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“Virtual Assistants and New Entrepreneurship” with Gina Horkey 163
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LET'S PARTNER UP AND MAXIMIZE YOUR FIRM


This week on the show we have Gina Horkey, founder of Horkey HandBook, a website geared towards helping others find or become a kickass virtual assistant. In this episode we’ll discuss everything Virtual Assistant related: Hiring, Training, Managing, and more. We’ll also touch on the current state of entrepreneurship and the future of the Freelance Economy.

https://horkeyhandbook.com/

Gina’s Guidance: I recommend one of my favorite books called Anything You Want by Derek Sivers.
https://www.amazon.com/Anything-You-Want-Lessons-Entrepreneur/dp/B0058LXVH0/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=anything+you+want+derek+sivers&qid=1568251598&s=books&sr=1-1

Hacking’s Challenge: If any member of our group and takes a video and posts it for their firm 7 days in a row, I will send them a surprise at the end of the 7 days.

Tyson’s Tip: Brendan Burchard book called High Performance Habits. He’s studied a ton of very successful people and really breaks down the habits that make them that way.

https://www.amazon.com/High-Performance-Habits-Extraordinary-People/dp/1401952852

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Transcripts: “Virtual Assistants and New Entrepreneurship” with Gina Horkey 

Gina Horkey
I think it’s just an amazing part of the time that we’re in is that we’re realizing, hey, like I do have skills, I do have a unique selling proposition. And I have the ability to market those skills to cool business owners that are doing cool things that I believe in and can stand behind and know that I can help them.

Unknown Speaker
Run your law firm the right way. This is the maximum lawyer podcast, podcast, your hosts, Jim hacking and Tyson metrics. Let’s partner up and maximize your firm.

Jim Hacking
Welcome to the show. Welcome back to the maximum lawyer Podcast. I’m Jim hacking.

Tyson Mutrux
And I’m Tracy matrix. What’s up Jimmy?

Jim Hacking
Morning, Tyson. Always good to record in the morning, I find I have a lot more energy when we record our episodes in the morning as opposed to the evenings.

Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, it’s funny to think about the exact same thing because we recorded a really fantastic one yesterday and but it was in the afternoon. And by the end of it, I was just worn out. And I don’t know why I don’t know if it’s just the afternoon or what but that’s why I like to get my best work done in the mornings. And I think that, you know, we’re gonna test out the afternoons and see how that works. I don’t know, we may have to flip back to the mornings after a couple months, but we’ll see. So it’s good.

Jim Hacking
Well, our guest today is Gina horkey. She’s from the horkey handbook. And I came across Gina on a podcast that I recommend to all of our listeners. It’s James Schramko, his podcast. And he had Jean on to talk about virtual assistants as he’s actually a coach, actually a coach for virtual assistants. So Gina, welcome to the show.

Gina Horkey
Thanks so much for having me, guys. I’m excited to be here.

Tyson Mutrux
So Gina, whenever Jim told me you were coming on, I was actually really interested because I I use a lot of virtual assistants, I hire them all through Upwork. And so I’ve got so many questions about how really edgy I am basically in general about hiring, paying all this kind of stuff. But before we get to all of that stuff, talk a little bit about your company, how you got into it, things like that.

Gina Horkey
Yeah, so as you guys mentioned, horkey handbook is our brand name, my last name is horkey. It’s HLR ke y, it is German, and I was lucky enough to marry into that heritage. And I actually started the website just as a place to showcase my freelance writing samples. So I had been in finance for about a decade, both servicing clients as a financial advisor, as well as like a support person to a small family run, but really profitable financial planning firm. And I was 30 years old at the time looking at another 30 plus years in the industry. And I just didn’t want to do it anymore. I couldn’t see myself kind of doing the same thing day in and day out for another like 30 years, right. So I finally gave myself kind of the opportunity to look into some different career options. And I came across freelance writing for the web of all things, I had no idea like people were getting paid to write content and newsletters and website copy and all of that good stuff. And so I decided to try my hand on it. And I safely kind of built my business on the side of my full time job and I was the breadwinner, we had two kids that were two and less than one at the time. And so for me to think about a career change as the only income earner was kind of a big deal back then.

Jim Hacking
And so how did it then grow? From there, Gina?

