Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: A jack of all trades is an expert of nothing, right? Having somebody who's a GHL expert and an account manager and running your social media, it's just not realistic. I myself wouldn't want to do all of that work.
[00:00:10] Speaker B: They're not working for us. They don't work for our clients. They work with us. There's a significant difference between working for somebody and working with somebody. We take care of our team. The rest will take care of itself.
[00:00:23] Speaker C: Welcome to the agency hour podcast, where we help web design and digital agency owners create abundance for themselves, their teams, and their communities. This week, we're joined by Lawrence Wong and Joel Keddie from Va Hub Pro, who connect agencies with specialized vas who are trained to help you grow and scale your business. And specifically, their vas are trained up in platforms like Go high level, Zapier Closedbot, make habli, and all the good stuff that helps you manage those services and that technology for your own business and for your clients. In this episode, we discuss how Joel and Lawrence took their experience of being scammed multiple times to learn the pain points of hiring a VA and used it to build their VA agency. The common mistakes that agencies make when delegating roles, and the challenge of letting go of technical tasks like building automations and funnels in high level and a whole lot more. If you'd like to know what it takes to keep your VA and the rest of your team happy and committed to delivering value for your clients, then this episode is for you. I'm Troy Dean. Stay with us.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, please welcome to the agency hour podcast, Lawrence Wong and Joel Keddie from Va Hub pro. Hey, guys. How you doing?
[00:01:38] Speaker B: Doing great. Just finished along day. Excited to be on the podcast.
[00:01:41] Speaker A: Yeah, we're excited to be here.
[00:01:42] Speaker C: Where are you guys based in the world? Just give people a little bit of context here.
[00:01:46] Speaker B: We're from Canada.
I'm in Edmonton, Alberta. Joel's from Vancouver, but he's actually traveling right now.
[00:01:52] Speaker C: Huh. So where are you?
[00:01:54] Speaker A: Yep, traveling North America in an Rv with my family right now.
[00:01:57] Speaker C: Oh, dude, that's awesome.
Yeah, that's great, isn't it? Such as an amazing time to be alive. Isn't it, like, the way that we can just connect with people all over the world and tap into the global talent pool and form businesses and travel in an rv and be location independent. It's an amazing time to be alive. I remember 100 years ago when I started out as an entrepreneur, and there was this thing called Skype and video bandwidth was so bad that you could only have a voice call with someone over Skype, and now it's like video. I mean, now we're in the. We're looking down the barrel of spatial computing, where we'll be able to do this just wearing our VR headsets and not actually have screens in front of us. It's just such an incredibly exciting time to be here and to be an entrepreneur. Now, I want to talk just a little bit about Va Hub Pro, which is your company now. I mean, you know, I know my audience are going to say, well, there are VA marketplaces all over the place. Before we get into what makes you guys different, I want to talk a little bit about your story, how you guys met, and why this was a problem that you decided to try and solve.
[00:03:05] Speaker B: Sure. I'll let Joe start.
[00:03:07] Speaker A: Sure. So Lawrence and I met, I think, back in 2018 or 2019. The two of us had actually joined an agency coaching program. Um, it was my first foray into the agency space, and it was basically just, you know, program to teach you how to build, uh, and run a lead generation agency. So, you know, everything from creating the agency to fulfilling for clients, generating leads using Facebook ads and things like that. Um, and Lawrence and I kind of met through that program and became friends, actually, I think I was prospecting somebody in the financial space, and I knew Lawrence had a lot of experience there, and so I had actually reached out to him for just some advice, because I didn't really know a whole lot about the industry, and I think that's what kick started our friendship and just connecting through that group, and we just stayed in touch over the years. I was running a different marketing agency with another partner for a while, and we reconnected, I think, in 2021, when I was running a white label agency, and I was actually. He became a client of mine through that agency, and that's. We kind of reconnected after Covid through that.
[00:04:21] Speaker C: Awesome.
[00:04:22] Speaker B: Yeah, I knew that I was always interested in the agency space, and when I met. When I first met Joe, actually, like, he had. They had gotten their agency up to about 60 grand a month, and I thought that was pretty cool.
I was. I was doing some coaching with financial advisors, but then Covid hit, so it kind of crushed my business, and I think Joel had to pivot a bit, too. Uh, so I was looking for.
Looking for something different, and I didn't want to run Facebook ads because I hated doing the technical stuff, and I knew Joel was amazing at it. So we formed a partnership. We always.
