Anna Li: In the past, my husband could totally change the oil in the car himself. But you get to the point where you're like, why am I doing this? Right? So it's maybe something similar that, you know, cleaning the house. You still do that. You still do this until you realize, you know, I'm at the point of like my income level and by looking at my own time capacity, what do I want to spend my time on? So I love paying specialists for what they do best.
SPEAKER_00: This is your daily real estate syndication show. I'm your host, Whitney Sewell. Thank you for listening to the show. My goal is for you to become a savvy investor by learning from some of the best operators and investors in the business. I'd like to hear from you. If you have questions you'd like us to ask on the show, or if you have someone you would like me to interview, please let us know by emailing info at lifebridgecapital.com. Please leave us a written rating and review. I would be grateful. Do not hesitate to let us know how we can best serve you at LifeBridge Capital. And now for another amazing interview with my friend, Alina Trigub.
Alina Trigub: Hello and welcome. This is your daily real estate syndication show, and I'm your host, Alina Trigub. We have an amazing guest today, Anna Li, and I'm very excited to host her on our show. You will be as excited as I am after you hear Anna's biography. Anna spent 17 years climbing the corporate ladder and achieved a senior leadership role. She even had a four-year assignment in Switzerland. Her life had always been busy managing her corporate responsibilities and running multiple businesses while also taking care of her three kids. Over time, Anna found that her friends and family were curious about how she managed to juggle everything so efficiently. She discovered that outsourcing her busy work to virtual assistants freed up her time and allowed her to focus on more important things. This realization inspired Anna to start a global staffing company that helps her busy operators become strategic business owners and free up their time. Anna lives in Philadelphia with her husband and three kids. In addition to her global staffing company, Anna also runs multiple other companies and invests in real estate with her husband. Despite her busy schedule, Anna enjoys traveling, skiing, and spending time with family and friends. Her ability to efficiently manage her time and delegate tasks has always allowed her to pursue her passions and achieve success in both her personal and professional life. Wow, what an amazing journey and so many nuggets of wisdom. So, Anna, welcome to the Real Estate Syndication Show. Thank you, Elena. Thank you for having me. Absolutely. We're thrilled to have you. And let's dive in into how did you discover that you needed to get help? And regardless whether it's virtual assistant or in-person assistant, how did that happen? Tell us the story on how it dawned on you.
Anna Li: Sure. I think like any entrepreneur or business owner, or just the busy mom or, you know, person who works a lot, I think I had to get myself to a breaking point to realize that I need that. So I think it kind of started with me just having a personality of, you know, overachieving and trying to, you know, control everything in my life, which is absolutely impossible. But I quickly started realizing that, you know, A asking for help or delegating is the only way to essentially grow overall in life and in business anywhere else. Back when we were in Switzerland, I was working for my corporate job because I was stationed there with my company and my husband and I were still running some of the flips and rentals here in the United States. So we had to have people, right? So we had some boots on the ground locally. And I wanted to start a new business in real estate wholesaling. And there's just no other way. I was busy 40 hours a week, maybe even more, you know, kids plus I wanted to enjoy my life as we were abroad. So I just discovered that we can hire people overseas for affordable rates. And that's kind of how it all started. And then I got addicted.
Alina Trigub: Awesome, wonderful. So it sounds like you were more or less forced to hire people to help you because you were overseas. Had that not happened, do you think you would have still decided to hire people to help you with your business?
Anna Li: I think so. Uh, just simply because I was still in the corporate, there's just physically, I wasn't able to do anything like that. A lot of, you know, my customers are kind of in the same position. Um, I have doctors, who want to invest or who want to start a side hustle, or lawyers, whatnot. So I feel I have great, successful careers, and they just want to find that little time to escape in whatever they want to do. So absolutely, I would still probably found myself in the same position.
Alina Trigub: So, Anna, it sounds like some people are realizing that they need help. For someone who doesn't realize, what would you say should be the thought process to determine that they are at the point where they need to hire an assistant?
