The Business of Virtual Assistants

Matt Watson

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matt watson very excited to be joined by Tyler Leber today who's one of the co-founders and ceo of Coconut VA they provide virtual assistance in the philippines which is really interesting to me because at Full Scale we provide software development in the philippines so it'll be fun to talk about what it's like to hire remotely and global talent what it's like to have a business like that which has its own unique challenges to it but also like to learn from tyler when should we hire a virtual assistant what kinds of things do they do a lot of times you know you hear about that you see weird ads on facebook or linkedin or whatever about hiring va so love to get some tips from him about how we could leverage va especially as other you know startup founders entrepreneurs busy business people like how they could help us do different things so before we get started do remind you about my company fullscale fullscale.io if you need to hire software developers front end mobile back in qa whatever we can help you with all the

things check us out at fullscale.io well tyler i think we need to meet in the philippines the next time we meet like

Tyler Leber

that we need to cross paths there yeah that's a great idea yeah it sounds like we're both just there in april so yeah

Matt Watson

we should have met then so you know you you told me that you have about 100 employees in the philippines yep yep correct

Matt Watson

so you started this about three years ago how in the world did you you get into this? Yeah. And I have my own crazy story of that. How did you get into this? Yeah, everybody's got their own crazy story about it.

Tyler Leber

So for us, we, so my original co-founder, we actually started a company previous to this, right out of college, we created a market research company. We basically told other startups if they had a good idea or not, if they could actually go to market with their idea. And we used virtual assistants pretty heavily in that company.

So, So, you know, obviously helping us on kind of more of an executive assistant side of things, but also running the reports and a lot of the analysis on the back end. And in that company, we had quite a few clients ask us like, hey, where did you find that person? Like, they did an amazing job on this.

Like, how did you find those people? And so we kept hearing that, you know, kind of throughout the life of that company, we ended up selling that company and we were kind of looking for our next idea. And our minds went back to that, you know, back to those questions.

So we started doing some testing, doing some customer surveys and found, you know, kind of a niche there where we could, you know, offer amazing benefits, amazing pay to people in the Philippines. And we could find them amazing jobs here in the U.S. working remotely. And we kind of, again, kind of stumbled into it.

It just really went very seamlessly right into Coconut.

Matt Watson

Well, it's, you know, if you can find really good talent and they do a really good job, people love it. People want more. they give you referrals all that stuff like that's the key to business is referrals right so to your point like hey we had great luck with these people and everybody else is interested and that that's actually how Full Scale started i needed to hire 10 software developers there you go for my own company and a lot of people said hey matt if that works really well for you how can i how can i take advantage of this and then we hired like 100 people in the first year wow it it took off like like crazy.

That's amazing. So you start this in, say, you know, summer of 2021. Before then, had you ever been there? No, no, I had never been there. Yeah, I'm here in Arizona.

And we actually started when we were up in Utah.

Tyler Leber

So a lot of people would ask us, like, did you serve your mission, your LDS mission over in the Philippines? But no, neither of us had ever visited the Philippines before we started it. So you start the business in 2021. When was the the first time you went there?

The first time I went there was actually this past April, which is pretty crazy. Yeah. Three years later. About three, almost three years later was when I first visited my co-founder, original co-founder, Eric Espinosa. He actually visited the year prior to meet some of our internal team.

It didn't work out for me. You know, I had a, just had a baby fairly recently. And so, yeah, it didn't work out for me, but he was able to visit a year earlier.

Matt Watson

So tell us, what is it like to start a business in another country? Yeah. So I went through this, but I'm curious, what is your take on like, okay, how do you create a bank account? How do you start a company?

Like, how do you do all the things? Like, what was your experience with that, like, international man of business, you know? Yeah, yeah, no, it is.

Tyler Leber

It's tricky. And I mean, we're still navigating it still, you know, complicated things are always changing, adjusting. You can always be doing things better. So, you know, in the very early days, it was a lot of online research. But luckily, again, we kind of had our foot in the door with that first company.