Gina Horkey
Yeah, so I started by offering just some writing services. And then I kind of fell into an opportunity doing email management and customer service for a high end tech entrepreneur, I basically saw an opportunity and pitched myself as a solution when it arose. And that was the kind of turning point for my business where I felt comfortable with the amount of money based on charging him a retainer to kind of gear up, sell my small practice and leave work behind to freelance full time and build the business that we have today.

Tyson Mutrux
All right, so let’s let’s jump in a little bit here. So whenever someone is interested in finding a virtual assistant, like walk us through the the initial steps whenever they they’re thinking about hiring us to find someone?

Gina Horkey
Sure. So we offer a free service, which is called the Virtual Assistant finder. You know, my target market is really our students, people that are looking to start a virtual assistant business by either repurposing skills like I did or by learning some new ones based on what entrepreneurs and small business owners are really in need of today. It’s really fun because there’s this whole new world of face ad. You know, the internet connecting us we can work with clients and clients can choose a virtual assistant from all over the world. If you can really find the right person for the job versus maybe somebody in your small rural, local economy, and oftentimes business owners wait too long before they make their first hire, or they take on their newest team member, and it’s because we’re used to doing things all by ourselves, most people start their business as a solopreneur as a solo practitioner, and we’re wearing like all of the hats, right? And then at one point, we realize it’s not as fun anymore, and that possibly, it’s time to find some help, otherwise, we’re gonna burn out and quit. So if you can, if you’re, if you’re on that journey towards building a successful business, try and stop before you’re at or over your full capacity, and identify where you can potentially make your first hire and bring on your first team member as a virtual assistant. That would be my advice in the beginning.

Jim Hacking
You know, talk to us a little bit about your business model that you came up with, because I was actually surprised when I signed up for your service. No one ever sent me a bill. And I think it’s great and interesting that you target the people that are looking to start the virtual assistant business as opposed to asking the end users to I mean, obviously, I paid my virtual assistant herself directly, but I never got a bill from Corky itself. Yeah,

Gina Horkey
I mean, again, like my goal is to help them to be as successful as possible, because ultimately, I know then that I’m making an impact, which is really important to me. And then my success grows off of that I didn’t feel the need to monetize on both sides. And I really just wanted to, you know, put the highest quality potential clients in front of this community of kick ass virtual assistants that, you know, have a great amount of potential experience. When you look at the students within our community. They’re oftentimes here domestically in the United States, Canada, Western Europe, New Zealand, Australia. And a lot of them are working and looking to change careers. So they have experience or just looking to work in an area that they’re more passionate about, or maybe with people that they’re more passionate about, and helping them to support businesses that they believe in. Otherwise, we have, you know, women that had careers in the past that maybe stayed at home with their kids, and they’re having to reenter the workforce. So they have experience and skills, they just don’t necessarily have recent work experience, and still others that are just looking to bring in a few $100. And so when you look, or think about hiring a virtual assistant, I think there’s a misnomer out there that you have to like, be ready to take on somebody full time and promise them like 40 hours a week, which is not true at all, most clients only need, you know, between five and 10 hours of help per week getting started and most virtual assistants are looking to take on multiple clients, maybe they’re looking to work 40 hours, maybe they’re only looking to work 10 or 20. But the cool thing about building a virtual assistant business is that it’s much more secure than working in corporate America, where you just have one employer. We all know that during different times in the economy when layoffs have happened. You know, if you’re on the side of that, like it’s less risky to have more clients and part ways with one of them and have to replace them than it is to get laid off from a corporate job.

Tyson Mutrux
So Gina, a lot of people, whenever they’re talking about getting a virtual assistant, they ask us, was this secure? You know, are what about my clients information? How do you address things like that? Yeah, well, most

Gina Horkey
of the time, you’ll have confidentiality contract in place, and a nondisclosure and all that good stuff, we actually arm our virtual assistants with contract templates that they can purchase through us so that they’re protecting themselves. They’re protecting the client, and they’re protecting the clients, potential clients as well, right. There’s also different tools like one password and LastPass that you can utilize so that you’re not sharing sensitive details, like passwords. And, you know, I think it’s also a situation where you have to get to know like, and trust somebody, so you’re not going to hand over the backend of your business is somebody that you’ve just met and say, Hey, like, here’s all of the pertinent details to my business and to my clients, businesses, like make sure you do the right thing with it, right? Instead, what you’re gonna do is you’re gonna take on somebody probably for a trial project, or maybe a trial period of time for a specific task, and you’re going to integrate them into your business a little bit more slowly than that. But it really isn’t any different than hiring an employee. When you think about like that trust factor, it just seems different because they’re not going to be in your physical space. But you still want to take the same due diligence of betting that person as a good candidate to support your business. Does that make sense?

