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I am in the middle of the cringiest cringe monster cringe mountain week of my life. As I'm recording this, I'm like nine and a half months pregnant. I don't feel great, I don't feel like myself. I don't like how I look right now and I don't want to be on camera. But guess what? That is the cringe monster talking. You know why? Because I've got some really incredible information to share with you guys today. And if I don't show up just because I don't like how I'm feeling or because the cringe monster is attacking today that is robbing all of you guys of this incredible information that you could have. Every single major person on earth that has made some sort of impact has delegated in some way. You cannot lone wolf your way through life. It will not work. Somebody told me recently, well, Courtney, once I'm as big as you, I'll hire a va. I'm like, honey, I would not have got this big if it wasn't for a VA and if it wasn't for operations and if it wasn't for social media support and video editing support and all of these other things I've delegated. Welcome to Built In Public. I am your host, Courtney Johnson. I've been a full time content creator and a personal brand strategist for seven years and I really built my career sharing the process, not just the outcomes of personal brand. Built In Public is about what it actually looks like to build a brand, a business, and to build real leverage in the creator economy. We're talking strategy, systems, audience growth, monetization and that uncomfortable middle ground between. I have an idea and this is actually working. I'll be sharing what I'm testing, what's working, what's not, and going to be bringing on people who are building their careers and companies out loud too. If you want honest conversations, practical insight and zero bs, you are in the right place. Let's build in public, my friends. Guys, today we're talking about delegation, virtual assistants, how to delegate in order to improve your personal brand and in order to spend less time on your personal brand. But before we get into that, I just want to be so freaking real and vulnerable with you guys. I am in the middle of the cringiest cringe monster cringe mountain week of my life. As I'm recording this, I'm like nine and a half months pregnant. By the way, did you guys know pregnancy is ten months, not nine months. Anyways, I'm nine and a Half months pregnant. I am, like, I don't feel great. I don't feel like myself. I don't like how I look right now. And I don't want to be on camera. But guess what? That is the cringe monster talking. You know why? Because I've got some really incredible information to share with you guys today. I've got some incredible lessons about delegating. I've got a whole entire playbook that I made for y'. All. And if I don't show up just because I don't like how I'm feeling or because the cringe monster is attacking today, that is robbing all of you guys of this incredible information that you could have. And I. I mean, I coach hundreds and hundreds of people building their personal brands. And the amount of times somebody robs the world of an important piece of information, an important piece of art, encouragement that someone might need just because they, I don't know, they have a zit or because they don't feel good or because they have some gray hair that they haven't got covered yet. Like, it is crazy the amount of gold that we rob the world of because, oh, I don't like how I look. So I'm practicing what I preach. I'm showing up today, and we're gonna jump into virtual assistants, building a team and delegating for your personal brand. So first, I just wanna go through my own timeline of how I started delegating, the thing I did to start delegating. And by the way, delegating is mandatory. I'm sorry, It's. It's a mandatory skill for anybody. Anybody. That doesn't mean building a team and paying for a team is necessarily a mandatory skill, but in your life, in the same way that understanding how to do addition and subtraction or understanding how to eat healthy, like understanding delegation and being comfortable with delegation is a essential life skill that could be as simple as your relationship. Like knowing how to delegate to a partner in a way where they're supporting you and you're not feeling like you're ripping your hair out. That could be you're doing some sort of volunteer thing and you are leading a group of people or leading just one other person and you're able to delegate rather than taking everything on yourself. Delegation could be learning how to delegate tasks to your kids and hold them accountable. Like, delegation is an essential life skill. It's not just something that is. Is for big business people. It's also an essential career skill. Such an essential career skill. I mean, right now as we're going into this age of AI learning how to delegate to others and to AI, extremely important. You cannot have a massive impact without learning the art of delegation. And there is nobody on Earth that has made a massive impact that does not delegate or did not learn how to delegate. I don't care if it's like the fucking Dalai Lama, okay? Every single major person on Earth that has made some sort of impact has delegated in some way. You cannot lone wolf your way through life. It will not work. Okay, Just getting that out there. Okay, so how I started delegating, the very first thing I did once I realized, oh, fuck, I gotta learn to delegate, is I hired a house cleaner. This was maybe in 2020. I was living in a really small house. It was like a thousand square feet. I could clean it my own. I didn't need a house cleaner, but I hired a house cleaner. I paid her a hundred bucks to come and clean my house for an hour. And when I tell you I was the biggest micromanaging freak out ball of anxiety as she's going around cleaning my house, I'm like behind her, fixing what she didn't do absolutely perfectly. She actually told me to go sit outside. So I did sit outside and I would be