Outsourcing in the Age of AI with Beejel Parmar

In This Episode

• [02:38] – Beejel Parmar discusses how chatGPT and other large language models have transformed the digital marketing industry, requiring proactive training of VAs to leverage AI effectively.
• [05:56] – Beejel describes his company’s unique approach to virtual assistant (VA) hiring, which involves a no-markup fee model and treating both clients and VAs as equals.
• [14:25] – Beejel talks about their virtual assistant (VA) training program, which includes ongoing training on AI tools like chatGPT and Claude.
• [15:48] – Beejel emphasizes the importance of VAs having the right character attributes and values.
• [23:36] – Beejel warns against working with VA agencies that underpay or overcharge clients and advises entrepreneurs to prioritize VA pay to maintain a healthy working relationship.
• [31:46] – Beejel suggests picking one business and delegating busy aspects to become a four-hour-per-week owner rather than starting multiple businesses simultaneously without a single one making money.
• [40:04] – Stephan and Beejel discuss the significance of delegation and outsourcing for entrepreneurs and business owners.

Jump to Links and Resources

Beejel, it’s so great to have you on the show.

Thank you so much.

Awesome. I would love to hear how your business has changed since the advent of ChatGPT, Claude, and all these other large language models. It changed the landscape for marketers, business owners, and anybody in the business world. Maybe it’s going to put some VA businesses out of business because they aren’t adapting to the new AI-focused world.

The change has been pretty dramatic, Stephan. I was in the Philippines when ChatGPT started making the waves in November 2022. I was there with a friend, and we started talking about it. Many VAs have been using precursors such as Jasper AI and stuff, so we were aware. With that technology, not a lot of our clients were leveraging AI back this year.

It was in January that my awareness went to. We had better start to learn this stuff. When I say this stuff, it wasn’t just ChatGPT. By that time, there were several AI products making the scene. I started really by encouraging the VAs. I remember there was a recorded call that we had with me encouraging the VAs. “Hey, you guys better start learning this stuff.”

As time went on, not only did I have to encourage the VAs, but I also had to really monitor and manage their learning through this because it can be very vast. So many tools are coming out and still coming out that are all AI or claimed to be AI tools. We created an internal training program for the VAs so we can just monitor that they’re actually taking the time to go through the fundamentals of prompt engineering and understanding the basics of AI and stuff. That’s part one. We really took it seriously early this year.

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More so, the BPO industry, which is the business process outsourcing industry that is very prominent in countries like India and the Philippines, is going to be impacted a lot. When I say a lot, some experts say 80%–90% of jobs in that industry, where many VAs get their start, will be lost in the next three to five years because of AI. That means a couple of things. That means there are going to be a lot more VAs available. The natural thing for them to do is to become VAs.

VAs are a little bit different from agents working in a call center or for agencies, for that matter. They are typically generalized VAs. They can help them with a general range of admin tasks, or they choose to specialize within a certain niche, whether it’s video editing, graphics, or more admin billing–type stuff there. We’re definitely one of the early adopters of AI. As a small company, we pivoted very quickly. Again, we still do a lot of non-AI stuff for our clients.

You’re right. I guess that, sooner or later, every VA will take it more seriously, whether the individual VAs or companies will want to up-level their skill. There are different types of VA companies we have to think about. Some specifically do one or two types of things for their clients. They may not need to upskill their VAs right now because it’s not their core business.

We work with a lot of entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, and micro businesses. It was essential for us to start upskilling because we knew that our clients were jumping on board and getting better educated. We had to match what we felt was happening in the entrepreneur space.

It was essential for us to start upskilling because we knew that our clients were jumping on board and getting better educated.

What’s different about how you’re doing it versus how the VA agencies do it?

I’ll share the three typical models that are out there, maybe four. There are physical location call centers. Many of those call centers started as simply making phone calls. That also added a VA component. Call centers and VA services are quite distinct in what their focus is. Many physical location buildings have added a VA component.

