David:

[0:00] So virtual assistants have been around for a long time and definitions have changed. Many think of a VA as someone in another country who can help an administrative task at a substantially lower pay point. There's a lot of misconceptions about VAs in the industry and why they do or do not utilize a VA. And so I brought on Samantha Prestige today, who operates a U.S.-based virtual assistant company, to help explain and demystify what that is and to help. People decide if that's a good fit for your business. So, Samantha, welcome to the podcast. And to start off, tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got started in the virtual assistant business.

Samantha:

[0:43] Hi. Well, thanks so much for having me today, David. I started this kind of, it was kind of a COVID cliche of when I started. I had my first son at the end of 2019, ready to go back to work and then everything is shutting down that March. So I was blessed enough to be able to stay home with my kiddo for a few months. My husband has a good job. But a few months in, I was starting to go a little stir crazy. So I have a lot of respect to all the moms that choose to stay home full time with their children. I needed a little bit more in my day-to-day routine and looked at my skills and kind of looked at what are the needs in the market. And that's how I got introduced to the virtual assistant side of things, and I've started to build up a U.S.-based team for that so far. And it's been just an exciting journey the past four and a half years.

David:

[1:34] Very good. Yep. Someone once said necessity is the mother of learning or the mother of invention. Yeah. And it's the same way with entrepreneurs today. You have a need and you just create it and go. Very good.

Samantha:

[1:48] Yeah. It was really understanding what was going to work for the skills that I wanted to provide, the family structure I wanted and the time I wanted with my kids and what people actually needed in their business.

David:

[2:02] Sure. And all works together. Yeah. Great. Well, Samantha, this is a Christian podcast. And so we like to inspire listeners to be salt and light in this world and therefore inspire them with ideas.

David:

[2:14] So what is one way you think we can honor that you have found that we can honor God in our business.

Samantha:

[2:20] Oh, so many ways. So many ways. I was just listening. I was watching a reel of someone making a joke of they're asking God, should I be an accountant or should I go on a missionary? And the guy's like, well, why do you think the only option to be a good Christian is going, you know, on mission trips? Like God gave you a gift with numbers, go do this and shine his light as an accountant. So I think for me, there's, there are several things. One, when it comes to how I interact with my clients, that's a driving force. You know, you can see something on someone's core values on their website of how they have integrity, how they're a good person and all those things. And you don't really know that until you test it, right? And I think for me, knowing that I try my best to lead with that light and that salt and that wonderfulness and what would Jesus do, that's how I show up for my clients. If something goes wrong, I'm not going to say, okay, how can I make sure this works for me? How could I invoice the most out of the situation?

David:

[3:19] Invoice the most, yeah.

Samantha:

[3:20] Yeah, it's what's the right way to do this? And, you know, really, if I was showing my faith, how would I handle the situation? So I think that's the driving force. And of course, there's always, you can network, you can connect with different people and bring up those conversations in a way that maybe they have been introduced to, Christians that drive people away from their faith, right? Maybe they have been introduced to that, that very judgmental side of religion in their lives and to be able to show up in an unsuspecting place in business and just be like, hey, I'm a decent human being. I get you. Let's just have a conversation. I think that a lot of people appreciate that.

David:

[4:03] Yep, absolutely. Honesty, integrity, transparency, it all goes in. Yeah, people talk about, oh, you have to have all these things and like, that's like being a Christian. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah.

Samantha:

[4:18] Yeah.

David:

[4:20] So virtual assistants, it should be obvious, but what is it and why would, why would I hire a virtual assistant for me?

