The Renegade Lawyer Podcast
The root cause of all lawyers' problems is financial stress. Financial stress holds you back from getting the right people on the bus, running the right systems, and being able to only do work for clients you want to work with. Financial stress keeps you in the office on nights and weekends, often doing work you hate for people you don't like, and doing that work alone.
(Yes, you have permission to do only work you like doing and doing it with people you like working with.)
The money stress is not because the lawyers are bad lawyers or bad people. In fact, most lawyers are good at the lawyering part and they are good people.
The money stress is caused by the general lack of both business skills and an entrepreneurial mindset.
Thus, good lawyers who are good people get caught up and slowed down in bringing their gifts to the world. Their families, teams, clients, and communities are not well-served because you can't serve others at your top level when you are constantly worrying about money.
We can blame the law schools and the elites of the profession who are running bar organizations, but to blame anyone else for your own woes is a loser's game. It is, in itself, a restrictive, narrow, mindset that will keep you from ever seeing, let alone experiencing, a better future.
Lawyers need to be in rooms with other entrepreneurs. They need to hang with people who won't tell you that your dreams are too big or that "they" or "the system "won't allow you to achieve them. They need to be in rooms where people will be in their ear telling them that their dreams are too small.
Get in better rooms. That would be the first step.
Second step, ignore every piece of advice any general organized bar is giving about how to make your firm or your life better.
The Renegade Lawyer Podcast
Lawyers: Delegate Your Way to Your Genius Zone Using AI
Explore the world of outsourcing with Andrew Jacoby, founder of Growth Era and Good Shepherd Staffing. Discover how to scale your law firm or business using overseas talent. We delve into the benefits, challenges, and practical steps of hiring out-of-country employees. Learn about tools like Loom and Trello for efficient management and hear success stories of transforming lives while boosting your business. Perfect for entrepreneurial lawyers ready to innovate and grow. Listen now!
Join us for a compelling conversation with Andrew Jacoby, the innovative mind behind Growth Era and Good Shepherd Staffing, as we explore the dynamic evolution of his companies. Discover how Andrew transformed his business from an outbound SDR appointment setting firm to a multifaceted entity that excels in CRM setups and funnel management. Through his journey, we uncover the potential of outsourcing to overseas talent, particularly for entrepreneurial law firms eager to scale. Andrew also shares his insights on collaborating with skilled individuals from Macedonia, highlighting the mutually beneficial nature of international staffing.
But that's not all—our discussion delves into the critical role of trust and delegation in business success. Learn from the inspiring story of Mimi, an employee who earned significant financial responsibilities through her demonstrated reliability and integrity. We offer practical advice on secure management of sensitive information using tools like LastPass, underscoring the importance of character assessment and maintaining successful professional relationships. It's about focusing on high-value activities and empowering others to handle routine processes, paving the way for personal financial freedom and a balanced work-life.
We round off our exploration with strategic approaches to hiring and training virtual assistants, revealing how to effectively vet and build skills in remote workforces. Andrew shares the benefits of establishing relationships with schools abroad and offering internships to cultivate talent. With tools like Trello, Notion, and Asana, managing tasks and teams becomes a breeze, enhancing both business efficiency and personal development. This episode is a treasure trove of insights into leveraging global talent, operating within one's genius zone, and ultimately transforming the landscape of professional and personal success.
Ben Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury and long-term disability insurance attorney in Fairfax, VA. Since 2005, Ben Glass and Great Legal Marketing have been helping solo and small firm lawyers make more money, get more clients and still get home in time for dinner. We call this TheGLMTribe.com
What Makes The GLM Tribe Special?
In short, we are the only organization within the "business builder for lawyers" space that is led by two practicing lawyers.
One thing we're sure you've noticed is that despite the variety of options within our space, no one else is mixing
the actual practice of law with business building in the way that we are.
There are no other organizations who understand the highs and lows of running a small law firm and are engaged in talking to real clients. That is what sets GLM apart from every other organization, and it is why we have had loyal members that have been with us for two-decades.
Darko and I founded the company which is called NextSales and then converted to Growth Era. We started out as an outbound SDR appointment setting firm. Now we've discovered other lines of business. We do some HubSpot setup, salesforce setups because we found that people had problems setting up and keeping their CRMs in order administratively. And then also some funnel management. When you have a certain number of conversations going sales conversations, a lot of times AEs or executive salespeople will let some of the details drop. It was useful to have an administrative assistant in the funnel just living there making sure that every deal has a next action. So it expanded the purview of the company.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Renegade Lawyer Podcast, the show where we ask the questions why aren't more lawyers living flourishing lives and inspiring others? And can you really get wealthy while doing only the work you love with people you like? Many lawyers are. Get ready to hear from your host, ben Glass, the founder of the law firm Ben Glass Law in Fairfax, virginia, and Great Legal Marketing, an organization that helps good people succeed by coaching, inspiring and supporting law firm owners. Join us for today's conversation.
