you guys are learning over here, if you guys decide not to work with us, you guys can just take it to Upwork, for example, and both that job there and just follow our process to find the best person for that particular role. And the pre-screening process, so once you guys do have those jobs up and running, a really good rule of thumb is to get them to send a video or a voicemail intro because especially on the marketing assistant side, and on the appointment set aside, the accents are really, really important. And hopefully, you guys did see some of this stuff, in our VAs is that you know, we make sure that the accents are really, really important to our clients to us as well. So you know, a video or a voicemail intro will kinda, you know, weed out the people, unfortunately, that we can be working with because our clients expect a certain amount of, you know, understanding of the English language and things like that. And on the marketing assistant side, you can do with a bit of a thicker accent, but as long as there are no grammar issues there, so as long as she has the perfect grammar, but still has a bit of a thicker accent. But on the appointment set aside, you definitely want somebody who has a nice and clean accent. And this person should be able to send you a video or a voicemail intro should make your life a lot easier. And then also on those video and voicemail intros, what you want to do is that you want to look out for grammar issues as well, if they have really clean accents and they're making grammar mistakes, then that's going to translate into their writing. And you just don't want that. So that's something that you should be on the lookout for. the accent would be especially important for an appointment setter and account manager as well because the account manager is going to be the face of your company, they're going to be dealing with your clients day in and day out. And they're going to be writing out emails they're going to be maybe sending out SMS is and they're going to be talking on zoom and phone calls and things like that. So you want to make sure that this is priority number one. We also recommend a Colby assessment for your new hire. And what that basically (means is that) there are several different assessment tools out there. It's a personality profile test. And we've been using this for some time. And if you do decide to work with us, one Colby test is free if you guys decide to work with us, but we do recommend that you get the person that you are going to be hiring. Take some sort of personality test, just so you know what type of personality they're bringing to the table. For example, with Colby, you're able to find out the right type of people, you know with that personality profile. Are they going to be getting bored really easily or are they going to break in the process? You have in place, or you know, if you assign them a particular task, they're just going to be able to do it day in and day out. So you know, having that assessment done upfront kind of gives you an idea that, hey, this person has a high follow-through or a high factfinder. Those are basically the Colby assessment lingo I'm talking about. But if you have a nice follow-through person, and a person who likes to find facts, before they do anything, that's an indication that they will be good as an account manager, there'll be good as a marketing assistant, and there'll be good as an appointment setter for you as well. So highly recommended that you do some sort of personality assessment as well. Alright, so on the interview side, here are just some basic questions that you guys should be asking. During the interview, take these questions, you can ask some of these, you can ask all of these if you guys are doing the hiring yourself simple questions. But some of these, you know, you'd be surprised by the things that you learn on how people answer these questions I like: Just tell me a little bit about yourself. You know...some people just get confused, other people, like if you're hiring for a role as an appointment setter, and they're really confident they're on their feet, they're telling you, you know about themselves and what they like to do, and things like that. Those are the type of people you want to work with. So you know, as simple questions, basic questions, but really, really important that you ask them. And if you do decide to work with us, then we take care of all of these questions for you guys, we present these questions for you. So you guys usually won't have to worry about asking any of these questions. And that's why we don't even when our clients come to interview with the VA’s, we call them an intro call. Because they're usually very easy and low key, it's not like you're going to have to ask them 10,20 different questions and things like that. expectation. So once you do decide to go with a particular person, maybe one or two, setting the expectation right from day one is extremely critical. You know, you want to make sure that your people are responsive, they're resourceful. Honesty is such a huge thing right now, especially with everybody working remotely, you know, this is a non-negotiable for us. You want to test them, you want to make sure you let them know that, hey, this is something that you know, everything else you can come back from. But I can't instil a strong work ethic, or if there is an honesty related issue, there is no coming back from those two things. So you know, for skills and things like that we can teach you. But as soon as there's an honesty issue, if they know these things from day one, then I think you're going to have longevity in your virtual assistant. So you know, you're basically from day one, you're setting them up with success, because you're making sure you're letting them know of your expectations that these things are extremely important to you: hard work, innovation, and then obviously ask for help, they should be easy to use should be available to them, or whoever they're going to be reporting to so that they can ask for help. Some, we've seen this in the past where you know, you hire a VA, and you magically think that all the problems are going to go away, that's not the case, you're still going to be there, you're going to have to provide them with a structure, you're going to have to for example, for a marketing assistant, if they don't have a list that you haven't purchased, then how are they going to run your outreach for you, or email marketing campaign and things like that, and then they need to have somebody who they need to report back to is going to be their coach or their boss or their mentor. And, and then you know, you help them grow that way. So if you just hire them, and you just kind of think about forgetting about them, it's probably not going to work. Alright, so I think the hiring process is pretty