Let’s talk about assistance. I don’t have an in-person personal assistant, although I do have help from my wife who’s very, very good with that stuff. So I must acknowledge that. But I do have a team. I’ve got a team, there’s seven people in my team. So for some people, that sounds like a lot of people, because you know, I’m just a bloke kicking around in board shorts and a T-shirt, working 15 hours a week. So seven people sounds like this huge indulgence for a micro business. Like, I’m a super tiny business, like a one to two-million-dollar-a-year business. And I’ve got a team of seven. My team of seven are all in the Philippines. They’re all virtual. They are amazing. And they’ve been with me for up to 11 years now.
My team have been with me in the long run. At one point, we had 65 people in the business. But I sold my SEO business, and I sold my website business. So a lot of the team went with that. When I had 65 people, I did have one person in my team who was my sort of virtual personal assistant. And I had six department managers at that time because we had different product silos. And I said to each of the leaders, when I speak to my assistant, and she speaks to you, then she is me. Okay? Because I just needed to get some space. I couldn’t have these six or seven direct reports when I’m trying to also run, you know, do podcasts and coach people. So I just dealt mostly with this person. And this person dealt with the lead. So I’ve had one point of contact, and that really made it easy.
Now that I’ve got seven people and they’ve been with me for so long, I don’t need a virtual personal assistant. Fortunately, my virtual personal assistant actually moved to Australia, had a baby and became an accountant, I think. So good progression for her. It was such a celebration to see her move on. And it was sad for me at the time that I lost my virtual personal assistant. But at the same time as my business model changed, I now have a great relationship with my little team. We meet once a week for about 12 minutes. And we just communicate on Slack back and forth, mostly in group chats by channel. So we have a channel for content. We have a channel for website, we have a channel for support, we have a channel for our regular sort of daily update of activities and news, you know, days off or things that we’re doing, etc. That’s basically it.
And most people now because they’re quite established, they know what they’re supposed to do. I know what I’m supposed to do. Things that I have to do get put in a scheduler, whether I’m doing a call, whether I’m doing a podcast, it’s in the scheduler, and otherwise, then it just basically won’t get done. I will ask my team members to chase me up or let me know, or give me alerts. I’ll say, Listen, if we’ve got less than six podcasts lined up, can you please let me know? And they’ll let me know. They’ll send me things to check for approval from time to time in the for-approval channel. And I might comment there, but if I don’t, it gets published anyway, that’s our rule. So I’m no longer the bottleneck.
So the short answer is, I’m pretty low on the personal assistant level, but I’m really high on my team level who are super capable, and mostly autonomous now. And that comes with time. It’s taken me years and years to refine that and learn that and get to that point. But I would say, as soon as your business hits several $100,000, you should absolutely get a virtual assistant in the Philippines. I’m more than happy to recommend my own business. My wife and I have a business called VisionFind.com. That is where you will find a perfect support assistant in the Philippines, who’s going to just become the glove to your hand. They will learn your business from scratch. And they’ll start to take on tasks as you teach them and they’re very good at support. They’re really good at research and assisting you. Anything that can be done on the computer can probably be done by a team in the Philippines.
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