Anna Li: I mean, there's just obvious signs, right? You know, are you stressed, overwhelmed? Do you feel like you're doing a lot? Just overall, your personal kind of reality, right? Then just do some mental check. If you're a person that, you know, Has a bunch of free time. I mean, maybe you don't need it, but I still feel like there's a, an opportunity to outsource a lot of the personal stuff that's happening in your life for me. Um, and I kind of positioned everything from my personal experiences, you know, I had to free up some time to. Start something new. Right. And I think that's the problem with the corporate job. You can only grow so much. You can only get promoted so much, right? So you're always limited to your. Not number of hours that you're available. Right. So in order to scale, you have to almost like reproduce yourself, clone yourself and you know, in whichever way possible. So I'd say anyone can benefit from that. Uh, the realization when, uh, to do that, uh, most, most often than not, I see that it's too late. You know, my personal example was kind of like still late. I probably should have hired somebody like a year or two years before that. Do I blame myself for that? No, I think that anyone finding themselves in that position should just be like kind to themselves, but also realizing, do the mental check and just ask yourself, am I overwhelmed? From that point on, a lot of people are asking me, what goes first? What do I outsource first, right? I'd say, try to almost have like a diary of what you're doing for about a week, right? corporate job or a regular job, whatever you have. Maybe you're running a side hustle already, maybe you're running a business, maybe you're running an investment, maybe you're running an analysis, whatever it is in your life, or you have a busy schedule with kids, just start pretty much outlining everything that you do. And then once you're done with a list of your major activities, you want to separate them in two buckets. One bucket would be a $10 an hour task, And the other one would be a $200 an hour task. And I want you to separate these activities into these two buckets. And a lot of times people will be like, well, there's an activity like that's worth $75 and it's purposeful. It's either this or that, right? Like you kind of want to push it into the two different buckets. The reason for that is if you quickly start realizing, oh my gosh, why am I wasting time doing this? Right. And then you kind of push it into that $10 bucket and other activities would be either $200 are priceless, right? Like spending time with your kids or whatever it is, maybe dogs, uh, you know, uh, your favorite hobby. Um, and you'll realize that, okay, that's, that's my priceless bucket. To be honest, it's not even a $200 bucket, or maybe that produces the most amount of income that's your, you know, closing the sales, whatever it is. So if you apply that strategy and you took $10 bucket is pretty full. You need to hire a virtual assistant.
Alina Trigub: So if someone is at the point that, yes, they feel overwhelmed and they're going through this list and maybe deciding that, yes, in addition to $10 and $200, they do have $75 bucket. How does the person decide what can virtual assistant do to them? Maybe their $75 bucket is way too full. So how do they know? for which bucket to hire an assistant? Is it always by default for the cheapest one or should you sort of weigh pros and cons on the one that's in the middle and the one that's lower in deciding when to hire a virtual assistant and what tasks to hire a virtual assistant for?
Anna Li: Sure, that's a great question. I think the 10 and the 200, it's a metaphorical. I'll give you one example. I love shoving snow. Whenever it snows, I never outsource this because I love going outside. See, I love going outside. I love that fresh air. I love snow. We didn't have it in a long time. Now we having it. I enjoy it. Right. For me, that's a $200 bucket because it's metaphorical. It's not necessarily the dollar amount that you actually pay for it. Right. So it's a combination of value of like financial value as well as the personal value. So I'll never outsource it because I love it. Now cleaning in the past, I thought used to be my favorite activity until I realized my favorite. Is a result of cleaning. It's not the activity itself. So I, when I finally realized that that the bucket was outsourced and, you know, depending where you live in the United States, you know, that could be your $20 an hour with 25. It doesn't matter. It goes into the $10 bucket, right? Because again, it's a metaphorical, I'm trying to stretch you to push you into like complete two opposites, right? So you almost have to gauge it by your feeling. What do you enjoy doing? What do you not enjoy doing? A lot of people, I know that your community has a lot of investors, maybe they're doing monotonous search for properties, right? Maybe it's something that they enjoy. Good for you. Continue doing that. They don't enjoy that. They enjoy the moneymaking process. The investment process itself will outsource that, right? Have somebody like do the repetitive tasks for you, and that would be a clear sign that, you know, that's the right bucket for the $10.
