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Be the Brick Breaker

Being the brick breaker so if any of you had well actually it's not just on the blackberry but the blackberry has the game on it. The brick breaker game people knows the aquarium everyone know that I know okay no no, I mean, who would have a life? The brick breaker game is one of the older videogames, but basically you have this like wall of bricks, lee you know, whatever like that and you have this paddle and a ball and you have to bounce the ball into the bricks and break the bricks and a lot of fun. Um, but so there's, like the screen is like this and the bricks are like here, so if you're really good, you can bounce the ball up over and behind the bricks and then it hits a bunch of books on the top and then you're really killing it. So basically, the idea here is that not just with outsourcing, but with email all sorts of stuff you want to have absolutely the bare minimum of touch on this stuff possible just enough so that you know what's going on and that you can check what's goin...

g on, but other than that, you need to almost completely remove yourself and this beak so what I was talking about before about progress beginning progress and moving that needle just a little bit you just want to hit the ball let it go and hit the brick and know nothing about it until it comes back to you and if you're really good and you can foresee the steps into the future then you could get it up behind the wall and hit thirteen bricks before it comes back to you and really it's a good analogy for that so for example with fancy hands if you send a task you get a une immediate email back with confirmation by the way I should point out you can also call fancy hands and leave a voicemail and then people will deal with that as well which is great if you're in the car or if you have a kid in each hand so with that being the brickwork idea you I don't want to get very involved if you don't have to you don't want to have to deal with an integrated you want to just kind of hit it off with someone else deal with it, put the ball in their court as it were and then get it back and just have that bare bare minimum knowledge. So in my case all I know on fridays is I get that e mail saying that the task has been assigned to do the post and then the next thing I know is that on my feed lee I have a new block post from my block nothing in between nothing before that nothing after that that's four seconds of my life but it's four seconds that allows me to know that things are working because and especially if it doesn't work, they're going to write to me and say, well, you know, I couldn't access is for some reason or this doesn't work and then I hit it off I said, okay, do this and I'm done again it's always being done always be always be closing this is always be done with that reference falls on deaf ears glengarry glen ross so always be done you want to be done because all day long now you're done, you're doing things were getting done, you're getting stuff accomplished and even those micro tasks that microtouch that tiny little bit of involvement that you need to have it's enough to sort of oversee your empire of over of outsourcing if you well, so this is actually why I kind of push back a little bit on that idea of having an over arching outsource person because you really don't need to have that level of involvement in a way you don't have to get into dealing with someone having to manage all that stuff because you just have to have a little bit a touch on each thing and take the bare minimum of time began just enough to know that things are working questions about what can't virtual assistance do aaron wants to know are there things that you would not recommend delegating to them and mad trends wants to know if there are hands off categories for virtual assistance okay, we're pg here right g um so although no that's not true okay are the things that I wouldn't have virtual assistant so I would say the on ly thing that I have never had a virtual system do is physically or is actually log into my banking website and that's not a trust thing it's because I've never had the need there's always been some sort of work around something that made it so that that wasn't necessary but other than that if you're working with a company that has some sort of reputation on that um not that us bases better but if if you are u s based on the company's us based on there is sort of like an automatic amount of accountability there because you have something to go after if you really need to no, there really isn't anything that I would say I wouldn't have a virtual system to of course keeping in mind that if it can't be done remotely then they can do it right so if we're talking about physical, real world things there's other ways to do that which we're going to talk about in the not the next segment but maybe the one after but they can call people for you. They can make appointments for you, the communiqu reservations for you. Maybe you don't want to have them talk to your mother for you or your girlfriend or your wife or your husband or whatever, but sometimes you d'oh, you know, if if you're going to be completely occupied in something and you need them to get certain information, if you're in a meeting and you can't possibly make a phone call and you can't text a lot of one for some reason or whatever, that might be a good situation where you have virtual assistant like you can send them an email, so I need you to call this you do this and then contact my wife and find out what they wanted to do, whatever it might be. It's true, hopefully they understand that the efficiency winds above the other stuff in that case, but so, no, they basically virtual says it can do anything that could be done remotely, and I would I would stick with that are their hands off things you can't have a virtual system to something that's illegal. Uh, so there, you can't have them find out where to get a list of drugs, you can have them do those kind of things you can't make that clear enough can't, but, um if the virtual system doesn't have an issue with it then there's really nothing that it's hands off and quite frankly people in the adult film industry probably use virtual system so it really amounts to the level of comfort that the person has with the work that you're doing and as I said before, they might not be a good for you you may not be a good fit for them and so that might just require having a different relationship with someone else uh you know if if you work actually I have a good example of someone who had an issue they were someone who was doing a lot of calls where they were pushing people to collect money who had not paid I think it was rent payments decided that they would have the virtual assistant call and the people that they were calling we're getting fairly abusive with thee assistant pick up calling so that was something that that person didn't feel comfortable doing anymore and quite honestly it's not fair anyway. So does that mean that it can't be done by virtual assistant? No, I mean it can't be done by that one, but there are plenty of services that just deal was collecting money and they're meaner and tougher than the persons that they're calling so they specialize in that so it might just be a different case a different use case in that situation so let's not be too specific about it just being virtual assistants basically outsourced specialist or generalists pretty much nothing that you can't have them do so basically all of these things kind of integrate in various ways you know the human auto responders one example but the one about having the task automatically assigned for the black post is another one it's sort of what I call it the holy grail where your automating the outsourcing so you also have to realize that a lot of these things can actually be done by completely automated services okay, so sometimes you don't even need to get to the virtual assistant point ah good example is wake up calls there's a service called waker upper and wake her up or is a free service it's a website where