Using Virtual Assistants To Create Leverage For Your Business With Daniel Ramsey

I’m super excited to be able to bring a special guest that will bring a ton of value to most of you, if not all of you, who are thinking about the best ways to scale your business. My guest is Daniel Ramsey. He is the Founder and CEO of MyOutDesk. You’ll find out more about Daniel’s business at MyOutDesk.com.

It’s the highest-rated virtual assistant company in the marketplace with over 400 five-star reviews and over 13 years of experience serving more than 5,000 clients. Daniel and his team know 1 thing or 2 about what it’s like to grow a company using virtual assistants as part of your formula. Let me welcome Daniel. Thank you, Daniel, for joining us on the show.

Brett, thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

Why don’t you give us a little bit more than what I gave to give us some background for who you are and how MyOutDesk came to be? I’m going to do my job as a host to ask you some great questions so our audience can learn like crazy from you.

I’m probably like all of your audience, an entrepreneur, and found myself on my honeymoon in Guatemala. My wife of three days and I were tramping through the rainforest, staying at this great resort. It was a Francis Ford Coppola resort and it was basically a treehouse in the rainforest. There were monkeys around and there was this great restaurant and bar.

One night, I found myself at the bar working. It’s midnight. I’ve ordered a couple of drinks. This is a romantic place, but there are candles at my table. The bartender is making fun of me in Spanish, and I speak enough Spanish to be dangerous. He’s like, “Dumb White guy, beautiful wife in the room, and he’s out here on his laptop.”

I’m probably like all of your audience. I was a young entrepreneur. We were closing deals and doing things. I needed to be connected to my team. At that time, I only had a couple of folks on my team. After that guy was making fun of me, I thought, “This isn’t for me. I want to have a family one day. I want to stay married.”

I want to enjoy my honeymoon and, let alone, maybe a vacation once in a while. It was at that moment that I had an a-ha that I had to change how I did business and what I thought I should be doing versus my team. After that, we shifted to a completely different blueprint. MyOutDesk was born to help entrepreneurs get some time freedom back in their lives and help them drive revenue and save costs. That’s what we do every day. Our mission is to have our virtual professionals be indispensable for their clients like they can’t run their business without us.

Virtual Assistants: MyOutDesk was born to help entrepreneurs get some time freedom back in their lives and help them drive revenue and save costs.

Right now, we have around 1,200 folks in the Philippines. I got on a call with a guy who sold Amish tractor covers. Crazy, he was breaking down his business and he’s a very successful eCommerce guy. He had this relationship with an Amish community and they didn’t want to sell online. He’s like, “I can do that for you.” Now, he’s running a multimillion-dollar eCommerce site selling tractor covers that are handmade by the Amish folks. From boat brokers in Florida to real estate guys to contractors, property managers, and everything in between, we serve businesses that need leverage.

That is a great introduction. Every single person, if they’re a seven-figure business owner, that’s who we’re trying to help out with this show. Even if they haven’t seriously considered using virtual assistants, the idea of leverage is key to an entrepreneur’s success. Maybe you can open our minds more to how to use virtual assistants to create more leverage in our business.

Before I ask any questions along those lines, my biggest question, probably least important, but my curiosity has to ask, what tip did you give that bartender who gave you that a-ha moment down there in Guatemala? That must have been some moment when you had that realization. You’re like, “I got to change.”

He got a lot of good tips. He was a great bartender, although that night, he took my phone and took a picture of me. I have that picture still and I remember what it was like to think, “Something’s got to shift in my world.” I got back to my office and back to reality after that. My wife is a teacher. She and I set about the work of putting our business in order. We started building SOPs and putting people in key positions. I started relinquishing the things that only I could do.

Two years after that moment, we left the country and moved to South America. My wife and I did the Tim Ferriss’ 4-Hour Workweek before there was a Tim Ferriss book or even that idea. We spent six months traveling South America. It was partly due to that one bartender taking that horrible photo and me thinking, “Something’s got to shift.” I don’t think MyOutDesk would be here. I certainly wouldn’t be the leader that I am had it not been for that one moment of a-ha.

Whenever it comes, we grab onto that clarity and we hold on tight. What a fascinating story. A great flame was sparked there. The passion and purpose of your business are probably born out of that moment. Thank you for sharing it with us. Let’s get into the meat of our discussion around leverage and how can we as business owners open our minds or eyes even to see opportunities for leverage. How do virtual assistants play into that?

