I can do it faster myself. It will take too long to teach someone to do it. I don’t trust that the person will do a good enough job. You must learn to elevate and delegate if you have said any of these statements. @jhunter101 Jeff J Hunter helps us to understand the importance of getting S#!t off your plate.
Transcript
Brent: Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce today I have jeff J. Hunter. Jeff, why don’t you go ahead and do a much better introduction than I just did? Tell us what you do in your day-to-day role and one of your passions in life.
Jeff: I’m a huge IT nerd. I’ve always been in IT my entire life started a computer store that I used to work at for free back at my high school days. And then I ended up becoming a it guy for a networking company in a health and wellness center. And then I became an it guy for a school. And then I became the it coordinator for the whole school district.
Jeff: And then I became an it project manager for each fortune 500 Phillips electronics. And I literally build virtual teams. That’s what I’ve done pretty much my whole life and turns out it’s a pretty important thing to do. These days, I was just telling you before the show that back in 2019, I used to have to convince business owners why they should hire remotely.
Jeff: And after COVID happened I got tapped by pretty much everyone to be their kind of remote team expert. I have a column at entrepreneur.com. I talk about virtual teams and personal brand. I’m officially faculty at digitalmarketer.com on how to build remote agencies. And I’ve definitely helped build out teams for, everything from real estate to e-com to
Jeff: every type of business you could think of. I have 170 team members, mostly in the Philippines. We’re a Filipino virtual assistant company called VA staffer which is now up to about 2.7 million in revenue. And that’s me in a
Brent: nutshell. All right. Thanks for that. So I know that we did talk a little bit about
Brent: pre pandemic. And there was a lot of resistance from employers to build out remote teams. I’ve been in the Magento space for almost 15 years now. And I think there was a necessity in our space that you had to build remote teams because of the lack of talent.
Brent: So maybe go into some of the reasons other than lack of talent in your local area, where you need to build a remote team.
Jeff: I think that’s very valid. I think that, when you hire remotely, you obviously can tap into resources that are not local. For example, I live in a very small 50,000, maybe 80,000 person town in central California, like it’s near Tracy, California.
Jeff: It’s a very small area. The closest, I am an hour and a half away from the bay area, in all reality, like my talent sources are limited. And I think most people actually are now. I also think that there’s another advantage here that we’re not talking about, which is the American work ethos.
Jeff: Where that’s progressed. I think that over time American has become more entrepreneurial. America’s always been very entrepreneurial, but I feel like right now there’s a huge movement in America for like side hustles and things like that. And and especially in a field that we’re not talking about that much, which is personal assistance and executive assistance, which is something that
Jeff: it used to be an incredible career, right? Like in the sixties, seventies you’d have assistants. Everyone had an assistant and nowadays it’s very challenging to find people for those types of support roles. And another reason why I really like the Philippines is because they have a very strong work ethic.
Jeff: They have a very like service, heart mentality. Also in the Philippines, it’s like a really amazing role that people look up to, to become an executive assistant to a founder CEO here in America. It’s like an awesome thing compared to in America, when you hire someone to be a personal assistant or an executive assistant, they say, cool, what’s next?
Brent: Do you think the Philippines are two virtual assistants like India is to technology talent?
Jeff: I think so.
Jeff: Although I have learned a couple things along the way. Here’s probably a valued nugget for your listeners. One is I don’t hire virtual assistants. virtual assistant, no matter where you are in the world are typically like entrepreneurs, they’re usually. Managing multiple clients, they’re servicing multiple clients.
Jeff: They have multiple retainers. And for me, I want dedicated people that are committed to me. We’re a permanent staffing solution. So like we build teams, we have people that have worked for the same client that have been on my, that have been in my client lists since 2014, we still have clients that have the same VA.
Jeff: So it’s I guess in all reality, what I do is I actually go out to like technical support call centers, like Uber, Microsoft, Shopify, Canva, right? Like I go to these types of technology companies and I find people that are like, Two years, three years of tenure, they usually work in six days a week.