Samantha:

[4:28] Yeah. You know, you teed this up in the introduction of a lot of people think VAs, they think international. I think also with the rise of AI tools out there, some software has said, oh, this is the virtual assistant and it's a chat bot. It is not a real person. And so there's a lot of misconceptions. And so I would reframe it for our listeners as this is a remote fractional supporter. This is a fractional administrative assistant or office manager or executive assistant. And really what you're leveraging their support for is so that you can focus on high value tasks in your business, especially in those small businesses. If you're a solopreneur where you have a team, maybe under 10 employees, you're wearing a lot of different hats as the leader. And that's okay. You're supposed to be in all the different things as a small business owner, right? Your marketing meeting one hour and then the next minute you're in some operations meeting. That's okay. But a lot of your work is then working in the business instead of on it. You're not owning that CEO role. Maybe you don't have the budget to bring on a full-time office manager. That's okay. Let's bring someone in part-time who's going to have your back, who will be that behind the scenes supporter. So how each client leverages their VA or their fractional admin is a little bit different depending on the industry and what they want to hold on as far as like what they're responsible for. But that's the gist of it is get it off your plate so you can focus on what you like to do and what you should be doing in your business.

David:

[5:54] Okay. I know what it means because I've asked this question before, but fractional. When you say fractional person, what do you mean by that word?

Samantha:

[6:03] Yeah, a fractional person is someone who is not like a full-time person in your business. So they're coming in in some kind of part-time, sometimes temporary capacity. For our VAs, we do work with our clients long-term. We've got some clients that are like, hey, I just got a project for three to six months. Other clients, they're with us three or four years. That's cool. But yeah, fractional is going to be they're only there as a part-time person. So you'll hear this term a lot with fractional CFOs or fractional CMOs, those chief marketing officers. So they are invested in your business. They want to see you succeed. They're going to bring all their knowledge and all their skill sets to you as if they were your employee, but they're only there on a part-time basis.

David:

[6:46] Yeah, no, that makes sense. And very good. So what would be the advantage then or disadvantage of hiring somebody remotely to you versus me going on career builder or indeed and trying to hire somebody that way?

Samantha:

[7:01] Yeah, so when it comes to like interviewing people on Indeed, and you're going to get a whole bunch of people. When we post for virtual assistants, we'll get an average of 300 to 400 applicants per job post, which is not uncommon for administrative or executive assistant positions. So if you want to trust maybe whatever AI filters you have on Indeed or the job board platform, maybe you're able to filter through those resumes a little bit easier. But then you're also saying that someone has to have an awesome resume to work with you. If their resume is not up to date, then they don't get an opportunity.

Samantha:

[7:35] Right. So our team can help really filter through that and get to know these candidates and make sure that we've we can vet them on a personal scale as well. So we know, hey, they have the technical expertise, even if their resume isn't up to date. And they're also someone that we trust with certain characteristics and like they're a decent human being, they're trustworthy and all those things. We can help filter for that. And we do that for our virtual assistant team, as well as for the in-person roles that we recruit and staff for. So the biggest thing is going to be that time advantage. And also a lot of people don't know or just haven't really been trained on how to read a resume, how to interview, really how to hire and find that right fit. So sometimes then you end up hiring on your gut feeling, which if you pray a lot, maybe your gut instincts are good. So that's awesome. Maybe God is leading the right candidate to you. But a lot of times those gut instincts can maybe be swayed by a candidate that smiles a lot or happens to be from the same hometown. So you connect on one thing, but you miss all these other red flags. And so we really help to draw out those red flags and make sure you're bringing on the best person for this role.

David:

[8:44] So it'd be true to say that one of the advantages to hiring through you a virtual assistant is that you are screening people before you even say, here's three people to look at. You've already screened that all three of these would probably be a good fit for you.

Samantha:

[8:59] Yeah. We're not just saying, oh, hey, here's some people that applied and they had the best looking resume and I really liked their name and their LinkedIn. We're saying like, hey, these are people that have already been through our vetting process. Now let's have you vet them. Also, we'll help you understand how to vet them. We'll say, hey, here are some of the questions you can ask them. Let's facilitate this so you're finding the right fit. A lot of times, Our clients that we've worked with, they've hired people before that have just not worked out.