When you work through a physical location building or company, there are huge markup fees they have to pass on to a client, typically two to five times what the VA gets paid, meaning you’re paying a lot of extra margins there. Here are some examples. If the agency is paying $10 or charging the client about $10 per hour, there’s a good chance they’re paying between $2 and $5 per hour to the VA. There’s nothing wrong with markups. Businesses have to make a markup.

Unless you’re a price-sensitive small business owner and on a budget, there are other options instead of paying such a high markup fee. Some companies, which happened very much through the COVID era when COVID hit, were physical location agencies, but now they have become home-based agencies. It’s still charged the same, but they got rid of their buildings. They’re making even more money because they’re not paying for their infrastructure.

The reason they had infrastructure was they felt they had better management of the VAs, more control over the VAs, and the VAs were showing up on time. COVID showed them that, “Well, we don’t need to have a physical location.” There are some companies that show a physical location. They say they have a physical location, but they actually don’t anymore. Those are the two agency models, and both have markup fees.

The next model is hiring directly. A lot of people start with agencies because that’s when they first hear about a service or VA services. Then they realize that, “Hey, I’m paying $10–$15 per hour for a VA, which I’ve been told by all the experts.” It should be costing me about $5 per hour, so they basically leave the agencies. Sometimes, they try to take the VA out of the agency, and then they find a VA directly.

There are some sites. There are plenty of Facebook groups, there’s Upwork, and they’re trying to hire VAs through there. There’s a lot of shifting through the applicants there. The problem with that is yes, you do save a little bit more, you can save a lot, actually, by having direct, but there’s a level of trust and accountability that doesn’t come with a starting point. You have to just hope you’re hiring somebody you can trust in the long run.

There are platforms like Fiverr and Upwork. These are great for projects where you have a single project, a graphic design, a logo or website, or something that says the start and stop points for that project. What we did when I formed my third company in 2019 I looked at these three models. What are the pros? What’s the good, the bad, and the ugly? We took the good of all the models there and created a new company.

We’re one of the few companies that has a no-markup-fee model. Even though we recruit our VAs and do the vetting, we have a localized model, a localized community, which means that about every three or four months, we pay for the VAs to get together. This increases loyalty and trust, and we can better support the VAs. We do social gatherings and professional gatherings, both in-person and online. The way we’ve done this is our clients actually pay the VAs directly. We’re more like a matchmaker than an agency. 

Let’s say you come to me and have a specific requirement for a VA, and we go to our vetted network. We will share your details in terms of the work you want done. The VAs look at that, and if they feel they’re a match for that, they apply.

We then arrange the interviews, onboarding, and ongoing support for the paying clients and the VAs, whom we consider to be the serving clients. We are bridging that gap between just hiring blindly and having a vetted hiring service for us. That’s what makes us unique.

Even though we recruit our VAs and do the vetting, we have a localized model and community, which means we pay for the VAs to get together.

You don’t pay anything extra. There are no markup fees. But how we make money is we have a support fee. Think of it as a membership fee to a VA. It’s very nominal, but both sides are happy. Paying clients are happy, and the serving client is happy.

So, is the paying client the VA?

No, the entrepreneur. They’re still the paying client, but we treat both sides of the equation as clients. Obviously, it’s the hiring client that’s paying, but we treat the VAs like clients, too, because we believe that they should also have the support that any client should have in the relationship.

What pricing are you looking at for a typical business? What’s one VA, full-time even perhaps, paying?

Generally speaking, it starts around $5 per hour. I’ve done a lot of surveys, and I’ve asked the VAs. The VAs get to set their rate. VAs who have specialized skills maybe $7 or so. Some of the senior managers that we have in place may be $7–$8. But the general admin, social media admin billing–type stuff, typically is $5-$6 per hour.

Are most VAs looking for a full-time position?

Most VAs would love full-time positions. But I’ll tell you this: 90% of my clients don’t hire full-time. They hire anywhere between one to four hours per day, generally speaking.

Why is that?

I forget the exact statistics, but I think 90% of entrepreneurs in the business world fall into this solopreneur or micro-business category. Many of them are tight on budget. Many have not figured out cash flow in their marketing and lead generation, so they don’t have consistent revenue. Hiring a full-time person is not always an option for a lot of people.