Tyson Mutrux
I mean, that makes perfect sense to me i It’s funny because I think hiring virtual says sent through a company like yours or through something like Upwork, I think you get more information and it’s more secure. It’s far more secure than if you were to hire an employee. Because usually when you’re hiring them, you’re hiring them through a company like, indeed those people aren’t rated. There’s not something that’s filtering those people. So I think services that you provide in companies like Apple good prime, provide, they give you a lot more information allow you to evaluate candidates a lot better.

Gina Horkey
Yeah, and I think when it comes to evaluating candidates, if we can speak to that for a minute, you know, when you think of like a traditional resume, if you were to put a job description out there and ask people to apply for it, a lot of times, you know, people will ask for your resume. Resumes are kind of an interesting beast, and the way that they have been done, for the most part in corporate America isn’t super helpful. So knowing how long you worked at these different companies and what your GPA was and what your college degree, like, That’s great information. But what entrepreneurs and small business owners really want to know when it comes to hiring a virtual assistant are what are the skills that you have? And what’s the specific experience that’s in line with the things that I need help with? Right? And so that’s another area that we try to help our virtual assistants to position themselves? Well, it’s really focusing in on their positioning, what do you do and who do you do it for. And you know, if you don’t have a ton of experience, talk about the training that you’ve completed, or your competence and helping people to figure things out. Technology changes so quickly, that once you know conceptually how to use something like an ESP and email service provider, it’s easy to learn one and then to transfer that knowledge on to a different one. So let’s say you have a client that uses drip, you have another that uses ConvertKit, and other that uses Infusionsoft and Constant Contact. Those are all tools that do something similar. And even if your virtual assistant they were looking to hire doesn’t have experience and the tool that you’re using right now, if they have experience in another tool, it’s parlays pretty easily as well.

Jim Hacking
Yeah, I want to attest to the the sort of testing out and interviewing the potential vas, I did all that when I was finishing up my vacation up in Michigan, and I sat on the back porch, and I had 15 minute Skype consults with about four or five people. And it was, it was interesting, it was sort of like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, it was like, one was sort of too new one was sort of too bossy. And then one was just right. She had the chops to help me organize my stuff. And I mean, I can’t tell you how, how great, she’s been with me, we are going to expand the stuff that she’s working on. Because she wants a little bit a little bit more time for me an extra five hours a week. So she’ll be up to 15 hours a week. And I’m just really thrilled with the work that she’s done. And it was interesting to me how different they all were.

Gina Horkey
Yeah. And you really have to find that compliment to you, right? A lot of people these days are doing things like this StrengthsFinder. You know, and this is something that we talk with our virtual assistants about too. There’s another test that I personally prefer that’s free. That’s called the anagram test, but basically different personality tests that kind of assess what are creating your main skills and attributes. As an entrepreneur or small business owner that’s looking to hire somebody on your team, you don’t want another you, right, you want somebody that can complement your skill set that can do the things that you either don’t enjoy doing, you don’t want to learn, or that you’re just frankly not that great at naturally.

Tyson Mutrux
I’ve got a few other questions, because we get the same questions all the time. And I tried to explain as best I can, but you’re probably a lot better at doing this than I am. So how do you how do you recommend that people train the virtual assistants to do the stuff that they need to get done? Because the I think you can correct me if I’m wrong on this. I think one of the big mistakes that people make is, is they they expect the virtual system to do everything. And I think it’s better to kind of piece things out. And it’s better to have multiple virtual systems as to have one that does a lot of things. Do you have any opinions on the?