David:

[9:26] And the reason

Samantha:

[9:26] For that is because they didn't know what their expectations were until the expectations weren't met. We need to change that story and figure out what are the expectations from the beginning so we can find the right person and that you're both set up for success. So that is a huge advantage in having us as part of your hiring team.

David:

[9:44] Sure. You had mentioned earlier there's different levels of virtual assistants. What are those different levels that we can hire somebody in for?

Samantha:

[9:55] So a lot of times when you're just starting out, you're probably going to be looking for a social media manager or a bookkeeper. Sometimes people want a generalist assistant who's going to do all the things. Those are different skills for someone that's going to be expensive or categorizing your expenses and doing some of your bank reconciliations in QuickBooks versus the person that's going to be posting on your LinkedIn or engaging with your followers on Instagram. Those are different skill sets, but those are usually what you're first hiring for. And then we go a step above. We say, okay, these types of skills are really for that entry-level administrative assistant, and you don't need to be paying a high-level executive assistant for these types of tasks. So let's assign some of these tasks to just admin, office manager. These are the people that They have some great potential as far as those critical thinking and soft skills, but they don't have all of the technical expertise quite yet. They're still learning, but they can still handle all those basic admin data entry tasks that you have. Then we go into that next level of executive assistant. This is the person that's going to have that higher level critical thinking. They're strategic with you. They're really going to start to anticipate your needs. They're going to say, hey, two months ago, you said you wanted to do this. I haven't seen it on your calendar. Do you want me to block time off so you can focus on this? Right. So you have those admins and those executives and then you have the generalist that can kind of do everything kind of in between those levels. You know, I rambled a little bit with all those different examples.

David:

[11:18] No. Yeah. It's from low high to high. And yeah. So like what could you do? Like partly I need some bookkeeping and social media or making phone calls. And I also would like five hours of this over here. Could you do that as well? So we have fractional or fractional.

Samantha:

[11:36] Yeah, we have paired two VAs or multiple assistants on one account before. And that's because we do want to maximize people's budget, right? I'm not just coming in to invoice what I can invoice, like I said earlier. It's okay, what's the support that you need? And then what makes sense for your budget? Now, we do have some clients that they only want one primary point of contact. Even though we own managing them, we own training and all that stuff with the assistants, they don't want to have to deal with different people to talk to. They want one person. So, OK, that's OK. We'll have you have an executive assistant and pass some admin tasks on to them. And you're just paying that higher rate for them to do some of that lower level work. But then you have the convenience of one person. Other clients, they're OK having a team. So we'll build out that team for them.

David:

[12:24] Okay, very good.

David:

[12:28] I know there's probably a challenge of managing, leading somebody that is remote, always remote, not in the same building. So how do you hire a VA and make sure you, it's valuable, make sure you get the most out of your work instead of just paying somebody and you have no clue what they're doing?

Samantha:

[12:49] You know, a lot of our clients have never had an assistant before. So this is a very common challenge that we're helping them to solve. A few different things here. First, we do have to get a little bit used to communication, but that can look different for every client. There's some clients where I say, hey, let's do Slack. Cool. They will download Slack on their computer and their phone. I love Slack because you can do audio notes. It's so easy. For me, Slack is like the best tool, but there are other clients that are never going to want to use it. They're like, I don't want to have to sign into something else and they want to text. Cool. We'll make sure that you have an assistant that's really good at texting. Me personally, I have 200 unread text messages. I cannot text my assistant. This is bad. I even tell my clients, like, call me. I'm okay with phone calls. Old school is good sometimes. Don't text me because you won't get a response, right? That's funny.

David:

[13:42] We're all different. We're all different that way. Yeah.