Alina Trigub: You got it. Thank you, Anna. Yeah, that's a great approach. So once we have the buckets with lists and our community in general are primarily passive investors, people that either busy professionals, busy with their personal and professional careers or busy business owners. So they definitely have a lot of tasks. So once the person comes to realization that, yes, I'm at the point where I'm going to hire an assistant, what sort of is the next step? Can they hire someone part time? Does it have to be full time? Is it VA or in-person assistant? Like, what do they do at this point?
Anna Li: Sure. they can do myriads of things, right? They can hire part-time, they can hire full-time, they can hire for project, right? So a lot of the project-based jobs would be IT-related. Let's say they need to develop a website, whatnot, or let's say they have a CRM and they need to integrate it. So a lot of these technical items could be project-based. And in terms of where and how to hire, I'd say, You have so many options, right? You can go on Upwork, Fiverr, you know, there's just so many other websites that are available right now. You can do it yourself. Uh, you can go out and hire through the agency. The typical agency model would be, um, let's say they'll hire somebody, let's say Philippines, for example, right? They'll hire somebody for three, $4 an hour, and they'll upcharge you, uh, charge it maybe 10, 12, $15 an hour. Uh, that's their model. That's their business model. I, this, this is how I used to hire people myself. I started with agency model. Um, one thing that I really didn't like about it is that, um, underpayment leads to a lot of turnover and, um, the whole premise on we're going to provide you with management. So for me, that was a great selling point. Reality is you have to manage your own people because otherwise you're going to have like the broken phone situation where you train the manager for manager to train the VA and it's, it's never going to work. So the third option, which is what I'm doing right now, is basically just a staffing company, right? What we do is we're experts in sourcing great people, right? So we just kind of charge for recruitment process itself. And then the virtual assistant kind of works for you. So when our customers are asking us, what are the options? We normally say, if you do hire part-time, try not to hire less than 20 hours a week. The reason being for that is you don't want your virtual assistant to be spread out too thin among multiple customers, because then your priority is a little bit muddied up. Maybe you need something right there and then, but they have responsibilities with our customers. I'd say start with 20, that's the ideal point. Unless again, you're hiring somebody on Upwork for project base, and then it just doesn't matter.
Alina Trigub: Got it, thank you. Let's talk a little bit about the model that you implemented for your company. So you're a staffing agency, so you basically provide candidates to your clients based on the client requirements, correct? That's correct. So if a client has the requirements and you provided a candidate and then the candidate doesn't meet their requirements during the interview, do you keep providing more candidates? Is that how the process works or is there something else to it?
Anna Li: Absolutely. Yeah. Just to give you some statistics, on average, we get about a hundred applicants to apply for any given job. When they're down to top 25 to interview, and then we present top three candidates to a customer, right? So we already filtered out using our system. And what the customer essentially gets is a package with top three candidates. Every folder has a pre-recorded video interview. It's meant for you to kind of have a feel for you did that interview, right? Because we're walking through all the relevant questions. So you have an option to completely just hire on the spot, or if you want to re-interview, you can do that too. And then we also provide the resume and the disk profile, right? So again, if you match your personality to what like who you're looking for, you can always target a certain disk profile for sure. Let's say out of the top three, you're selecting one, you like them, you hire them. If something would have happened, we have a complimentary replacement policy within 30 days, we deploy the process of hire slow, fire fast. We believe that within the 30 days, the decision could be made whether the employee is performing or not. I'm always having the conversation ahead of time with every leader about setting up the KPIs and expectations for every virtual assistant that they hire. We also started hearing, last year we did the survey, what voice of the customer, and they said, I just raised my price. I want to have an annual warranty that I can come back and replace it. And I said, let's not raise the price. Let me just kind of offer you a warranty, right? So I started offering the warranty just to cover our cost of replacement. So now they can essentially purchase a 12 months warranty for any reason, right? Because technically once we hire again, we're a recruiter, right? A lot of things that are outside of our control, whether, you know, how the leader leads, how the employee acts, right? So, you know, all the checks and boundaries are there, but you know, stuff can happen. It's a human business, right? So, yeah, customers are pretty happy with having that annual warranty, right? Then, you know, for whatever reason, if something doesn't work out for them financially, they can kind of put a stop on that and still come back and find a replacement.