Speaker 3:Hey everyone, welcome back to the Renegade Lawyer Podcast. I'm Ben Glass, where each episode I get to interview interesting people inside or outside of legal who are dinging the world. Today I've got a great guest, andrew Jacoby, and we're going to talk about outsourcing to overseas workers. We're going to talk about scaling your company. Andrew is a founder of Growth Era and a second company, good Shepherd Staffing and I was talking to Andrew before we went live like this is an emerging topic of interest to the entrepreneurial lawyers in a great league of marketing. How do we scale our company by using out of country employees for a wide range. For example, we have about 22 people under roof at Bangalas Law and seven of them are in the Philippines, including two full-time executive assistants for my son and I. So this is going to be awesome, andrew, because this is a hot topic for the entrepreneur not for all lawyers yet, but for the entrepreneurial small firm owner, this is a big deal. So welcome to the program.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much, ben. I'm wonderful to spend time with you. It's probably a big topic for the entrepreneurial lawyer and the really big law firm. Probably it's the in the middle, that's not.
Speaker 3:We never hear much about what goes on inside the really big law firm. But here's something. I'll start here and just go adjacent one step. So I was talking to a law student the other day and we're actually talking about AI. So AI and out-of-country workers two big deals, right. And I said to her what are they teaching in law school about AI? And they're saying, run, be very afraid.
Speaker 3:I said, well, okay, but our lawyers are talking about both AI and out-of-country staffing and saying what's the opportunity here? And the way I like to approach everything, particularly with what we're going to talk about here today, is what's the win-win? Here we can actually ding the world. We can help move the world by providing interesting work that pays as well or better than someone can make on their local economy to somebody who's got gifts and talents but they just don't have a place to exploit them, probably, or to use them, maximize them, in their own country. So we're going to go there today. Tell us a little bit about Growth Air, because that is an outbound sales company but primarily run, I think, as I understand it, by out-of-country employees. Yeah, that's a good question Again.
Speaker 1:I'm happy to be here, looking forward to the conversation. So Growth Era started out as a way of generalizing what I was doing as a freelancer. So I was doing outbound sales myself, both as an SDR, as an account executive as well. Actually, my sales career started out in the late 90s in car sales and then it went to inside sales for the technology world because that was what was happening in Silicon Valley in the late 90s. From there I got the sense of hey, if I'm on the phone all the time, I'm not on a car lot, why do I have to be in the United States?
Speaker 1:I ended up moving overseas, lived abroad and was doing sales development work as a way of making a living. I'm also a musician, so I was spending time playing music and doing other things and I thought it was a great idea because it enabled me to live overseas and I was trying to get other people interested in it. But it was hard work. It's cold calling. People don't really like to do that. Cold outreach a lot of rejection, it's definitely for a certain type of person.
Speaker 1:And then I tried some people in other countries and I had some very limited success. I was having difficulty finding people in India and Indonesia. And then I found this guy in Macedonia, which is the ex-Yugoslavia, through an online platform and I hired him. We started to work together and he was really talented and I was living in Vienna at the time, in Austria, for most of the year Can't live there all year because I'm not a citizen but for most of the year splitting between there, united States and Asia, and I had to leave. So I went to Macedonia because it was outside of the Schengen zones, it was outside of where I could go, get a visa run, let's say. And I asked Darko, who was my co-founder and this gentleman I'm speaking about are there other people like you in this place called Macedonia, where I've never been? He says yeah, and I said the second question is I'm from Philadelphia. Am I going to get killed if I go to Macedonia? Am I in danger? He said no, you're okay, you're probably safer than you are in Philadelphia, which is true. So I ended up going to Macedonia, rented an Airbnb and Darko and I founded the company, which was called NextSales and then converted to Growth Era.
Speaker 1:We started out as an outbound SDR appointment setting firm. Now we've discovered other lines of business appointment setting firm. Now we've discovered other lines of business. We do some HubSpot setup, salesforce setups because we found that people had problems setting up and keeping their CRMs in order administratively. And then also some funnel management. When you have a certain number of conversations going sales conversations a lot of times AEs or executive salespeople will let some of the details drop. It was useful to have an administrative assistant in the funnel just living there making sure that every deal has a next action. So it expanded the purview of the company and we have currently, I believe, a little over 80 employees there.
Speaker 1:The only one that's in the United States is my CEO, bryce, and who, ironically, was my client when I was in SDR, his first company. He then sold it to a publicly traded company, built and sold another company and then he went into coaching. He became our coach and then eventually our CEO. So when people ask me, ben, what can these people overseas do? Because I have a new company called Good Shepherd Staffing, which you mentioned, and my answer is they do everything in my company. So every function minus the CEO role. I have zero operational role in the company. I'm still on the board, but I don't have any operational role. So overseas employees do every single role. They're the SDRs, they're the finance managers, they're the chief operation officers, they're the customer relations managers, every single thing. And so that's the power of doing it. And the new company is my attempt to take what I've learned over the years of hiring hundreds of these people, multiple hundreds, and then teaching other business owners in the United States that don't have that experience how to do that and help them facilitate that.