Samantha:

[13:44] We all have different ways of communicating. I, you know, some people have 200 unread emails. I have maybe 10 unread emails. I prefer to be on my email. It's just what's the way that you prefer to communicate and then make sure that your assistant understands that and isn't aligned with that. The other thing we'll do though is to stagger their onboarding. So what I mean by that is going back to that fractional idea of, okay, this is someone that maybe you need them for 20 hours a week. And in that first month, we're only going to have them for 10 hours a week. And we're going to say, these are the things that they are learning and starting to do for you in this first month. And then the next month will increase their hours and here's what you need to train them on. And then by month three, now they've worked up to that full 20 hours. And that kind of staggered approach makes sure that you're not paying for time that you're not using. I would never have you start someone for 20 hours a week in their first month because you cannot train them on all the tasks to fill up that time, right? So you're just wasting money. So taking that staggered, structured approach to training and onboarding gets you used to delegating and communicating to someone. And then by month three, not only are they able to fill that time, but you're also able to communicate and delegate to them easier. You're used to having someone on your side. Now as tasks pop up and you're like, I do not want to do that. Here, Sam, you go. You know, you go do that. It becomes easier over time and we can do that.

David:

[15:10] I can vouch for that, by the way. I've tried to have other people help me. And it's something different to say, oh, this person helped me, than to also get that thought out of your head, onto paper, bring it over to them so they can communicate it, and do it how you want them to do it. That's huge. It's so huge. I'm really good, but I'm really good at motivating myself. But when I first started doing that, it's like, I'm bad. I'm really bad at that.

Samantha:

[15:40] Yeah, I think that the biggest piece of advice I give people is say, like, ideally, as the CEO, or, you know, whatever you want to call yourself in your business, ideally, as that person, what do you want to be responsible for? Right? Now, what are all the other things that you actually do? Those are the things that you want to delegate. But yeah, getting used to passing your brain off to someone is difficult. That's also why I love Slack. I travel to see some of my clients in person for some of the other work that we do. And so I'm driving a lot. And that's usually when thoughts come up in your brain, right? Because you're not distracted on your phone doing the things you're just driving. And if you're in Colorado, you know, driving in Colorado sucks and there's traffic everywhere. So there's a lot of time to think. So that's when the thoughts come up. I love Slack for that because I can just drop an audio note. And then my assistant also gets to hear my thought process, even if it's annoying. And even if I'm rambling, she gets to hear, okay, this is what Sam means. This is what she wants. This is what she's expecting. And I don't have to sit there and try to type it all out because it doesn't come across the same way. So again, I don't have an affiliate link with Slack and I should, but if you don't use it, I highly recommend using that or Teams or another platform that's similar to it.

David:

[16:50] Sure. Very good. So for you, what are some entry points into getting a VA? I mean, if it's $1,000 or $500, what's a couple entry points if somebody wanted to start?

Samantha:

[17:04] Yeah, most people are shocked to find out that we offer retainers as low as 10 hours a month, which is about two and a half hours a week. So for that administrative side, that's only $340 a month. For the higher EA side, that's about $450.

Samantha:

[17:18] Prices might change by the end of the year, but that's what they currently are with our team. And two and a half hours a month, that's a really good, or two and a half hours a week, 10 hours a month is a great entry point if you are nervous about delegating. And I think usually when people hear assistant, they think of a traditional secretary and the person that's looking at your emails and your calendars. You don't have to start there. If that feels like that's too high level of trust for someone, you don't want them to have access to your emails and see all of those things, don't start there. But let's start with maybe some CRM data entry. Let's start with, hey, you just went to all these networking events and you have 10 useless business cards, but you need to put them in HubSpot, take a picture, have your VA, put them in HubSpot, and then send them an audio note. Be like, oh, I met David. Here's two personal notes about him. They put that in HubSpot for you, right? Or looking at just kind of your client experience journey. There's a lot of administrative tasks that feel like they only take you five, 10 minutes. They don't feel like a burden, but then they add up. And then when you grow your business and you've got back-to-back client meetings, well, now you don't have those five to 10 minutes to add in notes or to do this little thing. And it's helpful to already have someone trained up on some of that by the time you're in that back-to-back growth place of your business.

David:

[18:34] No, I very much agree with that. I'm all on board. I'd love to have a virtual assistant and I think I can keep them busy for quite a bit.