We believe in something called a blended model. If you look at any major Fortune 500 company anywhere in the world, they are already taking advantage of a different pay scale in different countries. That’s the beauty of it. In the Philippines, which is where we operate, to have a Coke, it’s $0.50. To have that same Coke here in the US, it’s $1.50 or $2.

We’re not doing anything that’s revolutionary. We’re simply going to countries that have a high capacity for English. They have great education systems. They can go to university and get a degree. We’re offering them the opportunity. That opportunity comes in the form of your readers, businesses who are like, “I need more time freedom in my life. We’re taking on this new project. I need to help my team free up their day.”

I talked to a major company. They have 5,000 employees. It’s a several hundred-million-dollar firm, and they’re revamping their entire sales process. They’re adding SDR, Sales Development Reps, for their business and they need virtual professionals for that. We can give them 3 for the price of 1. There’s an amazing amount of opportunity to create what we call a blended model where your in-house people are loving on clients, doing valuable projects for the business that will push that business forward, maybe innovation, systems, or process, and all of the day-to-day stuff, the stuff that is repeatable or in a system, in a process, give it to us, we’ll handle it for you so you can go and grow your business.

What you said made it pretty clear for all of us. I love that you’re talking about a blended model. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. To even dial in the clarity some more, what are some typical tasks or even entire roles that are prime candidates for this type of opportunity?

For any business that’s in the SMB space, Small to Medium-sized Businesses, the biggest company that we have is about $200 million in revenue and the smallest company we help is $1 million in revenue. The primary areas that we help are administrative work, marketing work, and sales work. Those are the three categories.

I had mentioned earlier the sales development rep. My wife and I had our air conditioning break in the middle of the summer of 2019. We’ve been in our house for many years, so it’s an older unit. We called four different companies to say, “We need to send somebody out.” Out of the 4, 1 company answered the phone, and 2 of them never even called us back. What we do is help people answer the phone, follow up on leads, and help them drive revenue through what we call a sales development rep, somebody whose primary job is to get appointments on the calendar for the sales teams. That’s a standard position that we help a lot of businesses with.

The other two are marketing assistants. We have graphics folks, social media folks, and writers who can help you create a blog. We’re doing a podcast. We have folks whose job is to take this audio and put it on all the different podcast platforms. We’ve got the marketing side, and then my favorite is the administrative side. I call these people Director of Traffic.

I didn’t book this show, El did, who’s on our team. She does our PR. She’s a phenomenal person, been with us forever. Her job is to reach out to guys like you, set up appointments, and have us come on the show. There’s a huge value in having somebody own your calendar and email, and help you organize your day. I’d love to call them the Director of Traffic.

To review, sales, marketing, and administrative roles and/or tasks are the biggest or prime candidates for possibly using a virtual assistant.

Those are the three. What’s wild is one of my good friends owned a tech company. He was like, “Daniel, can you do customer service for us?” I’m like, “We can help you with that.” He’s been a client for a few years now. In the first two years, he doubled his company because he was answering silly customer service stuff and his team was not focused on growing revenue. They were focused on serving their existing clients, which isn’t a bad thing, but our people could serve the clients because they were all like, “Could you help me with my password? My page isn’t working.”

It was a very systematic response to most of the concerns that were coming in. His US team was focused on those things. We came in, we took over their customer service, and we helped them with marketing. Now, we have salespeople in those roles serving his customers and helping him grow his business. That’s primarily how we help companies grow.

I love it when I’m doing an interview like this, Daniel, and a question comes to my mind that I had never even considered. I hope that’s happening for some of our readers as well. In the case you gave, your friend owns a tech company or software of some sort, and he says, “Daniel, can you help me out with the customer support elements of this?”

You mentioned that as long as it’s not higher-end problem solving, and it’s not that it’s basic, it’s consistent in the response. It’s knowable that when this happens, here’s what you do over and over again. You go in and say, “We can do that.” From the time that you guys say, “We can help,” to the time that that thing is up and running, how much time are we talking about to make an investment and start to have this thing function for you?

I love where you’re going. I’m going to answer your first question because there was a good conversation there before we get to the cost and timeframe. You said that as long as it’s repeatable, the roadmap is an existing framework to follow. You can do the job and show them how and talk through the what, why, and where. That’s if it’s an administrative task or a marketing task.

If it’s a sales task, you should have plenty of call examples. If you’re asking somebody to do a new thing or get trained in a new process, as a leader, you’ve got to show them the way. The military has this great phrase, “You can’t give what you don’t already have.” They only promote people from within and you have to rise through the ranks. It’s the same thing for leadership. We’re entrepreneurs. We’re the one who fully understands our client, our business, and all the intricacies of what we do, and yet when we hire people, we have this false sense that, “Shouldn’t they understand? Shouldn’t they know?” They simply can’t.

