Okay. So I am so excited to introduce our guest who is sitting in Zimbabwe very late at night. Thank you. Thank you, Thembi so it’s what 10:00 PM for you? Yes, it’s exactly 10:00 PM right now. Yes. And it’s exactly 6:00 AM for me in Brisbane, Australia. Most viewers of this video inside the Thrive! Membership are in the U S and Canada.
So, amazing world. Amazing technology. Now, let me just introduce you Thembi. For anybody who doesn’t know her, I met Thembi a few years ago when I joined a community, a conference and community in the U S. You often hear me talk about doing all nighters Thembi not only belongs to that community, but when I first went to a conference, she gave this incredible speech and she won spokesperson of the year.
That was my first venture into launch club Thembi. I was just blown away. So having, founded an NGO in Vietnam and worked with people who face incredible challenges, everything Thembi is doing is just absolutely amazing. So Thembi actually takes women who are living in Zimbabwe in very challenging circumstances with very limited opportunity.
And I know , from my work in Vietnam, that opportunity is so rare and Thembi trains them, and teaches them how to become VA’s. Because Thembi is also an entrepreneur and she knows the struggles that we have when it comes to tech and systems. And so it’s like this beautiful marriage, you know, bringing the two together.
So most people, or all people in the Thrive! Community and in my community are actually entrepreneurs and they need help, but many people hire VA’s and it’s just so problematic because we don’t know what we don’t know. And we’re very lucky because Thembi has stayed up way past her bedtime to enlighten us.
She’s going to share with us, how to prepare . Which I didn’t know. And I must say, I’ve worked with VAs for a number of years, and it’s been so challenging on both ends at times. I really wish I’d have known this five years ago. You know, how to actually hire the right VA’s, how to prepare for a VA.
So I’m really excited. So now Thembi also has a gift for you at the end, which I will give you the link. Her organization is called Virtual Staff on Demand. Is that right? Yes. Yes. And, we will give you a link and all the rest of it, and Thembi’s here to help. So please welcome the wonderful Thembi.
Thank you. Thank you so much, Alison, for having me and for waking up this early to, to have me as well. And I’m so excited to share. Let me know if I have to just jump in. Yep. Yes. Well, I think the first thing is most entrepreneurs, I believe, and I’ve been working with business owners face-to-face, hands-on for at least 10 years.
Most of them don’t get help when they need it. They leave it far too long, they get caught up in the trenches of running the business. And oftentimes when I’m coaching and mentoring business owners, I’ll say “you need to get help”. And I believe one of the best things they can do is hire a VA to do like, I don’t, I’m prolific on social media.
I write so that it’s in my voice. I don’t do any of the image creation. I don’t do any of the scheduling. I don’t do any of the posting. That all happens while I’d work on growing my business. And I think a lot of business owners don’t even know where to start. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. And, do you know, it’s not even just where to start.
It’s maybe, they have started and they’ve had the frustrations along the way, where you’ve hired somebody and it wasn’t a good fit. We started implementing this in our organization also because of that. Because yes, we’re big company, but we’re not perfect. We’re hiring the wrong fit and we’re matching clients with the wrong fit person.
And I started realizing something, Alison, which I started doing testing, sort of, for our clients to see who they are, really. To understand who they are in their working style, before I could match them with their VA. Because, I think one of the things we just assume as entrepreneurs is that you’re just going to get somebody on Upwork or wherever you get them, there’s just going to be magic and your problems are going to be solved.
It actually doesn’t work that way. And certainly as entrepreneurs, we try to get somebody who’s like us. Who looks exactly like us, who acts exactly like us. And who talks exactly like us. And I think that’s a disaster right there. So I want to share something.
So basically as human beings, we are born with actually, there’s a study, which was started like 2 million people were starting this and, um, we are born with four things.
Four, of these traits are the analytical mind, the creative mind, the operational mind and the relationship mind. And as we grow up because of conditioning, that happens to us, you know, our parents telling us stuff, we start losing some of these things and this study, which was done, it showed that only 4% of the world have all four of them.
96% of us only have a few. You could have two, you could have three, but we don’t have all of these. And what I have found is entrepreneurs. We’re innovative, we’re strategic, we’re future focused or thinking of the future. But when we’re hiring, we don’t analyze and see who are we attracting.