Jeff: They’re usually getting mandatory overtime. Non-paid mandatory overtime, by the way, they usually have to commute. And then I just simply give them the pitch, which is, Hey, how would you like to learn how to become an executive assistant or a virtual assistant to these awesome companies here based in America.
Jeff: And you’re gonna make two to three times more than you’re getting paid right now. And you can work from home. In your pajamas. That’s how we get them to stick around. Cuz I, I think that, I think the real issue Brett is that retention rate. I think that’s the one thing that you really have to think about remotely is the retention rate.
Brent: Yeah, I know that we’ve hired quite a few people in Mexico and it has been a challenge in the developer world anyways to keep people from moving from job to job. In certain markets, there is a strong a strong, I don’t know what, I don’t know what the word I want to use, but, Trying to get somebody else’s talent, nabbing, your talent or whatever you wanna say.
Brent: So I know that recruitment, yeah. Recruitment is a much better word to use. So yeah, I, so maybe some secrets around how do you keep that talent staying there?
Jeff: Yeah. First off one, one thing’s for sure. You cannot treat people like. A clock in clock out employee. As a matter of fact, if you’re hiring people overseas, you’re not gonna have them be employees.
Jeff: Anyway, they’re gonna be a contractor. They’re gonna be what’s called a W8BEN W8BEN is a form. You have them fill out that they’re not a us resident. or citizen. And thus, they are not held liable or you’re not held liable to us tax law. So another benefit they actually make it very difficult to hire Americans.
Jeff: These days they’re getting so more expensive. just hire, especially the low wage people. If you’re hiring. A tech stack developer, a hundred K or whatever but if you’re trying to find just like low level, I here in California, where the minimum wage where I’m at is about $15 an hour.
Jeff: I. It really hurts the economy in all reality, because, and the sad part is these laws are meant to help people that are the most vulnerable young people in, maybe minority communities, they’re meant to be like, Hey, look, you’re gonna start out great with a great job, but here’s the problem is business owners have to evaluate what kind of return am I gonna get for a $15?
Jeff: They’re not gonna take their chances on some Joe Schmo. They’re not gonna take some chances. They’re gonna find someone who maybe has some experience or whatever else is they’re gonna pay 15 bucks an hour. So the people that need it the most are not able to get jobs. But anyway, the point that I’m getting at is, as far as retention goes, I try to keep things results based, not clock in clock out.
Jeff: So when it comes to results based you say, okay, what does it for? So in the E eCom space, for example, let’s say I built out teams to do e-com fulfillment. We have a bunch of stores. I have a guy who’s got a huge Trump store. Who’s just killing it. And it’s all drop ship. It’s all drop ship, Amazon fulfillment.
Jeff: They get hundreds of orders a day. They have a VA who basically goes in there, gets into their Amazon account, sets up the drop ship orders. Boom easy. Here’s another thing it’s very hard to find Americans that would be satisfied every day, going into an Amazon account and shipping drop ship orders.
Jeff: It’s like very a low level task. So I think that, setting the right expectations and having it results based, how many orders they should be able to fulfill per day rather than, Hey here’s the amount of hours you should work and that’s gonna go a lot.
Brent: isn’t that Amazon model, the exact model that Amazon uses in their warehouses to show productivity. And I know that there’s been a lot of talk about how busy and how that, that you have to be in motion all the time at an Amazon warehouse.
Jeff: Yeah, they have stories. They have stories about people who like pee and water bottles because they don’t have enough time to run to the bathroom and pack or something.
Jeff: obviously I do not condone that. I’m just saying that obviously they have results based stuff and it’s the same thing with their prime shipping model. Like they have their, like you can see every package, what like the, they know exactly what drivers are doing because they can see it.
Jeff: They got GPS, they got the little blub-blup, they got a picture everything’s results based. And I feel like right now we’re moving into results based, or even a show me economy.
Brent: Yeah. Do you think there’s a little bit of a trade off between just hourly and then results based. Some people are motivated to work a little too hard even.
