Vital assistants (aka virtual assistants) are extremely important for a business to succeed. If you’re a business owner, you’re going to have a lot of things on your plate. So you need a good vital assistant who can take on those mundane tasks so you can focus on what really matters in your business. As the owner, you want to be able to maximize your productivity and energy every day. Join Susie Carder as she talks to the COO and Founder of BeeEPIC Outsourcing, Beejel Parmar about his business and why vital assistants are necessary if you want to grow your business. Learn how to delegate and prioritize work. Find out what your relationship is to the word “productivity” as an entrepreneur. Start hiring a vital assistant for yourself today!
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I have a treat for you. This is something you’ve been looking for years. It took me many years to find Beejel. Since 2009, he has been providing vital assistant outsourcing services. That’s what we all need. He has advised thousands of entrepreneurs, professionals, and businesses on how to find, hire, train, and manage virtual assistants. He has also pioneered how vital assistants can help clients with the alignment of planning, task scheduling, daily accountability, and Key Performance Indicators to boost our productivity and profits. It’s such a pleasure to have Beejel in our studio. Please welcome my guest, Beejel.
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I’m so excited that you’re here. More importantly, I feel like this is one of those secret weapons that every entrepreneur needs, whether you’re in a startup, emerging, and scaling. You are the secret weapon. Tell people who you are, what you do in the world, and what your sweet spot is.
Thanks so much. First of all, my name is Beejel. I’ve been here in Las Vegas for several years, but it doesn’t feel like it. Prior to that, people will say, “Where do you live before Las Vegas?” I said, “Traveling around the world for about five years with my family.” I’ll share more about how that wasn’t by design either. Neither was coming to Vegas, actually. What I’ve been doing since 2009 is helping entrepreneurs and business owners learn how to best work with virtual assistants.
I’m going to do my best. That’s the first and last time I’m going to use the word virtual assistants because the very first thing I want to share is we should call them vital assistants. Virtual by definition means not real. The folks that I’ve matched with entrepreneurs are very real and vital to the business. I’ve been saying that for several years. If I say virtual, please call me out. From now on, it’s vital assistants. I’m building now my second company in the space and specifically how to work with home-based vital assistants. I’ll share some techniques and things I’ve learned over the last decade or so.
[bctt tweet=”Virtual assistants should be called vital assistants because virtual means “not real,” and yet they are very real and vital to your business.” via=”no”]
How did you start this business? You had to leave the US in 2010. Share your experience about what you learned about productivity and outsourcing from that experience. That spring-boarded what you’re up to and what you’re doing.
I’ll go back to 2009. In February of 2009, I had a dark night of an entrepreneur soul where you’ve tried everything, gone to the workshops, worked on the fire, walked on fire and broken balls, and everything else, and it’s still not working. You go, “Why me?” Long story short, I went through a very depressive time in February of 2009 and almost contemplated suicide. I had a $1 million life insurance policy. I asked myself, “Is that the only way I’m going to leave a fortune for my kids and family?” That never happened.
What happened was a few weeks later, I went to an event. I met a transformational speaker. I worked my life back out of that space. In that year though, I said, “What can I do next? What’s my next reinvention as an entrepreneur?” I realized that one of the things I was not being very good at as an entrepreneur was being very productive. I wasn’t producing the results I wanted to produce. That led me to look into starting up an outsourcing company. I hired three ladies in the Philippines. This was about August 2009.
A couple of weeks later, I was at my first event. I had my brand new business cards and website. I had my whole pitch polished. I was going around the room to network and get a whole bunch of new clients but the very first speaker on stage happened to be someone who was already in the industry, had a hundred people on his team and was very successful. With the one event I choose to launch my business, the speaker’s going to take all my business out of the room.
This folk is great. I went up to him at the break and said, “I’m just getting started. Would you mentor me?” He said, “Give me a call next week.” I did. We talked on the phone. I became a master affiliate. Six weeks later, around September or October of 2009, we started working together. From 2009 to 2019, I helped grow that business from 100 to 500 vital assistants.