Even people who are fairly well-established business owners don’t sometimes have the budget for a full-time person. They may not even have the need for a full-time person in their minds. Remember, the moment you hire a VA, they become part of your ROI mechanism. That’s how I see it, especially if you’re a small business owner.

We’re more like a matchmaker than an agency.

There are two or three reasons we want to hire a VA. We are bogged down with a lot of busy work, preventing us from making more money in the business. In that case, that’s the discipline of delegating the busy work so we can take that time back and apply it to making more money in the business. Or we can hire somebody to help us generate more revenue for the business.

Here’s an example. One of the ways I share with people to use a VA is to help them manage their sales CRM or their sales pipeline. Most entrepreneurs are not going to follow up. They go out there, they’ll network and make connections, but nobody in their team is doing good follow-ups. That doesn’t mean sending one message or one email. I’m talking about consistency to follow-up.

That’s where a VA can come in. They can help manage the sales CRM. They can guide and advise the entrepreneur on who to follow up with if the entrepreneur needs to follow up. That’s just one little example: if you’re on a super tight budget, you’re out there networking, and you know that you’re not good at follow-up.

Think about this. A budget of somewhere around $150 to $170 per month. That small investment could dramatically improve your follow-up, and that follow-up could dramatically improve your sales and revenue. That’s just one example.

If the VA is earning $5 an hour, what on top of that is the cost of the support from your organization?

We charge a nominal $79 per month. It starts at $79 per month, up to $129 for a full-time VA. It’s the cost of most membership-based programs. What they get with that is they know that they’re supported, the client is supported, and their VAs are supported. We provide ongoing guidance on how to use a VA better as well. It’s a novel program out there, but it’s been working well for us for the last three years.

We built a full-blown course on ChatGPT and AI that all our VAs go through. We call it the fundamentals.

How are you preparing the VAs in your community for the AI revolution? Are you doing weekly lunch and learns on ChatGPT, Claude, and whatever?

We have ongoing training on various elements of AI. We built a full-blown course on ChatGPT and AI that all our VAs go through. We call it the fundamentals. They go through that either before they get assigned to a client or in their first month of working with a client.

We have a lot of VAs that are constantly joining our network. We do our best to hire VAs who already have experience, but not everyone. Most of them have dabbled with it. I even call it being trained on it. The first thing we do is put them through training. Sometimes, let’s say you came to me today, and there’s a great VA for you, but they hadn’t been through the training. I’ll let you know.

We let our clients know. “Hey, look, we’ve got a great VA for you.” They haven’t been through the training or haven’t completed the training yet, but one of the mandates is that they get through that training in the first 30 days of working with you on their own dime. You’re not paying for them to go through the training. That’s something that they have to do to qualify to work with our clients.

That’s awesome. Where does marketing automation fit into the equation here? Presumably, you’re teaching them how to create images in Midjourney, create standard operating procedures with ChatGPT, proofread, revise articles with ChatGPT and so forth, but there’s a whole world of marketing automation software.

There’s simple automation, and there’s complex automation. It is one area where we’re still up-leveling our skill set. It’s what I call full automation. We have some VAs that have experience in automation.

Normally, in automation, these are one-time setups. Because they’re one-time setups, we don’t want to take a highly skilled person in automation and get somebody just as a general VA. If somebody needs a one-time setup fee, we have alternative options. It’s not normally our core team. We have some team members who specialize in automation, linking things together. Our focus is on the day-to-day admin level of a business.

If a client comes to us and they are providing automation to a client, then we’ll find a VA with automation skills that can be used daily on behalf of the client. But if a client wants an admin billing person and then expects the VA to be an expert in automation, that’s not the right use of the VA. We have to be very careful in terms of knowing what our day-to-day needs are and knowing what our in-the-moment needs are.

Got it. Do you find that any of your VA community members are really switched on about social media to the point where they’ve got quite a following themselves? Maybe they’re an Instagram influencer, or they might be a YouTuber.