Jeff: Yeah. I’ve actually had to have a real talk over the past year with my leadership team. I have nine people that run this company, VA staffer and actually technically have five people. And then four of those people have an assistant. Including my assistant. So I guess that’s 10 people, but what I’ve learned is that there is a little bit of a trade off.
Jeff: And I also learned that I don’t like to have caps on my people. I want them to be able to earn as much as they can whether that’s, if they, what if they need to put in extra time or whatever. I also reward my team. For example, Jacqueline, my assistant, she does a kick ass job. Hey, you did fantastic today.
Jeff: It’s two o’clock in the afternoon. We’ve done for the day. We’ve done the to-do list. Why don’t you take the rest of the day off? There’s little leadership nuggets like that, that make people like, wow, this guy is really cool to work for. If you’re the kind of guy who has your assistant work an hour, two hours overtime every day and never actually say, Hey, thank you so much for your what doing take the rest of the day off, whatever, like you’re setting yourself up for
Brent: failure.
Brent: Yeah. That’s a really good point. And having some of those expectations up front and what to expect at the end are so important, especially as a manager. So I would imagine then when you’re helping a company build a remote team, do you have a roadmap you’d walk ’em through to be successful in that.
Jeff: Yeah. So we usually start, and this is it’s funny, cuz it’s backwards. Most people think oh I, when they hire somebody, they have this whole laundry list of things they want them to do. I call that what I call the miracle trap. Like you wanna find this miracle virtual assistant, that’s gonna do everything for you.
Jeff: What that does is it burns them out and you’re also gonna find out they don’t like doing a lot of this stuff. So what I like to do is I figure out like, what is it that this person really likes to do. Like for example, because we specialize in executive assistance. We have what we have something called an experiential hiring process. But experiential hiring process means that we actually have tests of things that they would be asked to do for their real job. For example, one of them is taking meeting minutes.
Jeff: I have my assistant on all my calls. She’s matter of fact, she’s probably feeling weird right now that she’s not on this call because it’s a podcast interview, so she’s not needed. But on every other call throughout my day, I know that my assistant is trained on doing, taking medium. So the experiential hiring process, I have a 15 minute call where we give them a template of here’s the meeting minute templates. I don’t give them a lot of instructions cuz see, I don’t actually hire skill based. This is something that’s gonna blow people’s minds.
Jeff: I don’t care what’s on your resume to me. That’s what you’ve shown you can do. And by the way, I’ve also learned that B and C players. They’re good at copy and pasting A player resumes. I wanna see what you can do. And more importantly, I wanna see what you can learn. So I want adaptability on the forefront.
Jeff: How fast are you able to learn something new? I give them a blank document on Google docs. It has attendees objective of the call. What we talked about. Action items. Very simple. That’s what every call we have, and there’s a call it’s on zoom, it’s recorded and we send them the link. We tell them to listen to the call and fill in the form and we see what they’re able to take away.
Jeff: And that’s a really great way to see what someone’s comprehension is. Comprehension’s key. We hire people based on three things, their adaptability, their work ethic. And if they actually give a damn.
Brent: Is there a certain type of person that fits that well, or is it pretty much anybody that you can find.
Jeff: I like people that already work for American tech support companies, because half the battle is finding people that work on your time zone. If you’re recruiting from the Philippines, you wanna find people that are gonna work in your time zone as an American, which is half the battle, cuz they’ll fall asleep. So what I wanna do is I find people that already work during American hours at call centers, Uber, like I said earlier, Shopify Canva, and people that have already been trained by Americans because I know American obviously have really strong work ethic and standards, especially in training.
Jeff: And if I hire somebody from Google, Shopify. I know that they’re coming really well prepared already, and that they have good standards of their companies. So I might be one of those culprits recruiters that keeps stealing amazing people. But at the end of the day I have no problems with it cuz I know how much they get paid and I know how much more I pay them.
Jeff: And I’m proud to say that the majority of my team at VA staffer gets paid more than anyone ever has in their entire family generationally.