texting her, like, looking in the windows. Guys, this is literally a woman I hired to do like a woman one or two hour house cleaning. Like, she's got it. She's just gonna make the beds and wipe down the counters. Like, it's not that deep, but I was making it that deep. I had so much anxiety and I knew that I could have done it. I could have spent an hour or two, save the $100 and clean the house. I know I could have done that, obviously, and I would have done it in my way. By the way, I'm not a cleaning professional, okay? I don't clean every day, all day. This woman is a cleaning professional. Like, I get to trust her that her products and her knowledge and whatever is a lot better than mine. Ca. I'm not a professional anyways. I was micromanaging her so hard. It was so uncomfortable in my body just to watch somebody clean my house. I had so many stories and limiting beliefs that I felt like such a diva. It was not great. However, I started doing that because I knew if I wanted to grow, I knew if I wanted to make a massive impact, I would have to learn delegation. So that was number one, the very first thing that I did. So if you guys have not delegated anything, a great place to Start is delegating to family, friends, partner, or something at home. So that's like getting a cleaner to come for an hour. You're not wasting that hundred dollars. It's a hundred dollars invested in you learning to delegate properly and get the fuck out of your way. Or like TaskRabbit. Okay, maybe you have a lot of boxes that need to go to the recycling place. And of course, you could borrow your friend's truck and do it on your own. Or you could pay the TaskRabbit person 50 it up for you. So cleaning TaskRabbit, that's a really great place to start. Just to get into the energy of delegation. The next thing I did was I hired a virtual assistant. This was maybe 20, 21, I think I was paying $800 a month for this person. I started out using a tool called Time, etc. I ended up stopping using that tool after a few months just because they only use virtual assistants that are in America and are college educated. And that's really expensive. So you don't need that. Like you don't need someone with a college, an American college degree to be your virtual assistant. It's like, that's a little overkill anyways. But it was an agency. It was a program that I initially used, and I think I was paying six to $800 a month for. It was about $50 an hour, which is really expensive. I don't know that math. But she helped me a few hours a month. Now, the reason why I started off with an agency is because I wanted guidance. I wanted guidance of how to actually use a virtual assistant. It was a good program. I wouldn't do it now or ha or necessarily recommend it just because again, it's really expensive. And if you're gonna pay 6 to $800 a month, you might as well have someone for 20 hours a week instead of like 4 hours a week. However, it was a good place to get started. And again, I knew that the tasks I was delegating, it would've been faster if I did them myself. But I knew that I was investing, almost like doing a course. Like I was investing and understanding how to do it and getting comfortable doing it. After I had a virtual assistant, I hired an operations lead who's now my COO. I basically just made a LinkedIn post. She reached out. Actually, I also did the thing, you know when you're manifesting a partner and you, like, write down all of their attributes. I did that with her. I was like, I want someone who's analytical who can help me with this and this. And I didn't even know that it was called operations. I just made a LinkedIn post of like, this is what I need and what I'm looking for and. And then I hired her literally the next day. I think I was paying $2,000 a month when we first started. Now I'm paying closer to like 100k a year to work with her. So we've definitely increased and increased and increased and it's been like the best investment ever. I would say you can start working with an operations person for maybe $1,000 a month for a few different things or like $100 an hour for consultation type stuff. But that was definitely helpful. I hired was a brand manager, which is somebody that did my brand deals. I've gone through three agencies now over the past five years. My first agency was like very lifestyle focused. It was a huge agency. It was just like honestly kind of random, I don't know. Second agency, really great. It was a place called Elizabeth Talent that's here in Austin. They're kind of lifestyle focused, but they work with a lot of other creators. That was a really, really good experience. I worked with them for like two years and, and now I work with Smooth Media, which is a B2B career type focused agency. And it's been a really great experience as well. But a brand manager has been great. Typically they're going to take 20% of your brand deals now. It's worth it for me. I've made so much more money having a brand manager than doing it on my own. But 20% is standard if you have a lot of leverage. And exclusivity is standard, meaning even if you get inbound or you have negotiate brand deals yourself, they get 20%. This can be negotiated. I personally have like all my agencies have done like 20% exclusive. But that isn't necessarily what everybody does. If you have leverage for any reason, you can absolutely negotiate that percentage. You can negotiate exclusivity, like all these things you can negotiate and everybody does a little bit different. But that's pretty much standard. After I got a brand manager, I hired social media support. I use Elevate. I tagged them a lot on social media. They're really awesome and they help me create content, repurpose content, use ManyChat. They really help me align my offers and my launches with social. So if I'm putting out a post, they're gonna be adding the calls to action to it, et cetera. They're really like the. I think there's like feminine and masculine energies of content creation and they're really like the masculine energy, like knowing that