Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of The Testing Psychologist podcast. Today, I am having my first guest in quite a while and it was well worth the wait, I think. I am talking with Jaime Jay from Slapshot Studio, bottleneck.online, and two other businesses that we will certainly touch on.
I met Jaime about a month ago in person. I had heard him on two podcasts prior to that. He’s been on Practice of the Practice twice. I was [00:01:00] fortunate enough to meet Jaime when I went to Slow Down School, which I’ve talked about here on the podcast a little bit.
He was one of the sponsors for the conference. It also turned out that he was my suitemate in our dorm-style dwellings. So Jaime and I got to know each other pretty quickly with some funny/awkward dorm moments. And then I got to hang out with him across the course of the week and learned so much from him and found out that he’s a pretty awesome person to boot. So super happy to have him on the podcast.
Jaime, welcome. How are you?
Jaime: Thank you so much for having me, Jeremy. I’m awesome and I’m super excited and pumped to chat with you and your listeners.
Dr. Sharp: Likewise. Thanks for coming on. Let me tell the audience a little bit more about you and then we will just jump into it.
Jaime is going to be talking with us today all about virtual assistants. He is an [00:02:00] expert in this area and one of his businesses focuses on virtual assistants. So we’re going to be talking all about that and how a virtual assistant can help your testing practice.
Before we get to that though, let me tell you a little bit about Jaime. Jaime started out in the U.S. Army. He was a former paratrooper. After he got out in 1994, he worked for a few corporations in corporate America over the next 12 years, learned a lot about business and working with others, but didn’t quite feel like he had found his calling.
In the summer of 2006, he co-founded a small real estate ad agency and fell in love, and found his entrepreneurial spirit. That word is always difficult, but he found that and got to go through the rollercoaster of the real estate boom in 2008 and the burst bubble that we all know [00:03:00] about.
After that though, he moved on to focus on digital advertising and websites and marketing and branding. Jaime founded Slapshot Studio LLC in 2013. It combines his passion for ice hockey with the ability to build websites and help others develop their branding.
So, Jaime, I feel so fortunate to have you here on the podcast. Again, welcome.
Jaime: Thank you so much. What a kind introduction. I appreciate that. It’s a lot of fun doing this, especially with Dr. Jeremy Sharp. This is amazing.
Dr. Sharp: Jaime, if you could see, I’m blushing right now, so thank you. You’re a kind person as well. I’m happy to have you mainly because, so a combination of factors; I’ve been asked many times about virtual [00:04:00] assistants. So just on that level, I’m happy to have you on here to be able to talk about them but also, there’s an added layer because you’ve been doing this for a long time. This is your business and you have a depth of knowledge with virtual assistants that will be helpful for all of our audience.
Forgive me, I’m going to ask some basic questions just lay some groundwork and then we can dive into it and get into some of the nuts and bolts of a virtual assistant and how they could be helpful in a psychology practice.
Jaime: Perfect.
Dr. Sharp: First of all, I’m curious, your bio told us a lot but can you say a little bit more about how you found yourself in the business of recruiting, vetting, and managing virtual assistants just as a business?
Jaime: Sure. That’s actually a great question. The genesis [00:05:00] of me being introduced to virtual assistants or as I refer to them as VAs was in 2006 when I helped co-found a small real estate ad agency in central California. The partner I partnered up with was from the Philippines and he was then living in California and together we came together. We both had a passion for real estate and we needed to bootstrap this product and service that we wanted to develop.
A more affordable way of doing this was he actually introduced me to my very first VA. We ended up growing to about 13 virtual assistants in 2007 from the Philippines. So we had our core staff at our local office there in central California of about six people, if memory serves me correctly, six or seven people and then we had 13 virtual assistants.
They did everything from production to website [00:06:00] development to marketing and all kinds of cool stuff. We even published a magazine that we had distributed 12,000 copies around and they did the layout. They did the designs, all that kind of cool stuff.
I thought that was really cool to be able to work with these people, even though they were in the Philippines, we were still able to communicate effectively, we were able to do amazing work, and get so much more done all the while bootstrapping this venture. We were attempting to grow and grow and ultimately, unfortunately, as of 2008, we all know what happened and you said that. We’ve lost 72 clients in the span of about three or four months. That was out of our control.
I don’t necessarily know if I want to say my passion or my love for my interaction with my VAs is what drove me, but I had a really good experience. I bonded with them. It was [00:07:00] an amazing opportunity.
I find that most of us that are starting up ventures, we obviously don’t have a lot of capital when we get started, or maybe we’re worried about, hey, if we hire people on, boy, that’s a big expense and you have this to worry about and that, all kinds of stuff, I can go on and on. We can probably dive into that but overall, that’s where my start was, and because of the relationships that I built early on, I just continued those.
So since about 2007, I’ve had the ability to source a virtual assistance for friends and people in my sphere of influence and about a year and a half, two years ago, I opened up my own company, bottleneck.online and we helped stop the bottleneck now with virtual assistance.
Dr. Sharp: Oh, I like that. I always thought that was a great name for a VA company. I can certainly identify with that bottleneck practice.