I spoke all over the world, from all over the US, UK, India, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand. It was a fantastic time. In 2010, I had to leave the US. I started working with this new company. My immigration lawyer screwed things up. In June of 2010, he said, “Beejel, you’ve got two choices. Either you become illegal in the US and hope that one day they have amnesty or you leave the country.” We don’t want to break any laws so he sold everything. We packed 4 bags, 3 laptops, 2 kids and 1 wife and then we left.
We thought it’d be gone from 6 months to 12 months but we started enjoying the virtual life, the true laptop lifestyle that people talk about. We were living it. It wasn’t by choice. We were forced into it. For five years, not only did we grow the business but we experienced this lifestyle of traveling around the world and raising two kids. They were 5 and 10 when we had to leave the US. By the time we came back, they were 10 and 15. All of that was possible because we learned how to work with viral assistants in so many different areas of our business.
How do you feel like entrepreneurs are struggling? They’re struggling with procrastination and overwhelm? How does a vital assistant give them the tools they need to get them out of it?
I’m going to start a conversation a little bit higher up than vital assistants. People will say, “Can your vital assistant do that? Can I do this?” That’s great but I want to start slightly higher up, which is, “How are we valuing our time as entrepreneurs?” I’m not sure whom the audience is, whether they’re a new entrepreneur, maybe making $100,000 a year or $1 million but approximately a millionaire’s time is around $500 per month. It varies based on hours of work but let’s use that as a benchmark.
Let’s say that’s a millionaire. If you’re striving to reach the first million in your business, the time you’re putting into your business is around $500 a month. Let’s scale back and be more practical. Let’s talk about $100,000. This means that your time is approximately $50 per hour. If you are spending your time on tasks that you can delegate to somebody for $5 per hour but you are choosing to do it yourself and you want to go from that $100,000 to $1 million, how is it ever going to be possible? You are valuing your time at $5 per hour. Why? It’s because that’s what other people can do that work for.
More than just starting with, “What do I delegate,” we’ve got to start with a relationship to our time. When we talk about financial freedom, what does that mean? It’s about having the time to enjoy the money. You could be making millions of dollars and have zero time to enjoy it. There are many entrepreneurs out there and business owners who are burning themselves out making that million. This is a conversation about the time before anything else. We have to value our time.
We can start saying, “What are we doing?” I call it the morbid stuff, the mundane, the overwhelming, the repetitive, the boring that I don’t want to and the dislike of doing things in our business. When we can start to identify the morbid stuff, the thing that we do that drain the life out of us, we can start thinking about delegation. We want to delegate that morbid stuff, the stuff that we don’t want to do to a vital assistant. That’s the starting point of this conversation. It’s about valuing our time and knowing that there are things that we’re doing in our business that sucked the life out of us. We can start saying, “Who is the right person to do the actual work?”
I love that because I’ve been in all those seats, looking at making $1 million but not having a life, paying too much for what I could outsource but not knowing. Why I call you a secret weapon is because we don’t know what we don’t know. Getting into overseas hiring can be so scary for entrepreneurs. We don’t know how to do it. That’s why I’m bringing you the expert to go, “Let us show you another way and another possibility.” What I love is you handhold us from, “Let me handle the hard stuff. I’m going to bring you quality people.” I’ve done outsource on my own. That is process, arduous and time-consuming.
Let’s break this down because it’s good to give people options. Let me talk about two aspects of outsourcing. There are projects and processes. Let me define the difference between the two. A project is a website, a logo, a graphic or something that’s a one-time project. You can give it to somebody. They’re going to do it. You’ll pay them for doing it and it’s done.
Some websites have ongoing needs like eCommerce and stuff but generally speaking, a project is a one-time paid and done. The other side is what we call processes. Processes are the day-to-day activities like admin, billing, customer service and support. These are the nitty-gritty parts of the business that somebody has to be doing every single day while that business exists.