posts are going to go out every single week at these times, they're going to lead back to this funnel, et cetera. Next person I hired was podcast support. So like podcast editor. Next person I hired was a house manager, which is someone that does my like returns and errands and laundry and takes my dog to the vet and stuff like that. Then I hired sales support. This is the most recent. I got setters and closers and hired a sales consultant building on a sales team. Then a video editor. I have someone that helps me edit my brand deal videos and then an additional va. So that's my whole team. That's kind of like the who I've hired over the past five years now. How do you know when it's time to hire? I would hire sooner than later. Like even if you don't have your own thing, even if you're in a full time job, I would still invest 100, $200 a month into having somebody do admin personal stuff for your life. Like, I wish I would have hired a virtual assistant when I was making $50,000 a year. Like, to be honest, instead of spending that $50 on some other random thing I don't need, I wish I would have invested it into my career. But I would definitely read the book, buy back your time. We should all be millionaires. And then the hard work myth. Those are three really great books to see if you're ready to start to hire or hire a virtual assistant. And then a question that comes up a lot is like, what if I don't have the money? Again, you do. Okay, you like, I'm sorry, but you do. You can pay. You can spend $16 a month. Okay, let's say you have someone that's $8 an hour that you're that's helping you on a two hour project. You can spare $16. Okay, if you're watching this video, you can spare $16. Truly you can. It is so incredibly accessible to have a virtual assistant and if you truly, truly cannot. There are so many free AI virtual assistant tools as well where you can delegate to a bot that has a little bit more of a learning curve, but it's still a form of delegation or delegate for free trade something. Maybe you're really analytical, but you hate creativity. Find a creative friend and do a little trade or swap and practice delegating that way. Also practice delegating to your partner. Stop doing everything yourself. Other ways you know that it's time to hire one doing math around your hourly rate. So figure out what your time is worth per hour. So if you make $100,000 a year, that's about $50 an hour. If something costs less than $50, it's best to delegate it, especially if it would cost $10 an hour to do. Delegate that. Basically, any task that pays less than your hourly number, like admin scheduling, connection requests, editing, should go to somebody else, unless it's something you really love to do. Okay. Also, you want to hire before you're desperate, not after. A lot of people wait until they are in a desperate drowning situation to hire, which means they hire in a panic and it doesn't work and it's a bad match. So, again, this is not just about how much time can I save? It's like, how can you develop that skill and get really comfortable with it before you even need it? Okay, next, let's talk virtual assistants. Virtual assistant, I think, is the easiest, best, first hire. First of all, it is mandatory. Like, it is mandatory if you want to build a great personal brand and a really big impactful personal brand. I just, I'm surrounded by a ton of impactful personal brand humans, and I have never, ever met a single person in all of creator history or learned from a single person that has had a massive impact without delegating something to a virtual assistant. All of your expanders delegate, 100% of them. Like, it is mandatory, mandatory. And virtual assistant is the easiest way to start delegating affordably. Like, it can be overwhelming to hire an operations consultant. It can be a lot of money to hire a sales consultant or whatever, a virtual assistant. Again, you can start hiring someone easily for $100 a month. Now, again, there's a huge range, but it is so incredibly accessible. It's also the perfect way to learn the skill of delegation. And again, 100% of major content creators that are making a big impact in the world have one. It is impossible to grow without one, which is why I don't know why more creators don't talk about this, which is why I'm doing this whole episode. Because everyone has a virtual assistant, but nobody talks about it or makes posts about it. So I think a lot of people that are aspiring content creators or are aspiring to build their personal brand are like, how does this person have so much time in the day? You know that fucking quote that's like, you have the same amount of time in the day as Beyonce. That is not true. Beyonce has hundreds of hours in her day. And you have 24 Beyonce delegates. Okay. So again, how I started, I started using Time, et cetera. It's a virtual assistant company with US based assistants. It's definitely more expensive, it was a good experience and it's something that you definitely are going to invest more in. The second thing I did was use upwork and referrals. I would give this like a 5 out of 10. Okay. The problem with upwork, I do love upwork. I've used them multiple times. I've had great projects from upwork. I currently have a great virtual assistant, one of them who is from upwork. Okay. I can. I think it's a great place to start. And also you might have to go through a few iterations on upwork. You might have to go through a couple of people, spend a little bit more money to really find the person that fits with you. Sometimes it's going to be a slam dunk, sometimes it's going to take a little bit of time and that's normal. I don't want you to try upwork and be like, this person wasn't a perfect fit, therefore it doesn't work. You're. You're probably going to have to go through a few people and that's normal. Just because the pool on upwork is so big and anybody can apply. Like there's not a ton of filters of keeping people off the platform. It's not super curated. Like anybody can make a listing now. You