Gina Horkey
Yeah, I think both scenarios could work. I honestly tended to use hiring specialists myself. So kind of the approach that you mentioned, where you have somebody that’s specific to certain different tasks. So we are just updating our team page and we have a team of about 10 people right now just under the horkey handbook umbrella. So we have people that do you know, bookkeeping, somebody that does graphic design. For social media, we have three different people because Pinterest is completely different than LinkedIn and YouTube or Twitter or Facebook. You know, we have people that do content. We have people that can play kind of a jack of all trades, but end up having specific things that we’ve recruited from them and then we just know that they’re the type of thing personality that can figure things out for when a project arises, I know who to pair the project with based on, you know, the working relationship that we’ve had, I think the biggest detriment, or how to set up a new relationship between a client and a virtual assistant for failure is just what you outlined, where you find somebody that you like, and then you just throw everything at them all at once. It’s extremely overwhelming to the virtual assistant as they’re just getting started knowing your business, and what it is that you do and your system processes values, all of the things right. So as we talked about before, I think the best process that I found in getting started working with somebody is ideally, getting this process started before you’re at max capacity. But if you’re already too busy, you’re just going to have to maybe let some things slide so that you can find a little extra time in order to save yourself gobs of time and increase your profitability in the future. Which is by onboarding this new person onto your team and alleviating some of the things from your own to do list. bigging up to do lists, that’s a great place for you to start. So you recognize that you need help. The next thing is to figure out what do I need help with? There’s that Eisenhower matrix, you can do a quick Google search. I know that I think it’s Steven Covey that covers it in the seven effective Habits of Highly Effective People or whatever that title is, where there’s four different quartiles, right? There’s the urgent and important that are the important but not urgent on the top. And in the bottom left quartile, you have things that are urgent but not important. And then your fourth quartile is not urgent, not important. And typically, you can throw away the things that are not urgent, they’re not time sensitive, and they’re not really important to growing your business. So you take all those types of tasks, and you just throw them out with the bathwater. The things that you really want to focus on are the things that are timely, those urgent things that are also important. And often the biggest opportunity areas for people’s businesses are things that aren’t urgent, but are still important. There are those growth opportunities that if we invest some time in them, now, they will result to you know, bottom line revenue in the future. And so then you have to determine what are the things that are on your to do list that fall into maybe those top two categories that uniquely need to be done by you. So there are certain parts of your business that you probably just shouldn’t hire out. For a lot of people that’s maybe the practitioner work, it’s managing client relationships, is doing the sales, for example. And then there’s other things that don’t uniquely need to be done by you. But they’re very important to the business. So again, figure out what your priority list is, or your to do list what makes the cut into these categories, and then prioritize it from there. And then I would start with one or maybe two things. A lot of people that are building a new relationship with a virtual assistant will start with one thing. And then every week, it’s their goal to add something new, I actually just onboarding my sister into my business. And that’s kind of what we’re doing is focusing each work session, I’m going to teach her something new that I can take off on my plate and put on to hers. And one of the things that we’ll be working on today, in fact is I have an affiliate program for our business. And then we also have some JV joint venture partnership courses. And so we have to process payouts. And you know, she’s my sister, so I pretty much I trust her with all the money, things where I might not trust, everybody, my team is definitely trustworthy. But that’s just one of those things that you don’t necessarily want to just enable anybody to do on your behalf. And so that’s one of the projects that we’re going to take on today, I have the benefit of being able to train her in person. But if I weren’t in person, I would do a screencast. For her. Super easy to do, you can do it via zoom or not zoom loom L O M for free. Just install the Chrome extension. And it’s super easy to record your desktop, you can have yourself talking in the bottom corner, or you can not have the profile and just your voice instead. And that’s a great way to get people on boarded to task because you record how you do something what your processes, which is usually in your head, by the way, and that on paper and you’re able to then give that tool to somebody else and they can rewatch it as many times as they need to in order to complete the process to your standard. And then we try to teach our virtual assistants to make things even easier for you by taking all of that information than documentation and fleshing out an SOP, a standard operating procedure, because there may come a time where you promote that person within your business or you guys have to part ways for one reason or another and what a great blessing if they could leave you with that standard operating procedure to plug that next person into your processes and leave you in a good situation.

Jim Hacking
I love that you’re bringing on your sister as a VA that’s that’s awesome. What are some unusual things that you’ve seen people use VA sports.