I always know that we can go so far alone, but if you have a team, you can. You can do amazing things. So, uh, I didn't mind partnering up with Joel because he knew much more than me. And that's where we started doing lead gen and started our SaaS company. Uh, from our SaaS company, we started using high level a lot with home services and got to the point where we couldn't take on any more clients. Like, uh, Joe was busy doing all the builds. I was busy doing the sales, uh, doing all the marketing. I was doing the onboarding. I hate onboarding on Ghl. I hate it. I was doing it, and I had clients messaging me all day and at night and on the weekends. So got to the point where Joe and I had a conversation, and I said, joe, we cant take on another client. Like, I cant do this.
So we decided to hire some vas. Now, we had one working with us. He was actually Joel va. Hes been with us for four years, but we needed more. And I did what people usually do, where I put a post on Facebook, and we got a bunch of applications.
I hired one, and then they disappeared. And then we did that two more times. We actually went through an agency.
It was a horrible experience. And then the third one, I forgot. I forgot even who we got. But I found this website, paid this guy, we got a VA working with us, and two weeks later, the VA asked me if we had paid the guy named AJ. I'm like, yeah, we paid him money. And she's like, well, I haven't gotten paid. And Joel was like, oh, man, not again.
So we actually got scammed multiple times. Like, I think three or four times. And, you know, I looked at that as a learning experience. I don't look at it as a.
As something that's bad. You know, like, it might seem bad on the surface, but we look back at it, and it was a phenomenal learning experience for us because we learned what most people go through, and we learned what we didn't want to go through through this experience.
We got a great VA. And she actually told us to start a VA company because she loved working with us. So she planted that idea in our minds, and I had always wanted to do that. So I spoke with Joel, and we spent the next six or seven months figuring out how to do it, and we launched in November of 2023. And here we are.
[00:07:32] Speaker C: Wow, there's so much to unpack here. Joel, your name is familiar to me, and I've been trying to figure out where I know your name previously. Now a couple of things. So, services Hub Pro is, I'm going to say, is an agency for home service businesses. Is that right? And essentially you're using go high level to manage a bunch of stuff for those clients. Correct. Or are you selling it as a SaaS? Or is it kind of like a managed agency?
[00:07:58] Speaker A: Yes, it's more of a SaaS. So services SubPro is the company that Lawrence and I first started with.
After, again, we ran some lead generation Facebook ads and stuff for financial services.
We actually started off as in that industry and then just decided it wasn't really a good fit for us. And then we pivoted to home services, and that's where services hub was born. And it was through building that, like Lawrence mentioned, where. Where all of this came about. Yeah, got it.
[00:08:27] Speaker C: Where I actually know your name from, though, Joel, is Rockstar ads. Because part of. Part of my job is Rockstar ads still going.
[00:08:35] Speaker A: Rockstar ads is merging with Va Hub Pro, actually. Yeah, we're in the middle of merging the two.
[00:08:41] Speaker C: Got it. So. So part of my job here. And it's funny because you guys met through an agency coaching program, which is what we are. Well, we call ourselves an agency mentoring program these days because it's very high touch, one on one mentoring. And we, you know, people have a sort of a preconceived idea around coaching. Anyway, part of my job is to go and kind of find companies like Rockstar ads or e two M or Va hub Pro or pronto marketing or these, you know, white label, you know, service based agencies that can support our agencies. And so I'm familiar with the name Rockstar ads, and I think that's where I know your name from, Joel. So it's funny how the world just gets smaller and smaller as the computers get more and more connected. So now what I want is a couple of things I want to unpack here. One, you try and hire a va, you get scammed a bunch of times. Most people at that point, and I've had point blank conversations with agency owners that say a couple of things. They say, oh, I tried Facebook ads. They don't work. Okay, so let's just unpack that for a second. One of the most profitable companies on the planet, and their entire business model is advertising. And you're telling me that Facebook ads don't work? I would argue that the problem exists between the keyboard and the chair, not with Facebook ads. The same with hiring a va. How many times I've had this conversation with the people that say I tried to outsource something to a white label dev partner. I tried to hire a va to do it. No one's going to do it as good as me. And so they get burnt once and they give up. Right, you got burnt four times and kept going, what?
[00:10:15] Speaker A: What?
[00:10:15] Speaker B: Now?