can obviously see like reviews and you can see what they specialize in, etc. But it's not as curated as going through an agency. What I'm using now is this agency called Nexus Point and it's a virtual assistant agency with offshore assistance. So it's a lot less expensive than other things that I've used before. It's really great. They have a curated list of people. So it's a little bit different than another like a marketplace to where Nexus Point is only going to bring on people that are like, have a lot of virtual assistant experience. So that's something else. You definitely want to get someone that has experience doing it so they can kind of guide you rather than you having to micromanage them. So I've had some people ask, like, why would I go with an agency over upwork or like a marketplace. Again, agencies are typically more curated and then they're also not going to charge you if it's not the right fit. So if you find somebody on your own and it doesn't work out after a month, you might be out 500 or a thousand dollars or $2,000. If you go through an agency, most agencies are going to have the ability to swap out virtual assistants for free until you get to the one that you like. Like there's not going to be a monetary docking of that. And then again it's a lot more curated, so it just saves you time in getting to a more qualified person. Something else I like about agencies is that a lot of times they will coach you and how to best use your virtual assistant. So they might have resources, courses, consultants built into the program that can help guide you in how to best utilize them. Other places to find virtual assistants is referrals from friends. This is 10 out of 10. This is what I would recommend as top, top way to find a virtual assistant. However, this is really hard. When somebody finds a good virtual assistant, they're not going to tell you they're going to gatekeep it. Okay? They're going to gatekeep this person because they don't want their virtual assistant to be like distracted and not focus on them. Listen, people love to un gatekeep and give referrals to things, but when it comes to virtual assistants, for some reason they're like, hell, nah, this is my secret sauce. I'm not giving this to you. If you can find somebody who will actually give you a good referral of somebody that they've worked with. Amazing. For example, there is a virtual assistant I worked with. She was incredible. She helped me do brand outreach when I got my new agency. My new agency does brand outreach, so I didn't really have to do brand outreach anymore. So I didn't need to work with her anymore. And I referred her to a friend and now that friend is using her and absolutely loves her. And that was a really great referral. But again, most people are probably gonna gatekeep. I'm personally, this is like one thing I'm gonna gatekeep. If I'm still working with them, I'm gatekeeping my virtual assistants, especially since they work full time for me. So again, options. We've got Nexus Point, an agency that I would highly recommend. That's what I'm using right now. We've got upwork. It might take a few reps to get it right, but upwork is definitely the standard for a marketplace of virtual assistants referrals or your network. Amazing. That is 10 out of 10. If you can get that. I would prioritize that. Another place that a lot of people in my comments have mentioned is called Fresh os I've never used them, but I did make a couple of posts about virtual assistants and this was actually a pretty common comment. People being like, you should also recommend or try fresh os. I can't recommend them personally because I haven't used them. But again, a lot of my commenters recommended them and not just like bot comments. Like, these are people that I knew. Okay, I have the sneakiest cheat code on how to find virtual assistants or people to delegate to. A friend of mine, Victoria, she gave me this cheat code and it is so genius. So what you're going to do is you're going to go find a course that specializes in what you're looking for and you're going to poach the students. For example, Victoria wanted a notion consultant expert. Like, she wanted somebody to come in, organize her notion, create workflows in her notion, make it really beautiful. So what Victoria did is she paid $500 to go to a notions builder course cohort thing where you would learn how to be the best freelancer for notion consulting. Victoria didn't take the course. She didn't give a fuck about the course. She signed up and paid the 500 for the course because she wanted access to the student list. So as this six week course was going along, she was looking out for what students were most involved, what students were the best, what students had the best homework, what students were the most excited to be there and asking for the most feedback. And whatever students were best, she hired them on. Which I think is so genius because again, she's essentially just paying like a 500 placement fee for the perfect person. Oh, placement fees. Also something we should talk about. Some companies use placement fees, some companies don't. I actually haven't worked with anybody that has used a placement fee before. That's also something though, I know you can negotiate. So if you are working with someone that charges a placement fee to get you the right person, you can negotiate that off in like a sales call. Okay, now that we've been through my delegating journey, my virtual assistant journey, where to start finding people to delegate to? Let's talk about some limiting beliefs that might come up. Limiting belief number one, this was huge for me. I don't want to be a diva. I don't want to be a diva. Oh my gosh. I remember that feeling so deeply watching somebody clean my house and I'm like, I don't want to be a fucking diva. I can do this on my own. I like, I feel so diva. I still feel this, this is a cringe monster. That comes up a lot for me. But delegation is not about feeling important. You get to focus on protecting your energy of work that