Gina Horkey
Oh, I mean, I think that there is a rise to use virtual assistants for personal tasks more than ever before. And a lot of entrepreneurs, or small business owners, like, the things that we have to get done are just the things that we have to get done. So it could be, you know, shopping for birthday presents, or sending flowers or I’m not, you know, managing personal travel arrangements could be another thing. And I guess for me, it just is, it’s, again, these are all of my two dues, it really doesn’t matter if it’s for me personally, or for my business, because this is all my life. And I just need help, you know, being able to make sure it all gets done. So that again, I can focus on the things that are most imperative to my, my business or my personal life, the things you don’t want to put a sub in for, which is maybe reading to your kids at bedtime on the personal level, right. And I think it’s kind of cool that that people are realizing, okay, I can delegate certain things out in my life. And I’m going to, you know, make sure that I’m focused on the things that I’m most productive in and that I enjoy, because I think that’s how you’re, you’re most contented, happiest in life.

Tyson Mutrux
So something I’m really curious about is, these virtual systems are an asset to your company. And I feel like they can easily be stolen away. And maybe I’m wrong about that. But But is there a way like, so, a temp agencies, a lot of times they have the option that you can hire that person full time, but you have to, you have to pay the company a fee or something like that? I’ve never done that. But that’s what I’ve heard, is there a similar option when it comes to your company? So let’s say that they’ve hired one or two of your virtual assistants, they really really love them, they think they’re amazing, and they want to hire them full time, is there an option to then hire them for their firm, full time? Yeah, so

Gina Horkey
again, I’m not an agency, our main client is really helping to make sure that our students are as successful as possible. And they’re building their own businesses as virtual assistants. So you’re contracting with them one on one directly. And we’re really hands off when it comes to how much you decide to pay them and how you pay them and managing the client relationship, because there’s no profit on our side for it. But I will take a step back and talk to you about the most common ways people decide to find somebody, the first way being, you know, putting a call out to their own, like network or community. And that can be personally by making a post on Facebook. If you have a community like a newsletter for your business, some people will post, hey, I’m looking to hire somebody in this capacity, you know, reply or fill out this form, if you’re interested, those can be really great ways to source a potential candidate because they are already familiar with your business. Now, some people don’t want to work with family or friends. So they would prefer not to go that route. And maybe they don’t have kind of that online community newsletter audience to be able to reach out to. So your secondary option is something that you’ve already mentioned, which is going the marketplace route. So you’re going to Upwork, you’re going to Fiverr people per hour. There’s a whole bunch of different marketplaces now where there’s businesses that do ask, not so much in an agency standpoint, but they are a middleman for matching a freelancer with a small business owner. And they’re taking some sort of profit off of the top of that relationship. So if you get started working with somebody on Upwork, from what I understand, you’re not supposed to continue that relationship off of the platform, because that would be a violation of their terms and conditions. But most of the time, you end up wanting to have that direct relationship. So another way that you could get started working with somebody is using an actual agency. And that’s similar to the prop or to the marketplace, where again, they’re the middleman and you would have to buy out the contract, kind of like what you were talking about with a temp agency. So those are some of the drawbacks of those two areas, is you are working with that person, one on one, but the relationship is a little bit clouded when it comes to having a third party involved. The fourth option would be using a service like mine, which again, is just free. And it’s a way to connect you with some kick ass virtual assistants that, you know, I’m doing my part and spreading the word about their kick ass a myth, or whatever word that would be like getting in front of people like yourself that need quality people to help them to get to the next level with their business. So in that way, the first or the last way that I mentioned finding somebody that’s already in your network or using a service like mine, there is no hurdle when it comes to contracting directly with that person and you can decide, hey, this person should remain self employed, they should remain a contractor in my business, or you know, it could be that in the future, it makes more sense for you to actually hire them on as a full or part time employee.

Tyson Mutrux
I think that that, yeah, I think that that’s really appealing to a lot of firms. I think that that’s, I think I love how you differentiate yourself from these other services out there. I think that that’s great. I think it’s a it’s a really good idea. I think it’s really appealing to a lot of firms out there.