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No. That’s just not a priority for most of the VAs. In fact, if they were, there is probably less chance they’re going to be a VA, to be really honest with you. Social media is interesting. A lot of clients come to me. In fact, a very large number of clients come to me looking for support with social media. I’m very careful to say, “Look, your VA is not a strategist. They are implementers.”

Even though a lot of VAs may have more experience with doing day-to-day social media, I want to be very careful that people don’t think a $5 per hour VA is going to be a substitute for a consultant or a strategist, but more as implementer of their strategy that they feel is going to work for them.

If you could describe the ideal VA in terms of not their skills such as WordPress admin, podcast production, transcription, show notes, or whatever, but more like qualities of their character, attributes of values and things, what would those characteristics be?

The moment you hire a VA, they become part of your ROI mechanism, especially if you’re a small business owner.

As part of the hiring process, we actually have a set of ethics and values that they have to agree to. Most of our VAs are referred to us by either other VAs or even people who are not in my network. People might have a fairly large network of professional friends who have VAs, and sometimes, they don’t have enough work for the VAs, so they’ll recommend VAs to us.

I will say 95% of the team, if not 98% of the team, are actually in one city in the Philippines. They know that we’re localized. They can’t just disappear on us. That takes care of the character and the value side of it, plus they agree to our set of values, and then they agree to the clients’ set of values, too. We always encourage the clients. “Hey, look, we’re doing the first level of filtering. We’re going to filter them for, we believe, good people. They’ve been referred to us that they’re known by somebody else, and their skill set or in terms of what they say they can do.”

The second set is when we match them to the clients, we also encourage the clients, “Hey, you should probably only have your own set of values, your own culture, that they agree to, like any other team member you would hire, so that they not only agreeing to our ethics and standards but also your ethics and standards too.”

That makes sense. I’m curious what your company’s ethics and values are in terms of things like character traits or ways of doing business. I’m sure there are more than just a couple of values in your value statement.

We’re taking the whole word outsourcing. For every letter in that word, we’ve turned it into a value statement or a character statement. Communication is one of them. The other one is integrity.

Some of these values have been chosen, Stephan, because I’ve seen many VAs work for companies where they are told not to be fully honest and transparent. Many VAs have come out of cultures where transparency, authenticity, and integrity were not high in the value statement.

In many ways, we’re teaching VAs how to be more entrepreneurial because of who they are working with.

We’ve had to come up with something like reprogramming them or deprogramming them and changing the way they see themselves and how they see their service to their clients. Integrity and honesty: if they make a mistake, just come clean. Sometimes, if they want support, they can come to us, and we’ll help clean things up by that, and owning their job, really being in ownership. In many ways, we’re teaching them how to be more entrepreneurial because of who they are working with.

It makes sense. From an attribute standpoint or characteristic, it’s important for a VA, with all the changes coming down the pike with AI, to be nimble or agile. That’s not always the case, especially when you’re dealing with outsourcing to a country where that’s the way things have always been done. Culturally, they get into a particular style of working, and it’s hard for them to change.

Exactly. That’s why, on almost every monthly call, we talk about one aspect of our value system and drill deeper. I have spent a lot of time in the last several months, specifically on ChatGPT and AI. But generally speaking, we don’t want to waste a lot of time teaching them individual skill sets.

We have a team of over a hundred VAs, and not everyone’s doing the same thing. We leave it to the VAs to really upskill themselves technically. Really, a lot of my training focuses more on the character side of this. Who do we need to be? Who do they need to be to better serve their clients? This character training is very key for our company.

Very cool. How did this come about? That sounds a little bit unusual. That can’t be something all the other VA companies are doing, right?

It came from two directions. I’ve been in the VA industry since 2009. This is my third company working on. In my ten years in the call center, I discovered the good, the bad, and the ugly, for better or worse. I said, “Okay, there has to be a better way to not only serve the clients but also respect and honor the VAs, who are the ones doing the grunt work.”