With my company specifically, we focus more on the day-to-day processes. The reason we do that is that the margins we have are very small. We don’t have high upfront fees so our success is based purely on the long-term relationship with our client. That’s projects and processes. What I would like to say to people is to minimize your spending on projects. Get them done faster and turn them into assets. Maximize your investment in processes because that’s what makes the money in the business.
The third option is the agency model. Most agencies are paying between $2.50 and sometimes even lower. Some of my VAs who come to us were earning $1.50 in sweatshop-type conditions and we don’t do anything like that. All of our VAs are home-based but they were in sweatshop-type conditions up to around $3 and $3.50.
The reason that they accept such conditions is that they need the work. An agency will then mark them up anywhere from 3 to 5 times. You’re may be paying $10 but the person doing the work might be only earning $2 up to $3. There are several websites we can go and hire directly. You’re going to put up a job post and get hundreds and thousands of people to apply for that. You don’t know who they are. You don’t have time to check all their resumes. You don’t know if they’re real. That’s the problem with hiring direct.
Both work. Sometimes you may need an agency model. Sometimes you’re going to hit gold and find that right VA when you’re hiring direct. When I left my previous company, I said, “What have I learned from the last years of working with entrepreneurs?” We know that entrepreneurs have a hard time knowing what to delegate and how to instruct a VA delegate. If they go to an agency, they’re paying these high fees and then figure out they’re paying high fees. They try to hire direct and they can’t find the right person. They complain that the VA left and ghosted them. It disappeared. Also, when they hire direct, sometimes the person whom they’re speaking to during the interview is not the person doing the work. That person should be the front face of the VA.
We took all of these challenges and said, “How do we fix all of this?” We came up with a model, which is very transparent with our clients. Some people call us an agency but we’re more like a matchmaker. We work with the client very hands-on. We figure out what their needs are, how to prioritize and what to delegate. Even if you have 10 things to delegate, it doesn’t mean we should try and delegate all 10 things because there’s usually what we call a task backer loop.
You assign a task to a VA. They do the task and then send it back to you for approval. If you are an already overwhelmed client, you might take 2 to 3 days to check their work. Imagine if you’re given 10 different things out and all these 10 things are going to get done. They’re back on your plate to check and you’re so busy that you don’t get to check them. It’s far better to start with 1 or 2 things, get it to the place where they don’t need to be checked every single time and then add more things on their plate.
What we also realize though is that clients and VAs both need support differently. We have two sets of clients. We have the paying client and then the serving client. We treat both as their clients because both needs to be happy. There’s no point having a happy client and a miserable VA, almost like a vital culture in the background. Even though we work with home-based virtual assistants, in the background, there’s an online community. Every 90 days, I pay for them to get together because 90% of my team is in 1 town in the Philippines.
They get together for my birthday, Christmas and Easter time. They go on picnics and break bread together. This creates a virtual culture, which together, they feel supported. That means that they’re happier and serve their clients better. The other thing we did was that we typically do a cold recruit. Everybody has been referred to us by another vital assistant in the team.
We’ve built vital assistant resources that we pull in. We know that they’ve been recommended to us. Somebody knows them so if they disappear, we know where to find them. We have their phone numbers in the Philippines. I have a management team that I’ve been working with for over a decade, six of them. It’s been working fantastically.
As an entrepreneur, what are the three key things I need to know to work with a vital assistant?
First is to be clear about whether you are looking for more money, get more time back or grow. It’s depending on what your objective is. Sometimes all three but prioritize 1 of the 3 to start with. Based on that, what are the tasks that you are either doing that you dislike doing the morbid stuff as part of that bucket? What is it you are not doing that you know you should be doing? I’ll give you a very simple example. People ask, “Beejel, if I could only delegate one thing to a vital assistant, what would it be?” For me, it’s follow-up.