We we found some amazing people there in the Philippines. And so they were really able to answer a lot of the questions that we had. So, of course, you know, I had some experience running a business here in the U. That side of it went pretty smooth, pretty quick.

But yeah, then everything being compliant and all the legal tax related stuff in the Philippines, we really had to lean on the people that we already knew there. And yeah, so it's tricky. But if you have the right connections, if you know the right people, it can be a lot easier.

Matt Watson

here but our struggle when we first started is we're like hey we need an office space we need to hire like 20 people yeah but before you can do any of that you have to you know create a you know kind of like an ein number in the united states right you need to get your like federal tax id right yeah well problem there back then this was 2018 that was a slow process like you don't just like go online and submit a form and get it the next day or whatever kind of like states so you know technically we weren't supposed to do any of that we were paying our employees employees basically via like PayPal or something then, cause we couldn't do payroll and all this stuff the right way, but we managed to get like an office.

And of course the BIR, which is the same as the IRS here was actually across the street from us. And at some point in time they had came by and saw that we were operating and they're like, well, why aren't you, you know, you're not licensed to do this, blah, blah, blah. And, and we're like, Hey, we filled out all this stuff.

We're just waiting for you guys to, you know, approve it all. And of course the guy's like well i can help you take care of that yeah uh wink wink wink and of course we're like yeah that'd be great could you take care of that thank you now go away right right no we're not gonna pay you for this we're not gonna pay some ransom for this dude just go back to your office across the street and approve our stuff please right right do you ever have any of those weird moments over there yet no luckily we haven't had anything quite like that

Tyler Leber

yet no it's again it's been fairly smooth for us i i can definitely see that happening but uh no luckily for us it's

Matt Watson

been fairly smooth yeah there there seems to be this culture of fixers like you want your driver's license you can wait in line for four hours or you pay this guy like 20 bucks and he'll do it for you like there's that seems like that's a very common thing there yeah one of my brother one of my brother-in-laws there got his driver's license and had never driven a car once in his entire life but got his driver's license because you could just pay somebody to do it for you like like yeah that's crazy interesting things what other kind of i'm curious what other kind of weird business stuff have you ran into with like operating a business there or just you know you live in the united states and just operating an international business in general like

Tyler Leber

they're 8 000 miles away right yeah i mean there's there's a ton of different aspects to obviously just culturally and just the way they live is is quite a bit different than where we live here in the u.s And so navigating all that and even navigating just, I guess, like financial or like benefit, you know, expectations. So one thing that we knew we found out early on is about this 13th month pay thing.

So basically at the end of the year, you know, your VAs or your employees in the Philippines, they get like an extra month of salary. And that was so novel, weird to us. Like, what are you talking about?

That's so weird. You know, we just have never heard of that. So little things like that that we just didn't expect. And then even like the things that people in the Philippines just appreciate on the benefit side of things.

Like they they just prioritize things maybe differently than people here in the U.S. Like one of the things that we're we're toying with right now is the idea of like a pet stipend to help you take care of your pet. Because I swear, like, I don't know, I should run the numbers one day.

But most of our internal team, they have not just one dog or one cat, like they have nine cats or they have 10 dogs, you know, many pets in their house. And so to kind of help them take care of those plus four roosters. Don't forget the roosters.

Yeah. And so, you know, little things like that that you just have to be aware of or you have to learn over time to really like impress and delight the people that are working for you is focused on the things that they care about, you know, the things that are actually applicable to them.

Matt Watson

them. Well, it's like when you're, when the service that you provide is talent, right? Like taking care of the talent is super critical on a Full Scale. That's priority for us too, right? It's, it's figuring out, okay, how do we take care of these people?

And I'm curious, one of the things you get at scale, how do you help train, mentor the career growth of these people? Like, have you got to that stage where like, man, how do we, how do we help these people grow in their career? Like all of a sudden we have a hundred people that start, you know, you start to run into different things like that that

Tyler Leber

when you're 10 people you don't think about yeah no so true and yeah i'm one of the things is even just uh kind of how we even brand the the filipino side of our our company like we call people virtual assistants right we call our talent virtual assistants and a lot of times that makes sense to a u.s person and a lot of times that makes sense to people in the philippines but when you get to the higher paid talent the people that have been directors at a BPO company or any other company, that actually starts to become a little bit degrading, right?