The other part of this is I’ve been doing various forms of coaching and mentoring, being part of masterminds for almost as long. When we started this third company to improve the quality of the VA service, it was not good enough to tell them, “Hey, you got to be a good VA.” We don’t change overnight. We don’t go to a personal development event and come out on Monday or Sunday evening a better person. We learned things. We discovered things about ourselves, but that’s when the real work starts. The ongoing work is the daily part.

We just integrated almost what looks like a traditional coaching program for the VAs. For me, the payoff is this. I see this community of VAs that technically don’t work for me. They’re still working for individual clients, but we have a responsibility to help them become better VAs. That’s how it all evolved.

You refer to this as the good, the bad, and the ugly. What do you mean by ugly and bad? What’s that in reference to?

A lot of companies or agencies out there are not very honest with their clients. Quite often, you don’t get to have a one-on-one relationship with the VA. Or there are what we call fronters where the person you speak to is not the one doing the actual work. They are the most well-spoken team members. You speak to somebody; somebody else is doing the work. The people doing the work can change, and you won’t even know that they’ve changed.

Many call centers underpay their VAs. They hire very raw talent. Often that’s $1.50–$2. They rarely get to make more than $3 maximum. They get squeezed on pay. There are just these shenanigans that happen in the background that just didn’t resonate well with me when I started to find out these things.

That’s pretty dishonest. It’s a bait and switch.

VAs should also have the support that any client should have in the relationship.

A lot of bait and switch, a lot of underpaying the VAs, and overcharging clients. Again, many people are new to that, and that’s been around for now. I’ve been in it for over 14 years, and some people are still new. They feel that by going with an agency, they’re going to get better protection and better service, but it’s not always the case. In fact, a lot of times, it’s not the case because they’re paying a premium for the brand they’re working with, not necessarily the quality of service they’re going to get.

The other part of it is there are some companies out there that lock people into contracts. Think about this. If you’re hiring someone to work with you, and that person doesn’t work out, or your business changes, why would you want to lock yourself into a contract? Again, be wary of companies that want to lock you into long-term contracts before you’ve had the chance to even vet the service.

I always tell clients, “Hey, if you choose not to work with us, that’s fine.” It’s not new. Always find out how much your VA is getting paid. Regardless of what you’re paying to an agency or company, what is the VA doing the work getting paid? Because if they’re being underpaid, one or two things happen. One is that they overstretch themselves to take more work, saying they compete for your work by undercharging you, but now they have to do 12 to 14 hours of work just to make it work.

Entrepreneurs brag, “Hey, I’ve got a VA for $2–$3 per hour.” It’s like, “Yeah, but do you understand the consequence of being that cheap on the VA?” When you’re prepared to pay the VA a little bit more, you’re going to have a far more loyal VA, typically a far better relationship, and you’re not forcing the VA to have to work extra hours to make ends meet. These are just things that people are not aware of when they think about working with a VA.

It’s not that dissimilar from the model of fast fashion and buying stuff that’s inexpensive and doesn’t last, that falls apart, like shirts, pants, and so forth. It’s not meant to last because fashion will change and be out of fashion in the next season or year. The people making the clothes that you’re wearing that you’re getting from—I’m not even going to say the name of a store, but somewhere where you’re going to get $10 for a shirt—they’re making very little money working in a factory, and it’s probably pretty poor conditions. You’re paying less because they’re getting paid next to nothing. That’s an ethical problem.

I know on your website and your marketing, you talk about virtual AI advisors and AI business modeling. Can you talk more about those two things and what the value proposition is?

As we dive into AI, we created personas in ChatGPT, predominantly, and now Claude, representing a particular individual in the business. We start with a board of advisors, a marketing advisor, and a social media strategist. We built these personas to understand our unique business, sometimes us as individuals, and the client’s problems. We use these personas to give ourselves general business advice. We started to share this with other people, and they said, “Hey, can you help us with that?” We basically started to promote this idea of these virtual AI advisors.

The other part of that where it comes back into the VA side is once you build these—VAs don’t build these, by the way, this is the strategic level thinking work that a business owner would need to do to set these up—once you’ve set these up, you can use some of these personas to help your VA do their work better. An example would be a social media strategy, a virtual AI social media strategist.