As entrepreneurs or business owners, a lot of us either should have or need a sales pipeline where we have prospects coming in, we’re taking them through a sales cycle and hopefully, they’ll become a client. Most entrepreneurs, if they have sales pipeline software, they do not like to log in and manage it. If I go back in time as an entrepreneur and think about the vast amount of money I’ve left on the table simply by not following up with people, I don’t even want to think about that number. It could be eight figures, which is embarrassing. That’s personal to me.
It’s personal to all of us entrepreneurs. If you and I are doing it, we know everybody else is doing it.
I have a team and I still feel that it could be improved. I’ve been doing this for years thinking, “Things still slip through the cracks.” Even with all the systems in place that I put in, I still know there are things that slip through the crack from time to time. One idea is to have a VA manage your pipeline. Another way that we’ve taught entrepreneurs to use a VA is a role reversal. We’ve talked about assigning stuff to the vital assistant.
I started teaching entrepreneurs how to use a vital assistant to schedule their tasking. As in, if I have to get stuff done in the next seven days, is it on my calendar? I started planning sessions with my clients like, “What is it you have to do? What is it you have to delegate?” The stuff that they have to delegate, they’ll give to their VA but the stuff that they had to do would never make it into their calendar. They do the planning part but they would never put it so I started teaching their VAs and clients who work with the VAs. The VAs would schedule stuff in the calendar.
Let’s say you need to get a chapter in the book, Susie. You meet with your VA say on a Friday for your planning session. You tell the VA, “Next week, I want to write a chapter on my book.” The VA then would say, “Susie, how many hours do you want to allocate?” You say, “Two.” “What day?” “Wednesday.” “Preference of morning, afternoon, evening.” “Morning.” They would go to your calendar and put that. This is a vital assistant not doing the work but making sure that the stuff that you have to do goes in your calendar.
They’re going to call you up or send you a message on Wednesday night, “Susie, did you get that thing that you said you were going to do?” Either you’re going to say yes and if you say no, you’re going to have to give them your excuse for why you didn’t do it. You’re going to be accountable to the VA for getting your stuff done too. That’s a very interesting use of a VA.
We can do that for less than $5 per day. A lot of these things I’m talking about, we specialize in fractional outsourcing, which means that if somebody’s on a budget and I call it the Starbucks model, for 5$ per day, you can have a VA taking on at least 1 or 2 vital roles in the company that can either take stuff of your plate or ensure that some things are getting done that have to get done.
Do you help entrepreneurs discern like, “What do I need to do?” That’s brilliant. We don’t even know that we don’t even know what we should know to ask and go, “I don’t know.” I remember hiring my first vital assistant. I’m like, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing.” I would have to go, “I could outsource that. They can book my airplane.” It took me probably a good six months to go, “This is the stuff.”
We started with what I call the master delegation list. In an ideal world, what’s all the stuff you want to get off your plate? Essentially, I call it the goodest GOLD. Imagine you have four boxes, top to bottom. The top left is going to be G for what you’re Good at. O is what you’re Okay at doing. The bottom left is L, what you Like doing, and the bottom right is what you Dislike doing.
Think about the things that you are good at doing. That’s probably the last thing you’re going to delegate. All the things that you like doing, keep that on your plate. If you like doing it and it brings you joy, keep doing it. If there are things you’re okay at doing and things that you dislike doing, that’s an indication of the first things to delegate. We started with the master delegation list.
From there, we go back to what I said earlier. Is your key objective this month or the next 90 days more money? Is it more time for yourself, which means, “My money’s okay but I need to get some BS stuff off my plate so I have more time to spend?” Is it because you’re in a growth phase? You need to scale up your customer support team, billing and invoicing. That’s the scale. That’s typically the least number of clients we worked with in that final bucket. Most of my clients are in the, “We need to make money/more money.” They want to get some stuff off their plate because they’re burning out.
