how to improve your virtual assistants

Francis:

So here we’re talking really about a level of mastery. That’s the level of Tim Ferriss or someone who has done working with his self-motivated virtual assistant for at least 1 or 2 years. This is really long term stuff here. Yeah?

If he’s working on himself and if he implements all the work without asking in a nice way and from time to time he gives his own ideas; you can give him more responsibility. You can let him research training materials on his own.

You can assign him time for a paid training. You say, “Okay, you work 20 hours per week for me. Three hours per week, you read your E-books. And if you’re finished, you tell me and you propose other E-books to read.” They’ll tell you “Okay, you can do this.” 

Even further down the line, you can him a budget – a money budget for his own further training. One example I do at the moment where I give my assistant his own budget is 

1. he has his own Mechanical Turk account which I set up so that it works outside of the US as an employer.  
2. Then I have prepaid this with funding and he can use it to buy mechanical Turk work on his own terms as needed for my projects. I leave that money up to him. It’s something like $20 and it holds out for quite a while.

The other example is I have prepaid an account with Copyscape for premium search and he can use it as he needs it. What I don’t recommend is, of course, giving your virtual assistant access to your credit card information.   

You mentioned an idea of how to pre-fund money for your assistant before?

Stefan:

I said that I will only give my main assistant- my number one off my bunch, of course- access to my money. I don’t know if you said that already.

You didn’t say it?

Francis:

I didn’t say that but I do it like that also.

Stefan:

Yeah.  Because he’s the most trustworthy so it is enough that the most trustworthy has access to money or whatsoever.

And if I give money out, I would only either create a new Paypal account or give because on Paypal when you have a business account; I don’t know you have a business account?

Francis:

Not yet.  

Stefan:

Because when you have a business account, you can have like sub-accounts and give people access to budgets.

For example, I have a thousand euros or dollars on my account and I can’t give. It’s like in Dropbox, you add people per email to your team, so to say.

Francis:

Yes.

Stefan:

So you give that person a budget of $100 and he can pay from your account. The money is on your account but he can pay via his account.

Francis:

It’s very interesting. Is the business account for Paypal free?

Stefan:

Ah yeah, it’s free. It’s even cheaper than the basic account.

Francis:

Okay, this is a big recommendation. I have to check it out.

Stefan:

I think, you save a little bit transfer fee, 1% or something. I think for private accounts, it’s 2.2% and for businesses, 1.7% or something. You save even a little bit of money. They were tiny amounts, in cents, but it has more functionality.

To create a business account, you need your business identification or your business data and you have to send that to Paypal.

Francis:

Okay. So the requirement is that you have to have an established business with, probably, a tax number or something like that.

Stefan:

Exactly.

Francis:

So this I haven’t set up yet. This year, I will have to set it up because the income from my website surpasses the tax-free income that you are allowed to have in Germany.

And so this year, it’s definitively on my to-do list. And when I have this, I will probably also set up a premium business Paypal account.

Stefan:

Yeah, exactly. So in this way, I know of other people who did it this way or even further. Some people even gave full access but only for only having money on that by the money that comes in, you know, be of sales…

Francis:

Yes.

Stefan:

So you can never lose money.

Francis:

Yes.

Stefan:

Your assistant has only access to the money that came in through sales but never what’s on your credit card. 

So it’s a possibility.

Francis:

A good application of the funding you give your virtual assistant is that you allow him to buy premium stuff like E-books that costs money or premium services.

Well, anything that costs money on the internet that you allow him with a certain budget as long as it solves your problem. It would be a good idea though that every purchase he has to justify somehow in his daily reports especially at the beginning.

Stefan:

Okay. If he pays a certain price.

Francis:

Exactly. I remember reading something from Tim Ferriss – big outsourcing master – who said that his personal assistant who schedules his flights and organizes his calendar and stuff like that.

If she has to make a small purchase below $100 then she doesn’t even need to ask. Actually, I’m not sure if it was Tim Ferriss himself or one of the persons in his book he interviewed.

Stefan:

Well, it was about his forum where he had the food supplements and he had this problem with his customers that if they call customer support and complain about something.

Then his assistant would have instead of asking for every customer that complains. Thanks. For every customer that complains, instead of asking him, his assistant was allowed to just to settle the case. So he saves time. 

It doesn’t save him money because he would pay the customer back anyway but at least he reduces his incoming emails by 80% or something.

Francis:

Yeah. Because he makes more money with his free time than he would make up and back complains.

Stefan:

Yeah and he would pay back either ways so just fix the problem. That’s the idea. Just fix the problem. Well I think just a little back to the previous topic…

Francis:

Yes?

Stefan:

I think, maybe that idea comes from the book – from the 4-Hour Work Week. The idea to “This is the budget, fix the problem.”

Francis:

Yeah but I think since outsourcing in the original E-book, “4-Hour Work Week”, is the last example after definition, elimination, automation and outsourcing. Outsourcing is the last part.

You are supposed only to do outsourcing if you have already defined what you want, set your goals. If you eliminate everything which is waste; if you automated all that is automation; then only then, you would take yourself out of the equation by outsourcing.

Many people who dream big don’t understand the whole philosophy of the book and only see the outsourcing. They see the daily job and say “Well, I hire an Indian guy for that.” This is probably a little bit naïve and is doomed to fail, if I can say so, one way or the other.

I think, outsourcing already is a very advanced topic. And although it’s very charming because everyone loves free time and free results, there are some requirements to be met before you can actually start with outsourcing.

In the scope of our interview, the hiring process has to be right, the trust problem has to be solved and the work ethics has to be defined at the beginning. 

And that’s already when you are ready to do outsourcing. So we are really talking about some lessons that have to be learned. And that’s why we put them all into this interview so that other people have no problems to learn them.

If you learned all these lessons then you can have nice 4-hour work week lifestyle – live under the palms and not do anything while you receive money. 

Stefan:

Hmm, very pretty.

Francis:

Yeah. Everyone wants it. But if it was easy, everyone would have it. Since not everyone has it, it’s obviously not easy.

Stefan:

Yeah, I don’t think it’s that hard but we can do that later.

Francis:

Yeah. Perhaps, we will have another interview, why it’s so easy to live under the palms like you do. Or, perhaps, it isn’t easy. We’ll see.

Stefan:

Didn’t we want to do that, anyway? 

Francis:

Ah yeah. We’ll go to the cost of living in Thailand in a second.