They don't want to be seen as a virtual assistant. If we pitch them all these amazing benefits, above average pay, all this great stuff, that's wonderful. But if we call them a virtual assistant, yeah, the job title matters to them. Yeah, exactly. The job title matters.

Totally. And so, yeah, interesting parts about that where you have to brand it kind of differently to the client-facing side of things compared to the Filipino side of things.

Matt Watson

Well, so tell me this, when people think of virtual assistants, you know, people probably think of somebody that's helping me with my schedule or my email or whatever, or maybe helping do some data entry, planning travel, I don't know, like just all sorts of different things like that. I'd love to hear your take, like, what do your clients come to you and they want your team do?

Like, what do virtual assistants actually do? Yeah, yeah, great question.

Tyler Leber

So it is interesting because it's very customizable, which is, which is wonderful. And it's fascinating to see different use cases throughout our different clients. Like, I think one thing that people don't realize is that if you are hiring an executive assistant, or in this case, what we call a virtual assistant, which is fairly synonymous, you are hiring somebody that is, is just there to help you in whatever possible way that they can.

So yeah, a lot of times that does, you know, entail a little bit of email management, inbox management. But like one random example that I saw the other day is the CEO was wanting to basically build, do a build out in their basement. And so they tasked the VA with that, like, hey, go out, find quotes, you know, and come up with some blueprints and, you know, figure out a plan for this basement project.

Right. And so, you know, it's work and personal life. And it's literally just anything that will help the CEO focus on what they do best in the company. And sometimes that does, you know, require, you know, a few things on the personal side, or, you know, even event management.

I've been doing a pickleball networking event here in Phoenix. And so every month we'll, you know, throw a little pickleball networking event. And I've had, you know, my executive assistant or, you know, people on the team that helped me with that just because it's not something I need to be doing.

I don't have to be doing all that outreach or that planning or the venue, you know, management. That's something that it doesn't have to be me, even though I'm the face of it. I'm the person actually at the event. All of the background work doesn't have to be done by me.

Matt Watson

So do you think about all of them like their executive assistants, like most of them are working for executives or some of them, for example, are they people that are doing marketing related stuff or more like accounting and payroll or data entry or actually doing like customer support, product support, chat support? Like, do you help do all these different things or how do you think about this?

Yeah, it's very tricky. I'm sure you've run into it maybe just a little bit.

Tyler Leber

it i know you're doing more of the dev side but for us the virtual assistant term is like i'd say it could mean all of those things yeah it could mean all of those things but most people think of it oh like that's a personal assistant but yeah we've always been able to source many different roles so one one kind of play or angle that we've been taking recently is hey let's find you an assistant but then their their mind is really opened up to like oh outsourcing does work and and I can find amazing people for less than the cost of a US person.

And so then they start to staff those other roles. So if we can find you an amazing executive assistant for 16 bucks an hour, it's going to be so much easier for you to say, oh, we have this customer service position open. Yeah, why don't we just go with Coconut for that position as well?

And that's a $12 to $14 an hour VA. Again, we call them virtual assistants, but yeah, like you said, that can be used to mean a a lot of different things.

Matt Watson

So internally, when you when you track all these people, do you really track them by like their specialization? Yeah, yeah, we do. So you think about like, I really have like five different types of virtual assistants? Or like, how do you do that?

Tyler Leber

Yeah, yeah, we've tried to really categorize it and figure out, you know, what our most commonly placed roles like executive assistant is our most commonly placed role. But then we also have like social media manager, and then even just like general admin. So not somebody that's tied to an executive, but somebody that the entire office relies on them to do all of that background work.

Sometimes that's data entries. Sometimes that's, you know, running reports, data analysis, you know, many different tasks.

Matt Watson

So one thing I probably should have asked you earlier, I already know the answer to this, but for our listeners, why the Philippines? Why is the Philippines such a popular place for virtual assistants? Yeah, no, excellent question.