I love your system. You’re teaching us so much in this episode. I’m taking notes. I’m doing my homework because it’s so delicious to go, “How much money am I leaving on the table?” I’m spending $500 hours stuff doing things that I don’t either like or that I dislike. There’s still stuff that I do and I catch myself going, “Sam can do that.”
Listening to you, Sam has grown so much. I’m paying her so much to do $5 an-hour stuff. She’s not just an assistant anymore. She’s grown so much. I go, “Let me get her someone to do this stuff that we already know she hates to do but she’s got to do it.” It’s so delicious in her time, money and growth as a team member.
As team members start to integrate into our business, we’ve got to help them delegate the stuff too because we want to use them for the best use of their time.
[bctt tweet=”You want to help your VAs delegate their own things too because you want to use them for the best use of their time. ” via=”no”]
What is the biggest productivity hack that you have that anyone reading can take advantage of?
There’s a couple. One is the power of an afternoon nap. This is scientifically proven without a doubt. You can go check out that a 30-minute nap reduces the risk of heart-related disease by 37%. The reason it’s doing that is to reduce stress. Too long a nap is not necessary. You don’t need to have a long nap. We need to shut down.
There’s something I call a nap energy plan. If you look at it, it’s like Black Belt Mastery. Level one is to take a 30-minute nap. Level two, if you want to get that jolt, take a shot of coffee right before you take a nap. It takes about 30 minutes for caffeine to hit your bloodstream. If you combine the nap with a pre-cup of coffee, when you wake up, you are going to feel so alive and awake. Your brain’s going to be on fire. The third layer to that is the coffee, the nap and a cold shower. You’re going to double your energy for the day. You’re going to wake up better in the afternoon than you did in the morning.
One of the hacks speaking of the nap energy plan, we interviewed this Navy SEAL and he said, “When you take a nap, lay on the floor and put your legs on your couch. That five-minute nap will be equivalent to that 30-minute by the positioning because the blood comes down into the body.” I love naps. I’ve always felt guilty for years but in the afternoon, I’m like, “Let me shut my brain down a minute. Refresh.” Sometimes you need to hear it from people who are playing big in the world and doing big things. I did permission to take a nap. Let’s shift a little bit. Most of my lessons have come and my biggest failures or breakdowns. Let’s talk about what’s been your biggest breakdown or failure in business and then what you learned.
Let’s look at the word productivity for a second. The word productivity comes from farming. It’s how much we produce per area of a field. What is our relationship as entrepreneurs to this word productivity? There are three things that get rolled into this term productivity. What are we producing? How efficiently are we producing it? In what state? What is your production? What is your efficiency? What is your performance? How are we measuring that? What is your time value when it’s all said and done? How many based on the number of hours you’re working?
There are so many different things that we are doing and believe we should be doing. Every time we go to another seminar, there’s yet another tactic, another TikTok or Instagram strategy. Every time we get used to one platform, they give us 2 or 3 options to use. What we have is an infinite task list. For every task we do, ten different things end up on our task list. We will never out defeat the task list. We cannot be living on the task list.
[bctt tweet=”You will never out defeat your task list. You cannot be living on your task list. You have to focus on a period of time. ” via=”no”]
What we have to do is focus on a period. People say 90 days but I believe that 30 days is an optimum period. We have our vision at a higher level that we want to achieve by the end of the year but I always start with what is it you want to achieve in the next 30 days? What are the 1 or 2 results you want to create? Is it more money? Great. What’s the activity that you have to do to produce that result? Great. What should you be doing to produce that result in the next seven days? Great.
What is it you need to delegate to somebody else so you have the time to produce that result? What are the tasks that you have to do now? What are you committed to doing now to produce those results this week or that month? We have to get to tactical level thinking and understand that we have 24 hours a day. How are we going to choose to use it? Coming full circle, it’s about time. It’s how we choose to use the time to produce the result we need in the most efficient time possible in a state of grace, calm and happiness.