Instead, we try to find somebody who is just like us, the creative person and the relationship person. And that’s where disaster happens. So, as you are hiring. As you are thinking of hiring. You want somebody who’s strong in the analytical and the operational part. I made this mistake for so many years where I was hiring somebody who was exactly like me, because they sounded like me.
They, were me. I needed a mini Thembi. And those mini Thembis went and started their own companies, because that’s what mini Thembis do. So I wanted to share this kind of, just to get started to say, as you’re hiring, for your audience listening right now. This is new. I never used to teach it before.
And I started teaching when I started realizing when we were hiring and started using this, we started getting better results. You want to ask people like basically even a survey or something, just something that’s going to make you find out. Are they analytical? Are they operational? Are they complimenting your skills?
Obviously, if your skills at this side, you want somebody who’s going to compliment you this side, or if your skills are across, or maybe you have all four skills, but I’m sure you are weak somewhere. You’re not orderly. So you want to ask them, and interview them, based on these things.
Like fact finding questions, just to see if they’re a fact finder. If they, are orderly, you can even do Kolbe Test. Just to see where they are and it will tell you if they’re a fact finder, high fact finder, because most entrepreneurs, we’re not. We just want to do, do, do. I guess it’s the same if you’re not creative. You know, if you’re very organized and systemized and everything, but you’re not creative. Get a VA. You know, if you get really frustrated, trying to come up with those images and things like that, but you get a VA. That’s so interesting. So you test both the business owner and the VA?
We started doing that. We never used to do that before. And we’re realizing, and do you know what happened with us was, we’d have a VA and they’d work with client A and client A would be so happy, in love that VA, and maybe, let’s say something happens with client A or maybe client, A switches or upgrades, and they can’t work with that VA.
We take the same VA and we’ll give her to client B, and client B just is not happy. Client B just thinks this is a wrong match. This person doesn’t know what they’re doing. And I started wondering. I’m like, this is weird because this VA, Client A was bragging about her. And now client B is like, this is not working.
It’s just a wreck. And so I started saying, so what is the difference? And I didn’t come up with this research. This is one of my mentors actually, who came up with, as I was sharing this. And she is part of this research team, or they did it long time ago and she shared this with me. And so I started using that.
I started using, we have an assessment tool now. Where when somebody is coming to work with us, we basically just want to know who they are and we match them with somebody who’s exactly the opposite of that. That is so good. And that’s going to impact the success that people will have with the VA, because I know many people, I say you need, “you know, you need to get some help, get somebody to do, the more drudge work, hire a VA.”
They say, I’ve tried, the VA just didn’t work and I could never get them. That’s obviously part of the problem. So when it comes to actually preparing to hire a VA, what do you recommend?
Yeah, I think a lot of people, when we want to hire staff whether it’s a VA or a project manager, or whatever. We have all these ideas in our head, and we just want to take them, and we just want to dump them..
We don’t even know how long it’s going to take, especially with a VA, because you want to know how long it’s going to take you just go and just hire somebody and, they spend 20 hours doing a task or whatever it is. So what, the first thing I recommend is. If it’s something that you always do and that you do daily, start tracking it.
So, I like to use the app Time Doctor, where basically I am tracking everything, whether it’s checking my emails, whether it’s doing a lead magnet, whether it’s creating a graphic, I’m tracking it using Time Doctor, it’s free. Time doctor is free. Well, maybe it’s $10.
First of all, to see how long it takes me to do that task. And second of all, to see how organized I am with my time. Because, how do you hire and get help when you don’t know what help you need? You need to know what you need to help with first. So can you use Time Doctor? I don’t know that app, so that’s great to hear.
So , if I hired a VA, can I use Time Doctor to map out how long it takes them to do a task? Yes. Yes, we , all our VA’s. So what I used to do when I first started, I don’t do this anymore, but I still track my time using Time Doctor. I basically used to track how long it took me to do a landing page. Like, sitting down. And I’ll say, okay, four hours. Okay. So if I’m hiring my VA, I’m expecting them to take eight hours, because it’s their first time. Right? So when they take 20 hours, I’m like what happened? This took me four hours, it can’t take you five times more. And so I’m tracking my time and seeing that. And now with our VA’s internally, we actually track time.
And we’ve noticed that when we started tracking time, the productivity increased. Even though we don’t pay our VA’s hourly, we pay them monthly. We track every single thing. And so that it gives us a baseline. We know how long it takes for a lead magnet. We know how long it takes for a funnel. We know how long it takes for a graphic to be done, and your VA can actually be tracking their time.