[00:08:00] One of the things that I thought about just as you were talking about that journey is the amount of trust that has to go into a relationship with a VA. I think we can talk about this as we go along, but I want to say that to bookmark it for myself that I imagine a lot of listeners are maybe saying like, well, how can I trust this person or how do I know they’re going to do a good job? And that sort of thing. Before we jump into all of that, I think it is worthwhile to maybe just define virtual assistant.When I’ve mentioned it to other folks, I’ve gotten responses like, you mean a robot or a computer? What is a virtual assistant? Can you talk a little bit just about who and what is a virtual assistant? What they do.
Jaime: Sure. If you’re talking about a robot, that’s [00:09:00] an electronic virtual assistant, also known as a chatbot. If you’re talking about a virtual assistant without the electronics in front of it, that is a human being that is working remotely. It doesn’t have to be in the Philippines or it could be in India, it could be in the Ukraine, it could be right here in the United States, it could be in Canada, UK.
Virtual assistants are people that work remotely; meaning they can work in a coffee shop; they work in their house. They can even have one of those little co-working spaces that they go to. So that is basically what a virtual assistant is.
What a virtual assistant can do, well, there’s a plethora of different things and you can get into different specialties as well. So whether you need somebody to manage your bookkeeping, you want to have someone manage your website or build a website for you or be your webmaster for your business, or you need just a basic administrative assistant that’s going to go do research for you or answer emails or manage your calendar, book [00:10:00] your travel, there’s a wide range of different things that the VAs can do. Does that answer your question, about defining what a VA is?
Dr. Sharp: Yeah, it does. I think just that distinction and making sure people know that a virtual assistant is an actual person most of the time.
Jaime: Yes.
Dr. Sharp: Though, I would like to talk with you, I know that you have this chatbot project, maybe, is what you call it, going on. I got to hear a little bit about that at Slow Down School, and I think that’s super interesting. Maybe we can touch on that here in a little bit.
Jaime: Sure.
Dr. Sharp: But for right now, just important to say that a VA is an actual person, a human being that practitioners would interact with and almost like an employee of the company or more, would it be an independent contractor? That’s maybe an important question.
Jaime: Yeah because I wanted to make that distinction, [00:11:00] if they’re out of the country then, and of course, contact your accountant, your CPA, and find out what’s going to be best for you. The way that we work it here is they’re not even independent contractors so they are, in essence, a business expense because the money is going out of the country.
We can’t do a W-9 or a W-2 or anything like that. For the people that are in the states here, yes, of course, we can do that. I recommend you go explore the differences and the pros and cons of W-2 versus 1099. There’s benefits and cons to both of those.
I don’t call them employees. There are no “mandatory” meetings or anything like that they’re [00:12:00] there as support. So basically, it’s like they’re freelancers, so to speak. We’ve developed it in such a way to where we can say, hey, they’re 13 hours ahead of us, so there is some time that offsets the difference.
So we can just say, hey, can you get this done here? Can you do this? Hey, would you be available to meet with us at this time instead of, hey, mandatory meeting this day, this time, every single day?
Dr. Sharp: So that’s a way to get around the employee distinction or is that …?
Jaime: Yes, basically getting around that. Plus, you want to be mindful and respect that there is a time difference, but they have three different shifts there. They have first, second, and third shifts in the Philippines. So a lot of people in the Philippines are used to working our daytime hours anyway.
I think Manila is the number one [00:13:00] call center place in the entire world. So there’s more call center, they call them BPOs, more call center agents than anywhere. And so they work, obviously, during U.S. times there. So they have the first, second, third shift, but it’s a neat way to leverage your time, get a lot of stuff done.
Most of my VAs, I have 13 of them here that work with us and they work their hours. What’s nice is we will get all of our projects and everything set for the day, when we wake up tomorrow morning, all the projects are done. So it’s really neat.
Dr. Sharp: Oh, that is interesting. I like that. You’re not fretting over all these items, you’re sleeping and it’s happening while you sleep. There’s a certain magic to that.
Jaime: Exactly.
Dr. Sharp: So just a nitpicky question, I suppose, but one that popped into my mind, [00:14:00] how do you handle the payment then for an international VA? How do you actually pay them?
Jaime: Sure. We pay our VAs by monthly, there’s two pay periods, 1st and the 15th through the 16th through the end of the month. And so what we do is we have some time tracking software that we use, it’s called HiveDesk. Basically, what that does is it tracks their time and it also snaps shots of their screen while they’re working so you can make sure that they are really working.
We never had to use that yet, very fortunate. It’s really easy, it automatically calculates their time with the rate that they earn and we know exactly how much to pay them at the end of both these pay periods. And then what we do is either something like Xoom or PayPal.
The majority of our setup is set up through PayPal which is nice too because the clients that we have for bottleneck, we would invoice them, [00:15:00] they pay via PayPal, and then we turn right around out of that same PayPal account and pay our VAs.
Dr. Sharp: Oh, I see. I’m setting this up and spelling it out for anybody who might be listening. So if they were to work with bottleneck, for example, they would pay you for the service of having a VA, but you actually take care of paying the VA. Is that right?
Jaime: That’s right.
Dr. Sharp: So practitioners, like psychologists or therapists, it’s not like we would have to deal with sending money overseas to a VA or anything like that.