Speaker 3:As we move through time. Is your customer, like me running a business, someone you have to convince that it's okay to run a company with everyone being out of the country? Or are you seeing more people like, no, I heard about this, this is good, I'm looking for a company that can help me organize it. So I've got one-stop shopping. What are you finding? We're in the last quarter of 2024 as we're recording that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that there was a big acceleration during COVID of people being used to remote work in general. Even just in the United States, that change allowed people to get their head around working remotely, which is really the first piece of this puzzle, because you can't work with somebody overseas unless you can work remotely. So that's the first thing. So if you're working with somebody remotely, then does it really matter, intellectually speaking, whether they're in Michigan or in Macedonia? Not really. We just had a meetup in Macedonia.
Speaker 1:I flew over there and everybody from the company, or most people, flew in and we all meet once a year in person and team building and things. So there's a hybrid model there. But ultimately, the COVID period helped a lot of people move a lot closer to the concept. And then I think, the next, the people I talk to. There's general objections to it. For example, hey, I don't know if I can trust people with my passwords or how do I build up trust with people? Generally, the people I'm talking to have a curiosity and then they have a few lingering questions and my job is to teach them how I got over it and maybe that helps them to also do so, or not.
Speaker 3:I think for a lot of the lawyers that we coach and talk to, as soon as they hear from someone that they trust that, oh, she's doing it All right, let me go ask her a bunch of questions like how do you do security? How do you do confidentiality? If they make a mistake? What happens there? And so I think you're right Out of every adversity comes streams of opportunity, and COVID taught lawyers a ton who typically are very inside the box, if you didn't already know this very unwilling Like.
Speaker 3:The thing they don't teach in law school is creativity and entrepreneurism. Lawyers are all about finding the issues like all the reasons why something can't work. But that's not this audience. So let's talk a little bit about that First. I always like to approach things, andrew, from the mindset perspective. Lawyers have a hard time letting go of the vine. Nobody could do it as good as I could. It'll take me too long to teach. It's not even security questions first, it's those things. How can I teach someone to do this intellectually complex thing that we do called the law? So let's talk about that. Growth, worldwide economy, mindset that I think is probably required here.
Speaker 1:I think it's a really interesting question and I would say my career as a freelancer, let's say entrepreneur, which I started pretty late, my first real business, but I think I didn't start a business earlier because I was afraid to hire people, I was afraid to bring them on because I thought that they would take advantage of me. I had some bad experiences with employers in the past and a few partnerships that didn't work out or what have you, and so I had this fear and I thought I could just do it on my own. And that was not true. I didn't find success by myself. I have some skills, but profound weaknesses in my personality, in my work style. I have a more creative kind of vision type of personality and I'm a very poor administrator. And in business you need to administrate results for clients, you need to get stuff done. You can't just talk about stuff. An idea isn't good enough, and it really stalled my growth for a really long time.
Speaker 1:And the big change, the biggest change, was my changing of that opinion. It really happened through meeting Darko, when I met somebody who had complementary skill sets to myself. So I would talk about something and then he would go do it pretty competently and I would be amazed, because normally I just talked about things and nothing really happened. And with him it was this great partnership. He was younger, I had read a lot, but you and I were talking earlier about Dan Kennedy, so I know a lot about business, I have a lot of experience, but as an implementer I was really weak and he was really good as an implementer, but he didn't know as much. So it was a wonderful partnership. So I think the first question is is your growth being hindered by this attitude that you have to do everything? Because actually, if you think of yourself as an entrepreneur first and a lawyer second which I would argue to you is what you are, at least potentially, you don't have to do that Our people do that.
Speaker 1:Great. Exactly, If that's your primary identity, then you must, I would say. Then your role is the creation of the machine, the creation of the game that other people are going to play, and so part of that is that you have to have other people doing the work or you will do the work. So if you don't have an overseas assistant helping you, actually you are that assistant. That might be fine in the short term, as you said.
Speaker 1:Hey, it's going to take me longer to teach somebody how to do this today than it will be to do this thing. Let's say this five minute administrative task or what have you which is true today task, or what have you which is true today. However, if you have to repeat that task and most things in business repeat over and over again, that five minutes times every day over the next 20 years of your career is a long time. It's like months and years of your life actually. So you have to look at it like that and it depends on your end goal. My reason for getting into business was because I wanted to create opportunities for other people, create financial freedom for myself, create an environment that I wanted to work in, and then, ultimately, I didn't really think this was possible until I saw it happen. To create an asset that grows and flourishes with zero of my input. That was really the dream, Ultimately. While I tried to do it, it was really difficult, but then eventually, little by little, piece by piece, it happened.
Speaker 3:I want to come back to that and managing all these people. But one of the things that we teach lawyers is hey, if you're the law firm owner of a small firm, you're paid to do two things. One is to be creative about the business, as you said, creating the game that other people are going to play and fashioning a business model that fits to the life and the lifestyle that you want to live. That's a high value exercise, right? Not everybody can do this. And the other thing is when clients come to a law firm, they're looking for your expertise. They're looking for your creative solution to their problem or your creative insights into their opportunity. And if we could just play in those two zones of genius most of the day genius most of the day then the world is winning and everything else is just a process. Most client calls and inquiries are process questions. They are not legal strategy questions. But if the only thing you had to do all day was work with a client for legal strategy and your insight, like, that's the place we want to play. And so having others who can make you look good because you have a unfrazzled brain, right To think creatively.