only you can do. Again, I am not a cleaning professional. I did not dedicate my career to cleaning. I don't like cleaning. It's not something I'm great at and it's not something I'm going to change the world with. If I want to change the world, I get to focus on my unique strengths. Like you have this ceiling when you're working alone and you cannot further your mission or your impact without delegating. So again, I just to get over the diva, I'm like, well, is am I gonna make a massive impact from helping people build personal brands and grow autonomy for themselves or am I gonna make a massive impact from cleaning? Okay, let's be real. My passion is helping people build autonomy from their personal brand. Next, limiting belief. I can't afford to delegate. Yes, you can. So let's start with free. If you want to delegate for free, do a little tradesies. Do a trade with a friend. Okay? Now you can also maybe pay $10 an hour for five hours a month. That is $50 a month. I guarantee you, you are spending $50 a month right now on some stupid shit that you don't need. Maybe like a pair of shoes from Target. Maybe it's going out and drinking with your friends. Maybe it's three old subscriptions that you don't use anymore. That if you were to cancel it, then you would have that money again. You can start delegating. With $0, you can do some trades, but I promise you have the money. And again, this is going to pay dividends in the future. Next, limiting belief. I don't have enough work for a virtual assistant. That's okay. You don't have to hire someone for 40 hours a week or even 20 hours a week. A lot of people start with just two to five hours a month just to start getting it going, just to be in the energy of it again. I didn't need my house clean that day. I just wanted to be in the energy of delegating, feel how it felt, get my nervous system used to it. Next, limiting belief. I should be able to do this myself. Yeah, you probably can. You probably can do that thing yourself. That is not the question. The question is if you should and are you actually getting it done. Are you? Probably not. Like, it is so much better for something to be done and complete 80% as good as you would do it than not to be complete at all this one is probably the number one fear that comes up. It'll take longer to explain it than to just do it. And that's true the first time. It's gonna take you a lot longer to explain the task than to actually do it yourself. You are gonna spend an hour making a SOP or creating a meeting where you're gonna walk somebody through how you do things. And you could have finished that task in 10 minutes. The thing is, those 10 minutes add up over time. You do this thing for 10 minutes a day. Yes. It's gonna take you an hour to figure out how to train somebody on this, and you might have to spend another 30 minutes giving feedback. But again, if you're doing a task for 10 minutes a day, every single day for five years, obviously spending an hour, an hour and a half upfront is going to save you so much time in the long run. Okay, I don't have anything big enough to hand off yet. This is also pretty common. Start with the small stuff. Okay? A dozen five minute tasks can easily become an hour of your day. And those little tasks create this, like, mental clutter that keeps you from doing your best work. Oh, this one I had a content club member tell me a few weeks ago, I'll hire a VA when I get big enough or when I'm successful enough. Somebody told me recently, well, Courtney, once I'm as big as you, I'll hire a va. I'm like, honey, I would not have got this big if it wasn't for a VA and if it wasn't for operations and if it wasn't for social media support and video editing support and all these other things I've delegated, I would not be here. Okay? You don't delegate when you get big. Delegating is how you get big. Okay? If I delegate, I lose control of the quality. Okay? I'm just going to be real with you. Usually when you delegate, it's going to be done 80 to 90% of what you could do it at. And that's okay. You got to be okay with that. Now, once you start delegating to specialists. So if I'm delegating to like a sales specialist or operations specialist, they're going to do it a lot better than me because again, my expertise is not that. Same with the cleaning example. Like, even though I'm like, I could do it better myself, that's probably my ego talking. This woman cleans 40 hours a week for the last 20 years. She's obviously more of an expert than me. Yes, Maybe I want my pillows this way instead of that way, whatever. But she can do it better. So, yes, there's gonna be some people that cannot do it as good as you, but still having something done 80 to 90% of the way is better than it not being done and it being at 0%. And then you probably actually can't do it as good as this person. It's probably just your ego wanting to feel important because this person has spent their entire career figuring out this expertise that you don't have. Because in delegation, like, we get to keep the things that we love and we get to keep the things that are our zone of genius. Okay, I need to have it all figured out before I hand it off. You do not need perfect systems to get started. Oftentimes, getting a VA is what helps you figure out. This is also, again, why I recommend hiring an experienced VA or an agency that can kind of guide you through those resources. I'll also put, like, all these links in the chat of the agency that I use, all the other things that I recommended and the books I recommended, et cetera. Oh, this one is good. It's too personal to ask somebody for help. Oh, my God. Some of the things I've delegated are so personal. But you can set boundaries wherever you want. You can have people only help on certain things. You can have people only help on more public or visible things. You get to set those boundaries. I really struggle with that at first. I'm like, oh, my God, you're going to be in my email and you're going to judge me. Or I had to, like, justify things. I'm