Tyler Leber

So we we kind of stumbled in into the Philippines, you know, again, when we were at that first company. But we started Coconut and very intentionally chose the Philippines because in our minds, they have just such amazing they're just amazing people in general. The work ethic is really strong. Their English proficiency is also very strong.

And then even just culturally, there are definitely, you know, unique parts about U.S. culture, Philippine culture. But there is a lot of crossover. There's a lot of overlap.

And they typically will watch, you know, a lot of the same like Netflix shows that we watch, you know, which leads to just a lot more trust and relatability. And we knew that we wanted that for our internal team. And then we knew that a lot of our clients were going to seek that, you know, if they're hiring an executive assistant to help them with their basement project or with their email, like they want to be able to relate to that person and communicate very easily with that person.

And so, yeah, definitely a few factors, but those are some of the biggest ones that I think of.

Matt Watson

I mean, they're just some of the nicest, happiest people in the world. Yeah. They're just a different breed of people. I mean, Filipinos are amazing. And their culture is so much based on respect as well and hospitality and makes them really great for a lot of these jobs because they really do a very good job.

They're very nice to work with. They're very pleasant, respectful to work with. And they just have a great work ethic. They're very good.

And, you know, for the same reason you have a lot of success with the virtual assistants, we have a lot of great success on the software development side. So we have about 300 employees that do the software development side of things. So I don't have a virtual assistant.

I don't have an executive assistant. I've never had one. Why should I get one? What should I think?

I think the problem I have is, like, I don't know what I would have them do. Yeah. Like, I can see, like, once in a while and, like, help me do this one random weird little thing or something. Right. what would I have them do? Yeah, no, that's an excellent question.

We obviously get that all the time.

Tyler Leber

We're working on a few, you know, more marketing focused, like white papers or use cases to show people like, oh, this is, you know, Taylor at this company, and this is how he uses his executive assistant. So that's one thing that we're working on right now, because that's a question that we constantly get. Of course, the baseline, that baseline functionality, I'd say is the email management, the calendar management.

But again, just all of those other admin tasks that I think every founder has on their plate that they always feel like they just, they need to complete on their own. And that's one thing that we really counsel and advise people to do is just take a week or two and write down all of the tasks and projects that you've, you know, you're completing that week and figure out which ones are you doing, you know, constantly or repeatedly repeatedly, and then figure out, okay, is that something that absolutely has to be done by me?

Or could I train somebody to do that task for me? And I think that's a it's, I don't think we have any danger of running out of business, because I think that always happens as companies and as founders are more successful, they continue to grow, they continue to take things on themselves that they don't need to be.

But it's very like subconscious. It's just, you know, I think by by, by our nature, we're just always seeking more, seeking what else can we do? How, you know, how else can we grow the company?

So I think we're always adding on and tacking on responsibilities. And so doing, you know, periodic reviews like that, like, Hey, for the past two weeks, I've been doing this, you know, LinkedIn outreach or this LinkedIn posting, you know, every day. And like, why am I still doing that?

Right. That's not something I need to be doing. And noticing that and making a loom video or some kind of training, some kind of document, and then handing that off to your virtual assistant to have them take it away and then you never have to do that again.

Matt Watson

And most of your employees all work US hours?

Tyler Leber

Yes, yeah, I'd say like 98% probably.

Matt Watson

And most people feel bad about that, but most people don't realize that's super common in the Philippines.

Tyler Leber

Right, yes, yep, correct. Yeah, often we get that question, that concern in that discovery call, but I'd say one really interesting thing that we've noticed is a lot of mothers sometimes single mothers sometimes married mothers they'll just want to to have a job to help you know contribute to the household income or their own income and so they'll work part-time and what they'll do is they'll they'll work you know in their home as a full-time mom during the day and then as soon as their kids go down that's when they can clock in yeah us hours they can work you know four hours into the evening yeah they'll have sleep work till midnight or something their time exactly yeah so still the source of income they were still able to be there for their kids.