Gina Horkey
Thank you. Yeah, we’ve been at this for going on six years. And, you know, I did look into kind of a matchmaking option, I looked into kind of a using care.com type of field for the virtual assistant side of things. And, and then I just ultimately realized that again, I don’t need a profit on both ends of the fence. And I’ve been in the position that a lot of our students are in, and it doesn’t feel good knowing that client is paying you more than what you’re receiving. Because you know, then you’re worth more than that, right? And somebody else is taking a profit. So just doing my little part to help the kind of freelance economy and the throwback to entrepreneurialism, which I think is just an amazing part of this time that we’re in is that we’re realizing, hey, like I do have skills, I do have a unique selling proposition. And I have the ability to market those skills to cool business owners that are doing cool things that I believe in and can stand behind and know that I can help them with,

Jim Hacking
you know, I want to shift gears here for a minute. And I know that you are very good at marketing, your website is great. I know you sent out a weekly email, which I think is important for everybody to do. And I know you’re doing a lot of YouTube videos and podcasts and things. Talk to us about marketing and how that’s helped your firm grow. Oh,

Gina Horkey
I’m sure. So that’s kind of a Do you have any specific questions underneath that umbrella of?

Jim Hacking
Yeah. So why do you do a weekly email? I’m always on Tyson to start a weekly email, and what kind of a feedback do you get on your emails? Yeah,

Gina Horkey
so I guess from taking kind of 10,000 foot view, to marketing and branding, and all of that good stuff is, it’s a noisy world out there. And it’s hard to kind of stand apart from the crowd, there’s a lot of people that are doing similar things, whether it’s practicing law, or teaching virtual assistants, or whatever the case may be. And so you have to find what that unique selling proposition is for you. And a lot of the times, you know, or for me and my business, it is myself, to some extent, right. It’s the story of me going from somebody that wasn’t super fulfilled in their corporate career to taking control over my career future and figuring out how to do it different. And I think a big part of that is just connecting on a consistent basis, then with an audience, I inadvertently kind of grew the audience, like I said, working handbook started as a place to showcase my freelance writing samples. But then I started to chronicle my journey. And people wanted to hear about how I was being successful. And what I was doing that was working, and what I was doing that maybe didn’t work out so well. And that’s where, you know, I kind of aesthetically made that transition into teaching. And that’s more of what I do right now, because I am passionate about this self employment movement that we have going on. And so I started a newsletter in the very beginning, my blog, and website was launched in May of 2014. And I think it was in July that I started my newsletter, and it was just kind of listening to influencers, about building an email list and money is in the list. And that’s your direct connection with your customer base. And I didn’t have anything for sale really, at that time, except for my services. And the list that I ended up building wasn’t actually geared towards prospects that would want to hire me for freelance writing or virtual assistant work. But I’m glad that I took that step. I’m glad that I look, listen to that advice. And I’m glad that I figured out how to get the first 100 people to sign up for my newsletter. And, you know, now we’ve purged multiple times where we have like 45,000 people on our email list, and we just, you know, cut 23,000 earlier this year that maybe weren’t actively opening and reading our emails anymore. So we figured some things out as far as how to speak directly to our prospect, how to give them something of value in exchange for signing up for our email list, and then designing sales funnels, to be able to talk to them about their specific pain points and needs and offer them a potential solution which for us is either enrolling in our flagship course 30 days or less to virtual assistant success, or using our free VA Finder service. And writing a weekly email seems like a lot of work and sometimes you don’t feel like you have a lot to say. And it’s just really that the practice of being consistent and trying to connect with your audience in a specific way. So there’s different ways that you can go about emailing your email list, it could be sharing resources from around On the web, it could be sharing resources that maybe you guys have written content on or produce content that podcast episodes about. Or I take a pretty personal route to writing a newsletter. And so I try to take the themes of my everyday life and pair them with what’s going on in my business and what’s potentially going on in the day to day business of my audience as well. And then authentically work in plugs for, you know, our courses or services or other affiliate offers that we might be promoting or something like that. And that’s just kind of one leg of our marketing tool, we also use social media. And as I mentioned before, I have somebody kind of different for each one of the channels for the most part. And that’s because they all work so differently. We’re not utilizing social media to make a sale, but more to get in front of our target audience on a consistent basis. Same thing with maybe producing content for like YouTube, right and doing videos or being a guest on on podcast like I am today. And it used to be that you had to get in front of somebody like three times before they would make a decision to buy from you or not pretty sure the current statistic is like 13 times. And then you also have to, like, consider timing as well. It’s not always the right time that you’re in front of somebody that for them to get started utilizing your service or product, even if it’s the right fit for them. And so I think it’s just trying to figure out that balance of what to share in order to get in front of your audience on a regular basis. And then how often is enough, and not too much. And then you have to take into consideration things like algorithms and changes and, and the newsletter is so important going back to that point, because it’s what you own, like you don’t own the email service provider, we use drip, for example, or other people use ConvertKit, or whatever else. But you do own your lesson, you can afford that at any time, you do not own your social media channel, Facebook could go away at some point or, you know, it could shut down temporarily, which we’ve all seen happen from time to time, where things are glitchy or just not working. And there’s not necessarily really a list for you to export it in a given period of time to. So I guess the ownership is more in your prospect base in your email list versus on a social media channel. Although all of these things can work in conjunction.