Speaker 3:And the third thing point I'll make here is when you don't have this figured out. When you are the one who's also the doer, you're stealing from your family A hundred percent of the time. You're then the one that's late at night, early morning, saturday and Sunday, and you got your cell phone in front of you while you're at your kid's baseball game because you actually don't value that time with your family as much as you say you should. So keeping those things in mind, I think, pushes people, and once they see somebody they know like, oh wow, they're doing it. That's interesting because this first came up in our mastermind groups a year or so ago. We had all these questions like how do you share passwords? What about credit card numbers? What about membership numbers to America?
Speaker 1:Everybody has that question.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so let's just go there first, because I mean, I know some of these answers, I know how we do it, but what is your advice about management of personal information, the sort of stuff you don't want to see in the dark web?
Speaker 1:First of all, you want to be careful. There's real risk there. I can tell you from my experience. So we have a woman works at Growth Era named Mimi, and she was one of my first employees and she was an SDR for me. She was 25 when we hired her. She was basically her second job out of school, but she studied to be a finance person and Mimi eventually transitioned. She was a really good SDR, but we needed somebody in finance so we transitioned her into finance.
Speaker 1:Today, mimi has access. It's a multimillion dollar agency. There's a lot of money in the bank. There's a lot of money going. There's hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in transactions going through the company. She has access to all of it. She can move money.
Speaker 1:And so people are like, wow, that's crazy. And the answer is how that happened is little by little. She didn't start out with that access. She built it step by step. The same way, everybody builds credibility in this world by being honest and having integrity, doing what she said she was going to do and being reliable at a really high level for a really long period of time, and so that's how she built that trust.
Speaker 1:I would wire her every dollar in my bank account today and I have a hundred percent faith that, unless she died, she would wire me that money back tomorrow. If that was the thing, I would wire every single dollar that I have in the bank and anywhere and say, mimi, I need you to wire this money back to me tomorrow. She would do it. I have zero doubt about that Actually zero unless there was again some death. And whatever she did, she was physically unable to do so. So that's how you do it in the beginning. If I'm starting to work with somebody, it's the same way I would build trust with anybody else. It doesn't matter where they are Because, by the way, the truth is somebody can steal from you right down the road. From you, they can steal from you in your office.
Speaker 1:It's really about your judgment of their character. Mainly, as Warren Buffett says, you can't make good contracts with bad people. So it's really about the judge of their character. So the way that I do it personally is that when somebody comes to work for me in any role, I give them trust to a certain extent, but we start out with basic stuff. I don't give them access to my bank account on day one. I give them tasks that they can do. Look, I don't really care if they have access to my Google Drive folder or whatever and actually this is a little controversial but I'm not even that worried about credit card info and stuff, because if they start doing crazy stuff, you can get that money back.
Speaker 1:I have a high risk tolerance there a little bit of a gambler, so I don't know that that's for everybody. That's my own personal perspective. But I think the prudent thing to do is to give them work. Let them prove to you that they do what they say they're going to do, on time and as promised, over and over again, and then ratchet up, little by little, the trust that you give them for more sensitive information. That's the best way to do it. There are also tools you can use for passwords. We use LastPass. You can give people access to passwords that way. Actually, there's no great answer to this problem. It's really about your ability to trust human beings and your ability to discern which human beings you should trust and how much. That's really the best answer that I have for that.
Speaker 3:I think you're exactly right, because all the problems that anyone could imagine could be happening right in your own office and the stories are legion of small business owners, including lawyers, getting robbed by their bookkeeping team for years to set up fake accounts 100%.
Speaker 1:My family's in the jewelry business since my grandfather started our family jewelry business in 1947. That's where you're talking about diamonds and gold like actual physical stuff, and so the amount of times that we've had problems is just legion. That's why mostly that business is a family business, because you really need to trust people at a very high level to be walking around with diamonds and gold that you own.
Speaker 3:Hey guys, this is Ben. If you like what you've been hearing on this podcast not just the marketing and practice building strategies, but the philosophy of the art of living your best life parts. You should know that my son, Brian, and I built a tribe of like-minded lawyers who are living lives of their own design and creating tremendous value for the world within the structure of a law practice. We invite you to join us at the only membership organization for entrepreneurial lawyers that is run by two full-time practicing attorneys. Check us out at greatlegalmarketingcom.
Speaker 3:Let's talk for a few minutes about someone who is a business owner, a lawyer, who is entering the world. They're getting their first. Maybe it's not even an executive assistant. It is a out of country task worker for something but we're interested in because this is new learning and new space for us. What are some of the best practices in terms of how we are going to communicate, how are we going to delegate, how are we going to build a database of playbooks? You're talking to someone and you've got 30 minutes. Here's three skill sets that you do need to get good at.