Once you set that up, your VA can be trained to go to that adviser or tap into that persona and use that persona to generate social media content to generate a social media calendar. That’s how that went about. Because of that, many people kept asking, “Hey, would you guys just set this up for us?” We started doing some high-level consulting on setting up these virtual AI personas, a different type of VA, in essence, for businesses, as well.

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How do you charge for that?

It depends on the complexity. We’ve done hotels and universities. That can range purely into the thousands. It’s a different subset of what we do. It’s not even part of the outsourcing business. We have a whole different entity that we do that through.

For a small business, a solopreneur, or just a two or three-person company?

What we find with solopreneurs is it’s still complicated. Once you’ve learned to create a framework for one of these advisors, you can rinse and repeat. It’s the same methodology for almost every advisor. What it comes down to is entrepreneurs have this thing called resistance to doing certain types of work. This isn’t even pre-AI.

I will go back to answer a question you asked me very early on. Will a lot of VAs potentially lose their jobs because of AI? The ones who choose not to upskill might, but here’s the thing. Just because the tools have changed, entrepreneurs will not change their core characteristics. I’m not saying that this applies to everybody. This means that if there are things we’ve resisted doing before, even though the tools are out there, even though we can do many more things with AI, it doesn’t mean we’re going to.

Many people start with agencies because that’s when they first hear about VA services.

This is different from dabbling with ChatGPT, dabbling with Midjourney, and dabbling with this. Many entrepreneurs have become more unproductive than productive in the last several months. What I mean by that is they may be producing more stuff, but they’re not producing more revenue in the business. I always bring it back down to, “What do we need to do as entrepreneurs to stay on track?” That’s where a cousin program, you could say, to our core VA, kicks in.

Since 2018, I’ve been running a parallel program to help people decide, on a weekly basis, “Okay, what is my focus for the next seven days, next month? What do I need to be delegating to stay productive and efficient?” It’s amazing how many entrepreneurs will continue to go off track. Despite the vast number of tools, technologies, apps, journals, planners, and stuff, it still comes down to what you mentioned before: our characteristics. Our personal behavior pattern is going to be fundamental in the effectiveness of VAs working for us and the effectiveness of the AI tools we choose to help run our business.

Somebody who maybe relates to being a dabbler or dabbling in different things because they want to keep up on stuff, they’re trying different stuff, and they’re stretched too thin. What’s the solution that you would offer them as a way to counteract that?

This is a personal opinion. People can have different opinions, but my personal opinion is this: There are so many diverse elements to running one business and running one income stream successfully. If we take that and extrapolate it now if you add a second, a third, or fourth, and this is not unusual, by the way, Stephan. You’re probably aware of this, too. People have got this thing going and that thing going on. All is great, and there is no issue with multiple streams of income, but we have an issue with multiple streams of poverty.

What I mean by that is that if you do not have a single business making you consistent revenue, that’s your starting point. Pick one thing, get it working for you, delegate the busy aspects of that business, and then layer in another when you feel it’s the right time. If we’re starting three or four things simultaneously, none of them making money, all of them deserve and require some full-time effort, full-time focus, full-time deep critical thinking, and yet we’ve now spread ourselves thin over three, four different things. You’re making it hard for yourself to generate the result that you want.

My suggestion is to pick one thing, focus, do some deep work, get it working for you, get it making money for you, and delegate the busy aspects of it, where you can now become a four-hour-per-week owner of that business, meaning that your part of that business might be four hours a week. This is what I think Tim Ferriss meant when he said four hours a week. I don’t think Tim Ferriss ever meant to work four hours a week. I don’t think Tim Ferriss has ever worked—

A four-hour workweek, yeah, probably not.

Right. I believe you can get your management down. When I say management down, you can get your number of hours for a business down to about four or at least four hours of stuff you don’t want to do for that business.

We have to be very careful in terms of knowing what our day-to-day needs are and what our in-the-moment needs are to ensure the right use of the VA.

