We just got to hang out and chat with Anne Albrecht, and

she is the founder and CEO of her own consulting firm, and

she provides virtual executive assistance for biotechs.

Yeah, there's so many things that you don't think of that happen in

a biotech. And I think this is a theme we've sort of brought

up a few times on a few different episodes now, but this fractional help

so that the CEO, the founder, the executives can focus on

the things that matter, like the science or getting funding, not

booking their travel or worrying about how that board meeting is

going to get scheduled. Those are all the things that Anne takes off your plate. And

Her model is super interesting too. She has really

figured out how to work within the confines of a growing biotech and

how to help them scale reasonably. She's also just a delightful

person. So much fun to talk to. She has a really cool career journey. I

think this is an awesome episode that people are really going to find super interesting

and I hope you enjoy. Anne, thank you so much for being

here with us today. We are so excited to get to talk to you on

building biotechs. And like we always do, we're just going to jump

right into it with the first question, which is, what did you want to be when you

Thank you for having me on here. This is great. I had to

think back because I don't know how many people remember what they wanted

to do when they were seven. You know, because that was such a long time ago, depending on

what the subject matter was going on in school, like I really wanted to

earth sciences. So it was like meteorologist or once

I got even older than that, I knew I wanted to travel. So being a flight attendant,

how cool would that be to fly everywhere? And obviously I didn't do any of

those. So, you know, because who dreams of

being, you know, a professional executive assistant for a career? No

one, unless they had somebody who was an amazing parent who did that

before. I went through various stages. I was big

into music, believe it or not, when I was growing up. I was

a flautist for about 12 years. When

it came to college, I had to decide which direction I wanted to go in.

There's tons of flautists out there. So where would

I go? I wouldn't get very far, you know, if I had high aspirations. So

it's like, well, maybe I can do manage a concert hall or

something. So I actually went into management and then said there

are too many concert halls. So then I'll maybe I'll go into fundraising. And

that was my specialization. And then I did it and I hated it. I ended up

saying, well, what's similar? So I changed jobs, went into marketing as

an assistant, thinking I could move up the ranks. and

tried it out. They gave me for six months when I

was at a firm called Digitas. They let me try it out, both

as an admin and working on the marketing team. I was good, but I didn't

have a passion for it. But I was really good as an assistant. Maybe I

should do that. And then that's kind of how I ended up where

That's a great story. I love that. And I think that that's so

interesting, too, because I feel like people who sometimes we

talk to people and they, you know, they knew they wanted to be a scientist or

whatever, and that's their path. But people who tend to fall more

in that operations role, like myself, were the people who

were like, I kind of thought this sounded cool and I kind of thought this sounded cool and

I kind of figured it would all come together in some capacity. But I think that makes you

like a really nimble thinker, maybe, or maybe really adaptable. So

just trying different things in a different industries yeah i think that running joke

Nominally a recruiter right that is if you break down what i do

on a day to day basis to do a lot of things but one of them is recruit and for a

long time that was the main thing i did. Before i was running companies

and doing more strategy work who thinks they want to be a recruiter when they grow up. Right?

That's another one of those that's like, no, you end

up there through a combination of hilarious events

and circumstance and whatever your passions ends up being that

you follow. I think that the behind the scenes is so important

and we don't talk about it enough. And so I think we're really hoping to dig into

that with you today and think about, you know, all of the things that you

There's a lot. So you're working with a marketing firm and

then you made the jump into working with biotechs. So

So I've been in various industries, obviously, nonprofit and

marketing. When I left there, I worked with

Recruiter and they put me in with a

an early stage biotech. And as anybody who's

been in that field long enough, Even if they've been around for seven years

doesn't mean they're gonna stay around for seven more years right it was a

fabulous company based mall fam small it

was a great environment i work there for a year. Then two

thousand eight two thousand nine hit the fundraising nightmares they

had some. Interesting data that came out that wasn't helpful kind

of it. I wouldn't say it's similar to this environment but you know it

makes it harder and they realize that they couldn't couldn't sustain within

a month they went belly up right. So then i went from

a to children's hospital and then worked with a vc firm

after that that was last ten years of my life was working with a

venture capital firm who did early stage biotech investing. right,

and seeing everything that they did. So all the spaces that I've been

in in the past 20 years and my educational background

have all kind of steered into that direction. So I clearly

know what's required for an assistant. I've been exposed to

both the front end and the back end of how a biotech is funded

and how it runs. And then also seeing how

it's built up by working for You know, I was working at 5 a.m.

for 10 years of seeing hands on of how that works.

And then when it came to me deciding what I wanted to do

next, it was like I had these ideas in my head.