Speaker 1:That's a great way to frame it, ben. Actually, it is a skill set. So, number one, accept that you've never done it before and so your muscles for doing it are weak. I've been doing it for years, so I'm pretty confident with it. Again, I've hired hundreds of people and so I've gotten better at it over time. So accept that you're gonna be weak and there's only one way to get strong, which is to do it. So do the hard thing.
Speaker 1:And unfortunately in this case or fortunately, depending upon your perspective it's like swimming. I can't teach you to swim unless you're in the water, but you can't be in the water unless you know how to swim. So you just got to flop around for a little while while you learn. So that's the first thing Go easy on yourself, but do it. So what I would say is here's a couple of tools that are really helpful.
Speaker 1:Number one loomcom, a loom video. So what that is? It's a tool you can start out for free. You get five minute videos where you can do a screen capture of what you're doing and you can communicate asynchronously with people. Hey, this is the task I want you to do. Actually, do the task. Do the task on your screen with your face and then send the link to your new virtual assistant. I need you to do this and then send them that task that's number one, loom and then it's like 15 bucks a month for as long as you need.
Speaker 1:I have clients they'll record hours of loom videos, like just record themselves working for three hours, send it to their virtual assistant and then say show me anything that you could do here that I'm not thinking to give you, like any tasks that I did over the last three hours, and show me that you could do this task. So Loom is a hugely powerful tool, because another key feature of this is asynchronous work. That's key. You want to do the most important tasks of your day when you have the most energy, and so what that means is that you want to be giving administrative tasks to other day when you have the most energy, and so what that means is that you want to be giving administrative tasks to other people when it's convenient for you, and you want to be minimizing the amount of synchronous time that you have to be speaking with your assistants. So what that means is maximizing the asynchronous communication. Loom is a great asynchronous tool.
Speaker 3:Number one One of the things when I was training my executive assistant. In the beginning she manages a bunch of things, but, for example, all of my email, which lawyers thought that'd be impossible. For three days I just went through my email and narrated this person's important. If you see emails like this, they can go in the dump file and unsubscribe. This is how we would respond to this. And so she learned and in the beginning she's really sorting things into important or I think it's important, I don't know or delete.
Speaker 3:In the beginning I would spend time going in the delete file just making sure like, yeah, all the correct people that needed to be dumped got dumped. And now I hardly ever look at that delete file and instead of looking at hundreds of emails a day which is what everybody gets because of all the marketing stuff I'm looking at seven. And so that Loom video was the way to do it. Now I think for my own training, like getting off of the keyboard and just saying okay, rather than sending a chat or sending an email. Oh wait, let me just show you. Here's something I need to change on the website. Let me just show you on this short video. It could be 60 seconds or 90 seconds, it's 100%.
Speaker 1:It's a great tool. Loom is a great tool. Number two you need a basic project management tool. The one we use is called Trello. It is the brain dead, simplest project management tool you could possibly imagine and it's totally free. And basically it's set up as what they call a Kanban board, which comes from Japanese lean manufacturing, where they like to have visual workflows. And so we have a column of cards. The column is to do, doing, waiting, done, and I write the task, I assign it to my virtual assistant, we move it into the doing pile and then I follow those tasks along with her and as it's done, and that's really it. It's super simple. You can go much more complicated, you can have automations in there. There's labels for different types of tasks, you can do all kinds of stuff, but it's a basic, super easy, free visual workflow manager, slash project management tool.
Speaker 1:You can use other tools. There's plenty out there Asana, clickup. There's a ton of tools. The best tool for you is the one you will use. For me, trello is the easiest one. You could do a Google spreadsheet as simple as that. Simple as that. Also, we use a tool called Notion, which I highly recommend as well, because it's very flexible and yet very powerful, because you can manage multiple sort of layers of databases in there. It's a whole nother topic.
Speaker 1:So what we do is we have a list of all the tasks that we have reps doing and those will be listed on. This is a daily task Every day, you're going to do this, so maybe check in your case, ben, it might be check task Every day. You're going to do this, so maybe check in your case, ben, it might be check my email every day, twice a day, in the morning and in the early afternoon. That's a daily task and it's assigned to this particular virtual assistant. A weekly task maybe send me a digest of all the certain types of emails I got this week. That's weekly, and here's the VA that's associated with that task and it's getting done.
Speaker 1:Here's a monthly task. I need you to give me an update on all of my appointments for the next month. I need them whatever listed for me so I can know what my month coming up is going to be. And then we have a list, an ongoing spreadsheet, of every single task and the ones that repeat and the frequency Is it a daily task? Is it a weekly task? Is it a yearly task, is it a quarterly task? So, with those three tools, with Loom, with Trello and with Notion, or you could just use a regular spreadsheet for that list we find it's really helpful and really easy to organize. And then for daily back and forth communication we use Slack, as does basically everybody, because it's a really good way of not just doing everything by email.