Alina Trigub: That's excellent, Anna. So, do agency train people?
Anna Li: Agencies do. We don't. There's a reason for that. It's one of the things that I've learned, too. There is nothing that I can do to train a virtual assistant to be applicable to your specific business, right? So you can have a real estate investment experience. You can be a person who does cold calling or texting a bookkeeping, whatnot, right? So we always look for experience based relevant to the role, but we don't supply any additional training because Elena, you may be doing the same type of business that I'm doing completely different. Your priorities are different. You deploy different systems you deploy. So, um, I, I personally was sold on the premise. We're going to train your virtual assistant. And I, I so personally myself in action that it just doesn't work. And again, before I started going with this model, I actually interviewed quite a lot of investors myself, and I asked them the same question. Because a lot of investors hire a lot of virtual assistants with different agencies. And I said, in the end of the day. Was that a selling point? Yes. How did you like it? Hated that. Cause you know, when the expectations are not met, you have this like sour taste right in your mouth. But if I'm not promising anything, the only thing that we promise is that we're going to go through a very rigorous process to recruit the person for you. And after that, it's, it's honestly, if you're a great leader, if you set up a great training process, um, You're going to create an environment where the person is going to succeed and deliver great results for you.
Alina Trigub: Yeah, no, I absolutely agree with that, Anna. My question was more in terms of the generic skills, the skills that are needed, typically research skills, maybe writing skills, maybe project management and so forth. Some people may have it, some don't, but since these are the most popular, some agencies tend to train them. But it sounds like your agency tends to concentrate on finding the great talent, not necessarily training a great talent. Is that correct? Exactly.
Anna Li: Yes. So a lot of the time, more often than not, customers will come back and say, I need somebody with an experience. It's very rare when somebody would say, I don't care about their experience. So what's the point then of going through this training process and kind of selling on that? Because reality is, even think about yourself, right? When you went to college and then you went to your first job, did you use exact same tools that you learned in college? No. Right. Cause you know, your, your, your job was totally different and kind of the tools that they were using, the process that they were going through. Um, for me, it's, it's on the job experience. That's what's the most important. So for example, if we have a, we have a lot of lend investors and they're all using a, uh, tool, uh, launch control. So if they need somebody who is a texter in that platform, we're going to find them somebody who has experience within that platform. That way, at least when they're onboarding them, they don't have to tell them, you go here, you click there and watch this video and get this and that. But if they're going to have a list of 10,000 texts and they want to use specific scripts, that's where the personal training and personal connection comes into place, right? Same thing with a lot of folks are hiring for go high level, let's say it's a marketing platform, maybe some dialers, whatnot. So we're looking for people who understand the concept in general, but we're not trying to narrow them down to basically just kind of like, I know how to do it from A to B and I don't know how to kind of step a different direction.
Alina Trigub: Got it. And what is the most important metric that you track?
Anna Li: or my personal business with my virtual team. Every individual on my team has a different KPIs. Let's talk about maybe recruiters. They have certain timelines within which they have to provide certain deliverables. So let's say within a week, we have to have first 50 people reviewed, right? Because the overall process, people keep applying. Majority of the people would apply within the first week, right? So now we get more people that are applying, but I want them to already start the process, narrow down a few people, and kind of get to the interview process, right? So we have a little bit of a conveyor belt of who is responsible for what. There are any delays in that process, the KPI triggers it right away. And the way that we trigger it is that every team member provides a daily reporting by the end of the day. So you know for sure, like that person who is reporting on themselves, they know for sure that they're missing out on their certain KPIs, right? So I'm a firm believer in giving just-in-time feedback, right? Whether it's a positive feedback or some development feedback, but I do it right away, immediately. So some great result delivered, oh my gosh, great job, kudos, maybe some bonuses, whatnot. But if something is not performed, I'm not shy about just providing that development feedback and asking what happened, how can you improve it going forward.