Let's go for it. You know, I think there's a huge need for fractional

assistance support that for folks that do

what I do, who need it on a smaller basis, but also for

the biotechs who aren't as lucky. Not everybody's lucky to have these

really well-funded VCs helping them out. Because when

I was at there, they would hand us out every once in a while to

some of these portfolio companies, give them the support. But nobody has that. Not everybody has

that, but everybody deserves it because they need it. And so I

What are you doing today? Tell us about your company because you are the founder

I am, right. So I started it a little over three years ago,

just as me. I wasn't sure which direction I wanted to go. If

I wanted to keep it micro, just be me and have five, six

clients and just go from there. But people kept asking

me, do you have time? Do you have capacity, can you take on more?

So after a year after that, I hired somebody, hired

two. Now there's six of us in total. We've

had over 25 companies sign on. There's about 15 or

16 of them active. And that's where we are right now with some

I love that. That sounds a lot. That sounds very similar. I'm feeling deja

vu. I'm resonating with that a lot. When I started as

a consultancy of one, I felt the same thing. I was like,

do I want to grow this? Do I want to just stay? So I

know that there was the market pressure to grow that, but also as

a, you know, the ability to expand your offerings. You

know, what do you now provide to clients that maybe you couldn't when

it was just you? You know, how has that expansion enabled you to give

The immediate impact is that, call it selfishness, I can take

a vacation, right? You know, micro, you can't really take a vacation, have

backup. So now, you know, not only do I have backup, but my

staff has backup so that if they are supporting clients and

they are out, they have backup as well. There's the collective knowledge

that all of us have over the 60, 70 years

combined experience that we have, so that if one

of us gets into a rut, we can reach out to each other to say, hey, do you have

any suggestions? And then they would come up with something,

so that there's that, which is very valuable.

Otherwise, you'd be going off to message boards, you know,

that I'm various part of that I could see, like, they're

stuck, but they have nobody else to go to. But we have our own internal group

I love that. All of that sounds so familiar. And I just think that's a

And now does your firm operate? Are you fully remote? Like,

are your employees all remote? Do you go into clients? How does that

When I started, it was mostly virtual. Sometimes

I would call a few of the clients remote only because they were local to where I

was. And so if they had something special, I could go out and support

them. So at that part was remote. You know, because there's obviously a

difference between virtual and remote. Everybody seems to think they're the same, but

they're not exactly the same. Now, most of the time it's virtual, except

for various occasions where there's a big important board

meeting or event that's happening. And then we

will send the assistant who's assigned to that client out

if needed to help support them on site. Because not everybody is

virtual, all our companies. Some of them are completely virtual. Some of

them are hybrid. Some of them are all in person. And then in

terms of our staff, they're located all across the

US. Because we have clients both on the East Coast and West Coast,

we had to be considerate of time zones. So we've got a few folks

in the East Coast, Central, and not quite West Coast,

but out in Hawaii. It was important to make sure that we had

people in similar time zones to where the client

is, because we mostly support U.S.-based companies. And

they're looking for assistants who are actually working in their time zone.

So remote and virtual, let's just untangle that

a little bit, because I have a feeling I'm one of those people who just uses either

term kind of ad hoc. So what's the difference? Can you

So when I think of a remote, you're obviously working mostly virtually.

But it means that every once in a while, you could go into the office or

go to an event with other people from your firm. And so then you're

not really virtual anymore. You're just remote. Virtual means that

you are never, probably ever going to see them in person. It's all going to

be exactly what we're doing right now. It's, you know, over Zooms or

phone calls. It's all electronic communication. So

I really like that. And I think that's a really critical distinction that I

actually don't think has been made abundantly clear, but it makes a lot of sense the way

Remote is different than hybrid, too, because hybrid obviously means

that you're going to be going into the office or wherever you work. Your

folks are co-working space or whatever more than, you know,

That makes sense. Let's talk strategy because I

love to think about how fractional teams can help biotechs

build more intelligently, extend runways, cash

runways, and think about using leveraging internal

full-time employees better for their actual skill set.

So how do you approach that with your clients and what's your messaging around that

So no matter how small a company is, they obviously need all

the basic functions and support of one way or another. And in terms

of assistant support, whether it's executive assistant, administrative

assistant, they still need it, but obviously they can't support somebody

full-time or even part-time, because part-time implies specific

hours of the day each day of the week, right? So what we do,

and this usually helps with their budgeting, is we provide support

within a reasonable amount of time, and we only

charge per hour. So for their budgeting purposes, we

don't do the retainer route either. So if it's like a small, if

they don't have anything going on, say for the month of October. they don't have to worry

about, oh crap, you know, we're paid for the support and we're not getting it.