And I honestly recommend Time Doctor to every entrepreneur, whether you’re paying hourly or monthly. It’s good for you to have that baseline. Also, uh, it’s good for you to also have that, um, that discipline to know how long things are taking you. That’s so good. Thembi when, like a few years ago I ran a full team in our office.
One of the things I would do, particularly as our admin team grew, I would do, we used to call it a “work plan.” I think it was. And they would just track every half hour what they were working on. And from there I’d make procedures and things like that. But what I did find was really good. Some people would take ages on something and then I chat to them and I’d say, well, why did that take so long?
You know, out of 10, how much did you enjoy doing. Like two, I really don’t like doing that. So I would give that to somebody who enjoyed it and that really increased productivity. Exactly. Because it, so it also tells you the job satisfaction rates of your staff as well. So Time Doctor is really a great idea.
It takes screenshots. One other thing with Time Doctor, it takes screenshots as you’re working. So you can program it as the owner so it’s going to take screenshots every five minutes, or every three minutes, or every hour. However long you want it to take. And that gives you a baseline to say, okay, this is where this person is spending more time.
They’re spending more time when they are writing copy. Or they are spending more time when they’re designing. So it’s kind of just gives you that baseline. Yeah. And so you can even do the same thing, give people the same tasks and monitor how. Yes.. That’s really good. Yes. So if I’m preparing to hire a VA and I’ve used Time Doctor to track what I’m doing .
So you track your time. So you now know your baseline. It’s going to take four hours for them to do a landing page. And then the next thing you want to do is you want to create an SOP. And of course, this happens if you know what you are doing. If you don’t that’s okay, you will have your VA do it for you, but you want to create an SOP.
Why do you want to create some SOP? That way, it’s easier to give instructions because one of the things is, we have this idea in our mind and we write it or we post it and we text. Things which are written and not the same as things which are verbalized, like the way you write things and the way you say things are different.
So if you’re doing an SOP, so what I do is you record a video. We can even use zoom and you basically are recording your steps as you go. So this is how I check my email every morning, I wake up, I check this email. If this is like this, I put it in this folder. If this is like this, I put it in that folder, and you are giving your step-by-step instruction.
It sounds like it takes a long time, but you’d be surprised. It’s the same thing you are doing anyways. You might as well just do an SOP . I always say business without an SOP is really not a business. Because, when you’re going to go sell your business, you need standard operating procedures..
So why not create just standard operating procedures asyou are hiring a new person and tell them this is how I want it done that way. When that person leaves, you’re not worried about retraining, another person, you’re just giving them that video. This is how you check my emails, watch the video, follow step-by-step.
So the next thing after, you know how long it takes, use the time. You use that the loom or zoom, just check, just hit record, share screen, record, and just that going step by step to show people how you can do it. Great. Now I do that and I put that inside of a Asana with the link. Exactly. That’s where we keep our SOP’s.
If it means, even if anybody’s away, it’s so easy for somebody else to step in and do that, they’re just following. So, that of course is going to make it a whole lot easier for your new VA because they can see exactly what you want.
Ask your VA to record themselves as they’re doing the task .That way, because what if something happens to your VA? What, what if something bad happens to them? God forbid. You want to have something so that you can just follow that step-by-step procedure.
Yes. I also use Otter. And so I’ll often just turn that on and I’ll talk to it. Okay. So now I’m opening this page and then I’ll open PowerPoint. Now I’m getting an image and I’m pulling that in. And then at the end of it Otter has transcribed the whole lot. There’s the audio recording, but there’s also the transcript.
So you’ve then got the written step by step, instructions too. I think. Spending a lot of time in Vietnam, there was an enormous cultural difference. So I had a whole team over there and there, they don’t show initiative because that’s quite disrespectful. In their culture, they are told what to do and so they expect the detailed guidance. And I found that that really helps with a VA. Or do you think that VA’s can take projects and run with them and show initiative?
You know, it’s very cultural. I have been trying to train my VAs to take the project and run with it. And actually we have, and I’ve noticed that we do have a small subset of those who can do that, but most of them need the guidance.
That’s why we have like a support supervisory situation in a way the supervisors are the ones who are telling them what to do, and kind of helping them, guiding them. Most people really, I find it, they’re waiting for instructions. They’re waiting for you to tell them what to do.