Jaime: Exactly. There’s two things that come up right here. I’m glad you brought this up because this is that area that a lot of people are uncomfortable with in dealing with VAs. There is a plethora of companies out there, our options are wide open and many of those companies are phenomenal. They’re fantastic.
There’s also companies out there [00:16:00] that you don’t know just like with any other business. One of the biggest challenges that I’ve experienced, I started in 2006 with this so I’ve had a little bit of a track record here, but one of the biggest challenges I found was maybe I sent some money off to somebody and then they didn’t do anything.
Maybe I sent them a computer because I wanted to make sure that they had the right equipment because I really liked them. They were working for me for a good while and sent them and then all of a sudden they’re gone. They vanished. And now you’re out that computer, you’re out that money. That’s a big concern to me. I’ve also heard that from many of our clients and people that we’ve talked to.
So what we do as an outsourcing agency, is we actually vet these VAs. They do a DiSC profile, we get their resume, they go through and usually one or two [00:17:00] vetting interview process type style thing. And then basically what happens is as soon as that’s done, before we even introduce them to the client, we pretty much vetted them out.
They are human beings, we can never know what they’re going to do, but I have to say we have a pretty doggone good track record and we have a really good way of figuring out what makes them tick and whether or not they are going to be a good person, good fit. There’s two flags that go up through our questioning and our vetting process that we’re able to cut down on that aspect. So this is a big reason why people look to agencies to help them out with this.
The other thing is we never, and it’s in the agreements both on the side of our clients and on the side of our VAs, that they’re not to discuss financial matters. They’re not to discuss getting new technology, meaning they can’t ask for a computer. They can’t ask for a raise. They can’t do anything directly to the client. They [00:18:00] have to go through us.
That’s fine, if they want to ask for a computer, totally fine. That is fine. I’ve had many of my clients buy computers or give them gifts, certificates, or whatever, because they want to reward them for doing such a great job. That’s totally fine, but it has to go through us.
And the reason why, is because we want to make sure they don’t take advantage of our clients. We want to make sure that our clients feel comfortable that when they engage with these VAs, that they’re engaging with them directly, obviously they’re going to build a personal relationship over time. It’s just human nature but we want to take the element of the financial matter out of it.
So any financial matters whatsoever, whether it’s a raise or maybe they need to discipline them for something, maybe they missed a deadline or maybe they missed a project or something like that, the client will contact us, we’ll contact the VA, and get that problem sorted and rectified. If they want to dismiss the VA, they contact us, we dismiss it. [00:19:00] That’s the reason you have the agency there. You have the extras like, okay, we’re here for you. We got your back.
And then the other thing is, what happens if someone just goes AWOL, what happens if they leave? Well, they’re in the Philippines, we’re not going to fly over to the Philippines to go find them or what happened. Maybe we’re worried, maybe they got into a car accident or maybe it’s something more than what we think.
So we have a network of agents over in the Philippines to where we can literally go knock on the door. If we can find them, we figure out what’s happening. So that’s a big plus. Luckily, I’ve never had to do that but if we did, we can.
Dr. Sharp: Oh, that’s pretty incredible. I would not have even thought about that. I know it sounds like in many ways, y’all’s agency or company serves as a virtual HR of sorts.
Jaime: That’s a great way of describing it.
[00:20:00] Dr. Sharp: Okay. Oh, that’s fantastic. I like that idea that you even have contacts in the Philippines to check on the VAs if something goes wrong or that you’re worried about them. That’s nice.Jaime: And we have a good reputation over there. I’m not saying all of these and I would never mention names, but some of the companies over there, they work their VAs hard. They know they can get them for a lower rate. It’s not a good company working environment, in my opinion, that’s just me.
They are human beings; these are real people. They work, they have families, they have sons and daughters and husbands and moms, and so we embrace a very strong culture much in the same way that we do with our other companies, and we just want to make sure that they’re getting everything that they can.
So we have a really good reputation over there of [00:21:00] caring. We never miss payments. We’re always on top of it. It’s just a different kind of way that we look at doing things. We’re an advocate not only for our clients to the VA, but also from the VA to the clients.
Dr. Sharp: I like that. I can tell that just in the way that you talk about it, that there is a mutual respect there that I would imagine helps everyone.
Jaime: Oh my gosh, yeah.
Dr. Sharp: Let’s talk a little bit about specifics with VAs. How have you seen other, certainly businesses, but if you can think about mental health practices or psychologists, how do they specifically use a VA day to day?
Jaime: Sure. There’s several different things that they can do. We’re launching a little program here with a mutual friend of yours and mine, Jen, because she was looking for someone to answer phones. So that is a little bit of a different thing than we’re used to because typically, [00:22:00] the stuff that we do is administrative; computer-based or web-based, I should say, building websites or managing websites or booking travel, anything to do online.
We did not have the element where we can, someone, especially in the therapy world, can have someone answer phones for them and know what to say because you want to find somebody that’s going to embrace your existing culture in your practice and knows that, hey, when they answer a call, hey, is so and so available, I need a session or can we schedule, oh, he’s not available, no.