So it's really like an excellent win-win scenario in that case. That's not all cases. Sometimes it is tough to be spending all night at work and you still have to do things the next day. But we definitely encourage and try our best to help our VAs make sure this is a sustainable schedule and not something that's going to, you know, break them down and prevent any sleep.

Matt Watson

Something else you mentioned there I think is really important uh how important these jobs are to these people it's hard for people to understand like okay i can hire a va from you for you know 12 to 18 dollars an hour or whatever like what do you pay these people minimum wage in the philippines is about a dollar an hour it's a little more than a dollar an hour yeah my sister works as a um sort of data entry virtual assistant kind of job my sister-in-law in the philippines and she makes like four or five dollars an hour yeah that is is the best job she's ever had in her entire life.

I don't want to say she would kill somebody for a job, but she would almost, that's how good of a job it is because otherwise she would make like $2 an hour or $3 an hour or something like that somewhere. Like she worked on call centers and Expedia and some other different places, which were great jobs, but they, they paid like a dollar or $2 an hour or something like that.

And the jobs that we are creating for these people are are so important to them and so viable to them and they're by far some of the best opportunities and best jobs that they will find and part of the reason i say this is it makes them so dedicated to these jobs and they want to do such a great job and it's hard to imagine like if you hired most people in the united states for like 15 an hour you're probably not getting super great people like it's like minimum wage almost at this point yeah where if you hire somebody like from you for for $15 an hour, you're going to get somebody that has a college degree that is super dedicated, loves their job.

And they are all in on making this work because you don't realize like how great of a job this is for these people and how much money they make and how much of a difference it is to their family. Yeah. Yeah. That's so true.

Tyler Leber

And, and we've really tried to do our best to make, make it even more, I guess, uh, exciting to get a job like at coconut. We have a full suite of benefits. So we even like have health care for full-time and part-time VAs.

We have that 13-month pay that we've talked about, you know, fun like milestone gifts, birthday bonuses, all of these different things that, you know, again, we know that they really value and just make it so exciting to become a Coconut VA And yeah, to your point, like we never ever want to be a predatory agency, you know, where we're charging an insane amount to the client and then paying the VA as little as we possibly can.

Like, no, like for every single job, like we are trying to be, you know, above average. We're trying to pay the VA above average and then give extremely generous benefits on top of that. And like you said, that's going to lead to a lot less churn. It leads to a lot more loyalty.

So I'd say, I think when we have any contract churn, what we calculated recently is like 3% of the time that's because the VA is leaving. Every other occasion, it's just because because the client, you know, they're doing layoffs, or they're going in a different direction, whatever it might be.

So that's really amazing, you know, that the VAs are never really leaving these jobs, because they love the job, they want to stay there as long as they can. And they're getting great experience, you know, with US companies. So yeah, I totally agree with you.

Matt Watson

So I'm curious, you have this great business, I'm sure you get a lot of referrals, a lot of word of mouth. How do you grow your business? Like, how do you do sales and marketing for a business like this?

Yeah, it's tricky.

Tyler Leber

I mean, like you said, very early in the call or on the podcast, we do have competition with, I'd say more of those like predatory agencies or with just anybody in the industry. There's a lot of people trying to advertise, trying to cold email, cold call, you know, these US founders.

And so I think after a while, anything about virtual assistants or outsourcing founders become a little bit deaf to that and I think that's why referrals are so so important in this type of a business because really just that trust building and that relationship building is the key to making any sales in this industry and that's something we've noticed so I'd say basically from day one 50 to 60 percent of our business has come from referrals and then the rest has come from content marketing so we are finding brand new people but that's only only because we've built trust and early, you know, kind of a quasi relationship with them through our content.

We've shown them that we, they can trust us and then we can, uh, you know, staff people at their company. And that's exactly what we see at Full Scale. Like, uh, the same thing.