Right. Um, so for that, it's very helpful, especially

for the early, early stages, which when they're really, you know, counting their

dollars, but yet they also get the support of

knowing that we know what we're doing. We can jump right in and don't need

too much training so that when they start doing scheduling meetings

with investors, creating these board of director meetings, booking

travel, expense reports, we can jump right in and there's no training involved, which

saves a lot of cost on their end. So for a

lot of these companies, it's anywhere between 5, 10, 15 hours a week,

or even sometimes just a month. And we cater it to each individual company.

Well, even at like, let's say, 15 hours a month, what

is interesting about early stage founders, sometimes they think,

oh, I'll save money by doing it myself. But

if you really think about who is the value driver of

that company, especially at the early stages, the founder, they

need to be out pounding the pavement, they need to be doing what they

do best, right? Whether it's thinking about the science or getting money, right?

Finding that funding, pitching. And so every minute

that they spend organizing their travel or

responding to an email that is not

pertinent to the thing they're really focusing on right now, that is wasted time

Oh, and I've talked to a lot, especially lately, because everybody's talking about,

what's the savings? Because it's hard to actually put hard numbers on

it because each individual case is unique. But for instance, let's take the

travel aspect. Everybody's thinking about, or hopefully they've already

done it, going to J.P. Morgan. Right. So you think about

the rabbit hole that they could go down in terms of trying

to find a hotel, trying to find the right flights, if

they need car service or a car, thinking about how to get back and

forth. You think, oh, yeah, I'll just save it on my own. And we

all know what happens when we book our own travel. You think, oh, it's going to

take five minutes. And next thing you know, it's taken two hours to find exactly

what you want. And then if in terms of between

this, you know, the founder or the CEO and what we are,

think of how much per hour they're probably worth in

the time spent, and then think about we're a fraction of that cost.

And we do this all the time, so we know the ins and outs and how

to find stuff probably a lot quicker than them. It seems simple

enough is a reason as like why they need us, because in that particular

instance, we're saving them a tremendous amount of money and time. So

that amount of time that they've spent not doing it can

be used towards Oh, I need to reach out to these investors to

find some new money or, you know, partnerships with pharmas

I'll say, too, that there's a little bit of extra clout when

someone else is helping you with your scheduling. So if they're going

to J.P. Morgan and then they're setting up these investor meetings and they're kicking

you over, you know, oh, here's my E.A. That is a little bit

Exactly. And the way we function is we're integrated within the

company, the biotech or the VC or whatever company that

we're in. So when we're messaging with outside individuals

on behalf of them, it's from company X, Y, Z. So

it's not from, you know, Ann Albrecht at annalbrechtconsulting.com. They

don't know that we are consultants for the company. You

know, they don't know that, that we're only working a couple of hours a week at

most for them. They think we're full time and we're part

Ann, I'm really glad you brought up JP Morgan because when you were saying, you know,

sometimes it's a month, that was my first thought. I was like, wow, I wonder how busy she is

with JP Morgan. And then that, you know, you tackled

that. I assume the answer is very busy. You must see a huge uptick. in people

who need help around this time. What are the other seasonalities that

you see? Like, are there other events that all of a sudden you're like, oh, this is

coming up and now we're going to get super busy? Or like, does it quiet down significantly for

you in the summertime? What do you kind of see as the trend over a

Well, it's interesting. So what I see outside of the individual

science specific conferences that happen, and those are obviously individualistic

to the companies and the science that they're involved with. And they can happen anywhere

between the fall and the spring because usually they don't happen too much during the summer because everybody

is taking time off. There are the larger ones, there's J.P. Morgan and

then there's Bio in June. So those things can get ramped up

and Bio seems to be, in my opinion, getting just as big as J.P. Morgan.

Not as expensive, but being just as big. And they

may not be officially presenting at either one of those conferences, but

they'll be doing the networking meeting, which makes it even tougher to

find locations because the designated one-on-one spaces

at those two conferences, if they're not attending them, you don't get

to utilize them. So there's those and then depending

on how many board meetings they have every year, you know, not

all of them have the traditional, you know, March, June,

September and December timeframes. Obviously those ones make it even

harder to schedule during the summer or if

they waited until the last minute towards the end of the year trying to figure out

how to schedule all those meetings for the following year. And then

obviously during those particular months of when the board meetings are to

make sure everything is is prepared whether or not it's a zoom meeting

or an in-person meeting. I wouldn't say there's a real

downside or a really busy side. I

guess you could say between the holidays in December and

January it could die down, but it all depends on if they're attending

JP Morgan or not. And then during the summer, sometimes July

and August can be slow, but what happens if they're in the middle of fundraising mode?