Brent: I know that’s it’s a great way to keep retention as well is to pay them a, an extremely fair wage. Yeah. So maybe going back to just the reasons why why an entrepreneur or a business owner shouldn’t focus a hundred percent on clock in clock out.
Jeff: Yeah, I think especially remotely, you’re not able to be there and babysit ’em, you can’t sit there in a, you’re not looking at ’em through the cubicle glass. So you have to have metrics that you can measure to see if they’re actually performing that’s the bottom line.
Jeff: So for example, let’s go back to that Amazon fulfillment, cuz I’m sure everyone listening to this show knows a little bit about, e-com knows a little bit about fulfillment. If you know that someone’s gonna be able to do 10 to 15 order fulfillments in an hour. That’s obviously just a whack number, let’s say 10.
Jeff: So you know that they should be able to fulfill about 80 orders a day. So like order fulfillment, and if they get a hundred fantastic. So as long as you keep like metrics, that people are doing what they’re expected and you also wanna keep people motivated to learn and grow and develop.
Jeff: And I think that’s something that we all have to think about. Remember this the first day that you hire someone is gonna be the least valuable they’re ever going to be. They’re going to grow. They’re gonna become faster. They’re gonna learn more, unlike a computer or a car or whatever else that depreciates, they’re going to appreciate value.
Brent: And how do you give them space to continue to learn? So let’s just say that you bring on new technology. Do you make sure that they have enough time outside of their say 80 orders a day? They’re gonna be able to learn this new part of this piece.
Jeff: Yeah. So this is a very simple hack. Usually it’s us that figure stuff out.
Jeff: We’re the crazy entrepreneurs in our business. And we’re gonna do the work anyway. I just pop on a zoom call and I say, Hey, come on the zoom, call the suit together. So the only difference is I’m doing the work anyway. The only difference is I’m turning my microphone on and I’m explaining it and I’ll record it if I need to.
Jeff: So they have a little tutorial and then here’s the key that most people forget. Come back on the zoom call. Have them do it and you watch you just flip roles and that way, you know that they’ve got it. And then if they don’t get it, you don’t, they don’t mess something up because you’re watching it. You can say whoa, hold on a second.
Jeff: don’t forget to click that, fulfillment tab, the, don’t forget to turn off the white, to click the white label tab. We don’t want that to know it’s
Brent: coming from Amazon. I know that earlier too, you had mentioned a 90 10 rule. Maybe dive into that and explain that.
Jeff: Yeah. The nine, 10 rule is something I found out about myself in 2016 when I was actually working at my corporate job. And this was like my side hustle, VA staffer. It was just fun. But when I was working at Phillips I started realizing that as a project manager, 40% to 50% of my time, wasn’t actually managing projects.
Jeff: It was. Doing documentation that sucked. I hate documentation. So I actually ended up hiring somebody to do documentation for me and they were awesome. And I found them somewhere in Pakistan or something like that. This was before I knew what I was doing. I didn’t even know about the Philippines.
Jeff: When I hired somebody in Pakistan who actually had a project management certification and I couldn’t believe it actually, cuz I was a project manager and I didn’t have that certification. So to find someone overseas for $5 an hour that had that certification, which requires you to do 4,000 hours of project management documented, I was like, this is unbelievable.
Jeff: I started thinking like, what other things could I outsource? What other things could I. and the documentation came back amazing. I ended up becoming in the first 12 months of working there. I became one of the top five project managers nationwide out of 95 project managers in the company.
Jeff: And that was when I started realizing that, my most effective use of time isn’t doing documentation. So then I started thinking, what are other. That I’m spending my time on that. Aren’t my zone of genius that aren’t really, like basically I felt like I was kicking the rocks instead of pushing the Boulder.
Jeff: So I just started finding ways to maximize what my most valuable use of time is, which I’ve learned over the years now is marketing. And sales. That’s my best use of time coming on. These shows coming on these podcasts, talking about stuff, obviously people are gonna be like, wow, Jeff, you really did a great job on the show.