Speaker 3:We are building out. So we use Notion and Asana. I had to ask, like, give me the basic difference between the two. Notion it was described to me as a knowledge database, like everything we do once now becomes part of a Ben Glass law or Ben Glass personal playbook, right? So these are the people that are in my life. Here's where I like to sit on the airplane when I travel. It's all in Notion, and then we use Asana to keep ourselves my EA and myself on the same page in terms of all right, what's important this week? What are we doing? Right, the repeatable task. She manages all the calendar. A lot of the LinkedIn pitches that I get. We have a system because we're running two companies, so pitch me in the Ben Glass Law side. I may try to get you to be a vendor or a writer for us in the Great Legal Marketing side if you've got something to.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Asana's more task manager and Notion can be task management too, but it's built more for information storage and retrieval, I think.
Speaker 3:I agree with you.
Speaker 1:You can do a lot with Notion.
Speaker 3:Notion's amazing, one of the cool things to do is, as you're exploring any type of software and you're already working with a virtual assistant of some sort is you can have the virtual assistant. Go and learn this and come teach me, teach us, how we're going to use this thing together. The other thing that we try to do, andrew, if I give you a task, you're going to show me the first three times that you can do it to the spec, but then the fourth time maybe you've got a better way, like we know what the outcome is. But, ben, here's actually a better way to do what we are working on. That is having this close feedback loop, especially in the beginning, recognizing there's going to be errors made right.
Speaker 3:But the opposite side is, if you don't do it, then you're always stuck doing these tasks yourself. Let me ask you this If I followed you around for a week, you've got 80 or so employees out of country. What would I observe in terms of how you are operating, managing, using these tools and communicating with your team? You mentioned having one virtual assistant. He or she's got people that they're managing underneath them. It's just like a regular business structure that's got 80 employees and you've got a couple of reports and everyone else is managed down the line For.
Speaker 1:Grothera. I am just on the board, so I have zero operational role. The only meetings I have with Grothera we have a sort of board meeting call where we discuss the profits and what are we going to reinvest in and what are we going to pull out as distributions. Everything else is managed through the company. Essentially, I have zero operational role in that company.
Speaker 1:The new company is we started in January of this year, so I have a operational role in that company the new companies that we started in January of this year. So I have a staff internally of about four people and what I started with was four different people out. There were all reporting to me and then I found one person within that group that I promoted to general manager and I recommend this as well. So they manage the other people. I basically have one report that I deal with directly and they then manage everything else. I might or might not be on their weekly calls with the different departments. I deal with one person. This is my own personal style. I like that because what I want to be doing is I want to be spending as much time as possible completely out of communication. So what I want to be is personally, I'm like Dan Kennedy, I have no cell phone.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I have no cell phone. I like to avoid as much internet time as possible. I'm more or less successful on any given day, so I like to spend the good first part of my day listening to music classical music and writing and thinking and strategizing, because I see myself as a capital allocator, essentially as an entrepreneur. There's a lot of money running through these systems. There's a lot of capital being allocated hundreds of thousands of dollars a month so I really need to think am I allocating my capital correctly on a daily basis? Peter Drucker, a very famous management theorist, highly recommend reading the Effective Executive. Peter Drucker, a very famous management theorist, highly recommend reading the Effective Executive. He says the basic question of business repeats every day At the end of every day what business was I in today and what business should I have been in? That's really the question you're answering. Am I using my capital both labor and myself personally, my time, my labor, my spend, my advertising, everything? Is it being used correctly, at its most highest possible value, return or not? And if not, what could I do to change that? And that is a perennial question. It's like in basketball Do I shoot or do I pass? And that question never ends, and so that's what I want to spend as much time. So I'd like to block off four or five hours a day, because that's about all I can do with that kind of deep work in the morning to do that. Then in the afternoons what you'll find is I'll take a lunch. I might go like right before this call I went for a walk in the woods. I like to be outside and then I'll do administrative stuff in the afternoon. That would be now because I'm operating again. I have sales roles. I carry a bag for my company. I might be trying to generate interest for the business, being on podcasts like this or being on sales goals or writing copy or whatever fires for the day, basically solving whatever the bottleneck for the business is at that particular moment. Right now, for me it's like a particular bottleneck is I want to generate more leads. Then if I solve that bottleneck, the bottleneck will move to something else. How do I get more fulfillment, people to handle the demand that I've generated? Then the bottleneck will change again.
Speaker 1:So highly recommend another book called the Goal. I forget who wrote it, but it's basically about the manufacturing process. By the way, a business is a manufacturing process where you take a stranger and convert them into a customer, and then a loyal customer, and then somebody who refers you business. That is a process, and so in that process you have, at any given moment, a bottleneck. There's something that's stopping up your pipe. There's somebody standing on your hose and your 100% job, in order to get that throughput moving again, is to remove that bottleneck. So for me right now, that's lead generation. So I'm spending all of my time focused on lead generation to unleash that part of the funnel. Once that happens, the bottleneck will switch, it'll go somewhere else and it's constantly switching. There's always a bottleneck. So our job as business owners is to determine where is our current bottleneck and then spending all of our time fixing that bottleneck. It's just changing. The bottleneck always just changes. So you have to constantly find that bottleneck and remove it.
