Scaling Your Business With Virtual Assistants With Barry Coziahr

Most business owners find themselves stuck with too much work on their hands that they are unable to make real progress or start earning tangible results. This is where virtual assistants and work delegation come in. Derek Dombeck sits down with serial entrepreneur Barry Coziahr, CEO of Stampede Branding, to talk about the role of VAs in achieving business scaling and growth. Barry discusses the 80/20 Principle and how to duly delegate work to your remote personnel who are usually located on the other side of the world. He also explains the right way to vet potential VAs to ensure you are hiring skilled and talented individuals – despite not seeing them face to face.

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Scaling Your Business With Virtual Assistants With Barry Coziahr

In this episode, we’ve got Barry Coziahr. The reason I am excited about this show is many of us entrepreneurs get wrapped up in doing everything ourselves. Barry is an absolute wizard when it comes to delegating and utilizing virtual assistants. Barry, if you wouldn’t mind, tell everybody a little bit about who you are, and where you come from, and dive right in.

I’m from the Midwest originally. I grew up in central Illinois. I lived in St. Louis for about twenty years. I have a long background in community outreach, marketing, average promotion, and nonprofits. I started my own marketing company in St. Louis many years ago. We used a lot of remote or virtual personnel and growing that and other businesses. In 2020, we decided to open a virtual assistant business because we did such a great job finding excellent people putting a process in place where we found incredible people, and helping business owners do the same. Providing them with great people that can help them to take over things and do tasks. I still love working with nonprofits. I like helping small businesses. It’s a lot of fun. I am still pretty involved with the community. I like to read a lot, and that’s me. I got a lot of information about a lot of things that have piled up over the years that I like to share with people.

Virtual Assistant

We appreciate your time and we’re certainly going to pick your brain and try and figure it out because one of the things that I have been guilty of myself for a long long time and many entrepreneurs are is we have to have our fingers on everything. We are control freaks, a lot of us by nature. When I finally let go of the reins a little bit and decided to be more of a manager and allow other people to do the work, the freedom that comes with that can be significant. Certainly, if you’re doing it incorrectly or managing incorrectly, it can cause more problems. Let’s start at the beginning. We assume everybody knows what a virtual assistant is, but what is it? Just the broad definition.

We’re talking about remote personnel. These are people who are working at a distance. They can do anything that can be done with a computer at a long distance. It’s really cheap and easy to get them a phone line so they can answer your phone or they can do outbound calling for you or follow up. The list goes on and on. We have a big list of things that basically help people to figure out what they could do for them. The skills are tremendous and varied potentially. One of the things you want to do when you’re getting a virtual assistant is you want to find somebody who’s tailored for and has the tasks that you’re looking for. We have an eBook 249 Things A Virtual Assistant Can Do For You. It’s somebody remote who’s competent and can get work done and that you can work with to make it happen to grow your business

You’ve been generous enough to make that available to my audience. If everybody goes to TheGenerationsOfWealth.com/Delegate, you’ll be linked up to Barry’s ebook and things virtual assistants can do for you. When you look at the 249 Things, touch on a few of them. What are the more surprising things that a virtual assistant can do for you?

Some of the regular things. I’ll tell you some of the regular things and some of the surprising things. Anything that a local, somebody that’s comes to your office can do, except you don’t have to have an office, it’s great. Our people are from the Philippines. They speak great English. They’re taught English. English is a language that they know well by people. They love education in the Philippines. They’re lifelong learners, they’re big family people so they’re good. They’re a church community. They’re a big religious community. They’re good people in general. They’re a great place where we find our people. You’re working with this person whose skills can be pretty varied. We help people get people who are personal assistants, executive assistants, sales assistants, marketing assistants, finance assistants, about anything you can think of.

We’re finding somebody an animator for their marketing business, somebody who’s going to do animation. We’re supplying people that are working as a regular part of your team. They’re working 10, 20, or 40 hours a week on a regular task. We have one client who needs an animator. We found them an animator. Somebody who’s going to be doing that on a regular basis. That’s an unusual one. We have lawyers that we work for even. One lawyer has a personal executive assistant who helps her handle her email, her phones, and the whole deal. She can stay on top of people that are reaching out to her that need help. That’s invaluable. We work with coaches.

We work with a pet supply store. We supply a number of eCommerce pet supply stores. We’ve been approached to be the receptionist for an escape room business where we could, remotely see the people that were there coming to the business and let them in and be the receptionist from the other side of the world. The list goes on and on. It’s personal assistants, executive assistants, sales assistants, or bookkeeping people, looking at the list is a great thing to do because you’d be surprised at all the things that can be done remotely. Often people will take that as “I need help with that.” They get an idea of the person that they need and then they talk to our people. We zero in on it. Make sure you get a person that’s a good fit.