Jeff: I wanna learn more about getting a virtual assistant. Like this is the best use of my time. This is my only job, my entire company hiring, firing, managing recruiting, training, performance evaluations, video editing, graphic design, web design. I don’t do any of that. I have a whole team of 170 people that do all that for me.
Jeff: And my only job is to show up and talk about them. that’s it. So the 90 90/10 rule is about delegating that 90% of stuff in your life. That is, it is important, but not important that you do it. So you can focus on the 10% that really drives the business.
Jeff: forward
Brent: I know that I think it’s Verne, Harnish in Traction has a concept called letting go of the vine.
Brent: For any entrepreneur that is such a good value statement to make that you need to find ways to let go of some of those things and just trust the process that you’ve built. I know you also mentioned just an operating procedure that would help build out that process for a business owner.
Brent: Maybe dive into that really quick.
Jeff: Yeah. What I do is that anytime I want to teach something new to my team members is I will literally do a zoom call and I’ll record it and then I’ll have them go back and document the process, take screenshots, things like that. And then I’ll review the SOP together with them.
Jeff: We’ll pop back on a zoom call. They lead the call. They go through the SOP and then we reviewed it to make sure if it has any mistakes. And I’ll tell you, it’s funny, cuz you learn a lot about the SOP process. I call them freedom recipes by the way. And the reason why is because it’s like for me I’m a horrible cook.
Jeff: I hamburgers mistakes I can do. All right. I got a pellet grill. I can set the temperature. It’s easy. I set it and forget it. But when it comes to like baking cake or whatever, I’m trash. But, my mom’s got this cookbook. All right. And it tells me exactly what to do. It tells me I need flour. I need eggs.
Jeff: I need sugar. I need cinnamon. I need some nutmeg. I don’t know. I’m making some eggnog, maybe but the point is that I’m putting it in the oven. I got this bowl. It says to set it in the oven, 17 minutes for 350 degrees. And guess what? Doesn’t matter how bad you are, if your ingredients are right and you follow the instructions step by step, it will come out
Jeff: at least 99% of the time, the. You might drop an eggshell or something in there. But for the most part, if you’re doing the, if you’re following the recipe, you’re gonna get the same result. And that’s the key, by the way. That’s the key with delegation is getting reliability and repeatable excellence.
Jeff: Cuz I think that’s where people fall short is they’re not able to have a reliable system in place. And reliable people in place to finally remove yourself from doing something because you don’t trust the people and you don’t have a good process. The people, the process, I’m starting to sound like Marcus Laona right.
Jeff: You gotta have the people, the process and the product . But that’s the key.
Brent: Yeah. I bet the hardest part is educating the business owner on why they need to delegate these tasks out and even helping them find those tasks to delegate out. Cuz some people think everything I’m doing is so important that I’m just gonna keep doing it.
Jeff: There’s three lies. Okay. I’m gonna call ’em flat out lies that I hear every business owner. Okay. These are the objections. Whenever people come to me like, oh, I really need a VA one. They tell me that it’s faster and easier if I do it myself. Yeah, it probably is. But let me ask you something, you got somebody who’s doing it 80% and it frees up a hundred percent of your time.
Jeff: Let’s say you get two people and they both do it 80%. now you’ve got 160% results. And by the way, did I mention having someone in the Philippines even for us at VA staffer, it’s $1,500 a month for a full time person, what is your time where that’s nine bucks an hour, not even nine bucks an hour that’s insane to think that you are your own secretary for something that somebody could do
Jeff: as effectively if some by the way, I have people on my team that are way better than me. So we’re talking about above a hundred percent because I’m not good at it, period. So I think that, that’s lie. Number one, number two is that no, one’s gonna care about it. As much as me, man, my assistant Jacqueline cares about my to-do list
Jeff: way more than me. there’s she sent me a message yesterday and said, boss, we’re over halfway done with with July. And you still have these things from the to-do lists from last month, we probably should get this done. And I’m just like putting it off ah, like I’ll get around to it.