We help a lot of folks. They come into the door and they say, “These are the things that we need to do,” and we’ll help them slow down, figure out how to write an SOP, figure out exactly what the position looks like, and what the end goal is. We like to do something called an outcome statement so that our people know what the end goal is.

An outcome could be, “Help our company grow by 10% or 20% or even double over the next three years.” That’s a very clear goal for an employee or for an entrepreneur. You can say, “If we’re going to double, we need to do X amount of new business. I’m going to train you on how to do these calls or talk with our customers to get more business out of them.” The idea is to always give your people a roadmap to success and then show them the way. We’ve found when we do that, we have success on a lot of fronts. We have happy clients, we have happy virtual assistants, and the world is better for everybody that’s involved.

You’ve gotten good at people and their own processes, their own SOPs, as you put it so that then they’re ready to hand it off to somebody else. Am I hearing that right?

Yeah, and we’re different. In most outsourcing companies, you might come to that company and they might say, “I want you to handle our customer service.” They port over the customer service and that company becomes a third-party extension of the client. Our world is completely different. What we do upfront is a consultation where we talk through what’s the outcome, what your systems and processes look like, who’s on the team, how are you going to handle onboarding, and who’s going to train this person.

We go through a checklist where we’re going through all of the considerations of what it’s like to add a new virtual team member onto your team and then we help you craft that first 90-day launch period. Think of us as a staffing company that happens to have people in the Philippines. Those people are now going to be your people.

One of the things that’s different about our company too is we don’t place them and then go. We support the client and the virtual professional over the lifetime of the agreement. One cool thing is we’re able to provide healthcare. We’re able to provide benefits. We have a training platform. For most tasks, we have some additional supplemental help that we can provide to both the client and the virtual professional. What we want are long-term matches and relationships.

As you’re scaling a business, turnover is that evil little elf that comes and cuts your ankles when you’re trying to climb the mountain. You don’t want to lose great people. We find that if we do the work upfront, set everything up, and help the entrepreneur or the leader get clear about what they need and the tools and the support that’s going to be necessary over the first 90 days, everybody wins from that conversation.

You guys have to be process or workflow experts, organize work, and help people get clear before it can be handed off to somebody else to take it. You’re also doing the staffing firm thing. As a point of clarification, it sounds like those virtual assistants, those resources, those people still work for you and your company. They’re not working for your clients directly. Is that true?

We work like a staffing company. The clients have access to the people. They interview them. They go through 3 to 5 different interviews. We get clear about the outcome. We have a full understanding of what’s going to help the entrepreneur either grow revenue, save time or maybe get better at a thing that they need help with. We’ve set up that outcome. We go into the world and give them 3 to 5 people to interview. Once they choose their culture fit and their previous experience fit, that person reports to them at 8:00 AM on a Monday morning and says, “I’m ready to work.”

Our clients have a direct relationship with the virtual assistants. The reality is, this is how we help people grow. We couldn’t do it as a third party. We couldn’t do it and not have the interaction and the relationship because we rely on our clients to deliver that training, onboarding, and support for the virtual assistants. It’s their business and they know it best. Our main value prop is finding great talent, putting them in front of our clients, and helping both parties win together. That’s what we do in a nutshell.

What else should I be asking? I want to go down the alleyway or a main road, but the gotchas. When it doesn’t work well, what’s missing? What are people doing that gets them off track when they try to go down this path?

There are a lot of things. I love this analogy. Somebody said, “Daniel, you’re a leader of your business. You’ve organized 1,200 people and 900 clients. You’re able to look at things linearly, put systems and processes in place, stay in the detail, but also stay in the vision space. It’s a unique talent. You don’t even realize that you can shoot and dunk like Shaq, a basketball player.” The reality is, being an entrepreneur means you have an unusual skillset. It means that you’ve got the ability to do multiple things and understand lots of different facets of your business.

One area that is a challenge for our people is, an entrepreneur has so many fingers or hands in the fire that they can’t focus long enough to give the virtual professional or virtual assistant enough time to get into the job and the support that that person needs. That is one of our biggest areas of improvement as a company. We work every day at it to make sure that our clients understand the commitment and amount of training that is required.

As you’re growing and scaling, the more you can systematize your onboarding for new employees, sharing things like what’s your company vision, what’s your origin story, what are your vision and values for your folks, we find ourselves helping entrepreneurs not only tell those stories with our virtual professionals but helping people through that process a lot more than you could imagine.