Alina Trigub: Awesome. Absolutely love it. So Anna, if some of our listeners are interested in hiring virtual assistant, but for a slightly higher role, maybe a project manager or managing a team, would you be able to provide such services or do VAs exist that can fit that skill set.
Anna Li: Yeah, absolutely. I started working with startups and small to midsize companies recently. So we have a service for just virtual assistants that are more like subject matter experts, right? So think about bookkeepers, think about your admins, think about your cold callers, salespeople. And then we also offer a more kind of expensive option and that's anywhere, starting from United States to anywhere in the world. And it's for your maybe HR directors or operational managers, right? Somebody in that leadership position who has experience behind their belt. And that is just more expensive product than in terms of the kind of staffing costs. Other than that, we do provide that option. And I actually went back to my own corporate folks that I know and used to work with. And I just started having some contract discussions with them too about that. But yeah, startups, definitely we support them already. And essentially the progression of any kind of smaller business venture is they want to outsource the most sort of like tedious, annoying, you know, repetitive tasks first, but their final goal is to outsource themselves. Right. So the most common request would be, you know, they're kind of start with few people here, but they want to end with COO or, you know, partial CEO or something like that. So they can concentrate on the strategy, the growth, you know, 10 exit instead of two exit because they're still in the business. Right. So absolutely.
Alina Trigub: Thank you. And so with that in mind, what would you say are your daily habits that you stick to that help you achieve success and help you to, uh, produce at your highest.
Anna Li: So I guess every single day, uh, I, if we kind of step away from just general outsourcing, um, starting day with great mindset. And I think I start my day recently started deploying the strategy. I'm still working on that is starting my day the night before. Right. So having some journal, a little meditation, um, some sort of routine to start the day before. And in the morning I, I like to wake up and, you know, we have older boys and the younger boys. So spending time with them, giving some hugs and kisses for at least some of them who could still do that. Um, my husband and I play pickleball in the morning. So I, I kind of like that having that routine for myself, uh, gets me into right mindset. So by, by eight 30, when everyone's gone, you know, you know, to school, um, we kind of start our day and, um, you know, Contrary to probably what a lot of people would say, I try not to overschedule myself. And I tried to have a lot of kind of free time for, for thinking, for kind of going on a walk and, and just, uh, doing more, more of that part. Um, cause I realized that again, I tend to go back sometimes to my tendency of overdoing and overworking because the funny part about freeing up your time with virtual assistants is not to overload yourself again, because if you're that type of personality. You can easily find yourself what to do because it's it's kind of like that busy business makes you feel that you're productive. So I'm learning the old habits and getting into more of new habits of, you know, wondering, you know, enjoying the day and going outside. Right. So and that tends to bring amazing results. Similar to what is being discussed by Ben Hardy, 10x versus 2x or 10x is easier than 2x. I think the less effort I make and kind of think completely differently than I used to or based off my prior experience, the best results that I'm getting effortlessly. That's the best part. I get the best result effortlessly. That's something that, you know, I'm learning how to enjoy that.
Alina Trigub: That's amazing. With that in mind then, have you noticed changes to your business or in your business while you're going through this progression or through this growth progression, I should say, as well?
Anna Li: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's kind of going from different types of customers, right? Even my recent growth with going through corporate customers and People just come out of nowhere, right? They, they, they heard. And up until like, still till now, I, I, I want to deploy the strategies at some point this year to start doing some sort of kind of. Paid advertisement, right? That's that's maybe in my head as everyone else is doing it. But up until this point, I didn't have to do it because everything is always based referrals. Um, and. you know, somebody recently pointed out the thing broke the event broke or what was the phrase? I keep forgetting the phrase, but something don't break it.
Alina Trigub: Um, broken, then it's working something to that extent.