Tyson Mutrux
That’s awesome. All right. So I do want to start to wrap things up, because we want to be respectful of your time, Gina. But before I do, I want to remind everyone to go to our Facebook group, there’s a lot of great activity. Hopefully, that never goes away. Because there’s a lot of greatness in that Facebook group that would be devastating. Also, if you don’t mind taking a few minutes or a few seconds, really to go to Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And it’s a five star review. That really helps us out Jimmy, what’s your hack of the week?

Jim Hacking
Alright, so for my hack of the week, it’s actually a challenge. So here’s my challenge if any member of our group, and every member of our group takes their phone and shoots a video and posts posted for their law firm for seven days in a row, starting the day after this episode drops or whenever they want to start if they do seven days in a row, I will send them a surprise at the end of the seven days.

Tyson Mutrux
Wow, I don’t even know what the surprises so I’m mentoring it. Can I can I do this too? Am I Am I a part of this? Can I do the seven day challenge?

Jim Hacking
You know, it’s been a while since you posted video. So I saw that you posted one yesterday. I was excited about that. So yes, you can participate as well. But you got to do seven days in a row. And you got to share it with the groups everyone can see what everybody’s doing. You know, it’s

Tyson Mutrux
funny, I didn’t post a video yesterday that was posted in 2016. Someone ended up commenting on it, and it went back up. It gets in the algorithm. So some guy commented on it. He apparently searched he was he’s looking for about case funding or something like that. There was a video about it. It was insane. So good stuff. Alright, Gina, do you have a tip or hack of the week for us? Yeah, you

Gina Horkey
had mentioned maybe a resource that would be helpful. And one of my favorite books is by Derek tippers. He’s the own CD Baby back before like iPhone, iTunes was a big thing. He helped independent musicians get published on the internet and be able to sell their stuff. And anyway, he is author of a wonderful book called anything you want 40 lessons for a new kind of entrepreneur. And I like the audible version because he reads it himself and he’s got a very nice calming voice and it’s just one of my favorite all time books that I’ve listened to multiple times it’s pretty short as well. And it kind of really just helps you to think about your own business and doing it your own way because you do have options, choice control over how you run things.

Tyson Mutrux
Great stuff, great stuff. All right, so my book, I’ve got a book this week. It’s not an app like I normally do. But I’ve got a book this week. I got I gotta be honest, I think Jim turned me on to this guy. I’ve never really been a big fan of his, but I warmed up to him. Brendon Burchard, I think Jimmy, you introduced me to him, but he’s got a book called High Performance habits. And I just honestly got it out of curiosity, because I was like, Okay, we’ll see. It’s actually a really good book. It really does break things down. And he’s essentially analyzed, highly successful people. And it’s been a long time doing it and really breaks down the habits you need. And so it’s really cool. It’s not really, really complicated. It’s a fairly thick book, though, but it’s a really good book. And so I recommend it. So high performance habits, how extraordinary people become that way. I Brendon Burchard. Gina, thank you so much for coming on. This has been a lot of great information. It really do appreciate it.

Gina Horkey
Awesome. Thanks again for having me. And for anybody that’s interested in learning more or finding your own kick ass virtual assistant or maybe you know somebody that wants to become one, check out the 14 handbook.com that’s H O R ke y hand book.com Thanks, guys. Awesome. Thanks. Bye.

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