Then it could be really busy. Like I worked on a client, two

of us actually worked on a client that was really heavily

working with investors and they were scheduling like 20, 30 meetings. So

That's such a good indication though of like why someone would need your help. Like

everything you just listed out. These all take time to prepare

for, right? You can't just be like, OK, we're having a board meeting. I'll send a quick Zoom link

for tomorrow. Like, no, you got to think it through. You've got to have the agendas.

You've got to have everyone's calendars managed. Like these

things take time. And I think people don't think about exactly

my boyfriend, who happens to be Six Sigma. And I jokingly

say, one of these days, I really want to have a stopwatch. And

actually, you know, stopping and starting so people realize how much time

it really takes to do something, because nobody really thinks it. When

I interview a potential client, we go over things. There

are plenty of times when they think, oh, I think I need 20 hours

for an assistant. I'm like, well, what do you need them to do and who are they working

with? And they tell me and then I say, I actually think you only need 10 to

15. And they look at me like I'm nuts. And yet when we start doing the

work, the number is usually about right, because I have mentally

have been doing this for years, you know, stopping and starting my internal

Well, and then there's the efficiency that you have cultivated, where

if I'm going to go do a task I'm not used to doing, or I only do every once

in a while, like schedule a board meeting, right? I'm not going to

have the emails at my fingertips. I'm not going to have the templates, the

protocols. I'm going to be searching around. I mean, there's so many

things that go into that. We do some interview scheduling for

our clients as part of our work, and we

had to have a candidate meet with some board members because

it was quite a high-level candidate. I think to meet

with three board members, it was 18 or

so emails back and forth to get those scheduled. And of

course, they're not in the internal calendaring system.

So it's not like we can just peek at their calendar and then move forward. So

that takes more time than you'd think. But for somebody who is moving

between those same tasks all day and not context switching, that

So I have a question for you that I am super interested to hear your answer

on. When you handle communication with your clients and

internally, what's your preferred method for keeping everyone organized and

on the same page? Because you're obviously disseminating a lot of information and

We use various software for keeping either,

you know, spreadsheets that we've utilized, the password management

that we have, anything for internally and

externally. So we use SharePoint, you know, for a lot of our information,

Slack. A lot, because even our clients use,

some of them use it pretty heavily, some use it very infrequently. We

internally use it. So we use that, one password

so that we can put all our passwords in one spot and makes it

easier in case we have to backfill somebody in just in

It's always interesting to hear about what's coming up or what people are just like,

We're very individualized because it's not like we have a

team of assistants working with one client. It's one person. So

it's more like what the client is using. And

so outside of making sure that we have things in

place, for coverage or transition, because every once

in a while we do transition. It's all individualized, so it's

on their space. The everyday stuff that we work on is

core. So it's correspondence, it's

calendaring, which goes along with the correspondence, right? It's

travel, it's expense reports, and

sometimes we do deal with some contract management stuff and helping to

organize that for the early stage ones, especially so that they're

prepped and ready and a little bit more organized when they have to start doing their data

When you bring up early stage, and I know that your model is super cool because people

can work month to month, they can call you when they need you, but

when is it the ideal time? When are you like, yes, you brought

me at the perfect time. Is there a perfect time? Do you have an

ideal client that they're super early stage or

So we have clients that need various different things. So I

have one client who is pretty well established

and they're actually a public company now, but they only utilize us for doing

the board directors because they're pretty slim in what they do. We've

got another others that are only, you know, a handful. Maybe

they've got three, four, maybe five at most. Actual

staff, the rest of them are consultants, right? Just like, kind of

like we are. And it's just the occasional, oh, we need to schedule some

heavy investor meetings. Can you deal with that? I would say as soon

as you're starting to deal with anything that's slightly complicated, rather than

just doing one-on-ones, it's probably a good idea to start involving us.

As I said, we have clients that are only five hours, and then we've

got some steady eddies that do between 10 and 15 hours. And

as you get used to us, then you start realizing, oh, well, we can ask you

to do this and this and this, and then we grow with you. And it's amazing to

think of how long we can stay with a firm as they continue to

grow until they fully realize that they need a full-time person. that

Even then, I feel like since you are so flexible in your model, once

they have their full-time person, staying on to be

that flex, that overflow, okay, it is JP Morgan

season, or that person wants to go on vacation. And,

you know, being able to have that steady knowledge base, that coverage,

if you are that flexible, why ever wind down with you? Why not

We have one or two of those that have done that. Usually they just say, we're

going to stop it, but we know we can go back to you because we have history

with you and we can just jump right in. But we can jump right in

with almost anybody though, because on the core of it, the EA

work is consistent no matter what company it is. It's just, you know,

I just find it so hard to believe, Anne and Karina, that you guys didn't build your

companies at the same time while knowing each other, because it's sort of like you both

built the same model and two different functions. There's a lot of similarity. It's