We spend a lot of time helping businesses do that. We should talk after this. We could maybe help some of those businesses get that stuff figured out so you guys don’t have to spend as much time on it. Anyway, I want to circle back to what you said about the onboarding. The path for the virtual assistant requires investment. I don’t mean dollar investment. I mean energy, focus, and time. If we find the right match and we start them, are we talking about a couple of weeks of onboarding if there’s sufficient focus, effort, and energy there? Are we talking about a couple of months before it’s humming? What do you see typically before that thing is working the way that we all want it to?

The average is probably 90 days. What we help our entrepreneurs understand is nothing happens overnight. It all depends on how systematized your process is. If you already have the training manual in place, if there are already people doing that job, and if you’ve already gone through the hard pain of documenting the system right, then onboarding can be relatively smooth. Let’s say it could be 30 or 60 days.

If you’re in the process of getting that training process put together, you’ve never done it before, or you’ve done it only yourself and you’ve never trained somebody, most of the pain of onboarding new people is creating that system and process. We’ve done it so many times that we know this is the area where most entrepreneurs need help.

Virtual Assistants: Most of the pain of onboarding new people comes from creating that system and process.

In the first 90 days, that’s where all the heavy lifting is. We tell people, “It’s typically 90 days to start feeling relief. Six months, you’re like, ‘I can’t believe this. I’m never going to go back to the old way of doing business.’ In 3 to 5 years, we are indispensable in your business.” It’s our mission. It’s what we do as a company. I’m proud because most of our clients’ report, it works well.

I talked to that Amish guy that I was telling you about. It’s his first week and he’s like, “Daniel, in one week, I had him trained up to take 70% of my day away.” That’s unusual. That’s fast. The thing is, he had all the systems and processes already documented. He’d been doing it himself for a year and a half. Those are the stories you want to hear. We have other stories where we miss things as a company or the client misses things. We help them get those things right. When you’re trying to scale a business, the system and process almost dictate the success of the business.

Let’s remove the word almost. It does.

Sometimes, you’re a weed entrepreneur. With the shelter in place, maybe you’re scaling regardless of a system and process. Usually, it matters.

I hear you. I was trying to underscore the point. For everybody reading, you talk about 90 days, probably typical. If you’re reading, ask yourself, “How long does it take to get a good team member up and running?” It takes time. Again, if you’ve done the work that Daniel’s talking about where you’ve done some good process design work, you’ve got your SOPs in order, everything’s documented, of course, that time’s going to go a little bit faster, but it does take time. Once that is done, what a difference to have somebody taking those repetitive tasks. That’s awesome.

People haven’t seriously considered this before. I hope that they are thinking about, “How could I leverage virtual assistants to take away tasks or even entire roles in my sales, marketing, and administrative functions?” Those were the most commonly used, but it doesn’t mean you can’t be in other functions as well.

The fact, Daniel, that you have 900 clients right now and 1,200 VAs that you’re connecting with people says you’re doing something right. Your insights have been invaluable for people who are even somewhat considering how they can get more leverage through lower-cost resources. What a great story you have to tell and what a great service you offer. Daniel, you’ve been doing this for how long now?

We’re in our 13th year now in 2020. In fact, we started in April of 2008. I’m excited. Brett, you’ll love this story because I’m a story guy. We started accidentally. I hired some virtual assistants. A good friend of mine said, “Daniel, can you get me some?” I was like, “I don’t know. It’s hard to do. You got to interview a bunch. I’m going to have to charge you some.” He’s like, “Charge me.” In the first 2 weeks, he hired 5. Within a year, he had seventeen virtual assistants. We’ve been filling a need since. Entrepreneurs come to us because they’re like, “I need talent. Can you help?” We’re like, “Yeah. Come on over. We’ll help you figure this out.”

You’re supposed to say that you had some grand design and you came up with this cool way. Instead, it happened by chance.

I love that you said that. The truth is, all great businesses exist because they solve a problem. In our world, I needed talent and I found a way to get talent for less than I could locally. I figured out that they were great. We simply had a business need in my own business. From my honeymoon, I was like, “I got to get some help here.” It turns out that I wasn’t the only entrepreneur out there that needed help. it’s good. I want to give away our book and make an offer to your audience. After many years and 5,000 clients, we learned a couple of things about virtual assistants. We wrote a book in 2019 and we’d love to give it away.

Let’s do that. Let’s talk about how they can learn more. Why don’t you talk about how they can get the book? I want to make sure that they know how to contact you or interact with you on social media or whatever the best way to interact with you and your team is. Let’s talk about both those things.