But you’ll have one or two shooting stars who are like, you know what, I’m taking this, I’m jumping with it and they’re telling you what to do as the entrepreneur. But I think it’s our responsibility for our businesses to be the one taking the lead and encourage that VA to come up with ideas. Because one of the things which when you are a VA and you have somebody who’s employing you, you are thinking there are, I don’t know if it’s, this is right, what to use, but you’re thinking they are so smart and so brilliant.
You can’t bring ideas to them. Like there’s nothing, you know, they are your boss. And so I think it’s important for you as an entrepreneur to encourage your VA’s, to come up with ideas, to bring them to you, to encourage them to go and research for you and bring stuff to you so that they can grow. And some of it is not even researching.
They already know it, but they have this thought that, who am I to tell her what to do. She’s paying me every week. Yeah. Disrespectful. Right. And what about, you know, engagement with the staff? Do you, if you hire a VA, is it better if you just like communicate via Asana or do you recommend that they have regular Zoom meetings?
You know, I have found that’s what his worked for us and the clients who seem to be happy are the ones who usually have regular calls with their VAs. So we recommend that you have a weekly call with your VA for us in our situation, Slack and Asana, we use slack within our organization, Slack and Asana are good.
But, there are some things that get really miscommunicated with this whole, whole online thing. Like online is great, but it’s not great. You know, things get missed along the way. So I always encourage you to have a call weekly call with your VA. Just to say, “Hey, let’s catch up. What has happened, and how can we improve this, and how can we change this?”
Because, when we didn’t have that, we used to not have calls, things would go for so long without even , like nobody catching. The VA is thinking, she is aware. And the client is thinking, oh, she is aware. And it ends up being this whole gap of no communication whatsoever. So now , we actually are encouraging and we email clients to say, try to have those weekly calls with them.
That’s where we can keep that momentum going. Yeah. And of course the other thing also with the weekly calls, which I have found. We used to have the client, we used to do daily calls. And I remember when we did a case study for this client, one of the things he told me was there’s no way his business would be at six figures if he didn’t have our VA’s.
But if you also didn’t have to have the calls because every morning he’d be thinking, okay, What am I going to talk to her about today? What am I going to give her today as an assignment? Because we get lazy. We get complacent. We naturally. Life gets in the way. And we found that those people, those clients who haven’t really done the whole follow up with the VA’s and the whole calls. Sometimes they don’t submit anything.
They’ll go for weeks or months without submitting. And you’re following up, like, “Hey, are you okay? Do you need help? Do you need us to do anything?” But when you have the calls with your VA every week, or even every other day, you are thinking, okay, “what am I going to give her? I have to give her something like, what am I going to give her today?”
And that increases productivity. And I remember this client came to us with no business. Within a few months was at six figures. And he says, the only way is because every morning, if they thought, what am I going to talk to her about? So he had to come up with stuff that needed to be done. Yeah. And of course, if you’re using Time Doctor, then you’ve got things to talk about. Exactly. Because you can see where there’s gaps in her time. Yeah. Gosh, that’s so interesting. And Thembi, how much does it cost for a VA? Because I know that’s a question people have asked me to ask.
So it depends. I have to say it depends on where you get them. Um, I’m going to say, if you are getting a VA, most of them are going to charge you hourly and it’s not, obviously it’s not cheap. If it’s hourly. We do packages. We do a monthly. So we have like a standard package, which basically you’re kind of getting about 20 hours a week. Plus, or minus, depending on how much you’re submitting.
And that’s $497 for us. And if you are getting a full-time VA, this is somebody who’s kind of going out of their way. It’s not just a full-time VA working, but they also went out of their way kind of just researching and doing stuff for you and just seeing how they can edge into your business. That’s $1197.
Wow. And I have to say, we call our VA’s, VA’s right now, but technically they’re digital marketing techies. Because we do lots of funnels, lots of integrations, lots of digital marketing background, social media graphics, and all that stuff. But we are in the process of rebranding. So yeah, so it’s, it’s for us, it’s $1197 for a regular VA and it’s $497 for the standard VA.
Wow. And both of them are 20 hours? No, $1197’s are full-time VA. For a full-time VA. Wow, that is so reasonable. We expect you to give them full time work. It doesn’t happen. Sometimes we have clients who don’t even submit stuff and we’re like chasing them to do that, which is okay. It doesn’t matter because our VA’s get paid monthly. And so, but it’s really a full-time VA. And how do you go working with time zones?
We, most of our clients are based in north America and the UK. The UK, no problem. Because they’re kind of in the same timezone as Europe, I should say we’re kind of in the same time zone with north America, the worst we have is Hawaii, which is like 12 hours, I think.