like, well, the reason why this is this way is because this big, entire drama situation happened. And that's why blah, blah, blah, like, it is quite intimate to delegate, but you get to set the boundaries and you get to slowly share or slowly grow in that vulnerability. You don't have to do it all at once. Okay. Another one is, I'm gonna waste money. This is the last fear. Yeah, you're gonna waste money. You will. There's a quote. I don't know who said it, but it's like, if you want to make $100,000, you're gonna waste 10,000. If you want to make a million dollars, you're going to waste 100k. If you want to make $10 million, you're going to waste a million. There is this tax that's like the tax of mistakes or iteration or wasting. Personally, I don't think it's wasted because you learned from It. But yeah, I mean, if you want to make a massive impact, there is the waste that comes with it. You're going to hire someone and it's not going to work out. You are going to forget that you had this tool and never use it. You are going to sign up for something or you're going to hire a consultant or delegate something and they're going to end up sucking and you don't get that money back. But that's okay. That's part of this. It's inevitable. It's not. Oh. If it's going to happen or not. It's absolutely going to happen. You just get to decide how you're going to react to that. But know that that is extremely common and extremely. Okay, so you're going to waste money. Yeah, that is part of it. However, it's going to save you so much money in the long run. Okay, so next, what should I delegate? So really there's two types of tasks. There's recurring tasks and ad hoc tasks. So recurring tasks are the things that you do every day or every week. So that's check your email, check Slack, send these monthly invoices, send your LinkedIn connection requests, respond to comments, etc. Then there's or like scheduling someone to come on a podcast, whatever. And then there's the ad hoc one. So ad hoc ones are just like things that are coming up kind of randomly. They're not recurring. So some. I'm going to go through some recommendations for work and personal in these categories so you can start to get ideas of what you can start to delegate. One of the easiest things to start to delegate is your LinkedIn, especially your LinkedIn connections and LinkedIn messages. And LinkedIn comments like, this is easy peasy to delegate. So make a list of all of the people that you want to be connected with on LinkedIn. So these are the people like, if you want to speak at more conferences, maybe you're going to add conference organizers as connections. If you want to get brand deals, you're going to go and you're going to add brand managers as connections and invoad some marketing managers. If you want to get a job, you're going to go add recruiters on LinkedIn. So you are going to make a list of the types of people you want to see your content and be connected with. Give that to a virtual assistant, and the virtual assistant is going to send those connection requests for you. And then also checking your LinkedIn messages so you don't have to check them. And commenting and liking on both your posts and other people's posts is a great virtual assistant task. Other Recommendation Tasks Brand Deal Outreach Again I used to have a dedicated virtual assistant that would just do brand deal outreach, but now my agency does it. So brand deal outreach. Just make a list of the brands or the types of brands that you want to work with, have a template and give it to your virtual assistant. And they can send out 10 emails a day to brands that you want to work with. So cold outreach is great. Managing comments managing DMs, keeping track of expenses Invoices One of my other favorite ways to use a virtual assistant is chasing invoices and making sure invoices were paid. Oh my gosh, how much money do you think the world has lost from invoice chasing or like not getting paid on time? It is pretty crazy. So to have somebody else have maybe a spreadsheet or a tracker of okay, you got paid by this person on this date, or this person's payment plan is complete, or this brand paid you, or the person you're freelancing for paid you is really helpful. Scheduling calls or managing your calendar. Super, super helpful to have a virtual assistant do that. For example, today I am not feeling great and I noticed there was just too much on my calendar. So I can text my virtual assistant and be like, hey, can you reschedule X meeting and Y podcast? And so she immediately goes and starts coordinating with the person to reschedule. That way I don't even need to worry about about it. And then scheduling calls too. Of course you can use like a calendly link or Google Calendar to schedule calls, but sometimes it gets a bit more complicated. So having a human help you is really helpful. Managing her email inbox the very first thing that I have assistance help with is managing my email inbox. If anything is urgent or needs me, she'll just text me and be like, hey, this person is asking this question and I'll just like respond with a voice memo. Oh, here's the answer. Instead of having to like go in, blah blah blah blah blah. The thing is, you probably have patterns in your email inboxes. Like my email inbox has pretty consistent patterns of coordination and scheduling for speaking or podcasts, et cetera. People requesting things of me, people having questions like typically you start to see the patterns, the questions are the same, the things that you are coordinating are the same, and it becomes pretty predictable. And then pitching yourself for things like speaking, podcasts, et cetera is really great to have a virtual assistant do. Again, like having A template where it's like, maybe your goal is to get on 10 podcasts this year, having a template and having a list of podcasts that your virtual assistant is reaching out to every single day. And then once you get one of those deals, they're coordinating it and setting it up. So pitching yourself, amazing. Also