Was there a time in your business when you had an epic failure? What did you learn from it?
I was doing the opposite. I was not doing any of that. I was going to seminars and workshops, getting high on the possibility of what’s possible, getting it down to what the F do I need to do now.
This is called Power Your Profits, Beejel. In building your wealth, what’s been the wealth strategies that you’ve implemented?
I’m going through my first financial literacy program. I have a degree in Aerospace Engineering so I could tell you how to build a spaceship to land on the moon but I could not tell you the fundamentals of money. This show that we haven’t learned the fundamentals of money. When you come back to wealth strategies, while we may have lofty dreams and aspirations as entrepreneurs, the sooner we start the fundamentals, which I’m sure that you teach here, Susie, do the fundamentals and then build a dream on top of that.
[bctt tweet=”Do the fundamentals and build your dream on top of that.” via=”no”]
I didn’t do that. Therefore, I have no claim to the word wealth. That is why I’m still working my butt off in building this business because I didn’t start younger. One of the things that I’m involved with is a financial literacy program for children as young as seven. We need to pass down our learnings as entrepreneurs to the young generation so that they do have the knowledge and opportunities to do what many of us did not do.
We didn’t learn. My parents didn’t teach me. I happened to come across a woman when I was 26 years old that sat me down and said, “Susie, you don’t need any more shoes and handbags. I want you to take that money and invest it here.” I didn’t necessarily know a lot about it until I started building it going, “I fell in love with it. I’m interested. How exciting.” That shifted the game. I love that you’re doing this for our children and then our children’s children and as a parent to go through the program with your child. A lot of us don’t get that learning how to manage money and what to do with money. We’re trying to give that to our children. You have a gift for us. What’s our gift?
It’s a tool. A lot of what I talked about is you create a list of all the morbid stuff, the gold framework and a few other things. Exercise takes you from everything you need to delegate down to the focus few, the 3 or 4 things that you can start with. If you go to BeeEPICOutsourcing.com, you can download that guide for free. If you want to speak to us and get our help in doing that, please start a time to chat with us.
I’m assuming it’s because of your name, Beejel, that you have this love and fascination with bees. I love that you’re on brand. Your chair and wall are on bringing. You got the Bee EPIC up there. Is it outside of your name or not?
It’s a coincidence, but right before my 50th birthday, I came across a book called The Wisdom of Bees. An individual was consulting large organization corporations on how to structure their entire organization around the science of bees and beehives. I got fascinated by this and started looking at, “How can I apply the same wisdom to working with entrepreneurs?” The bee is a symbol of productivity. It is an ancient symbol.
The honey that they produce is liquid gold in the ancient culture, but bees are very organized. Each bee has a unique purpose for its role. We entrepreneurs have a unique purpose in what we do. Bees serve the hive. We, entrepreneurs, should be serving our community and bees serve humanity. I believe that we entrepreneurs need to serve humanity. The bee became a symbol of productivity in the company. As entrepreneurs, we need to be more like a beekeeper.
Imagine a beekeeper with a beekeeper suit on. That’s our protection from the business so we can stay high level and work on the business. Let the busy bees joyfully do the work every single day, and together we produce the honey. EPIC stands for being Efficient, Productive, Intentional so focused and getting things done, and the C is Completion. That’s one thing I found. Entrepreneurs start a lot of things, but we don’t complete a lot of things.
Thank you for your time, your generosity, and your gift. Thank you for who you are in the world. Thank you for helping me, my business, and my team. I appreciate you. I look forward to playing more with you.
Thank you so much.
Since 2009, Beejel, has been providing virtual assistant outsourcing services. He’s advised 1000s of entrepreneurs, professionals and businesses on how to find, hire, train, manage virtual assistants. He’s also pioneered how VA’s can help clients with aligned priority planning, task scheduling, daily accountability and KPI tracking to boost personal productivity and profits…
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