However, most of them are like nine hours and below and six hours. So what happens is usually a client will submit work, go to bed. Like right now, they submit the work and we wake up in the morning, we started working on it. By the time the client wakes up, our goal is to give them an update, depending on if it’s like a fast task or it takes longer, or we give them an update.
So when they wake up, they see an update or something at least. And so for them, it’s like, okay, now they can give us feedback if they want or something like that. And, we found that. Which works very well for our clients in north America. They like it because they’re like, oh, I go to bed and I wake up and my things are done. The fairies have been here!
Yeah. It’s done while I sleep. And as you mentioned that your VA’s are actually digital techies. Can you tell me more about that? Yeah. So, as I said, we’re in the process of rebranding, when we started, I said VAs, but you know, when you think of a VA, a VA does emails, they check emails, they get more like a secretary.
We don’t do that. We train them to work on funnels, on digital. So, we use Kartra, Kajabi, Infusionsoft, click funnels, Ontraport, Active campaign, all those applications. Like, right now, for example, we have a VA who went into an Active campaign and they’re basically taking and creating some automations for a client.
They could be doing some, graphics, social media graphics, that’s the other thing. Like the client will give us a blog post, and they just create social media graphics, and they’re posting them on different platforms. Or they could be doing like, funnels for a launch.
Somebody can say, I’m launching this week and we create the pages, the email sequence and all that stuff. We do not do copy. We just do the hardware , we don’t do the software. We just do the technical stuff. Somebody could come and say, I need some Zap integrations. We do that. So it’s mainly tech, the tech stuff involved in your marketing.
Yeah. So if I was to say to you, for example, I’m getting a little bit excited here. So if I was planning a launch, I’ve got a 15 email sequence here. And I have Active Campaign and I have Kajabi. Yes. So if I give you what I’m going to say. I give you a word document or Google document. Here’s my emails.
So we just put in your emails in Active Campaign and we integrate them with, oh, you use Kajabi. We integrate them. Well, if you want automation, obviously you’d let us know. But sometimes the VA would ask and say, “Hey, do you want us to create an abandon cart sequence? Do you want us to do this automation for you?”
So we’ll create it. We’ll put those emails inside of Active Campaign and program them so that they go at the time you want them to go? Wow. So if I was to say to you, okay, I have the lead magnet. I’ve got the page in Kajabi, the lead magnets doing really well. I’ve got an email sequence and everything else.
I’ve now created another lead magnet. And I want this funnel for it. Yeah, you will just do it? Yes. we’ll do the funnel . Yes. So the Kajabi pages will be done. Email sequence will be done. Everything will be set up in my Active Campaign account. So it just goes out. Yes, of course. You’ll have to test it and check it.
Like right now, the client we have, the one I’m telling you about is in Active Campaign and click funnels.
And this person does six figure, basically six figure months. They have a seven figure business and they had no automation whatsoever. So they came to us and they’re like, I have no automation. Can you just go in and just check what’s going on? So basically the VA went in, she has implemented abandoned cart sequence. She has implemented automations, so that when a person attends a webinar, they get a reminder email or they don’t get a reminder email or whatever. So basically she has sorted all the automations. What this client came to us and said was I need, I just, I feel like there’s something missing. I am doing seven figures, but it’s not really set up.
So the VA went in and basically just fixed and cleaned up. Wow. And that client has increased his revenue.
So if I was to say, I’ve done a webinar and I’ve done a webinar funnel, but I’m now going to run a new webinar funnel campaign. Okay. Here is my email copy. You know, for the sequences and I just tweaked the whole last sequence and I send it to you in a document.
And I say, this is the last webinar. And here’s the copy for this webinar? Will they create like slide decks? We don’t specialize in Slidedecks much. We haven’t done that a lot . We actually, it’s funny you’re saying this because we actually just started testing this out with my webinar, which I did last week and I said, I need it redone.
And I say, can you please create slide decks for me? So I can’t guarantee that something like that would be done perfectly when it comes to Slidedecks. We’re not really experts in PowerPoint. We have never done that. Unless if you have an SOP, because some people have come to us with an SOP and say, this is exactly what I want and we just follow your SOP.
Yes. See, I do, I have SOP for that. It’s the same slide in PowerPoint. It just needs a new title and a few new images and the colors. Well then that’s, easier. We have a client who basically does webinars every week and they send us their PowerPoint slide and they say, can you move this image? Slide number one needs to go to five slide number, kind of move it around and all that stuff. And we do that.