you put in your number he put in the time you want and you put in a message that computer voice will read and it's waker upper with no e indians who ppr have a mobile app that works great you know? So that's the kind of thing where somebody really oh yeah I need a wake up call but maybe your virtual system doesn't work those hours and also with a service like fancy hands because it's an on demand service you can't uh usually you cannot ask for something in a specific time if they give you like a bit of a window so waker upper there's uh services will follow that c c is always a great example is two for reminders, you know, I would never tell, like a virtuous is and remind me to do this in two weeks. This is not a good use of those resource is. And again, this speaks to what I was talking about throughout this about optimizing, automating and outsourcing is that we have to look at that automation and that optimization first before we can even consider outsourcing this stuff, and again, it allows you to sort of take advantage of if you're using a service that has a limited number of tasks for you to use, or you want to produce a high volume of stuff that they just you can't expect a person to do, so there's things like that, and then services that will, you know you can automatically order things our food ordering sometimes is also one of those things, like with seamless web or food menu pages, those kind of things where you for you to describe what you wanted and haven't assistant call you may be waiting thirty minutes for them to actually make the call. So in those cases, it's not necessarily good to go with a virtual system, but other than that. There's no harm in trying because those who said you'll get a response from someone who is in a completely different sort of state of mind a different perspective than you have and you khun build and learn I had a better do that task every other questions coming keep going if you have more to cover okay why I s o I would love to hear though if there's things that people are thinking about can I have this outsourced? I'm really interested in that kind of thing because everyone has a sort of different goal we have a few of those damn cox wants to know if they could ask the virtual assistant to take a picture for me of say what time's square looks like right now kind of a virtual photographer there is a service that does exactly that and it's called I think and I can check on this later but I think it's called go see it on dh basically it's a service that was developed for people buying things on ebay s o that you could have someone local verify it for you and go make sure and take a picture but it's basically an outsource service around the world where somebody can take a picture of it that's a that's a good one like that of course you could look a tte there's plenty of live webcams I think in time square but no. So that would be a real world test that you would not have a virtual system, too. But there are certainly outsource services, as I said, that will allow you to do that. Toula blum wants know if someone needed to be sued and they wanted to serve papers but didn't have an address. Could fancy hands find the person that's a good one? Okay, so absolutely so. As I said, you know, a lot of virtual systems, as I said, in essence, our customer service people in a way, but they're also investigators. They have to sort of figure out some of the time sometimes what you need and how to get it done better. So finding out where someone lives or where they are currently hiding is a very good thing. And even if that means that the assistant says, like, oh, I found this service that for twenty dollars I can buy a record on them, and then they can do that for you. So that's a really example. However, you know all the answers thing I've done. One of the more fun things that I've ever found was an investigative service eso I think I got the idea when I saw wedding crashers and the guy he calls his friend toe look up where the guys are actually from and you see that in movies all the time where somebody like has a private investigator on staff and I was always curious like how does that work? Who has a private investigators that they could just call so I wanted one so I I found a company things called omni investigative services and that basically will run background checks and do surveillance or do whatever you kind of need around the u s and they manage it from they have their own network of people who do this stuff, so I've actually used that several times for real estate stuff and just to find out more information about various people but of course now there's absolutely refresh that will kind of tell you everything you need to know about somebody based on social media, which is kind of scaring itself including I've heard of several cases of that where people were looking to serve papers, for instance, and they found where the person was based on social media, so I want to look into that um richard is asking a question about the amount of detail that you supply when you're delegating and if you could give an example about the amount that you put into a police do e mail prince gets a template as well. Oh yeah, is that a template? Less is more s o I have been intentionally vague on several occasions and I continue to do so with virtual assistance because sometimes you don't want it, so this is this is going to sort of contradict a little bit, but it's not that you're not providing the task properly, but sometimes you don't want to pigeonhole someone into doing something your way when their way maybe better. So occasionally I will be intentionally vague in the way that I need something done, knowing that they may write back to me and asked for more information and that's perfectly all right, there's nothing wrong with with getting it wrong the first time, as I said, and you start to learn the level of detail that you need, but if it is a process that I know is going to come up more often than that is something that I will take the time to write down into never no note, and then I simply will share that note with the assistant so that they can do it although quite honestly, if it is a repetitive process, then you probably don't have to issue it yourself, as I said, but the friday processes I know that's once a week I have other processes that are once a month or once every couple weeks and those could be automatically issued referring to the ever note note without you having to do it yourself. So in that case, you want to provide a lot of detail, but it's not something that you have to write yourself each time, basically what we've gone over now, you know this this all of this stuff that we've gone through is the external brand. I want to run through that again really quickly because I since we broke this up into two parts, I wantto pull it all back together, so we talked about ever known and the aqua notes and followed patsy c and all those are that external brain idea we'll start all of this is but all of that is sort of the optimizing thing where you're you're really optimizing the way that your thought processes working the way that you get ideas, get your ducks in a row, basically so that's the alternative part and then with the automation were looking at that we're looking at I t or if ands appier, which not only can optimize our automate, the process is completely, but then they can even take it a step further and send them on to a virtual assistant service so we got the optimized we got the autumn it, and then we end up with the outsourcing, which is its own component. In that case, I was recommending virtual for dedicated assistants and fancy hands for on demand assistance. But then it all ties together. As I said, the example of the human auto responder, where you're able to provide people the information they want on a quick basis. But someone is giving them a personal response and then keeping all this in mind while being the brick breaker where you're just trying to move things forward and have a little touch is possible so that, you know, what's going on. And you have your own checks and balances.