Speaker 3:That's what I'm spending my time Most lawyers are spending all of their time totally fragmented, solving 27 minor issues every single day and wearing every single hat. Does Growth Era and Good Shepherd Staffing? Both provide essentially the same services, but from different parts of the world.
Speaker 1:I would say the Growth Era is a business process outsourcing company. So we have certain business processes that clients come to us to manage for them. So that would be various things. Call it the sales ecosystem. Good Shepherd Staffing is more of a general staffing company. So our clients are more business owners, like the people that are listening to this today, that are frazzled. They're doing work that they shouldn't be doing. They want to be offloading that work and we're here to help them find the people also act as a intermediary for that. So they can deal with a US company and we'll handle the overseas paperwork and we'll handle the billing and if the person doesn't work we'll help with training and if the person doesn't work out, we'll find another person, that kind of thing. So it's more general staffing. We are not then managing the resources that we place with our clients, Whereas in a growth era we are managing the resources too.
Speaker 3:The product you're selling in growth era is different, even though it's supplied by human beings around the world.
Speaker 3:Yes, that's the similarity, exactly, and it seems to me that just even four or five years ago, if a business owner wanted to go and get a virtual assistant help from outside the country, it was going to one of these websites and then trying to find someone directly in another country and then trying to vet and figure out the rules and figure out how to pay, and then there was an intermediary taking a percentage of that, which I think was a more daunting task. So now a company like Good Shepherd Staffing is. I guess you're recruiting, doing vetting? Do you do any training of the folks that are being hired as virtual assistants? Yes, how to be a great virtual assistant and how to keep your job forever.
Speaker 1:Our ideal virtual assistant and most of the ones we place. Now there's some people that are coming in for specific roles, which we then go out and procure on an as needed basis. So that's a specific but the general virtual assistants typically what we like to do. We have relationships with schools in other countries that people are going and paying in order to learn these skills of how to be a virtual assistant. We are then taking those people internally. They act as interns for us before we place them with clients. So we already know they have the basic skills. They can speak English and write English, they show up on time, they do what they're supposed to do. So we vet them in that way and then we train them in defined details of what they're doing and then ongoing, we are monitoring their behavior and if they need help, we are then helping them say, okay, they need to study this particular thing, how can they improve? And then we guide them towards further education. But my general advice to people and this is also maybe controversial, but I think the best thing to do is to find somebody who is smart and hardworking and honest, and these days, with the internet, they can learn anything. So that is the best way because you'll get the best dollar for labor. You'll get your best value because you'll hire them for less money because they won't be that experienced. You'll have found them early on in their career development. You will then be a part of that development and you will gain access to the best part of their career trajectory.
Speaker 1:That's been my experience over time, rather than finding someone who's already an expert and then the market's already priced into their labor what they know, and so I think that the better arbitrage usually not all the time, this is most of the time is to find the diamond in the rough. Who's got the right pieces? Because on a per hour basis it's relatively inexpensive. So if they spend three hours studying something, even if it's on the clock, it's a great ROI for you. As you said earlier, ben, you can go learn this thing and teach it to me.
Speaker 1:So I recommend people do that. So, internally, they come to us after already having invested in their own career, and then we take them in as interns, train them as interns, and then we place them with clients and we start off with a 10-hour free trial. So if you're not comfortable, if you've never done this, we'll pay the person to work for you for 10 hours, just so that you can see what it's like. You can experiment. Hey, go find me the cheapest trip to Bali, doesn't matter Whatever. You want them to do for 10 hours, just so you can see what somebody like this is like to work with.
Speaker 3:So you said a couple of things First. So I had no idea that there were actually schools that folks are going to in other countries to learn how to be one of these virtual assistants supporting a business.
Speaker 1:It's great work for them.
Speaker 3:That's 100%. Look, sometimes you'll hear people say you're only paying $5 an hour, and that's ripping people off, except for they can only make $2.50 an hour in their home country, whatever, and they get to work with somebody cool like us right.
Speaker 1:Also, they get to work from home in a lot of places. For example, in the Philippines, if you live in what they call the provinces, there is no local economy that you're going to make any real money. You have to either go to Manila, which is not great and probably far away from you, or you have to leave the country, which hurts their ability to be with their families, and even formed families. You giving them work where they can do from home, if they have internet connectivity, is a massive blessing for them, apart from the money.
Speaker 3:Yeah, with our team in the Philippines. We send them the swag from the law firm. We send them some books and other things that we like, that actually, when you find out it's not like here, they can't just order something on Amazon and it shows up the next day. All the folks that are working for Ben Glass Law from the Philippines are curious, good people who have now been with us a decent amount of time where they are part of the team. They're showing up in our newsletter. Sometimes they show up at our meetings. Virtually Our team does work US-based hours, East Coast hours. I don't know if the folks that you were supplying to Good Shepherd are all working asynchronous versus. I heard there's this whole subculture in the Philippines that just are living life at opposite timeframe from the local.