And then you’d automate all of those emails that are automated in the funnel. That would be completely done. So I could send you a document with all the email copy and I wouldn’t need to go inside Active Campaign.
No, no. I think that’s actually where our specialty is going into those campaigns, into those automations, and just putting stuff for you. That’s what we trained them in. Yeah. Yep. And so the, and that could be the same with like, as you said, the abandoned cart. Wow. That’s as long as you’ve got the email sequence.
Yeah. Yeah. Fantastic. We’ve got Sharon here too. Do you have a question, Sharon?
I’m just writing. I’m getting lots of ideas here because we’re going to be scaling up a bit and the whole thing, you know, creating courses. The actual webinar things is the easy part. It’s all the other stuff that you just don’t want to do. And, that sounds like a dream come true because I need to redo my email sequences and, I mean, it’s like, oh my gosh, there’s just so many pieces to a new anything, and then even your old anythings. They need to be updated from time to time. So, yeah, it’s really interesting. So did I understand you to say I understood the $497 for, roughly 20 hours, $1197 a month? Full-time? Okay. Just wanted to get clear on that one. I’m thinking out a little bit.
Yeah, I must say the idea of just handing over the copy and not having to go inside Active Campaign at all. And it happens while you sleep. Yeah. That’s what I love. And then the automations too. I mean, it’s just one more thing you don’t have to do. And I know you have to do a final test, but if somebody else could do all that and then you could say check it out.
Yes. So like I have the Thrive! Membership, so I do a masterclass each month and then, some sort of training that I put into the online library and I usually record that through Zoom and then what I do is I’ll cut it up and put it into smaller pieces and load it up into Kajabi. Your VA’s could do all that for me?
Yeah. Yes. We could do that. We actually do that for one of our clients. You do things like YouTube videos? We do, but we don’t, we have one gal, who is a specialist in video editing.
She just give birth to a baby girl yesterday. So, right now we do not have anybody, but this skill-based cause we didn’t have a lot of requests for video editing. So we really only had one gal and. She had trained somewhere to do this whole video thing , so that’s really what she does, but the cuts, the chop, you know, the chop this in and chop that video editing we can do.
Things like introductions, you know, if you’ve got the same introduction . Yes. That we do. Podcast editing, we do that. And then you can just chop it in and chop at the end and add your intro and make it blow smoke.
Any other big tips you have Thembi?
Yeah, one other thing which I want to share and I know a lot of us, we trust and it’s good to trust people. It’s good to have this trust factor. But I think it’s also important to protect yourself while you’re trusting your VA.
And one of the ways I do that is obviously through Last Pass, which is a password sharing app. And I encourage every entrepreneur, always look into Last Pass and say, how can I protect myself as I’m working with this person? And how can I really be safe with that? And we mentioned the things like Asana and Slack. Just having a professional communication, you know?
Yeah. It’s so easy to just send an email, a quick email and say, “Hey, do this,” but it’s so hard to track emails when you go back and try to track everything. It’s so hard. So try to always use something like Asana. Which is a project management. That’s where you can see where your project is, what happened.
She said, you said, she said, you said, and you have that track record. And if it’s slack is communicating, just so that you have something that’s professional, which you can use. So things like that, um, as you’re hiring and honestly, you know, Allison, it’s so easy to say, oh,
I’m just gonna do it. I’m, just going to go in Active Campaign and just write an email. But what happens is you’re only taking 10 minutes. That’s 10 minutes ends up being, yes 10 minutes, but it ends up taking you from the zone. If you know what I mean? Like you, you just take some time and you’re like, oh, it’s only 10 minutes, but it’s 10 minutes out of your zone of genius.
And I think it’s important as entrepreneurs to really pay attention to what we do in our zone of genius, to how we utilize our time, creating our zone of genius. Because most of the times we end up spending all these hours, all these years thinking we’re saving. Yet, we are just wasting so much money and so much time because when you look at it, I’ll just give an example.
If you were to hire one of our VA’s at $1197. If you divide that by 160 hours. Yeah. So that’s yeah, that’s $7.40 an hour. Is it worth it for you to spend an hour doing a $7.40 work? I think that’s one question you should ask yourself.