A lot of our clients are really struggling right now

because they don't have funding to hire. And so, you

know, we've been helping to get really lean in those cases, get

really scrappy and think about, OK, well, you don't need a full

time hire for this role. So that's sort of that was part of the impetus of

starting this podcast is thinking about, hey, there's a lot more ways to build biotech

than maybe you've even known about. And it

came from, to your point, knowing some of these robust ecosystems

where they did give a lot of support to baby biotechs in

the different business verticals. And then when we work

with clients that don't have that support, it is so obvious they really

need it. And so I'm really excited to have this conversation because it's

yet another thing that we can offer to our clients and say, hey, you

don't need yet to hire a full-time EA, but

I agree and we think of the things that they may not have thought of

and we have a list of providers just like you do that

they ask me like, hey, especially when it comes to like

IT or what happens if

they can't always ask us to do the travel? Do you have any travel agency suggestions

on who to go with? And we have those. you know,

all those sorts of things that you probably have as well,

you know, so that if it comes up, you're like, I know exactly who you should work within

So, yeah, that kind of brings me to my next question. When you think

about the strategy that you provide, it sounds like more than

just doing the work. You also are able to be a resource to

your clients. What other things do you kind of step all with them as

they're growing or their areas where you step in and you say, oh, I've seen a

Yeah, so it all depends on whether or not they have

something in an operations mode, administrative mode, on

board or consultant. And even then, even if they do, they usually

ask me if I have any suggestions because anybody who's worked with somebody

who's a pretty seasoned EA knows that they've done all that operations stuff,

whether it be an office move, obtaining like

office equipment or IT equipment or working with IT

firms or any of that so that when they come to me they

get to a certain size and they realize that they can't rely

on Joe who is a lower level person

who is pretending to be IT because they don't want to hire an

IT firm then I can provide them a couple of of options, for instance,

you know, one that's meant for small businesses who does work with biotech so

that they're used to that. They're very flexible versus some of the

bigger ones who, they're great. They obviously

know the system and have worked with lots of companies.

So they've streamlined things, but it's more of, I don't want to say it badly, but

it could be more like my way or the highway kind of mentality. And depending

on how the biotech is, that may be good or bad for them.

Yeah, we've certainly seen that my way or the highway with a few IT firms.

They don't know where to go because that's the other thing. In this fractional

space, a lot of people realize that when we need somebody fractionally,

Well, we happen to have a downloadable guide on our website that we're always building

out. So we'll be sure that you're in there, but you should take a look. And if there's anyone we

missed, we'd love to add them. We don't, for instance, have any

travel agencies on there. That's not something that in our recruiting

space we've actually been asked to do since before the pandemic.

So prior to the pandemic, we did occasionally, you know,

organize travel for a candidate to come on site. But it's been

a long time there. You know, companies are now comfortable

Yeah. So it's interesting. And with that specific thing,

some people think, well, we'll just book it and I'll just have the assistant book it. And nine

out of 10 times, that sometimes can be perfectly fine. But if it's a complicated

trip or an international trip, or you think there's going to be problems

with that trip, using a travel agent in that aspect is

actually better because usually they have 24 hour lines you

can call. Cause what happens if you're, you know, you're flying into Europe,

And there's a problem with the flight, but yet it's the middle of the night here. I'm

not necessarily going to wake up because it's not like we offer, we

don't really offer 24 hour, you know, concierge service, but you

know, I'm not going to wake up at 3am to jump on online to

fix it. If it happened during the day, during business hours, of course I

would do that, but you don't want to leave them stranded. So sometimes using

A lot of us like doing the booking ourselves because we enjoy it. Right. But

you have to think about it. If it's a simple trip and you think there's going

to be no complications, sure, you're going to do that. If it's complicated, totally use

a travel agent because sometimes obviously they can fix things. But

most people forget that travel agents can get discounts that

you can't normally get. So whether or not it's a higher end hotel

that your executive wants to stay at, but you can't, it's super

expensive. just getting it off of the website and they don't want to

do hotels.com or Expedia because those third-party services can

cause issues sometimes. A travel agent is a good resource because

I'm really interested, too, how you're seeing AI

impact your clients, if at all. Is anyone adopting any

sort of AI? Have you adopted any sort of AI to help streamline things?