We know that they shouldn’t just say no, it’s, I’m sorry he’s not available at this time, but when’s it another time that maybe he can get back to you, that’s convenient for you? So there’s a way that we can train and work with them in such a way that lives up to the therapist’s culture, the practice, whatever [00:23:00] it is they want to be able to convey through the VA.
So that is one thing that we’re working on but for the most part, it’s going to be something like administrative assistant doing stuff like that. Oh my gosh, bookkeeping is a big thing.
One of the things that we have to be careful of is the HIPAA compliancy, there are going to be some things that we need to look into. Perhaps it’s the first time that we look into patient records and the whole confidentiality thing. So there are some things that are a little bit more difficult than having someone on staff in person that are there, but for the most part, there’s usually a way that we can find that we can help somebody out.
Dr. Sharp: Great. You mentioned earlier, you listed off several things that I didn’t even think of. The bookkeeping thing is pretty big. So when you say bookkeeping, do you mean like balancing the QuickBooks account?
Jaime: Yes. Exactly.
[00:24:00] Dr. Sharp: Okay.Jaime: So here’s the cool thing, every single one of our VAs are college graduates. So if, say, if you wanted to get a bookkeeper, I would go out and find somebody that graduated with an accounting degree. Here’s the other thing, one of the biggest questions we get is, well, they’re in the Philippines, do they speak English? Will I be able to understand them?
The answer to that is they start speaking English. It’s their second language in about the 3rd grade and their entire college is taught in English. That’s why we focus on people with college degrees. While some of the programmers or the people that are a little bit more into the more specific programming, coding, development, that kind of thing, they might not have as good English as styles pronunciation, but they’re not going to be client facing.
But more and more, [00:25:00] you would never even realize, I’ll give you an example, if you go and check out any of my blogs, that’s written by Karen who lives in the Philippines and she actually taught English in the Philippines and she’s fantastic. If you talk to her, you would never know she was from the Philippines. So there’s that that we can look at as well.
Dr. Sharp: Oh, that’s great. So even there, writing blogs, that’s a legitimate task for a VA.
Jaime: Yes. Thank the Lord, we have Karen. Social media is a good thing too. If you think about it, would you say you’re pretty busy?
Dr. Sharp: I would say that. Yes.
Jaime: It’s that a lot of therapists, more I’ve learned about therapists and their practices, Lord almighty, they’re trying to do so many things. And then social media comes up or you’re blogging like, hey, you should write a blog. It’s a really good way to get [00:26:00] your word out there and share what it is that you’re doing because that’s SEO, and SEO is another thing that VAs can do for you.
All that is time consuming and the social media, oh my gosh, you need to post on Facebook and oh, Instagram, oh my gosh, Twitter and oh, this, this is crazy. I don’t have time to do this. I want to focus on either growing my practice or talking to my patients. So that’s what a VA can do for you.
I don’t even do any of my own social media posting hardly anymore. It’s all done by a VA. So the VA does all of our posts across all four different businesses that we have on, geez, that’s probably 24 different platforms.
My show notes for the podcast are written by Karen. All the social media is done by Christine and it’s just wow. It gets a lot done. I basically get to oversee it a little bit and make sure the brand is [00:27:00] represented well and stuff like that. But other than that, they are just killing it. They are awesome. They are my rocks.
Dr. Sharp: I’ve heard from other folks too, that to level up your practice or even just give you a certain amount of free time and just let you relax a little bit as a practice owner, it helps to outsource as much as you can. It sounds like the VA’s are a great way to do that if you can find the right fit.
Jaime: Yeah. And you know what too, Jeremy, is really cool and this will be helpful for the therapists that are listening, my good friend Scott told me this, he said, do something as if it was the last time you were ever going to do it. No matter if you’re going to hire a VA or not, but if you can add workflows and processes to everything you do, eventually you’ll be able to find out what you can outsource. In essence, in doing so, create [00:28:00] a job description so that when you are ready to do something like this, you’ve already got everything done.
What I mean by saying, do something as if it’s the last time you’re going to do it, the next time you go to post something on social media, write the steps down exactly the way that you do it. And the reason why I say to do that is because if you go, say you log into Facebook and then you go to click post and then you go here and then you got to go to a file that you set up or a folder, something like that, whatever your steps are, write that out and sure it’s going to take longer that one time, but here’s the deal.
If you ever do go decide to hire somebody, guess what? They’re going to do something and they’re going to learn about it the same way you do. No one’s ever going to be better than you at what you do because it’s your business. It’s your baby. It’s what you’ve built. So why not give it the next best thing. [00:29:00] And when you bring someone on, have a system to train them in a very similar way that you’ve done it.
Obviously, I like to be open minded and if they have a better way of doing it, cool, let me know. That’s awesome, but at least, this is foundational. It’s appealing and it’s very easy and it saves a lot of time during that onboarding process.
Dr. Sharp: As you’re talking, I’m thinking about, okay, how can we apply this specifically to folks who do a lot of testing? That’s my audience for this podcast. Two things that jump out right away are assuming the HIPAA compliance is in place, is there a way to you train a VA to take let’s say clinical intake notes and write up a thorough clinical history based on your notes and maybe a template that you provide, something like that?
Sort of like an alternative to dictation, maybe.