Matt Watson

People will get emails every day from people in India, Latin America, all over the place for software development services. Don't know any of these people and they ignore all of them. Right. So best case scenario, you're another email in their inbox that they ignore. yeah it's super difficult it's it's a type of service that is sold almost entirely based on trust like if people don't trust you they're not going to do business with you and uh referrals of course is one of the best ways to do that content marketing also works really well uh that's part of the reason we do this podcast there you go um i have a newsletter at startup hustle news.com that's 30 000 people are subscribed to congrats um and we post on linkedin and and we do some some other stuff. What, what kind of content marketing do you guys do?

Tyler Leber

Yeah. I mean, so again, my original co-founder, uh, his name is Eric. And then we brought on a new co-founder recently. His name's George. Uh, all three of us have pretty consistently posted on LinkedIn.

And I'd say one of the most fascinating things to me at least is, you know, we'll post content about whatever's going on in our life or whatever, you know, struggles we're, we're encountering as, as just founders of a company, and we'll get business from that. So my classic example is sales navigator, LinkedIn sales navigator, you can, you know, kind of cold message people.

And so for a while, I really wanted to try to figure out how can I pitch VAs and get some positive replies, get some business. And, you know, I don't know the exact numbers, but I probably sent, you know, one or 2000 messages, right? And I didn't get, I don't think a single client from it, maybe one one client.

But then I started my pickleball networking, you know, group and event. And I started messaging people about that. And within like, you know, 500 messages, I had a ton of people interested in that pickleball networking event. But the fascinating thing to me was like, whereas before it was, hey, here's this amazing VA, like you would get no reply.

Now it's like, hey, here's this awesome pickleball networking event. It's like, oh, I don't really want to go to that. But can you tell me more about your VAs? And it's just so fascinating.

Like if you're really truly trying to connect and be genuine with people, they will be, you know, I think just inherently interested in what you're working in and how you might be able to help them. Yeah, I think that that's a great insight.

Matt Watson

And I mean, if you send somebody a message on LinkedIn, they may read the little message or like, ah, delete. But if it's more intriguing, they're more likely to go to your profile, they're gonna look at your profile and be like, okay, well, maybe this is a little more interesting. I'm gonna ask this guy about this Coconut VA thing.

Yeah, I think it's great. And but it's so hard to do that at scale. That's That's why you need to hire a virtual assistant to actually help do this, right?

Tyler Leber

Exactly, yes. No, and I'm sure you've done that as well, just delegated a lot of those responsibilities. But yeah, for us, right now we're trying to, another, I guess, angle we're trying to take is webinars. So, you know, every month we'll host a webinar that we're truly just trying to bring value to founders. And like you said, yeah, we have a VA on our team.

They're the ones reaching out on LinkedIn, sending out some cold emails, trying to get people to that. And again, just delivering value as best we can. How many people do you get to show up to your webinar? So we've been doing it only for a few months now.

This past one, we actually had, I think, 600 people sign up on LinkedIn. I think we had 50 to 100 people show up. So you're doing like LinkedIn Live? No, we actually just did a LinkedIn event and then sent people to Zoom.

Okay. Okay, cool.

Matt Watson

Yeah, what's the struggle is you do all these different things and even us with the podcast podcasts and newsletter, you know, all this kind of content marketing. And it's really hard to know if any of it works. You do all this stuff and you really don't know.

And somehow some of it works and you anecdotally hear stories. I hear a story about this guy's like somehow or another, I read this thing and then I ended up in your newsletter and then I listened to one of your podcast episodes. And then I went to your website and I scheduled a call, but I hear that story like once every three months you know like yeah totally and then it's just so hard it's so hard um sales and marketing is hard for every business and every business is totally totally different on how you do sales and marketing so i always love to hear how other people do sales and

Tyler Leber

marketing yes yeah definitely i think uh i think adam robinson he's he's great on linkedin he's got retention.com and rb2b yeah and i he's he's talked about that quite a bit where yeah he does i think i can't remember how many podcasts a week but he always tries to become a guest on you know know, however many podcasts a week and no, yeah, there you go.

Oh, awesome. That's exciting. He'll be on Startup Hustle. The secret's out. Oh, nice. That's exciting.