Jeff: So that’s line number two, line number three is that you suck it delegating and it would take more time for you to teach them how to do it than to do it yourself. Ooh. See that’s the key. And that’s why I say there’s no excuse with zoom calls, cuz you’re already doing the work. Same with emails, like emails and stuff like, oh, I can’t have, that was actually really hard for me..
Jeff: Okay. The delegating emails was actually really hard for me because like I’m a control freak. So I actually, every day for about a week, we just went into my emails and I told her, Hey, here’s what I would do with this. Here’s how I’d respond to this. This is trash, this is spam, whatever. And if they’re not sure about it, message me.
Jeff: If they’re not sure about it message me. And I think that building that trust and having someone who grows with you in the business is one of the most important things you can do. As a matter of fact, the first two hires I tell every business owner should be an executive assistant and a copywriter
Brent: I can say from experience I’m in an entrepreneurial group and one of my forum members has an assistant and she is doing I where’s 10 of us in our group and I swear that this assistant’s doing most of the work for our group.
Jeff: Truth be told Brent my assistant is the one who set up this call for us.
Jeff: Yeah, she’s on my LinkedIn. She’s sending you the pitch. She said, Hey, this is what I talk about on the show. Like that’s, by the way, that’s a process that I built. I said, Hey, let’s engage with these people. I tell them, Hey, go into people, be genuine and listen to their latest podcast. I actually have my assistant listen to a portion of your show.
Jeff: So she gave you some feedback on the show like, Hey, whatever, you’re. Previous guest was great show. She likes it. She added you a connection request saying that she liked the show. And then after you come back, Hey, thanks for connecting. We should talk about this on the show. And you’re like, yeah, you know what,
Jeff: that sounds genuine. And I think my audience would get something out of it. That’s all stuff that you can build out. If you have someone who’s reliable that you can trust. And I think that’s the real problem today. It’s really hard for people to find. I don’t know if you know this Brent, but right now in the tech space I think you, you already said something about this with the developer, but right now in the tech space, the tenure of a team member is only 1.8 years on average.
Jeff: So imagine dumping all of your time, all of your resources, all your training brain dumping for a year and a half, and then find out at 18 months that person is gone.
Brent: That’s super expensive to keep hiring. And I know that we’re in Minneapolis where the employment rate is less than 2% right now.
Brent: So talent is very hard to get. So you’re exactly right. And I think, maybe just as we’ve got a few minutes here, why don’t you just tell us a little bit about the reasoning behind, not that higher fire mentality, but that trying to keep somebody on consistently is so important.
Jeff: Yeah, I think that it goes back to what I said earlier.
Jeff: It’s about building that trust. It’s let me give it an analogy here. We are entrepreneurs we’re we wear a lot of hats. Now I’m wearing my VA staffer hat. I’ve got all these other hats here. I have my Savage marketer hat right here. That’s my podcast, which I should have you on my show by the way.
Jeff: And what do we do as entrepreneurs? We put everything on our plate. We have a lot of stuff on our plate. And when you hire somebody, especially an assistant, what happens is you’re gonna say, okay, cool. I wanna focus. Remember that nine, 10 rule. I wanna focus on these important things, these 10%. So what you do is you’re starting to delegate.
Jeff: You’re starting to take your stuff off the 90% plate, and you’re starting to pass it over to your assistant. You’re passing it over to your assistant. You’re passing. Next thing you. Especially around that 50 50 mark. We’re like, oh my gosh. My day is so much better right now. Like they’re doing 50% of the work.
Jeff: I’m doing 50% of the work. What do entrepreneurs do?
Brent: They work all the time. Yeah. They start
Jeff: filling their plate back up. So now you got 50% over here and you got 50% over here, but then guess what happens? We’re like, oh, now I have more time to spend with my family. Oh, now I have more time to go to these networking events and masterminds.
Jeff: Oh, now I have time to launch this course. I’ve been putting off. Oh, now I have time to start doing more content marketing and stuff, right? Oh, Hey, I’m gonna start a podcast. So now you’re back to a hundred percent, but it’s all a hundred percent things that you wanna do. And this person’s over here doing 50% now, guess what happens when you don’t have that reliability?