Jaime: 100%. There’s a form that’s [00:30:00] called Delegation Tool. If you go to bottleneck.online, click on the Delegation Tool. What’s cool about that is that it lists out all the tasks that you do in a given day. You list 1-3, what gives you energy to what doesn’t. All the 3s come down at the bottom of the form. And those 3s are the tasks that you can delegate.
And then from the tasks that you want to delegate, you can create a workflow for your VA. And we’ll find a VA that can do that, whether it’s transcription, dictation, whatever it is.
Dr. Sharp: Okay. You mentioned the Delegation Tool back at Slow Down School and I looked at it and it certainly is super helpful. So if there are folks out there who are listening, some of you psychologists or mental health practitioners, and you’re saying, I don’t even know what I would do with a VA, this Delegation Tool is a great way to help figure that out. It can help you identify the [00:31:00] things that you can outsource and start to think about letting someone else do.
Jaime: Yeah. It is totally free by the way. So if you go there, download that Delegation Tool. I don’t ask for an email, nothing like that. This is simply a really cool tool for you to use. And then it’ll open up into Google docs. What I recommend you do is you just go up to the file. There’s a file up in the upper left hand corner, click file, make copy, and then you can copy it right to your own Google drive and name it whatever you want to. And that way it’s native right on your Google drive.
Dr. Sharp: Oh, that’s fantastic. I want to take that and in just a minute, ask that question, okay, so I have filled out the Delegation Tool, now what happens? Before I get to that, just to touch on other things that I could foresee a VA being helpful with from a testing standpoint, I could see a VA perhaps doing some of the things that we traditionally assigned to a psychometrician who’s like [00:32:00] an assistant in testing especially logging onto online scoring systems and transferring those scores into the typed report that we turn out. I can see that.
I could see inventory and ordering testing materials could be a task for a VA where I think speaking to the psychologist now, we’ve all been on the Pearson website and know what a pain it is to go through and actually order new materials. So to be able to outsource that and just tell a VA how much of what particular measures you need, that could be an easy task for a VA.
My brain is turning with things that even I could outsource here in my practice and I think others could probably do the same. That’s great.
Jaime: That part, obviously, I have no doctor in front of my name, so I definitely don’t know [00:33:00] that much about the intricacies of it. However, the cool thing is in sourcing for a VA, if you say, this is what I’m looking for. We have a detailed questionnaire that you would complete before we start the sourcing process. If you list out what you want, we’ll go and find somebody who may not have that specific experience, but are affiliated with that industry.
There’s a lot of medical psychology. There’s a lot of that in the Philippines. I think it’s like the third or fourth largest number of graduates are in the medical field.
Dr. Sharp: Okay. That’s good to know. So that really gets back to the selection process is maybe how I would think of it. Say, someone goes out, they fill out the delegation tool. They’re like Jaime, I want you to find me a VA, what happens after that?
Jaime: The next best thing would [00:34:00] be to go and fill out a questionnaire right on the
bottleneck.online. That questionnaire comes into our system and we take a look at it. What we’ll most likely do is reach out and schedule a consultation to get an overview and a feel to see if this might be a good fit for them. That way, they can answer their questions and things like that.
If we decide that they’re already a good fit, maybe we’ve talked to them before, we can see from the questionnaire that this is something we can definitely do, we’ll send them out a questionnaire. And then they’ll complete the questionnaire.
Once they complete the questionnaire, we’d definitely follow up with them at this point to give them an idea of what’s happening. And then we ask them at that point to fill out the Delegation Tool but chances are they’ve already filled it out, they’re way ahead of the game.
It takes about 7 to 10 days for us to source a VA. The reason why is because we have to go through the vetting process if we don’t have anybody identified to fill all the needs for that specific [00:35:00] client, based on their questionnaire. So usually we just say 7 to 10 days.
During that time, if they’ve already filled out the delegation tool, great, if they haven’t, we ask them to, and we also ask them to fill out a job description. We also have a job description form that we send them via email during this process so that this is 7 to 10 days for them to get ready, know exactly what they’re looking for, fill out their job descriptions. They have a good idea of what they’re going to be doing when they get an interview.
So what happens is once we identify the candidates and we’ve vetted them and we’re ready to go, they will be contacted by our HR person moderator from the Philippines to arrange for an interview. We’ll identify three candidates. They’ll go through the interview process and it’s 10-minute interviews for each of the candidates.
It may seem like a long time, but it’s plenty. It’s usually done in the morning or afternoon because [00:36:00] as they’re not hired yet, they are 13 hours ahead of us. They’ll go through these three interviews, 10 minutes, all the while being moderated with Irene.
What she’ll do after that is she’ll have a short little meeting with the client to see which one they like best. At that time, they’ll say, well, I like this person the best. They’ll set up what they call as a confirmation interview. During that confirmation interview, it’s just the client and the VA, nobody else.
You can do a 10-minute call or you can do an hour long call. It’s totally up to you, but this gives you an opportunity to really dive deep, see if the belief system is shared, see if that you really believe and you fill in your heart of hearts that this might be a good fit for you.