Sort of like travel, but I don't know. There's so many things happening out

That's funny because I think a few of our clients actually, they are

doing AI, ML for the science side. But that

aside, it's interesting. We've been fielding some searches

on apps that help as an assistant. We've been

looking into them. Our model is unique, obviously, because we're

working with multiple clients. So it's not as if I'm working for Ann

Albrecht Consulting and looking at just for Ann Albrecht Consulting. It's obviously

used for our clients. So we have to make sure that confidentiality is

in there, you know, and how they integrate. Especially for chat

GPT, we have some restrictions. In our own

firm, because of all the bad press that they've received so

far, we actually tell our assistants that they aren't to use

it unless the client specifies it. Only because I don't want anybody

getting into trouble for something that, you know, they've used it for

and it's incorrect. Right. But I do know that as an assistant

space, they have been talking about finding ways to make it a lot easier. I

was looking at multiple calendaring, so it's a little bit more than just using

Doodle Poll, which I'm sure most people have heard by now if they've had to

do meetings. A little bit more robust in that. But the question is,

how does it integrate with other people's calendars? both outside the firm

and how do you deal with the confidentiality and where does stuff get saved?

It's definitely going in that direction and we definitely

want to start using it, but I don't think it'll ever, ever

negate the human aspect of how we deal things because

that's been a lot in the news lately about assistances. You know, oh,

you know, like Calendly, for instance, you don't need an assistant because we

have Calendly. Well, somebody still has to act as the assistant on

Calendly. You know, you send the person a link and then they still have to go digging

and searching to see what works and doesn't work very well with multiple meetings

I think there's also something else too. When you're dealing with things

particularly like travel and all the many things, many

of which are very confidential that you handle, there's something to

having a person there for even like the emotional support side of things, right?

If something's going off the rails, you know you've got a person. If you

really need to run an idea by someone, you've got a person. Like Calendly's great.

Again, I still have to send the email that sends the link and

if something goes wrong, I can't get into the back end of

CalME and fix it. Whereas if someone could just be like, oh, I'll just email them and I'll

handle this situation. There's a huge

element of just having that support and feeling

like you have a team with you rather than just fully relying on

software. I think that really means a lot to people. People

The interesting thing with that is that the more things get easier and

complicated at the same time, you still have to troubleshoot that. So it

means that the assistant actually has to be pretty technically savvy

and knowledgeable. So, you know, making sure that they have all that

background so that they can figure it out. For

all those aspects, usually if you have an assistant, they're the first line

Yes, that's exactly what I'm driving at. It's knowing someone's in your corner. And

I think, you know, yes, you have to be tech savvy and all that. You

also have to be financially savvy because we keep a really close

eye on how many systems we're looking at and paying for. And you know, it's so

easy to be like, oh, this sounds cool, subscribe to this. Oh, it's one month here, one month

here, da, da, da, da, da. And then part of what I do is sit down and

look at all the systems we have and say, do we even need these anymore? Are these redundant?

Are these a security risk? Because the more systems you have, the

more security risk you have. So, you know, someone does have to manage that

and stay on top of all of the subscriptions. And I think

that's where you see, like, you need a person on the ground. No software system's

At least not yet. Yeah, in the recruiting space, we're

seeing a lot of really interesting stuff with AI for

sourcing and outreach for candidates. And part

of my job at the moment is to stay on top of that because we need to

make sure we're cutting edge and we're doing all the things that

our clients would expect us to be doing to cut costs and to speed up

processes while staying safe, while staying legally compliant.

Because we're also seeing that, I think just New York now, but other

states are following suit, have legislation on the books about using

AI in hiring. So I'm sure that, well,

more to come on that. It's every day, I have multiple Google alerts

so that I know what is coming down the pipe for recruiting. And I'm sure that that's,

Yeah, I mean, side note, I mean, obviously, you know, this, but

AI is built on, you know, obviously, it's still built by

people, and their biases are unconscious bias. It's

more than they think it. So that's obviously, like with CHEP

GPT, what got them in trouble is a little bit of bias

going on there. And I think they found that with some of the AI software

Yeah, so what happened there was really interesting. It's built by people,

but then it's also trained by data. And

who decides what data it trains on? It's not

conscious. It doesn't know to pick through data

and think, okay, Why would this data set not be

totally unbiased? And so some of those early headlines were that

some companies had an early start at using the

open AI system way before we knew it as chat GPT. And

they started to build AI and similar tools into their

databases. And these companies were really big companies with large databases. But

they also attracted particular demographics for

years and years and years that applied to these jobs. And so An

engineer is a white male. That is what their database

told it, because that was the skew. And so it's so fascinating.

So now that that is, now that we know that, it's

easier to train on better data sets. It's garbage in,

garbage out, just like data analysis for the entire history of

the world. We just did it much faster and much larger this

In terms of using it for our purposes, I'd rather

wait. Think of it like an update to any like Microsoft software. You

know, you get the people who want it right away and or the phone, right?

Think of the iPhone update, right? They want it right away with all the

new things, whether or not there's bugs or not. And then you have the people who wait

until the very end, who should have been. I like to be

somewhere in the middle. I want to vet it a little bit more so that

we don't have as many hiccups. But I also don't want to

be the tail end of it to find out that we're one of the last people to use it.