[00:10:15] Speaker C: I'm not, this is not an invitation to grandstand and, you know, float, pump your own tires, although you can if you want to, but I'm genuinely curious. What is it about the mindset that says this is a problem that long term is worth solving versus someone who just gives up and. And inevitably stays small because they are now the bottleneck. They can't grow because they're not prepared to get through the first half a dozen catastrophes of trying to build a remote team. What? Why did you keep going and not just throw your hands in the air and go, well, you know, fuck it, it's too hard. We're just gonna stay small and we just won't take on any more clients.
[00:10:56] Speaker A: I'll give you my two cent from my perspective of it. Um, the first is the agency that I ran that Lawrence mentioned before, where we, we got up to about, I think, our biggest month was 62k in recurring revenue.
We had done that through multiple things, one being Facebook ads. So they do absolutely work because that's how we were able to grow and bring on clients and scale our agency. But two was building a team because we couldn't do it alone. It was myself and another partner. We started it together. We got to a certain point that it was beyond our capabilities to do it alone. And so we ended up hiring a VA. I think we had two vas, and then we had two north american based account managers at that time. And without that team, without those other people to rely on and to be able to trust and outsource work to, we wouldnt have gotten our agency to where we did.
So I had had a good experience working with Vas prior to even partnering up with Lawrence. And then I would say the other thing would be that last VA that we got who we paid the company, but they didn't even pay the VA.
She was fantastic. She loved working with us, we loved working with her. And just the trust factor we had already built in that relationship. And working with her gave us just that idea to, like, we got to keep going. I know we need to build a team in order to scale up our agency. And I, this person seems really genuine. And so I think that that just gave us that trust factor to just keep going.
[00:12:27] Speaker C: What is it Lawrence, do you think, why did that Va like working with you so much? And again, you know, not. Not, you know, I mean, this isn't a, you know, a mutual admiration podcast, but, like, I've had va, I've had staff all over the world for many years, and I've had similar feedback that people generally love working here.
What is it, do you think that you guys did differently that apart from rip her off and actually be fair and pay her, what do you think you did differently that made her really enjoy working with you guys and actually suggest that you guys start a Va company?
[00:13:00] Speaker B: I think we just treated her like a person.
We treated her like a team member, and we made her feel like part of our company, which is how we always work. Anyone that works with us, we share with them our vision, and we share with them where we want to go. And we tell everybody this. This is kind of our internal message to our team. The minute we bring them on, even in our interview, we tell them that they're not working for us, they don't work for our clients. They work with us. They work with our clients. There's a significant difference between working for somebody and working with somebody.
Everyone who comes and works with us, they know that they're a partner. And this particular va, she came to us, and she knew she was going to be a partner. And at that point, like, we're going through some times where I didn't even know how to use her. I didn't want to know how to use her skills. Um, I didn't even know what we could do with her. There are a lot of times where she didn't do anything, and we still paid her. And I think she. She appreciated that she was trying to figure out how to help us, too. And just really, Joel and I, we tried to treat her like a team member and try to treat her like a human, and I think that's really. That's what she appreciated.
[00:14:25] Speaker C: Hey, digital marketers, this one's for you. I've got 30 seconds to tell you about Wix Studio, the web platform for agencies and enterprises. So here are a few things you can do in 30 seconds or less. When you manage projects on Wix Studio, work in sync with your team on one canvas. Reuse templates, widgets, and sections across sites. Create a client kit for seamless handovers, and leverage best in class SEO defaults across all of your wix sites. All right, time's up. But the list keeps going. Step into Wix studio to see more culturally, depending on where your remote team are even hiring in Australia or New Zealand, where, you know, the culture is very similar. I've been very proactive and working hard with my team here to let them know that they can push back. Right. And that they can tell me I'm wrong and that if they've got an opinion and they've got some data to back it up, then let's have a robust conversation. And that they are. They have an equal voice at the table.
Culturally, if you're dealing with someone in, particularly Southeast Asia, you have to work very, very, very difficult to be very hard to make it okay for them to bring that because they're so eager to please. They're all about saving face. They're very proud.
I had to get very used to people calling me sir and boss, and I just realized that was never going to change. It's like, okay, call me sir, call me boss. I'm okay with it.
