🌴 Your virtual assistants can't run your business for you...

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In retrospect, my first attempt at starting a marketing agency was something of a dumpster fire.

(It went very poorly)

Being a college student, I was completely broke, so my brilliant idea was to hire complete newbies, “virtual assistants” to service my clients and run my business.

If you’re a sucker for pain and suffering like myself, perhaps you’ve tried something similar yourself. (Spoiler alert: it’s a bad idea)

My “brilliant” idea was that the fulfillment work wasn’t actually that hard so I could create training and standard operating procedures for every phase of fulfillment.

The idea was that with these trainings and sops, I could teach someone with no experience how to do the fulfillment work without having to pay them the higher rates of experience, US employees.

Lower costs, higher margins.

What a “brilliant” idea.

I hired the virtual assistant for $3-$5/hr and off I went signing as many clients as I could.

The day I hired those virtual assistants was the last peaceful day I had for 6 months.

Let me explain…

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The Context

The next six months were a blur.

I spent every spare hour of the day, 7 days a week, desperately trying to train and manage my agency.

I remember very distinctly working until late in the night just to wake up early and do it all again.

When you’re working that much you miss out on family events, trips with friends, important family milestones and so much more.

But the worst part was, no matter how many systems I put in place, no matter how many operations consultants I hired, I couldn’t get ahead.

Soon, some of my clients got frustrated and began to churn.

But because I was spending all my time trying to build systems to fix all the fires in my agency, I didn’t have time to go out and find new clients.

Slowly my revenue began to decline and I had to face the cold hard truth:

You can’t fix bad employees with good systems.

Try as I might to spend every spare second building training for my staff, you physically cannot build training for every possible scenario.

Without the necessary experience to build good judgment, a virtual assistant can’t perform at the level needed to sustain an agency

Have Your Cake & Eat it Too

Luckily, there is a happy ending to the story I shared.

If you don’t limit yourself to only hiring “virtual assistants” from the international talent pool, you’ll unlock a new superpower.

On the one hand, median salaries in places like Eastern Europe range from $500- $2000/month which means talent is much more affordable than in the US.

On the other hand, instead of just hiring team members who can follow algorithmic tasks, in the Eastern European talent pool you can hire professionals from Amazon, Deloitte, McKinsey, Honeywell and many, many more of the world’s top companies.

Let me make this even more simple…

If you find the right overseas hiring pool, you can hire people who are cheap AND have the experience you need to thrive.

So much of the work being done in agencies today isn’t algorithmic.

It requires cultural nuance, critical thinking, and a proactive work attitude.

Today my agency, Go Carpathian relies on talented, experienced team members to get the job done.

It’s how we’re able to get appointment setters booking 10-20 calls per week within their first month of joining us

or how we’re able to get operations managers who scale our clients’ agencies, manage their staff, and run project management without waiting around to be told what to do.

and instead of churning all my clients, Go Carpathian is on track to be one of the fastest-growing recruiting agencies in the United States.

The way to have your cake and eat it too is to hire experienced people to do the work from areas of the world you can afford.

There is a time and place for virtual assistants, but you can’t run your agency without experienced people in the right seats.

(Trust me on this… I tried.)

Try something better than just “virtual assistants”

Most agency owners I talk to are shocked by the level of talent available in Eastern Europe.

Instead of just virtual assistants, you could hire Operations Directors, Project Managers, Client Success Reps, Developers, and many, many more roles for up to 67% less than US equivalents.

If you’re hiring for a role in the next 90 days, tap the link below to meet with one of my recruiting specialists. We’ll show you what your options are and see if it’s a good fit for us to recruit the role on your behalf!

→ Click here to see if you’re a good fit for our done-for-you recruiting service.

Until next time,

Nathan

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Nathan
Co-Founder | Lean Leverage & Go Carpathian
Helping you hire the best & the brightest
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