straightforward. We've talked about this already, I'm going to go into a pre onboarding process so So usually when you hire your virtual assistant, what's going to be the now after you've set the expectations and everything, you're going to go into an onboarding process where you want to have everything ready for the VA their email addresses, you know, your access to their slack and you know what their first day is going to look like, what their first week is going to look like on there in terms of their training and things like that. So if you want to plan for all of this stuff ahead of time we add RepStack because we were doing this quite often, We decided to add an extra step on our end if you guys are able to do this with talent from Upwork Fiverr or online jobs.ph all the power to you. It may scare away some of these people but you know if you're willing to pay them for you know, say three days of testing or something like that, then I would highly recommend that you implement this process. Just on your own as well, we do this for each one of our clients, we call it the pre onboarding. So what this process is that, you know, we've gone through 1234, sometimes even five or six interviews, before we bring that person to the table in front of the client. But we really haven't tested out their work ethic. So what we want to do over here is in the pre onboarding processes, we want to test out this person, but with about 16 to 24 hours of working experience. And testing, really, what we're looking for is looking for a strong work ethic. And we're looking for any red flags. So if the VA is logging in late, for example, on day one, on their pre-onboarding, if, you know if there are some issues like they said that they can do this particular task, but they're completely alone on what graphic design is, or what advice and things like that, you know, so some of these things we test out for our client, or we build them a single cent. And if there is a red flag that we need to catch, we're going after those red flags like a hawk. So if there is one, what we would do is that if you find in a worst-case scenario, if we did find that after everything, we found some issues, we'll pull the plug on, it will tell the client that hey, this guy, we had an issue, we're going back to the drawing board, and we'll find you somebody else, at least in this particular case, the client did not have to bring them in into their organization. And, you know, this person may have been turned back after one or two weeks anyway. So we'll probably preempt that, in this particular process. We also use these three days of training to kind of set up a 90-day learning path for the VA, because the first 90 days of learning is extremely important. So you know, if it's the CRM training, anything like that, basically discussing with the clients and things like that, and we have a template of our 90-day training plan over here as well. So if you guys are hiring them yourself, I highly recommend that you guys put together the first 90-day training plan or the learning path for them. And you know, there might be a CRM that you guys want them to work on, there might be a graphic design platform that you want them to work on video editing, whatever you may need for your organization, you put that in a learning path, and you hold them accountable to that. So we do that in our pre onboarding with the VA s. And then we also do a stress test. And you also want to do this, if you're hiring yourself, then definitely stress test work from home setup. In this you want to check out the internet speeds, a minimum of 15 megabits per second is recommended. With this particular speed, they can easily make phone calls and things like that for you as well. Bauer backups in place, work laptop with the right hardware provided to the VA, if if you're not providing them, make sure that they have this machine ready to go. Do they have a VPN to log into your accounts, maybe Facebook and Instagram and things like that, then verifying this particular setup and then also setting up their Time Doctor? So you know, if you're using up work, for example, they do have a built-in application for that to track time and things like that. So I recommend that you use that. If you go through us all our viewers are on time doctors so those reports would be going back to you guys on a weekly basis. And then camera and lighting are really important as well. So you know, like having a proper work area, things like that. Because a lot of these people may not be used to working from home, it might be their first job working from home, but making sure that they have a dedicated space. With proper lighting, a good camera will ensure that you know you guys are talking to them face to face like we are right now. And communicating is so important these days. You guys all know where we're all probably zoomed out by now. But you know what I'm talking about. So but having that face to face interaction, is all we have. If the cameras are off, then you know you're missing out on a big dimension of their personality. So, here's the process for onboarding. So when you guys are doing this yourself, you definitely want to look at this. What tools need to be set up for them? Who will set these up, create a checklist, you know, have everything organized before they onboard before their day one with you guys? What will their orientation process look like on the initial day, accessing tools, software, communication expectations, so do all of this stuff on there on their day one? How will they be trained in what you expect them to do, orientation on the role training on the day to day and things like that? So the onboarding is going to be a huge part of your overall process. So make sure you make this process really, really good. We have a really great onboarding process where you're our account manager, the VA, and the client is on that call, you know, we've already gone through the pre onboarding process. So the onboarding process gets a lot easier, most of these things are already taken care of in the pre onboarding process. So it's a lot easier if you decide to go with RepStack. But if you're doing it on your own, then just make sure that you follow this guideline, and you should be good to go on that. Alright, so ongoing training, management and accountability. There's lots of good stuff over here, ongoing training(s) are a must. We do ongoing training(s) on a bi-weekly basis, sometimes on a weekly basis as well, weekly CRM training(s). So these are all processes inside of RepStack. But it will give you an idea of how much time and attention you guys will need to give to your VA so that they're successful. And also following up, for example, tracking, tracking their end of day reports, some of the VA, as you must have seen in the videos, their end of day reports are critical because it