If you decide to move forward, then we go ahead and make the arrangements to get them onboarded. If you would like to say, you know what, I didn’t connect with anybody and I don’t think anybody works for us, we’re happy to go out and source another three candidates for you and have you do the process again.
Usually, if you haven’t picked a [00:37:00] VA by this time, it’s probably not a good match for you. I don’t think we’ve ever even made it past the second total interview if someone had to redo it. So we’re pretty good at identifying good matches.
So then you would choose to work with them. And then what happens is our Irene will call you after the first day and make sure everything went good. She’ll call you at the end of that first week, make sure everything went good. She’ll also call you at the end of the second week and make sure that that went good.
And right before you hire them, we send out an agreement, let you know everything, the payment processes and when and all that. We do the same thing on the VA side. And then as soon as you go through that, we recommend you meet with the VA once a day for the first two weeks for training, a minimum of an hour.
And then after that, we think it’s really good to meet with the VA a minimum of once a week just to have like [00:38:00] a company meeting or whatever just to make sure that things are getting done and you plan for the next week, things like that. I meet with my VAs once a week as well. I really like that.
And then we do a 90-day probationary period where we usually reduce their rate for the first 90 days. After that, when you say, yeah, I really like them, I want to keep them, then we go back and they usually get a raise at that time and the relationship continues. We will also do an evaluation at the end of the 90 days, and then we do it every three months. We’ll send you out an evaluation once in three months.
At any time, people need help or they have questions, hey, I’m not sure what else to do. My VA is awesome, but I don’t know if I can delegate this or how do I delegate this or this is so sensitive, do I give them my passwords? So there’s a lot of things that we can help out with that.
There’s a really good piece of software called lastpass.com and that’s [00:39:00] what I use for access for all of my stuff for my VAs. I’ll tell you, at this point, I build up such good trust with my VAs. They have access to my credit cards to help me book travel. We’ve bonded, we’re big family.
So it just depends on what your level of feel is with them and how long you’ve been with them and how the relationship has been but just know that they are human. I cannot ever 100% promise that they’re not going to do something to upset somebody or not show up, but at the same time, I feel pretty good that they’re going to be good people.
Dr. Sharp: That sounds like it. The vetting process sounds pretty thorough, to be honest, and y’all been doing this for a long time and I guess some of it too is just trusting your agency or whomever to get the VA. Trust that [00:40:00] process.
Two questions from that, we should probably talk about how much a VA costs. I’m sure people are asking that question. So can you speak to that?
Jaime: Sure. That’s the beauty of this, is it depends on what level of expertise you’re looking for. It can range anywhere from $6, $7 an hour, all the way up to $15 to even $20 an hour. It depends on what you’re looking for and the higher end are more specialized. That’s programming, web development, design, something more specific, more focused. When more data entry, administrative assistance, those are a little bit more affordable.
Many times I come out and say this a lot, I volunteer it now because I’ve been asked so much, but they say, oh my gosh, that you’re paying them so low, how can they live? Well, just know that the average rent out there in the [00:41:00] Philippines is about $300 a month. It’s completely different than it is here in the United States.
To give you a great example, I had a client that was searching for a social media manager in the U.S., the lowest they got here after their interview process was $44,000 a year for social media manager. That was expensive. We found somebody that was more qualified, had a degree for $12 an hour. That was pretty amazing and had more experience than the person that was wanting $44,000. With $12 over there, $12 an hour, that’s a huge income.
Dr. Sharp: I think that’s something to wrap your mind around. Even being a little bit familiar with this setup, it’s so hard to think, is [00:42:00] that really okay to pay that little but I think that’s important to think about that. And for anybody considering it, to do your due diligence and whatever feels good to you, internally with hiring internationally or not, to know that you’re doing the right thing, but again, the trust comes into play. I know you’ve been doing this for a long time. You said you have very positive relationships over there.
Jaime: We are launching our United States virtual assistants as well. We are getting into that. Just know that you’re probably going to look about three times as much for the same types of services in the U.S. than you would in the Philippines. The other thing is, too, is they have a thing called the 13-month bonus. Have you ever heard of that?
Dr. Sharp: No, I sure haven’t.
Jaime: The 13-month bonus, it’s a bonus in the Philippines. It’s pretty standard over there. For all of [00:43:00] my clients, I leave this 100% optional. You do not have to do it. I do it. Basically what it is, is you take what they’ve made for 12 months, divided by 12, and that’s their bonus.
In my case, I give it to them on December 15th. As long as they’ve been out of probation and they are working with us on the time that the 13-month bonus is delivered, but it’s a neat way, you’re paying them at a lower rate than you would pay somebody normally here in the U.S. Still fair though. Let me reiterate, still fair.
I think it’s a good move on anybody’s part because it’s good for the holidays for them. It keeps them around; it keeps them motivated. They’re very happy. They feel rewarded because they worked hard for you all year long. It’s just not that much more to be able to do something for them like that.
[00:44:00] Dr. Sharp: Oh yeah, that’s fantastic. I like that idea, just in general but especially in this context. That sounds important. Let me ask you, I’m conscious of time, but you did mention a little bit or briefly folks that may not be a good fit for a VA service. Could you speak to that a little bit, like from the practitioner side, who probably would not benefit from a VA or not be able to use a VA the right way?Jaime: Sure. Are you familiar with DiSC profiles?