By the way, I’ve had Tim Ferriss on this podcast, speaking of The Four-Hour Workweek.

Great, awesome. I’m a big fan of the book The ONE Thing. I often drift off course because things happen, and you sometimes have to invest more energy in certain things when ChatGPT and AI came about. We have to add more hours to our learning curve there. But still, coming back to the lane, they say if you stay in the lane, drive long enough, and compound that consistency, that pays off for most people.

Speaking of The ONE Thing, the book by Gary Keller, there’s that one question that helps clarify the one thing. Do you recall what that question is?

It was the one thing that, by doing that one thing, it makes everything else easier or something like that.

Yes, or obsolete, or irrelevant, something like that. I’m curious to hear. If you have one thing that doesn’t have to be right now—it could have been three years ago, six years ago, or whatever—and you realize like, “Wow, I need to clear the deck of all these other things that are distractions or that are preventing me from focusing on the one thing because the one thing is X.” And what is that for you?

It’s not so much about doing one thing because I believe we have to wear multiple hats at different times of the week as solopreneurs. There were a couple of things when you asked that. First, we do that one thing when we choose to do something. Do that one thing and do it well because we do have to switch our conversation. After this, I have to meet with my accountant because we are solopreneurs/micropreneurs. We have multiple roles in our business.

Even though I have a team of 100 VAs, they don’t work for me. I have a team of about five core VAs with very different business roles. There is one thing that I know was a game-changer for me. It is how I chose to use a VA in a very unusual way. That one way of using a VA was priority planning. I’ve trained some VAs on daily priority planning, first with me and then with my clients.

We do that one thing when we choose to do something. Do that one thing and do it well because we do have to switch our conversation.

It starts monthly, so monthly project planning becomes weekly project planning, which becomes daily project planning. Then, on a daily basis, the VA checks in with me. “Hey, Beejel, what are you doing today? I know what you’ve delegated to me, I know you delegate to your team members, but what are you choosing to do today?” And then, they check in to see (a) if it is on my calendar and (b) if I get it done.

I believe we are the best at sabotaging our own goals, dreams, and aspirations by not doing the right things on a day-to-day and week-to-week basis. We will spend thousands doing vision boards, dream boards, and fancy planning, yet we won’t show up any given day and do the right thing or the one thing that we’re meant to do that day to move the needle in your business. 

This is where a VA can be of support by checking in and helping you with project planning, scheduling things into your calendar, and then seeing if you showed up and did that one, two, or three things that you’re meant to do any given day that will move you towards your goals and objectives.

I found the quote from the book, by the way. It’s “What’s the one thing I can do such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?” It’s such a great question. It’s just powerful.

It’s really hard to answer a question when you’re a small business owner. But in my particular role, it’s doing this. The more I speak and share my knowledge of the industry, the more clients we get, and the bigger our business grows. If I did more public speaking and educating, and that was my primary role in the business, what I’ve been working on for the last few years is to get more of that. Anything that’s not that I do my best to delegate to my team.

Even the sales part, Stephan. I’ve trained my VAs to handle the sales part for me. Apart from selling on a webinar on stage, our natural flow of sales goes through all VAs. Even the marketing aspect of it as well. Systematically, I’ve delegated so much of that admin-level workout to team members and focused my effort, my one thing, on being the educator in the space.

If you are overwhelmed, you’re doing the opposite of the one thing. You’re doing everything else, but probably the one thing you need to focus on.

A virtual assistant can support your overall business plan and forward progress through project planning and long-term scheduling. Share on X

Exactly.

You’re a member of some different masterminds. We met through the JVMM (Joint Venture Mastermind) and different networking groups. When you’re on stage, you’re speaking virtually to these groups. That’s the one thing that moves the needle for your business. How do you identify which masterminds, networking groups, associations, and so forth to be a part of? Because you could easily get overwhelmed by joining all of them, getting spread too thin trying to develop those relationships and all those different masterminds.

There are different types and different flavors. We’re part of one that I know or maybe part of another that we’re unaware of. I joined because of the quality of the people in the network. The founder has a lot to do with it, but you have very little interaction with the founders. Ultimately, it will come down to the quality of the people in the network. That’s part one.