If someone's thinking about working with you as a consulting firm or they're

thinking about making an in-house hire, what do they need to consider between

those two things? Like, is there something that, you know, differentiates a

consulting firm doing EA work or just hiring a full-time EA?

So cost savings wise, if you're not going to be

actually having somebody truly do 30 or more hours of

actual work, it probably makes more sense to hire somebody like

us. because of all the other extra costs that are associated with

hiring somebody full-time. But not every executive is savvy

about this, because I remember when I first started doing this, and I would say what our hourly rate

is, and just sort of like a law firm, we booked to

the closest 15 minutes, right? And they see it and they're like, oh

my God, if I multiplied that by 40 hours and

this is what it would have cost if I hired somebody full time. I'm like, you wouldn't

do that. But the team that I have are Ann Alper consulting

staff. So I actually pay for all

of that stuff. Then the client doesn't have to

worry about, they don't have to pay for the taxes, they don't have to

pay for the benefits. You know whether or not it's health or

dental or 401k or training unless

it's specific specific to them only you know that's what we

provide and that's all mixed in to the rate and so they

don't have to worry about that so it's actually much more

cost effective for them to use us that it would

be for them to hire. The only time that it would make sense, obviously, as I said, is

if it's going to be at least 30 hours or more. And especially

if they're going to be in person, yes, because we're not going to be there

in person, right? But usually the core is 30 hours

or more. And we've transitioned a few companies once they've hit that

mark. And I'm very proud to say, and I tell them congrats, because obviously that

Well, that means you've done your job so well, too, right? Because you've helped them scale

Yeah, that's how we look at it too. Eventually we hire replacements and that just

means that we did a good job. Everyone wins sort

of along those lines. The other big cost savings that I,

as also a W2 employer, see are the vacation time

too. And people don't think about that, especially I bet in your space,

because when your EA goes on vacation, It

feels really jarring. That is a big problem if you are

used to the support. But with your team, that's covered, which

Exactly. So unlike with a micro company or individual consultant,

they get the backup from us. So they take a week or two

week vacation. We ask them, do you want fill in? And we'll

fill them in. And depending on what the client is, we'll determine

I think what you do is so valuable because there is so much going

on behind the scenes that does not need to be and should

not be done by the executives because they need to keep their

eye on the prize and they need to be building their biotech and

not worrying about all of the things that actually have to be done to

build that biotech. So you just are such a facilitator. And

I think from as a recruiter who did used to go

on site, my main counterparts were the EAs

and it is just such an amazing role that it's

just touches every part of the company. Don't think enough people

realize that, especially when they're in a small company. You see it more when you're in

the bigger companies and you're seeing, you know, the EA staff is

sort of circulating and just handling all the things. But at those

small companies, you just provide such a valuable service. It's a little taste of

And can I tag in something on that one? Because you made me think of something.

Anyone who's listening to this who was like, wow, this sounds like a career I'd be really

good at. I love organization. I love calendar management. I think this would

be really cool. We talked about your career path and it's a little windy

and my career path has also been windy. But looking

back, are there things you would tell someone like, hey, this would be the experience I

would specifically go after. These would be the skills I'd start really building because

I think that's really valuable. If someone wants to be an executive EA,

I don't want to advocate constantly moving around, but I definitely think because

each company has a different culture. So and each company is unique

between small and large requiring different things. So

that's important. Truly, truly, truly taking advantage

of any trainings and encouraging them

to speak up to their managers to ask for that training. Because

most companies tend to forget, unfortunately, that

assistants still also need the training. And two, to

network. The nature of the assistant position is a very siloed,

very kind of lonely position, even if you're in a larger company. And

yet you're expected to know all this information. And the only way

to know all this information is actually to go out there. So

yeah, I'm an introvert, so that is, even though it's kind

of tough for me to do that, I still force myself to do it. So in order

to know the right resources for event planning, I

actually go to event planning conferences, to networking,

because there's a couple of organizations, especially in the Boston community that I'm a

part of. So I'm part of that. Even to a certain extent,

a lot of EAs tend to do some of the lower level HR related stuff.

Right. So there are some HR related things that they could do and

the same thing for operations. So, you know, getting out there and

learning about that stuff is very important. And if they need somebody

to mentor, definitely, you know, finding somebody who they can mentor and

That's great advice. Yeah, I was going to say there's a lot of crossover between

HR and EA. So I've seen people go

both directions and enjoy, you know, getting

a taste of bold and then saying, okay, this is my group app. I love HR. I'm

going to stay there. Or I love assistant. I'm going to go

all the way to, you know, EA. I want to be the EA to the CEO and manage

all of the things. And that's not for everyone. And so it's nice to get the

taste. And it actually is something we see people move around quite

I remember when I was figuring out what I, if I wanted to go in this direction

and I had a friend who is an HR consultant and she says,

oh my God, you should totally go into HR because you already know all of this stuff. You'd

be great at going that direction. So I think to your point, yeah, they

get pulled in all those different, either way and they go back and forth.