Dr. Sharp: No, I’m not.
Jaime: On the DiSC profile, the high D’s the demanding people; it’s this way or the highway. Many times, people that have that personality may not realize they do but what I’ve found is when you have someone that’s [00:45:00] very dictatorish, it’s going to be a bit of a challenge. Normally through the interview process that when I get to talk to them, I will probably be able to discern whether or not this might be a good fit for them.
Here’s the number one reason why VAs don’t work out is because they weren’t properly trained. And that’s why we recommend, we don’t make this mandatory, but we recommend to the clients, hey, take an hour each day for two weeks and get into this, because if they don’t learn or they have someone that’s like, how do you not know this? I know this stuff. Well, they don’t know it because they’re not in that industry or maybe they don’t have the experience they do. Everybody’s different.
So if you’re that dictator; do this or, you’re probably not going to be very successful. If you don’t take the time to share your knowledge and share what you’re doing, then you’re probably not going to be successful in maintaining a relationship with the VA. And to that effect, if you don’t have the patience to [00:46:00] train and you just think they should know it already, you’re probably not going to have a good relationship.
So some things that I’m asked sometimes that throw up a red flag are; do I really have to train them? I don’t have time to train them. Don’t they just know? You know what, I can’t train them, I’ll give them all this stuff and I’ll see how they work out. I will probably say, you know what, I’m so sorry but it’s probably not going to work for you. They need one-on-one time. It’s really important.
Dr. Sharp: That definitely makes sense. I think that’s important to say that because even I, to be honest, when you said an hour a day for the first two weeks, I was like, whoa, that’s a lot of time. I don’t know if I could do that, but to be prepared and just know that that’s what it will take for an enduring fulfilling relationship with a VA, I [00:47:00] imagine that it’s worth it.
Jaime: You can think about it this way too, it is a lot of time, but one of my friends who helped me create our workflow process, Scott, for a five-minute task, he’ll train for about 30 minutes. For most people, that sounds completely ridiculous. He spends five minutes on this task every single day, but he’s going to take 30 minutes to train somebody on a 5-minute task to make sure it’s done right, well, what is five minutes times 52 work weeks?
Because he spent 30 minutes with them and trained them correctly, he makes up all that time on the back end. This is your business, if you’re going to take two weeks, that’s 14 hours out of two weeks, that’s a lot of time but that’s not a lot of time. If you can take 14 hours out of two weeks to make sure that somebody is trained effectively for your business [00:48:00] and you want to make sure that they’re going to be administering your business effectively, then it’s definitely worth that.
And what’s cool that I found that most of the time before somebody hires a VA, that’s what they’re worried about. Oh, I don’t know if I can afford it. Oh, I don’t know if I’m going to have the time. I’m so busy. Post hiring, oh my gosh, how did I live without a VA?
Dr. Sharp: I can’t believe it. I’ve had that experience even with folks here in the office so I’m sure that happens with a VA as well. One thing that occurred to me as we were talking, just jumping back to the pricing issue, I should point out too, and correct me if I’m wrong, Jaime, but the beautiful thing about a VA too, is that you are not necessarily paying these individuals full time. They are getting paid for the time that they actually work on your business, however that long that takes. Is that right?
[00:49:00] Jaime: For some companies, yes. You could go to a place like Upwork or something like that and they will do hourly. For bottleneck, we pay hourly but we base it on a minimum of 20 hours per week. We have a little bit different model than other companies, and the reason why is because if you were to call another company and they do hourly-based projects or project-based work, you may not get the same person every time because they have hundreds of VAs that are covering.Don’t get me wrong, they do good jobs but if you’re looking to build a relationship with your VA and handle stuff, if I were to do less than 20 hours a week, they would go out because they ultimately want a full-time job. So they would go out and get all these different projects, and then this is what happens, your stuff may start falling through the cracks, or it may not be as much of a priority as this other client, because they’re making more hours, so they’re making more money.
I just alleviate all that. I say, okay, if you go part-time, they can take other [00:50:00] projects on, but I will not allow them to take another job on being long term because if there’s ever instance or an opportunity for them to go full time with this person, I want them to be able to say, okay, no more projects, I’m going to go full time.
It’s much easier to say, I’m not going to take on any more projects than it is to say, hey, I’m not going to be working for this company anymore, I’m going to go work over here.
Dr. Sharp: Okay. That’s good to know. I appreciate that explanation and that makes sense. That totally makes sense.
Let me ask you before I let you go; this has been a ton of good information. I should say too, before I forget that all of these things that you have mentioned, the delegation tool, certainly your website, and anything else that’s popped up over the course of our talk here will be in the show notes. So folks can access all of that there.
I wanted to ask you, this is just [00:51:00] personal curiosity, because I heard a little bit about your chatbots at Slow Down School, and I am curious, could you say a little bit about what these chatbots are and where y’all are at with this in the context of mental health?
Jaime: Sure. A chatbot is an electronic virtual assistant. You can go on Facebook messenger and you can see they they’ve opened up their API for chatbots, meaning that you can actually do chatbots on Facebook now where you can be talking to an actual bot.