First, there are mastermind groups and networking groups, which can be very different. Networking groups can be hit or miss. You can be part of a networking group, and you don’t know the caliber of people there when you first start. Start to assess whether it’s the best use of your time.

Ironically, as we are speaking here, one of my senior VAs is in a networking group on my behalf. I’ve got my VAs helping me with networking as just one example: “Well, have you thought about that?” They’re part of my team, they’re part of my business, so they’re out there networking like they would in any other networking group.

The other way of looking at mastermind groups is the quality of the content as well. What will you learn through that network, not just from the principal but from the community as well? What is the thing that we can learn through these one-on-one exchanges that we can have with members of the group as well?

Yeah, and if you pick the right ones—I rely on my intuition a lot for this, pick the right masterminds, the right groups to be a part of—it’s life-changing, destiny-changing. You’ll get lifelong friendships, collaborators, colleagues, and business partners. It’s amazing. 

If we could leave one parting nugget of wisdom for our listener, what would it be?

I normally start my presentations with this concept or idea: “What is the value of your time?” Putting VAs aside for one second, what’s the value of your time? I believe that for every hour we are willing to invest in our enterprise, that business will give something back to us.

If we are filling our workweek with the $5 per hour activities, I believe we’re sabotaging the true value of our time. We’re undermining, undervaluing, underpaying ourselves by doing that work. When you start with that principle of our value of time, how we’re choosing to invest it, and whether we can delegate that work to somebody else, that’ll be a paradigm shift for many people.

Awesome. Thank you, Beejel, and thank you, listener.

I think this is an exciting time to be alive. Dabble a bit in AI, but look for ways to outsource, delegate, and get stuff off your plate so you can focus on one thing. We’ll catch up with you in the next episode. I’m your host, Stephan Spencer, signing off.

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Your Checklist of Actions to Take

Stay aware of emerging AI technologies. Encourage my virtual assistants (VAs) to learn and adapt to AI, such as ChatGPT and other large language models.

Implement an internal training program for my VAs. Ensure they grasp the fundamentals of prompt engineering and understand the basics of AI.

Explore specialized niches within the VA domain, such as video editing, graphics, or specific administrative tasks.

Build a localized community for my VAs. Promote regular social and professional gatherings for increased loyalty and support.

Hire VAs as part of my Return on Investment (ROI) mechanism for my small business.

Delegate networking tasks to my VAs. Extend their roles to represent me in external networking groups.

Train my VAs to handle sales and marketing tasks. This allows me to focus on my core roles, including public speaking and teaching engagements.

Leverage virtual assistants for priority planning. Ensure daily, weekly, and monthly goals of my VAs align with my business objectives.

Establish a support fee model. Act as a matchmaker for VAs to my clients rather than as a traditional agency. Foster trust and loyalty with my clients.

Visit www.BeeEPiCoutsourcing.com and access Beejel Pamar’s gift, the Outsourcing ROI Blueprint. Engage in short exercises to craft a personalized outsourcing and delegation plan for my business.

About Beejel Parmar

After reading the book “The 4-Hour Work Week,” Beejel Parmar hired 3 Virtual Assistants and started his first VA business. Several weeks later, he started working with a call center, and over the next ten years, he helped grow that business from 100 to over 500 VAs. In 2019, he started his 3rd VA business, pioneering a unique home-based VA model. Today, clients around the world delegate their busy work, and AI work his team of VAs. Beejel has spoken on stage in 8 countries and is asked to speak at workshops, masterminds and networking groups.

Today’s time-challenged professionals and entrepreneurs look to Beejel’s AI, productivity training, priority planning program, and VA services to boost efficiency, productivity and profits.

Audiences globally have been entertained by his costumed presentations and inspired by how Beejel and his family had to leave the US in 2010, and how they embarked on a 5-year travel-work global schooling adventure. An aerospace engineer by education and a project engineer in his early days, he is on a mission to help entrepreneurs become more productive.