The book is called Scaling Your Business with MOD Virtual Professionals. In order to get a copy, you have to have to text SVP to 31996, and you’ll get an electronic copy completely free. You can put it on your Kindle or you can get a PDF. It’s got all of our proprietary stuff. We put in the book, how to onboard, what the growth path looks like, what are some considerations, and those different areas that we serve people. We’ve given people job descriptions, launch guides, and what the first 90 days ought to look like. We’ve put all of that in the book. If you get a free copy, I hope it will help serve you regardless if you decide to work with us or not.

Scaling Your Business with MOD Virtual Professionals: How to Drive Revenue, Save Time, and Create Your Dream Company

That’s super generous. I appreciate the offer that you’ve extended to everybody reading.

The other thing is we do these consultations as a service to entrepreneurs out there. If you decide you wanted to talk to us, in that text, you’ll get a copy of the book. You can also get a consultation. What’s cool about the consultations is we’re going to spend 1 hour or 2 with you. We’re going to break down your business process, who’s on your team, what systems you’re using, and whether or not this makes sense for you.

That is something we do for free because, quite frankly, when we choose great entrepreneurs to partner with and help them get leverage, our business is better and their business is better. That’s another offer for everybody who’s reading, we’d love to meet with you. We’d love to hear about your company and whether or not you think virtual assistants would work for you, we would add value to your business.

I had another thought. It didn’t occur to me either that somebody might come to you thinking, “I might like to do this virtual assistant thing, but I don’t even know if it’s good for my business.” You said you talked through their business with them, maybe identifying areas where this could be beneficial. They don’t have to know ahead of time, is that right?

Yeah, and here’s the truth. After doing this 5,000 times, we know which types of businesses make sense for us, and what processes make sense. We were talking to a potential client. This guy still uses paper files and didn’t want to get on Zoom or do face-to-face. Most of his business came from referrals and relationships that he already had. His business was blowing up and he needed some more time. The idea of working virtually didn’t jive with him. He’s like, “I don’t know if I can do it.” We helped him discover all of the considerations. If you choose to go virtual, if you decide you want to hire a virtual assistant or have a virtual blended model, there are a lot of considerations.

We walk through those considerations with entrepreneurs every single day. We won’t say yes or no. We will give you the information. From there, you can make a decision on whether or not it makes sense for your business. Sometimes, we tell people, “This doesn’t make sense for you.” Other times, we’re like, “This makes sense. We’ve done this 500 times. You’d be 501. I know we can win together. Come on. Let’s go.” Those are the conversations that we have.

Daniel, I appreciate the time that you’ve spent giving to our community, to share some insights about what’s possible when it comes to leverage through virtual assistants. It’s been super informative. I certainly love the storytelling as well. Thank you for making it interesting. Before we go, other than texting to get the book, which is a generous and phenomenal offer, what are other ways that people can connect with you guys, and learn about your business, other than going to MyOutDesk.com? Anything else that you would point people to?

Our Facebook page has got a ton of value. If you go to our MyOutDesk Facebook page, you can check out videos and what clients say about us. There’s a lot of good stuff. If you follow us there, you’ll get all the videos and information that we put out. YouTube’s a great spot too, but we’re on all of the social platforms. If you put MyOutDesk.com into Google, you’ll find us. We’ve got tons of videos, webinars, and blogs that we put out. Our whole world is making sure our clients know exactly the right way to use our virtual assistants. We put all that stuff out for free. Every single day, we’re pushing out more content.

Thank you again, Daniel. This episode, I’m sure, will be tuned in to. I encourage people to reread if they need to go back and catch some things. Full of insights, great knowledge, and tons of great experiences you’ve had over the last several years, helping business owners get the beauty of leverage so they can get some of that time and money freedom that we’re all looking for. Thanks again.

For everybody out here reading, please give us feedback, give us ratings, share the show with others, and keep coming back. We’re going to keep bringing you seven-figure business owners who have worked through real challenges and have some great tips for things that they learned in their journey. We’re going to have other experts like Daniel who know what you need to know in order to scale successfully. Thanks again, Daniel, for coming. Appreciate your time. It’s been a great interview. I hope you keep doing some good work out there to serve tons of businesses.

It’s my pleasure, Brett. Thanks for having me on.

Tune in next week for another great episode and tell everybody else about it. Take care.

Important Links

• MyOutDesk.com
• RISMedia’s RealEdge Podcast
• Scaling Your Business with MOD Virtual Professionals
• MyOutDesk – Facebook
• YouTube – MyOutDesk