Speaker 1:It's both, and so I have some assistants in the company where I don't really care if they work synchronously or not. They can do the work at night. It doesn't really matter to me. I have others that I need them to be online, and so you just have to work that out with each particular person.
Speaker 3:I asked you earlier about a sort of training for the virtual assistant. Does your company offer training for people like me, someone who would be new to this, to say, hey, this is how you do this most efficiently, this is how you manage somebody, this is how you use these tools, or you should use tools. Is there any of that in the Good Shepherd staffing?
Speaker 1:It's a great question. We're going to do that in a more sophisticated and systematic fashion. Right now, I do send emails to people like they're on my email list and training within those emails, but I want to build a course for it because it's a great question. Ben, I take it for granted because I've learned these skills, but, as you said, not everybody knows that it's a great idea and we're going to be doing more of it more systematically.
Speaker 3:Here's your other plus maybe is building a little cohort of hey, here's five guys and gals in America who are using our company and the same thing happens for us. So several of our Philippine-based employees. They work out of the same company and they actually go to a Ben Glass Law office right, a secure facility, and they have their own little trainings and mini mastermind. This gets back to the whole sort of blessing of this is a huge win-win relationship. And I would just say to biz owners, in addition to getting great quality work done by people who, as you say, andrew, show up and work hard and want to please you, there's this whole sort of immeasurable of you are having an impact on somebody else's life. You're helping their development. You said you'll be a part of their development. I can't emphasize this enough the feeling that you have that you're changing the trajectory of someone's life. Yes, they're helping you. Yes, you're paying them less than Philadelphia-based or Washington DC-based assistants, but you are helping them acquire skills that they leave you. They're moving up the ladder as well.
Speaker 1:In Growth Era. We have a bunch of people that are young Most of them are SDRs, so that's an entry-level sales role and they're in their early 20s. It's their first job for real and these people are making more money than their parents and they're supporting their parents in the villages.
Speaker 1:And it's amazing, it's like really powerful, because the sense of pride that they have for what they've accomplished and it's great to see. I think, once you've reached a certain level of where your bills are paid, really the benefit of business, in my view, is the providing of opportunity for other people and to me that's what feels the best is taking a young person and giving them an opportunity to shine and the opportunity to support their family and to do so in a respectful environment, whereas a lot of places they don't treat them very well, they just see them as overseas. Oh, these dumb, poor, cheap people. If you treat them well, the loyalty and the relationships. Again, look at the end of the day, my co-founder, darko. This guy in Macedonia is truthfully smarter, harder working than me. It just so happens that he was born in a poor country and had less opportunity. I just gave him the opportunity. That's reality. I just happened to be born in Philadelphia and he happened to be born in Skopje, macedonia.
Speaker 3:And it's not his fault. That's just what it is. And what were you doing before all of this? I'm just curious about your own journey through life.
Speaker 1:I've lived overseas for 13 or so years. Before I started Grothera, I was playing music in the subways of Vienna. That's how I was making my living.
Speaker 3:If folks want to connect with Good Shepherd Staffing, find out next steps. In fact, you said you even have a 10-hour trial.
Speaker 1:Yeah, sure, absolutely. What should they do? We're happy to help you out. We'll send you over some Loom videos, so the reps will be speaking and you just pick one, the rep that you like, and then we'll facilitate a trial, 10 hours, and, if you like it, you can hire them full-time, half-time or just a la carte.
Speaker 1:Per hour per week, and that's it. It's pretty simple. Don't stop, don't delay, because look, if you're doing work that you can get done for an inexpensive hourly amount overseas in a free market, over time your wages will not be much above the labor that you put in. So if you really want to make good money in your career and as a business owner, you really need to be doing the high level work of strategy, of vision, and all the other work needs to be done by other people who are in different places and with different skill sets. So you have to be honest and look at what you're doing on a daily basis and write down what you think that is a per hour basis work, what that is, and you really should only be doing the highest level, maybe sales and marketing, vision, capital allocation, things like that. Those are the high leverage skills.
Speaker 3:That's a good lead in to repitch no BS, time management. French Amen, fourth edition, ben Glass and Dan Kennedy, because, at the end of the day, that book is a philosophy book which encapsulates what you just said. Let's do our genius zone work, yep. Let's recognize that there's people all over the world who for stuff that either is not valuable for us to do it or we just don't like doing it, but it needs to get done. There's somebody whose life will be lit on fire by being able to do that. Andrew, this has been an awesome conversation. Hang on. After we disconnect, I do want to get your address. Great Folks can go to goodshepherdstaffingcom. Check them out. Just go find out more and more about how to be a great delegator of things, so that you can be a better lawyer to your clients and a better member for your family, because at the end of the day, as I said earlier, if you don't figure this out, we just steal from our families, and that's not what we were born to do Amen.
Speaker 1:Thanks, Ben. I really appreciate you having me on.
Speaker 2:Yes, sir, and that's not what we were born to do the legal profession. So they can deliver high quality legal services coupled with top-notch customer service to clients who pay, stay and refer. Learn more at greatlegalmarketingcom. That's greatlegalmarketingcom.