Samantha:

[18:43] Yeah. You know, what's interesting is we have had people say that as well of like, oh yeah, if you give me 30 hours, I'll fill 30 hours. And going Going back to the staggering, if you can film awesome, like I don't want to diminish the confidence you have in your ability to delegate, let's do it. But a lot of times it's not, it is a little bit of a hurdle at first, even if you've had assistance before. And so you think something takes 30 hours because that's how long it takes you to do something. But if you, if you pass it on to someone who is, yeah, they're used to admin every day. They don't procrastinate on some of these tasks because that's where their zone of genius is right where maybe your zone of genius is maybe more on the social side of business or something this person's only going to take 12 hours to do it right so we've also got to kind of figure out what is your zone of genius

Samantha:

[19:30] and what's actually the appropriate amount of time for a task that's.

David:

[19:34] That's funny that's that's very true very true um So I just thought of this question I may have asked you, but philosophically, should we be hiring a VA or hiring somebody local or does it matter? What are your thoughts?

Samantha:

[19:51] Yeah. Okay. So it's interesting you threw in the word philosophically there. Maybe I am a little bit biased. I will say I do love being able to work in person sometimes. Like my mom is my ops manager, which is an amazing dynamic. But when we have our strategy meetings, she comes. She's in New Mexico. She drives up to Colorado for us to have our strategy meetings because those are the types of things I really do appreciate doing in person. We've done them virtually, but I like when they're in person. But that philosophically is an interesting kind of thing to throw into that question because, hey, if you want to support your local economy, if you never shop at Target and you shop at small business boutiques all the time, hire locally. That's your philosophy in life. That's your thing. Go for it.

Samantha:

[20:37] But there's a lot of talent across the US. There's a lot of times like we hire candidates that have been stay-at-home moms before and now they're looking for something flexible. And so there is a way to work with people remotely. Even if you do like that water cooler chat from the office, there's a way to introduce that into your remote dynamic with an assistant. So I would say just don't be closed off to it. Again, though, if you are dead set on, I want someone coming into the office. We worked with a client who we helped to recruit for this person. It was an in-person role, so they're not an assistant. But they only come into his office once a week. All of the work that they do, their entire job description can be done remotely. But he's a very high-energy visionary, which I understand you kind of have to be in the room with him to get his style. And so once a week, they do all of their virtual work in his office so they can keep that dynamic and keep that connection. That's totally fine. That's his thing. That's how he prefers to work. He's very aware of his management style. He's worked fully virtually with an assistant before. They did great work, but he didn't love it. OK, that's OK. Right. You just have to kind of be aware of what's your preference and what are you willing to sacrifice on to gain a little bit somewhere else?

David:

[21:54] Yeah, no, that's a very good answer. Thank you very much. Appreciate it.

David:

[21:58] So you've talked about a lot of neat things today. A focusing question, what is one bit of knowledge or challenge that you have to give to our audience that they could take away and take action on today? If you're going to boil it down to one, you can say two things.

Samantha:

[22:13] That's right um well the the hesitation was am i insightful enough or wise enough to give a piece of advice there but i think that the biggest thing is yeah going back to what you want your job description to be and maybe hiring and delegating isn't a possibility for you even at just that 10 hour retainer that's okay but focus on really what you want to be doing in your business, and start working toward a way to delegate the rest.

David:

[22:41] Very good. Yeah, working on your business, not in your business. That's how you go forward. Very good. Well, friends, that's about it for right now. Your next step is to check out the show notes. We're going to have links and sites and how to contact Sam and get more involved with her business. If you want to hire a virtual assistant through her, we'll have all that in the show notes. Sign up for our newsletter because that's a great way to communicate with us and not use it on future episodes. And also book a call with us to get unstuck and move forward in business if you are stuck, if you're a perfectionist like myself and get stuck because things aren't perfect. But friends, that's all for now. And trust you've been inspired to redeem your business, to redeem your time and buy it back, and walk worthy of God's great name. Bye for now.