That's amazing. So yeah, there you go. You know, that's him at work and he doesn't know the direct, you know, I guess ROI, you know, or benefit from that. And he doesn't know that.

Right. And he admits that openly, but he still does it because again, that once every three months, uh, that's worth it to him.

Matt Watson

I think what I learned here is I need to start a pickleball club. Yeah, agreed. I think that's what I learned from you today.

Tyler Leber

Yeah, no, there's been a few copycats already in the area.

Matt Watson

Well, you know, speaking of that, when you guys do sales and marketing, are you doing it to all of the U.S.? Did you say you were in Arizona? Do you focus like locally or do you have customers nationwide? Yeah, we have customers nationwide.

Tyler Leber

And I would love to have more in Arizona just so I can meet them in person. But, yeah, no, we have people all throughout the U.S. And then we also actually have some international clients, the U.K. And then I think we had one in Dubai and then Australia.

So, yeah, we've had a few international clients as well. But our marketing is really focused in targeting the U.S.-based audience. Okay. Yeah. Well, very cool, man. This is a very cool business.

Matt Watson

I'm curious if you have any other tips out there for people that are thinking about, like, should I hire a VA? What would I have them do? like do you have any other tips about or like tips about like how to work with a VA and get better usage out

Tyler Leber

of them yeah great question one tip that I always give we've kind of talked about it as like a strategic vacation so one thing that I like to tell founders to try out is hey take this like strategic vacation so take three or five days where you don't bring your laptop you don't bring anything you know related to work and then you just note down all of the things that that basically break, you know, once you've come back or even before you leave, like, hey, this is the thing I'm most nervous about, or, you know, this whole list of tasks and responsibilities that would keep you from enjoying that vacation.

And then once you get back, you know, really look into that list and see, okay, yeah, this is something that's dependent on me and either try to find a way so it's not dependent on you. And that's really, I think, where the VA comes in is trying to move all of those things from that list to your VA or just to somebody else that you trust so that you can take those vacations and really enjoy them fully.

And I think that's key for founders is to not be the bottleneck in their business. And I think that's where a lot of founders struggle is that everybody is relying them for everything. And being that active, it is an active process to move those things off of your list to other people on your team.

Matt Watson

How long do you think it takes people to train an executive assistant to do that stuff? Is that like a 90 day kind of process or?

Tyler Leber

Yeah, I mean, it depends on the task, of course. But you know, we're hiring people that have I've already been an executive assistant for for a number of years. And so oftentimes, they even bring their own ideas of like, hey, I could be doing this for you, or hey, I could be doing this for you, which is really nice.

That's what I feel like a lot of the times they can kind of hit the ground running. There's a few other tasks that that you might want to build up trust, right? If there's anything on the financial side, right? Like, hey, pay these bills for me, or whatever it might be.

That takes some some time to build up the trust. And, you know, you really, really want to rely on that that person more heavily over time.

Matt Watson

Yeah, speaking of that, like how much training do you have to do you do internally for these people? Yeah, it's, it's been really nice. We honestly don't have to do much.

Tyler Leber

Um, we were considering right now coming out with more of a coconut executive assistant course so that it's a little bit standardized of like, Hey, this is the tool that we recommend, right? Like superhuman. They're amazing for email management so that you and your, you know, founder kind of partner can, can work in that.

And that's probably the most effective tool that we've seen. Uh, so we want to do something like that in the near future, but oftentimes we don't have to do a lot of training. Cause like I said, we're finding people that are just the absolute best at what they do already. Uh, and they've already had years of experience.

And so it would be really just redundant for us to train them too much.

Matt Watson

Okay. Well, I really appreciate having you on the show today. I think this is very interesting of course, cause I have, I have ties, have a similar business at Full Scale. If you need to hire software developers, you can check us out at fullscale.io. If you need to hire virtual assistants, check out Tyler's company at coconutva.com.

I love the name of it, by the the way i think the coconut part of it is funny i think that's a great great name for it okay any other final tips words of wisdom for anybody listening on no that's that's it for me i really appreciate you having me on all right well thanks everybody and uh see you on the next one