pitching yourself for like, speaking. Speaking applications, that's also really great. Pitching yourself to clients too. I have delegation support in my DMs that outreaches to people that are really good fit to like, come on my webinar or do a challenge and they will go in and like, message them for me. Some personal things that you can do. Scheduling appointments. So if I'm like, my hair is looking a little ratty, I need a blowout next week before my podcast recording day, I can ask my virtual assistant to schedule that Disputes. Okay, so I bought a stroller from the Nordstrom anniversary sale and it charged me twice. Guess what? I'm not going to be on the phone with customer service for Nordstrom for an hour. I'm going to delegate that. Travel is a really good one too. So booking flights, not just booking flights, but like your flight gets delayed, it gets canceled, you have to reroute through a different airport and your baggage is lost. Like to have somebody take care of that for you and take care of the sitting on the phone, very helpful. The other day I was charged 300 instead of $30 for parking. So have my virtual assistant help, call the parking company and like, get my money back. Personal paperwork. A lot of things are on pregnancy, like insurance stuff. There's so many forms you have to fill out. My virtual assistant knows all my information, so I just send all the forms to her and she fills them out again. You don't have to get that personal. It's just helpful for me. Pet or kids admin. Not my virtual assistant, but my house manager make sure that my pets are taken care of. So make sure that they go to the vet as much as they should, are up to date, like on their vaccines, that they have their flea and tick medication this many days a week, that their nails are trimmed, that they have a bath, you know, every other week. That's super, super helpful. And then travel admin, again, that is incredibly helpful. Even having someone that has like, your loyalty numbers to the different airlines and they can use your points in these ways, et cetera. By the way, a friend of Min launched a course for virtual assistants about points and like, how they can best use credit card points and stuff. So I'll see If I can put that in the. In the show notes, too. All right. I have a delegation exit, like a SOP example. SOP is standard operating procedure, and it's essentially just a document where you guide people through your. You guide the person you're delegating through the task. So in this example. And I'll link this, like, obviously. See, it's kind of hard to show you as I'm talking, but I'll link an example. Standard operating procedure. So it's really just a document. You give it to the virtual assistant or the person you're delegating to, and it says the task. The task is actually, I'm going to open it right now and read you through it. Okay. The task is to send LinkedIn connection request. Then I usually have a purpose on the task. Like, why is this important? Why am I even doing this? And then it's an overview of the task. So your task as my virtual assistant is to send a connection request to 50 people per week. It talks a little bit about my target audience, how to find them, and then weekly reporting. It says, text me at the end of the week with my current LinkedIn connection number and log these numbers in a spreadsheet so we can see how it's growing over time. So again, I have the purpose, like, why connecting with people is important. An overview of the task step by step. So it says, Open LinkedIn. Click on the people bar, type in these types of words, Send a connection request requests. Don't click the Follow button and add this to a spreadsheet. Other ways to improve your SOPs. I really like the tool Tango. So Tango will follow like your cursor as you're working. Like, you can turn on Tango and it's going to follow your workflow. So it's gonna say, click here, click there, whatever, and it's gonna give like a SOP or tutorial to your assistant. And they can even guide you. So they like, this tutorial is like an interactive tutorial that's like, now click on this button on Link. Now click this. Tango is really helpful, especially for complicated tasks. And then I also like Loom. So you can use Loom to record your screen and record yourself talking in your screen. So I could also use something like Loom to say, here's what I'm doing, here's why I'm clicking this, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now let's talk about some delegation methods. So first, this is the delegation method that I use. It's called the one thing a day method. So you basically Just delegate one task per day. That's all. This is very much using the the One thing book framework. You guys hear me talk about the One thing book all the time. I love it. Mainly my One Thing for the last couple years has been posting every day, but there was a year where my one thing was to delegate one thing every single day. This is a really good method if you have a lot of fear or cringe around delegation. So all you do, you wake up, you say, what can I delegate today? Delegate one tiny thing until you get into the habit and the energy of it. So again, this gets you comfortable with the feeling of not being the one doing the task. And it's small enough that nothing like catastrophic can happen from this. Okay, next way to delegate next methodology is the I don't like it rule. Make a list of everything that you don't like doing the tasks that you avoid, the tasks that you procrastinate on, or the task that you dread. Just brain dump it and then document them and start delegating. The next strategy is the do it three times delegate it rule. So anything that you've done three plus times, you can document it and you can delegate it because that's when it becomes a repetitive task. Then asking your AI, so asking Claude or ChatGPT, based on what you know about me, what should I be delegating? That is a great question to ask your AI friends, or as a friend of mine calls it, Silicon God brain. Something