I found, when I started to just really track my own time the amount and, you know, I can get caught up in the details. I’m a bit of a data geek and, I like things to look, right. So I’ll just tweak this. I’ll just tweak. I’ll just tweak. And so I would spend time putting together social media posts.
That image doesn’t match that, the colors are actually wrong, is that the font that I want? I’m terrible. . In that way I can get caught up in the details. I shouldn’t even think about that anymore. So I’m going to be questioning myself. It should be about a new product I’m creating. Yes. Not about which posts I’m going to post on social media.
I think it’s one of the biggest stumbling blocks. And I think it’s one of the things that entrepreneurs do too late, way too late. Yeah. One of the things my mentor say, Jeff Walker’s also your mentor too. He said, one of his biggest regret in business, was not hiring early enough.
Yes. And I think we do not hire early enough with the idea that we’re going to try and figure this out by ourselves and the time you waste trying to figure out things on your own. It could be the time you have made so many products. It it’s so, so true, you know, and it’s one of those “Oh, by the time I train them and all the rest of it…” I always said to people, you’ve only got to do that once.
You know, anything worth doing twice deserves a system. So exactly short system and procedure in place they’ll come in and just take the headache. I mean, I mentioned to you that I’ve been ill. Well, I took a week off. I was in the hospital. And other than I sent one email at the end of the week because I like my emails to be in my voice. I did nothing. Anybody who is on any of my platforms would never have known. My VA had posts scheduled and organized. Business keeps ticking over. So it really is such an investment. You know, in actually getting and growing your business.
So, I have one question before we go, Thembi, do your people know Convert Kit as well?
Yes, we do. So Convert Kit, Kajabi? Yes. How many of the platforms do your VA’s know? We’ve been learning as we go. We know most of them. And one thing which I have realized with these platforms is most of them, they are just the same. Honestly, they’re just similar, but we know most of them, the one which we don’t really, we have never used is Memberium.
We’ve never used Memberium. Infusionsoft, we used to struggle with it. We ended up having to invest in the training for Infusion Soft so that we could get it because we used to get quite a few clients, wanted us to do Infusion Soft. So that’s one of those, but the ones which people are familiar with, like Convert Kit, Active Campaign, Lead Pages, Kajabi, Aweber, Kartra, you know, those ones, which most people use Ontraport.
We use them and we have learned them, some of them, as we go with the clients coming to us. Great. But, I mean, if you’re building funnels, then you’ve got all the main ones. So let me ask you a question. Do you believe, like I’ve got Kajabi and I have Active Campaign.
I’ve also got WordPress, but I use that more just for my blog. I’ve had a long time, but Kajabi and active campaign really that’s where my funnels are. Do you think that business owners should also invest in something like Lead Pages? Or do you think they can do it just as well with Kajabi pages? Not if you’ve got Kajabi because Kajabi, I mean, lead pages has beautiful pages than Kajabi,
I have to say. But what I have found is Kajabi is not that bad. The only thing which I don’t like with Kajabi is their email system. So I’m glad you have campaign email system. What I have found with these tools is these are not true. No matter how they tell you all, this is an all-in-one, you can just do it all.
Something that’s going to be lacking and it ends up being so time consuming. And so not worth it to end up having five or six different programs, trying to get all the, all-in-one. I love Kajabi. The membership site is beautiful. It’s clean. It’s just so pretty. You can’t compare with their membership site, but when it comes to their pages, they are lacking in terms of, their pages compared to Lead Pages.
But not to the extent where your conversions rates are like that down in the dumps. So really it ends up coming back to the conversion, right. Clients with good Kajabi and their page is converted 60%. Why would you move to lead pages? Yeah. Great. So, yes, I actually used Kajabi email for a short time.
I went from Aweber to Kajabi and my deliverability went through the floor. It really dropped. So I then went to Active Campaign, which picked things up a bit. But that’s so wonderful to know. So I think we’re done. That was fantastic. So much great information. Now I’ll also put the links to your site under the video once it’s posted up.
The website link, which we will add other websites. Yes. the website. It’s virtualstaffondemand.com/
Okay. Oh, great. So it’s affiliate too. So there’s a bonus. I’m always saying to members, you know, build affiliate relationships, with things that you believe in wholeheartedly.
Well, I’m excited to learn more about this Thembi. Thank you so, so much for your time. And thank you, but 11 o’clock at night there now it’s almost eleven. Like my brain has officially shut down at four hours. Well, somebody with a closed mind for the last three hours, you’ve been amazing. Thank you Thembi.