Work Delegation

When you’re a small business owner or you want to grow or scale your business, how do you know when is it time to delegate? When is it time to bring in that executive assistant for example?

One of my favorite pieces of my tool that I am applying, I’m sure a lot of people have heard about this. I’m sure you’ve heard about it. There’s a thing called the 80/20 principle. The 80/20 principle deals with 80% of the results come from 20% of the effort. It was discovered by an Italian economist and horticulturalist. It’s Pareto principle is what it’s called it’s the 80/20 principle. What he found was that about 20% of the population in his country owned, 80% of the property. They also then found in his garden that about 20% of the plants were producing 80% of the produce. The 80/20 principle is a rough principle where it’s not always 80/20 exactly, but the general rule is that there are certain things that you do that produce the biggest results in your business.

Some of those areas that you should look at in your business are promotion, sales, customer service, these things. You need to grow your business. You need to get more customers. Most people do. You need to get more customers, and you need to have income coming in this takes activities like promotion, sales and you have to service your people. Those are some key 80/20 areas that you can zero in on. You take a look at what somebody could take. There are two ways to apply it as I see. 1) What are some of those 80% of the things that I shouldn’t be doing that have to get done, that somebody could take off my plate the things that aren’t necessarily the big movers and shakers in my business the big things that move the dial and push me forward?

Is there somebody else that could do a number of those things? They have to get done. They’re necessary. They do assist, but they’re not necessarily things you need to be doing. Are those all piled up? Are they stopping you from doing the key things that would allow you to expand your business, make more money, get no clients, and do the things that are important within your business? The other side of it is, are there things within your business that if you could get some help with them, you could grow faster? If you could have somebody helping you with a lead generation method that you use within your business, is there somebody who can help you to do follow-up actions or send out simple emails that you put together on a routine basis to help you to reach out and make connections on LinkedIn every single week?

Somebody who could help you create some content and post it on social media and check your email for follow-up things These are things that could make you money and could get you new clients. Do you need to get some help from somebody who’s directly assisting you with those things that immediately move the dial? Like in the case of eCommerce, we help people with the customer service side of things. They’ve got people all the time there helping and making sure people get what they need, which is key because they want people to come back. They want people to sign up again and help them to make sure they get what they want. There are a lot of examples of that with the 80/20 principle where you can basically take a look at those two things.

Another way of looking at the 80/20 principle is you could have 10 things on your plan for the day and there are 2 of them probably that those are the things you must do. The other eight, if you didn’t do them, the universe wouldn’t necessarily fall apart or anything. Chances are. I could be wrong or roughly that percentage. Maybe there are 3 or 3.5 things that you must do. The other eight are nice and that’d be great if you did it. I know it’s true of my list of things to do.

You look at that and you say, “How do I get somebody to take some of these other things off my plate, do them, and develop a system where they can take them and that I can get on with those key 20% of the things that are the things that push the business forward, that make it that we truly expand the things that I should be spending my time on that would make a difference?” Everybody could probably think of those things and they’re the things that you like to do.

The highest and best use of your time should be as often as possible utilized.

It’s a matter of like, “What do you like to do?” There are some things I don’t like to do. I don’t like to do bookkeeping. There are people who love to do bookkeeping, and that’s great. All they want to do is bookkeeping. There’s a lady who’s growing a business I talked to the other day. She realized she asked to get involved with sales, but she wants to spend her time doing bookkeeping. She’s bit the bullet, selling, networking, and meeting clients. There are a lot of things that lead up to meeting a client that she could have somebody else help her with and that would help her grow her bookkeeping business. There are a lot of uses for virtual assistants.

Vetting People

I know in my business and we’ve used virtual assistants for years, my executive assistant lives in the same state as me, but she’s two and a half hours away. We have some of our VAs are in the Philippines. Over the period of the last many years, we had to go through a fair number of different staff members to find the ones that we liked. You run a service and you vet a fair number of people to find the quality ones. Compare what your service does if I wanted to go out on my own and try and go on the internet, go on Facebook, go on wherever possible to find one, how do you vet them?

Recruitment is a big job all by itself, like finding the right person. I’m sure you have this experience where you spend hours, days, and weeks, looking for and trying to find somebody that you’re truly going to be happy with. Testing is one of the things we do right off the bat. We have great tests that we give to people. We do a personality test, which it’s test that measures key traits very accurately, communication traits, stability, responsibility, and how aggressively the person is going after things and getting things done. These are key things that it measures. That’s one test. We also do another test called an IQ test, which measures intelligence quotients.