I do about once a quarter is I will time track everything I'm doing in the day. I'm like, 8:00am, open my Slack, respond to this person, blah, blah, blah, blah blah. 9am, check my Instagram messages, respond to this customer service inquiry, check on my messages from my cohort, respond like I'm just going through minute by minute, every single thing I'm doing during the day. And then I put that document into AI and I say, what should I be delegating? So yeah, those are some ways, some strategies to start delegating. Some other notes is you don't have to delegate directly forever. So I don't directly manage my VA right now. My operations lead, my COO manages the va. So it's not something you necessarily have to do forever. But again, it's a really important skill to start. And then it's mandatory. Like I want to reiterate how mandatory delegating is. It's mandatory. Start delegating today. Like, true. Like after you put down this podcast, go ask your partner to do something or go ask your kid to help you with something or ask a friend for a trade or go hire someone to do something. Like, it is mandatory. And just some questions that you guys submitted to me. One, what should you expect at different price points? So to me, I'm personally not going to pay someone less than like $10 an hour just because I want people to be like, in abundance. Some people are going to say, oh, you can pay this person $5 an hour. That is true in some countries. Yes, you can pay people. But I don't know. I'm. I'm going to start this at $10 an hour because that's what I start my VAs at. Okay, so $10 an hour. They're probably a little bit of a beginner. They might need some handholding, but that's pretty standard on like an offshore VA. Where to start? $20 an hour. This is either gonna be a really experienced offshore VA or this is gonna be a more entry level level US or Canada based VA. $30 an hour. You're delegating something for $30 an hour. that point they should be guiding and consulting you and they should be leading the conversations, not really the other way around. And once you get into 50 an hour, that's when it becomes like an operations type role. And then how much should you expect to pay somebody for a VA? So you should expect to pay between 50 to $5,000 a month for a VA. And actually you're not going to pay $5,000 a month for a single person. That's like maybe if you have two. So one singular VA full time. Yeah, probably going to be between 50 and 3,000amonth. Maybe 3,500 at the top. Top. Personally, I paid anywhere between 500 and 2500amonth for a VA so it's accessible. Again, you can find somebody that you can pay $10 an hour, they can work for you 10 hours a month. Like it can be accessible. You can do this right now. You can afford this if you're listening to this. So again, you get what you pay for. Somebody that is super, super cheap, is probably more of a beginner. And if you have the bandwidth to train a little bit, that's great. Personally, I just like working with people who are already tr. That's again, why really the gold mine of this is finding a friend that will give you a referral. Because if you have a friend that's really successful and doing great and they have a VA that they have trained, oh my gosh, that is a gold mine because you don't have to train them. They're trained in this other person's style. Okay. And then some good workflow tips to start working together. 1. Start a Slack channel of tasks. You can also do this on a spreadsheet. But I just like doing this on a Slack channel. I just have a Slack channel and every time I have a task I pop in the Slack channel. So something I put in the Slack channel today was, hey, can you cancel this membership? Easy peasy. Then you can mark each task as like recurring or ad hoc. So you're putting tasks in Slack or a spreadsheet. You want to really be clear if this is like a one time task or a recurring task. If it's a recurring task, make that clear. Is this something you're going to do every week or every month, et cetera, etc? Also recommend making a loom video or a tango for every recurring task. So you can also have Claude turn that into an sop. It's helpful to have an SOP for every task, especially recurring tasks. Like again, I gave the example of sending LinkedIn connection requests so they can go back and they can see that and they can go step by step on how to do the task. Yeah, and that's pretty much all of my tips. Tips. Okay. That's all my tips for virtual assistant, slash, delegating. Again, I put all of this into a document, including sample SOPs that you can copy and take for yourself. And I also have a bunch of different ways that my virtual assistants and people on my team support me. So this is gonna be a free document. It's gonna be in the show notes. It has links to literally everything how to find one. I even got some special like discounts and referral links for y', all, so feel free to use those again. They'll be in the show notes. And I am so excited for your delegation journey. All right, guys, that's all for today. I will see you guys next week. I do have an ask for you guys before we go. If this podcast has benefited you in any way, if you have gotten a tip that you've really loved and you've implemented it, if it's given you some sort of inspiration, if it's given you some sort of motivation or clarity, my ask is that you leave a five star review. I would appreciate it so much. It has helps spread the message, it really helps the show grow and it helps more people get access to this information. My deepest desire is on gatekeeping. Shit. I want to un gatekeep information so anybody that desires to build a personal brand, to build a business, to create this success in their life and to live their dream. I want them to have all of the information, and I don't hold shit back on this show. Okay? We are not holding shit back. Back. So in order to get this message to more people, in order to get these resources and tips to more people, your reviews go a long way. I appreciate you so much. Thank you.