Anna Li: Exactly. So I may be at the point where I never need to advertise because it's just the natural progression of the growth, um, in larger and larger organizations that are looking for our services. And I think probably that would be. something that I enjoy the most out of all of that.
Alina Trigub: You got it. Awesome. And for our listeners, as we're wrapping up the interview, I guess one of the last questions about VA is for someone who is at the point when they're ready to hire someone, how should they decide whether they should hire a VA themselves or go to an outsourcing or an agency like yours?
Anna Li: Sure. I, I guess I'll, I'll use a metaphor of, uh, an oil change. So in the past, my husband could totally change the oil in the car himself. Uh, but you get to the point where you're like, why am I doing this? Right. So it's maybe something similar that, you know, cleaning the house, you still do that. You still do this until you realize, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm at the point of like my income level and my. looking at my own time capacity, what do I want to spend my time on? So I love paying specialists for what they do best, right? I love paying chefs for what they do best. Cause you know, I'm not maybe the best cook or at least I can't cook the way that they do. Um, maybe I'm not even the best as cleaning, right? Uh, I, I'm not the best as a lot of, uh, technical stuff, right? So I love paying people for what they're great at. And finding my, my who's right in my life that kind of can support my life and growth. Um, so I would kind of go back to that and then probably deploy that strategy and say, is this something that you enjoy doing now? That's your process of God's first thing. Cause a lot of people kind of start, well, it's going to save me money. I'm not going to have to pay for this. And I think when my husband used to change the oil for his car, probably was the same rationale. Why would I pay on, I don't even know how much it costs, maybe a hundred dollars. Why would I pay $100 to change my will? But in the end, this $100 becomes like, why am I doing this? Like, I'd rather pay $100 to do that. So find yourself where you are. I kind of highly encourage you to do it yourself to understand whether you like it, whether you can do it. Are you successful in that? And for that, we actually have a course that we recorded. Go on and check out the course, because we teach people to hire themselves, right? Because my whole point in the very beginning was the agency model doesn't really work, right? It didn't really work for me. It didn't really work for a lot of people. And I said, enough is enough. A lot of people were asking me how to do it. How were you so successful in hiring? And I was just done repeating myself. I wanted to create a course, record it, put it out there, here, take a course and you can hire yourself. And it's very effective. And a lot of my customers actually start with course, they start hiring quite a lot of people, and then they're realizing, okay, I'm at the point where I don't want to change my role anymore. And then they come back to me and they say, you know what, I want to use your team.
Alina Trigub: I love that metaphor. Thank you, Anna, for that. One of the last questions we'd like to ask is, how do you like to give back?
Anna Li: Going back to the course again, I used to sell my course. It used to be quite a significant item within my P&L. I realized that not everyone can afford it, but I'm so passionate about people outsourcing that I wanted to share that knowledge. I'm a firm believer in sharing knowledge. It shouldn't be stuck in just my head and somebody else's head. So what we've implemented in terms of the pricing strategy, we just said, you know what, you can pay whatever price you want. You know, you want to pay like $10, pay $10, whatever, right? So the course that used to cost $500, we essentially, you know, I want people to pay some amount because I find that if you pay some amount, you find a value in it. So that's why that's probably the biggest giveaway that we do. Completely switch the model and, you know, A lot of our customers are super grateful, especially somebody who is starting out and can't afford it.
Alina Trigub: Awesome. Thank you for that. And on that note, how can our audience find you and the course that you just mentioned?
Anna Li: Sure. You can pretty much visit our website. It's outsourceyourtasks.com.
Alina Trigub: Awesome. And outside of your website, are you on social media? Can our listeners find you on LinkedIn, Facebook or other social media handles?
Anna Li: Yeah, it's at outsourceyourtask everywhere.
Alina Trigub: Awesome. Anna, thank you so much for this amazing interview. It was great to have you here and thank you again.
Anna Li: Absolutely. Thank you for having me.
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for being with us again today. I hope that you have learned a lot from the show. Don't forget to like and subscribe. I hope you're telling your friends about the Real Estate Syndication Show and how they can also build wealth in real estate. You can also go to lifebridgecapital.com and start investing today.