What it measures is problem-solving ability because you want somebody who’s more of a problem-solver. It’s a key component of somebody who’s going to work for you. The third test that we do before we make a final decision about somebody, and we do interviews, we talk to the person, we check into many other things about the individual, is what’s called an aptitude test. The aptitude test measures the person’s ability to duplicate things and follow instructions so they see what they understood, what was asked, and do they follow those instructions. I’m sure you’ve run into all three of those things potentially being an issue. If somebody is not in good communication with you or they’re not stable or if they have low responsibility, these can be things that cause you a problem.

If they’re not problem solver, this can be a problem. If they’re not getting instructions well, those can be issues. The testing helps us to sort that out. We have a person who’s flat out finding people, testing them, interviewing them, making sure that we have good high-quality people who are then chosen by the best of our people as the person who’s going to service the clients. That’s important, the selection process. The other thing that we do, which is pretty key and important is we act as an outsourced HR department. We’re coaching and helping the person get into position and into place doing the tasks that are needed if there are any problems as we move forward. We have lots of experience with working with other businesses. We’re able to help the person to tweak their activities and get in a better shape with what they’re doing. All those things.

If somebody’s doing it on their own, it’s trial and error.

I’ve used testing for a long time. For many years, I’ve been experienced using testing materials in recruitment and for other purposes. It does make a big difference. The trial and error can be pretty painful.

Been there and done that.

We act as an outsourced HR department. I’d say that we hit it better than our 80% and 90% of the time. For the smaller things where maybe it’s not quite a great fit, we’re right there. We handle it without missing a beat or missing a day’s work. There are other things, which you probably put in place because you’ve been doing it for a long. Besides having these facilities that we offer, we recommend to people that they have a daily report from the person. Do they know what’s been accomplished? They meet with them on a regular basis and have regular meetings. I’m sure you do this. I meet with some of my assistants daily.

Some of them are just to check-in. We use online communication tools. There’s a great one called Slack, which is e a little chat facility. There’s a free version that you can use to chat amongst your staff so that we have people posting their updates daily so that we know how they’re doing and what’s happening. Regular meetings with the clients are part of what we do to make sure everything’s going great. We try to meet with people on a weekly basis. I think that’s key. Our agencies meet with you and the VA on a weekly basis to make sure everything’s going well.

The other thing I’ll mention is the thing called SOPs, which are Standard Operating Procedures because if you’ve got a great process and you have a person who’s doing it well, then you need to document that process, what they’re doing and how they’re doing it because as you expand your team, now you’ve got a copy of this process and you can pass it on to the new person that’s come along who’s joined the team or the case where you might have to replace the person. You’ve got these processes recorded and it’s easier.

Now more recently we have that staff member that part of their job is to do all of the SOPs and update the SOPs. It’s not that we want to replace them, but the reality is someday we’re going to end up having to replace them. Early on with the trial and error, we were trying to come up with all the SOPs and if you hire the right assistant and you put the right butts in the right seats, it is very easy for them.

That’s training that we have, that we make available and we train people, we train our staff on how to do SOPs. We train certain staff. If clients request it, we put them through the training. We have it available. We can do that.

Usual Pricing

What does the pricing look like specifically to the Philippines that’s where you source your people from. My VA, who is my executive assistant, is in the same state I’m in. She’s going to be significantly more sure than what we would spend. We have a call center that’s stateside. There’s a big range of expenses, but what do you see as average?

We provide people for a little less than $10 an hour. That’s usually with a monthly commitment, like 10, 20 or 40 hours a week. It’s right around that. It can be more depending on the skillsets that are needed. It can go up a few bucks from there all the way up to $12 or $13 an hour. That’s super reasonable. There are no payroll taxes involved. There’s no health benefits or insurance because we handle it for them, there’s the replacement costs are kept low, meaning there are no recruiters that needed and you can continue to keep focusing on the things that are important. There are all those benefits financially. It works out great to help people grow their businesses.

Freeing Up Control

When we finally give up and have to do everything ourselves, it’s virtually impossible to scale when we are all common in one way, regardless of where we live and who we are. We only hang up 24 hours a day. There’s almost much you can do. We need time to podcast. While we’re doing this, our VAs are getting other stuff done, which is the way it should be.