Jeff: And that person goes away. Now you’ve gone from a hundred percent and 50. And now you’re taking all that work back. So now you’re doing 150% and you have to go through hiring again to find someone to train, to do the other 50%. And so you can go back to a hundred percent. That’s the freaking story that I hear every time.
Jeff: And I can tell you this, our client retention rate is 97.2%. There’s not a single time in my entire career of eight years of VA staffer has a client ever come to me and said, you know what, Jeff, I don’t think this VA’s gonna work out because I really miss doing my own emails. And I really miss taking my own meeting minutes and I really miss doing my own order fulfillment, like never
Brent: Actually my name isn’t really Brent. And I’m just Brent’s assistant. So you liar ,
Jeff: I’m a liar. Yes.
Brent: I do find it interesting now that I know. Because you did said you listened to the episode with Taran Giselle and that you are gonna do an Ironman now. So that’s fantastic. Want my help in doing that?
Brent: So I appreciate that your assistant added all those extra details in oh, that’s horrible. You’re training for your first Ironman. Which I think was Coeur d’alene that they said you were doing so very exciting.
Jeff: I’ve been to coeur d’alene it’s a beautiful place. yeah. Good. But yeah. But
Jeff: that’s a great place because see, people don’t know the context of this funny conversation we’re having right now, but I’ve never ran in my entire life, except for maybe when I was in high school. And it was like required physical education class. Okay. And by the way, I grew up in a really poor area called Mooresville, North Carolina, which it’s better now.
Jeff: But back then, NASCAR cap, the world, my school was so poor that they Bused us over to Duke university to do our mandatory physical education, cuz we didn’t have a track but now here I am turning 40 this year and I’ve ran more than I ever have in my entire life. As a matter of fact, I’m looking at my total distance here, which I think you’re gonna be very proud of by the way.
Jeff: Right now, for those of you who are listening in I’ll rate off the numbers. But I have ran in the past 20 days, 54.7 kilometers. I’ve ran 76 times and I’ve ran a total of 9.93 almost 10 hours. And I’ve lost 10 pounds by the way.
Brent: That’s great. Wow, fantastic. Good. So that, that you’re getting ready for that Ironman.
Brent: And that’s so exciting. So as we close out the show, I always give everybody a chance to give a shameless plug about anything you’d like to plug. Yeah, Jeff, what would you like to plug
Jeff: today? I’d love to connect with you guys on LinkedIn. Jeff J. Hunter on LinkedIn. If you are, thinking about, if you hear this and say, you know what, I probably need an assistant.
Jeff: You can check out VA staffer.com, schedule a strategy call on there. It’s completely free. And by the way, my team’s job is to disqualify you. We’re very picky. We only actually take on about five to 10 clients a month because that’s, it’s hard to hire at the rate as finding really good people is very hard.
Jeff: We’re probably just as picky in hiring people as we are finding clients. I’ve definitely learned that there’s many times in life where I should have never taken somebody’s money. So I always tell people to make sure it’s a really good fit. And if we can really support them because that 97.2% retention rate, I’d like it to be a hundred percent, I know things happen, but usually what happens is when people come with us come and hire with us.
Jeff: We don’t do any marketing and sales outside of doing like this and the shows and stuff. Most of our growth over the past year and a half has actually just been from working really hard on just keeping client relationships. And usually they add on they’ll hire a second VA or things like that. Anyway, that’s my shameless plug for VA staffer.com.
Brent: Perfect. Jeff I look forward to seeing you at the next Ironman event that we’re both attending and I wish you all the best in your running world. I know we didn’t I always end up getting running. Into my podcast. So I’m glad that that we got that in. And I will put all these in the show notes.
Brent: Again Jeff, it’s been great having you on the show. Why don’t you tell, as we close out, just tell ’em how they can get ahold of you.
Jeff: Jeff J hunter.com has my socials and stuff on there. If you guys wanna learn more about VA staffer or VA staffer.com. Thank you so much for having me, Brent.