Same with operations too though. You see a lot of people shift into an

operations role because for exactly what you said, and

I did work as an EA for a while and What

did I do? I planned an office move. We did the real estate

thing. You get the furniture, you, you do everything. You end up just being

pulled into every last little thing. And so I think it's such a great career

path because it allows you to pursue different interests, right? You

could do a little HR and then to your point, maybe work for another company and that's not

their primary concern. And you do something else. I really love your

model of, you know, we're here when you need us for the time you need

us, because it's another thing where it's a very scalable function.

All right, so you are firmly ensconced

in your current company. What do you see as next for you? Are

you growing it bigger? Are you kind of staying where you are? What do you hope for?

I have an executive coach that I've had for a couple of years, and she

asks me this every once in a while just so I can get back on the right path and

stuff. And I've always just chose to let this company grow

organically as needed. Like this year was a bit more

networking. Next year in the immediate is we call it

the year of the employee. Right. So our goal is to actually

get all of us together in one place next year for a little little retreat

because it's very important because of the nature that we are virtual. Right.

But for longer term, I do consider seeing it

growing. Last couple of years, we've grown it by two or three people every

year, so it's probably going to stay that way, but it also depends

on the market, right? So everybody seems to think that when

people start laying off and we've helped support some people who've companies

that have been laid off assistance, does that automatically mean that

they're going to gear towards us? Not necessarily. They may find a way

to have that old assistant work as a consultant individually, so it

may not grab us. But we are that resource and just

getting us our name out there should have lead more people

to say, oh, let's contact them. Right. So, yeah,

I do see it growing. Personally, it means

that as it gets bigger, I'm going to work less and less with clients. Right.

I only work with three, four at most. Everybody

else, all the other ones are with the other admins on the team. And

I only take specific kinds now, if not

at all. It always goes to somebody else. So if I'm interviewing with

somebody, the client, they're not going to get me because I don't

have the time because just like the other entrepreneurs and the

founders that you meet up with, I'm now also now ensconced

with all the same startup stuff and the same problems that I actually tell

them that they need be, I have to find that I have to start taking my

Well, Anne, what is your favorite fiction or

It's funny. So I'm a big fantasy and science fiction fan.

So most of them I probably wouldn't want to name light of day.

But if I had to pick one, it would probably be the Outlander series,

you know, that was made into the Star series. I've read

them since they came out like 20 years ago. So, you know, I've

been a longtime fan. So for fiction, that would be it. But for

nonfiction, I mean, outside of reading journals and,

you know, publications, I do have some other books, but the latest one

And you guys are going to laugh. So it's the birds of

Massachusetts is a field guide because I live right outside wooded area,

like a really nice nature preserve area. So I'm constantly like

when I have a few minutes and I need to decompress, I go look up. Oh, what bird

And I used to live in Florida and I literally have Florida birds sitting right

behind me. And Massachusetts is up on my desk because I live in Massachusetts and

I need to get a New Hampshire one. I just really. I mean, I'm not

going to see any of these birds up here. I can promise you it's snowing and the

complete wrong climate, but I still have it because you never know. So I

No one's going to really want to see, you know, the HR guide to startups

that, you know, that I have that I gave to one of my employees or, you know,

women's leadership stuff. I'm like. i mean i have tons

of those when i'm like i i looked at it last night when i was prepping i'm

like what book should i recommend and i saw something nope you know what if

i'm gonna be real that is probably the last non-fiction book

that i read so you know As

somebody who's super, super busy, you know, you have to decompress. And

so, um, and working from home, it doesn't mean I

can get out very often, but I have the woods and I, you know, just take

a minute. I'm like, Oh, let's listen to the bird. I'm like, what bird is

that? So, you know, take your mind off of work to go back to

Very cool. I love that. We have a whole list on

our website of all the books that have been recommended, and I'm absolutely adding

So Anne, where can everyone find you and contact you

Sure. So we're on LinkedIn, so you could always look up Ann

Albrecht Consulting. We have a website, annalbrechtconsulting.com, or

you can certainly drop me a line. It's really easy. It's

Perfect. We'll link all of that in the show notes that people can click right through if

they're on their podcast app. But it has been such

a pleasure, and I really hope people have learned a little bit about

this, about all the inner workings, the things they need to think about building