I like spending my time meeting with a lot of people and talking with them, consulting them on their business and how they can move things forward. I talk to them about which services we have that are right for them. I enjoy that part of the business because I enjoy meeting with people. I meet with a lot of people every week. I enjoy leading the team. I come up with strategies and guide them in general, for both my businesses because I have a marketing business and a virtual assistant business. They’re both staffed by my virtual assistants. I don’t have to necessarily get into the weeds on other parts of the work that have to get done. As you said, “While I am busy doing that, those actions that I prefer to do that I like to spend my time on a lot of work is getting done because I have people doing it.”

For us entrepreneurs, people who listen to my show and shows like ours, it’s truly meant to be a business, not self-employment. For us to live our vision the way we want, and enjoy our lives, it does require help. For a long time, I was scared to have employees because all the people who don’t own businesses tell me, “Employees are terrible. VAs considered as an employee role, you’re going to have to babysit.” I would say if you do it wrong, you will babysit and there will be headaches.

Work Ethic

The two VAs that I have specifically done our social media marketing, I have never had a one-on-one conversation with either one of them. My executive assistant’s job is to oversee the two VAs who are in the Philippines. They can message me. We use Teams through our Microsoft account for all of our messaging as you mentioned Slack earlier. They can message me, but honestly, it runs smoothly. I don’t need to get involved. If I do need to get involved, that means the wheels came off the bus and something went wrong. They’re grateful for the work and we’re grateful to help them. We love giving them little bonuses and things along the way. You mentioned earlier, specific to the Philippines, their work ethic and the quality of people are fantastic.

A key for a business owner is you have to find some things that are tasked that have to be done every single week because there are things that either you should be doing or you are doing that have to get done every single week. There could be a lot of things. Social media is a great one and if you can, “Good. what do you need done? How do you need it done? What are you expecting?” Somebody’s producing that every single week. Maybe at the beginning, you might have to handle the person yourself, but it doesn’t have to be a big deal. They set up so they show you what’s happening once a week. They meet with you once a week. If you’re doing it with us, you can meet with the person who’s overseeing them on our side of things and it’s great.

These tasks are laid out every week. They’re helping move things forward for your business. I’m sure you’ve got lots of examples of that. I architected the whole thing, but I don’t do it. The accounting, I don’t do it. There are many different pieces of my business that I don’t do because I have people that I put in place. You figured it out too. These people in the Philippines are great people with great work ethics, and what it costs to employ them is something that a business owner can use as one of the benefits of the global system. Everything we had going here, we can use it to grow to leverage and grow as a business for real then he can honestly scale it like you figured out, I figured out and others are figuring out, but we can help.

The number one example I would give is this show. My VA scheduled you and sent me all of the information. You and I are on here and we get to have a good time. Right after we’re done recording, the VAs are going to take the recording and it’s going to go to post-production, it’s going to get launched and I don’t touch any of it. The reason I don’t is because I’m an idiot when it comes to that stuff. I would be horrible at it. It’s not some suit, I don’t like it. I don’t want to do it. I want to do this. I love chatting with you and helping our readers. That’s where I draw the line. My show is run by VAs.

We have many very similar things that are totally taken. I meet a lot of people every week that work is done by my team. They’re the ones who schedule people for me to meet and help me to meet people that I meet every week. They help me to do follow-up actions. Follow-up is incredibly important in a business. I get assistance with that. I get help with that the business grows because of it, because these key things aren’t dropped. We have a marketing side of things. We have over 40 people that are remote and these people are run by my partner. People who do search engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising I’ve never had a direct conversation with these people. They are getting work done for my people, for my customers.

Episode Wrap-up

I want to be respectful of your time. I appreciate you coming on, and sharing all your knowledge and your experience with working with VAs. For anybody who wants to get the 249 Things A Virtual Assistant Can Do For You, go to TheGenerationsOfWealth.com/Delegate. We’re here to live our vision, love our life, help each other, and spread the message. Follow us on Facebook, @TheGenerationsOfWealth. Join that Facebook group. Get involved in a community.

If anybody wants to reach out to me directly, the best place to reach me is through my marketing email address, Barry@StampedeBranding.com. If you fill out that little form and get the eBook, you’ll end up talking to me if you want to.

We’re all here to help and share our knowledge and we can help each other and give business back and forth to each other as entrepreneurs. That’s the goal. It’s all about networking. We’ll wrap it up. Thanks for joining us on this episode, until next time, go out and live your vision, and love your life.

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About Barry Coziahr

Barry is a seasoned consultant and trainer who has helped thousands of small businesses grow through practical seminars and workshops. He’s also a serial entrepreneur and co-founder of Teambuilders Agency, a virtual personnel agency. Barry’s expertise is sought after by prestigious organizations and he’s been featured on popular podcasts.