We are taking it to the next level. We call it relationship experience technology where we’re actually animating the bots now. So the bots will actually talk with you. Their mouth will move. They’ll move. They’re fully animated and it’s an incredible experience.
Anywhere from typical lead generation, customer service, consumption bots meaning [00:52:00] that you if you have your phone, you can use the native scan code right on your iPhone or your Android device and scan a little messenger code, and up will pop the bot.
We’re seeing people using these everywhere from, oh my gosh, when you come to the site, if you need help with something, their customer service bots, or if you have an instruction booklet, say you have a sauna or a hot tub delivered to your house, and you want to learn how to put it together, instead of reading an instruction booklet, why not scan the code and have a bot walk you through it and talk you through it and show you how to do it.
We’re excited about this and it goes right in line with our brand mantra and our vision and culture because we’re marketers so what do marketers do when they get a hold of stuff, well, they ruin it. We want to be [00:53:00] careful with how we do this, that’s why we’re developing the CUI standards, the conversational user interface standards.
We’re working hard to help people build relationships 24/7 in whatever capacity they can via robot. So it’s not a human, it’s not a robot. It’s something in between. It’s that third way of looking at something that will help to improve the interpersonal communications between humans and chatbots.
Dr. Sharp: Wow. I love that kind of stuff, technology and artificial intelligence and all of that. So this is just fascinating to me. Could you see something like that being deployed, say, on a practitioner’s website for scheduling an appointment or maybe, like for us, getting information about the evaluation process or something like that?
Jaime: 150%. Yes. It’s wide open right now. It’s so new. We’re [00:54:00] working with the University of South Florida in developing a new bot project with them to where we are going to be a category killer meaning that there are certain software out there that will no longer be needed due to the fact that people can get this at a much more cost-effective way and accomplish much more at much higher conversion rates.
Dr. Sharp: It sounds exciting. I love technology. I love to see how we might […]
Jaime: We’re not quite there with AI yet. That’s still a little bit off, but I think it’s the end of email. I know people are going to say, what? No way but hey, fax machines are no longer relevant. Email replaced fax machines. So we’ll see.
Dr. Sharp: I’ll say, you heard it here first, everybody. Jaime Jay says that email is going to go away soon. I’m sure there are some people out there that are [00:55:00] rejoicing that.
Well, Jaime, I know you’ve taken a ton of time. I appreciate everything that you’ve shared with VAs and how to walk through that process and hopefully, practitioners are coming away with some idea of how a VA could be helpful in their businesses.
If anybody has any questions or wants to reach out, what’s the best way to get in touch with you or even pursue a VA service?
Jaime: Sure. Thank you so much, Jeremy. It’s been a privilege and an honor not only getting to meet you in person but continuing the relationship. You are amazing. And so thank you so much for having me as a guest. It’s been a lot of fun.
The best way is probably to go to bottleneck.online. You pretty much can get all the information you need there. [00:56:00] I believe there’s a download, seven things you need to know before hiring a VA and it’s totally free. So two things there to help people out.
Dr. Sharp: That’s great. All that will be in the show notes. I know we didn’t even mention Jaime or touch on some of your other companies, one of them, Slapshot Studio. You do website and branding and those services are pretty incredible as well. There are links to that on my website under the resources section.
Jaime Jay, thank you so much. You have a wealth of knowledge that I got to experience firsthand and I’m very happy to be able to share that with our podcast audience as well. So thank you very much.
Jaime: Oh, you’re so welcome. Thank you, Jeremy.
Dr. Sharp: All right, take care, Jaime. Bye bye. All right, thank you for listening to that interview with Jaime Jay. Like I said, Jaime is an incredible person. [00:57:00] Not only has he started what seems like a thousand different businesses, he is one of the most genuinely kind and compassionate individuals that I’ve met and just pure optimism, pure joy. I hope some of that came through here during the podcast.
Also obviously, very knowledgeable. So if you have any interest in a VA or like I mentioned at the end, web design or branding services, Jaime is definitely your guy. So hopefully you took away some helpful tips from this podcast and are thinking about different ways to outsource and level up your practice.
If you are interested in connecting with other psychologists and folks doing testing, feel free to come on over to the Facebook community, which is The Testing Psychologist community. You can search for that in Facebook and we’ll be happy to add you to the group. We have a lot of [00:58:00] cool discussions there about different aspects of testing from case consultation to batteries to business stuff. So we would welcome you if you’d like to join us there.
And of course, if you want to talk about how to level up your practice and add or grow your testing services, I am happy to talk with you about that. We can do a 20-minute complimentary consultation just to see where your practice is at. I will give you any ideas that I can think of. If it feels like consulting is a good way to go for you, I am happy to do that with you as well.
I’m also excited to say that I’ve been hard at work booking some interviews for the next several weeks. At this point, I’ll be talking with the CEO of TherapyNotes about an EHR and how an EHR can help you in private practice with testing specifically. I’ll be talking with Dr. Jacobus [00:59:00] Donders who wrote a great book on feedback. I will be talking with Dr. Cathy Lord, co-author of the ADOS. So we have a lot of cool interviews coming up and in the meantime enjoy your testing, grow your practices, and take care. Bye bye.