sets the pace on how they did in the entire day, just looking at a VA’s end of day report will tell you how much engagement they were throughout the day. And you know, if the end of day report is full of different things they were doing, and they're talking about different things, and it's really in-depth, that's usually a good sign that your VA is doing really, really great. But if the end of day report is to the point and minimalist, you know, there's usually a problem there. So, you know, a, they're submitting that report and B how in-depth that is a good tracker for you. And then also you know, the time tracking application that you should have in place. So Upwork reports, or in our case, Time Doctor reports, are very, very in-depth, the account manager should be able to or in your case, if you're directly working with them, you should be able to go into those reports and review those reports and see if and when this could be used for coaching as well, guys, because sometimes you can go into a report like time doctrine, you can say that this person is taking extra hours on making a particular post, maybe for Instagram. And that's a time for you to coach, okay, can you take this training, and now you've cut down that one hour that they were taking on a particular task to maybe 30 or 15 minutes, so so it's not just to catch these guys do something, maybe watch some YouTube cat videos, but it's also an opportunity to coach your VA is into cutting, they're cutting the short time that they might be taking on a task that you know can be to can be done a lot easier. Alright, so we're nearing the end, I just want to kind of give you a comparison of the hiring process between rep stack and Fiverr. And the red basically means that these are the tasks that you guys are going to be doing yourself. And the green means that these are done for you. So obviously, on our end, you book a discovery call. And if you decide to work on Fiverr, Upwork, online, jobs.ph, something like that you define a budget, you figure out, you know, so so we've kind of listed a USA based VA usually starts at $20 per hour, offshore quality, VA will be between seven and $15 an hour, something like that. And then obviously step two, step three, step four, we take care of these for you. On this site, you will be doing-create a job description. So we've kind of given you that job description for whichever role you want to hire. Just take that modified for your agency and post it away, then shortlisting- start your shortlisting process, you know, get them to send you those audio clips, video clips are better, I prefer video clips, for sure. Because you can see a different dimension in that process, you can see how prepared that person was. Or they just, you know, got off their bed and recorded that video for you. So it gives you a very different dimension if they were to send you a video and the best person assesses their abilities. We've kind of given you a lot of guidelines over here on how you can do that. One of what - One thing that sometimes we do is slack based interviews as well. So depending on which position of VA might be going into, you know, having them do a written interview on Slack, tells you a number of things on how their English is going to be. Is it going to work for your North American market or not? And how their grammar errors and things like that. So just an idea. You guys can do some different things over here. There's a ton of ideas over here that if you just stick to those, you should be able to find somebody reading hire the freelancer, obviously, you know, once you've gone through the entire process of assessing them finding the right person, it's now time to hire the person, you want to also have NDA with them. And a co-signed contract on platforms like up work, there is going to be a general contract, but it doesn't hurt if you need to sign get them to sign an NDA for yourself, I would say that the better you know, the more legal documents that you have signed, initially, just get that done and taken care of, the better it is it just covers you in the long run. And then worst-case scenario, if it doesn't workout, you just rinse and repeat the whole process. And you try again till you find the right person. And there are going to be even in our case, with everything that we've got going on our side, we have a lot of processes. Sometimes the person even with the pre-boarding process, we've had these cases where you know, a person has gone through the five, six interviews, and we've gone taking them through the pre-boarding process, we onboard them with the client, but a month in, it just wasn't the right fit. And if that happens, it's that's okay, sometimes you'll have to go back to the drawing board, and find the right person for your organization and the person who's the right fit. And that's just part of the hiring process. So be okay with that. And you'll be fine. Alright, so on the performance benchmark, we've kind of listed out some day-end reports over here. So you guys can take a look at these Day end reports. There are some videos, more videos over here as well. But here are some Day-end reports that your data and report can you know, if it's looking something like this, then you know, your virtual assistant is doing good to check out this one. This is like, an entire, you know, blog post, this could be this one as big as well. So you know, it's and these are available to you guys. Use them as you may when you do hire your VA or show them what occurred there and report what it looks like so that they know what they're doing. And you know, how they need to report and things like that. And, and you don't have to reinvent the wheel, just show them some of these reports. And you should be good. So there are the reports for sales assistants. And there are day-end reports for account managers as well. And I also wanted to just give a shout out to our business course coach who's Josh Nelson, he's been fundamental in our growth as well. He runs an operation called the Seven Figure agency. So if you guys don't have a lot of these processes set up right now, I recommend that you look at Seven Figure agency and I think that's going to be especially for some of you who are, you know, still at the growing phase or you know, close to or less than $10,000 a month or right around that mark. And you may not have a lot of these processes in place. You know, Josh Nelson opens up his entire agency and gives you swipe and deploy files for you know, even hiring these types of people and what kind of roles they might be going into and what work they can do for you guys. And you can just throw a lot of work at them and just tell them to Hey, take this training with Josh Nelson and just start doing this cold outreach for me and things like that. SoI highly recommend that you look at the Seven Figure Agency