But you have to work very hard to make it okay for them to feel like they are an equal. Right. So don't underestimate. You can't just say it once and then expect them to step up and act like an equal. You have to continue to repeat that message. Yeah. So can you maybe just walk us through some of the tactical things that you've done to instill that confidence in your team and let them know that it's a safe environment for them to not just be subservient and take orders and do as they're told, but to actually contribute.
[00:16:27] Speaker B: It starts with the beginning. The beginning interview. Um, when we first meet the person, I want to find out who they are, what they're made of, and just kind of their past history. Like, that's really important to me when they come on. We do have a very good onboarding process with the VA and our team. Uh, that explains to them our culture. So our culture is all about the client. It's about making sure the client, um, is taken care of. And they understand that our. Our goal is to help our clients scale, because if we can help our clients scale, then we will keep the client for long term, and they will have a position with us for the long term. And that is the singular focus.
They also know that what. How we work is we are proactive. Joel and I are the most proactive people on our team. We're there with the team. We are working alongside them.
We're not the owners who are going to be flying off to Mexico for three months and leaves the team alone. Like, we are in the trenches with them every single day, Joel is in the trenches with the GHL team. We have a huge GHL channel in our slack where there's, like, 50 or 60 members. We've got some pretty high end GHL experts there where I. If anyone has any questions daily, there's like, 40 or 50 messages in there to help them solve certain issues.
We figured out issues that are GHL issues. We figured out issues that are close by, issues that they don't even know about. And then we work with the founders to get them figured out. We issue tickets, and we make things happen. So Joel and I are proactive, and we spread that attitude throughout the team. We allow them to be proactive, and we allow them to ask questions. We encourage questions. We don't want them trying to figure out something themselves. If they cannot figure it out after a certain amount of time, I tell them, just post it in the GHL channel. We'll work together as a team. You are allowed to ask questions. You have permission. You're not going to get in trouble. So all of them are empowered to do that, and all of them are empowered to be proactive in what they do and to be proactive with their clients as well, and to figure out the solutions. So that's the culture that we work with. It's a culture of proactivity and just doing what they can to help a client improve in as many ways as they can. If a client gives us a task, we always work with them to help them figure out, how can we improve this? How can we make it better? How can we make this workflow better? How can we make it more efficient? So that's what we're thinking. A lot of people know how to do. Not everyone knows how to think and process. So working with them step by step on developing those critical thinking skills, that is one of the most important things that's missing out there, that we're working actively with our team on every single day. So developing our people, Joe and I take a lot of pride in that. We work with our people individually and as a team every single day.
[00:19:40] Speaker C: Now, full transparency. We, you and I have been talking for a while, Lawrence and I came across you. I was introduced to you from Ryan at Growthable here in Australia, who are a high level support agency. If you're selling high level to a lot of clients and you need someone to onboard and look after your clients, growthable are one of those options. And he introduced me to you. We then went back and forth for a few weeks, and then I reached out to you and said, look, I think we need someone to come and join our team full time as a high level expert.
You put a candidate in front of us. We were halfway through that call and it became, I was very impressed because it was kind of got a bit awkward because it was pretty obvious that the communication wasn't great from the candidate. And you actually called it halfway through the call you actually said, look, I don't think this is going to work. Can we reconvene in an hour or so? I'll have someone else for you, for you to talk to. I was very impressed with your assertiveness on that call and your ability to say, I think this is a good fit. And to end the call prematurely, you then put another candidate in front of us who is amazing. And Asif, who's based in Pakistan, we onboarded him. He's been incredible. His communication has been outstanding and he's just got such a great vibe and a great attitude and a real hunger to learn about us. So we're using one of your vas from va hub Pro. So I just want to let everyone listening to this know, full transparency. I also don't get paid to recommend these guys. Right. So don't think if you go and get a VA through these guys that I'm going to make a kickback because I don't get any affiliate commission here. I'm just wanting, as I've been doing for the last twelve years, putting resources in front of you guys to help you grow your agency and unlock some constraints and some bottlenecks. So va hub pro, correct me if I'm wrong, but is specifically a team of Vas that specialize in go high level close bot and some automations like zapier make.com dot. I know youve got a bit of WordPress stuff as well. Maybe tell me who the ideal client is for Va Hub Pro?
[00:21:43] Speaker A: Sure. Yeah. So you definitely covered the gallant for the most part there. We do have a good majority of our team are Vas who have experience in GHL.
Typically were looking for people who have at least one year experience, but many people on our team actually have 3455 years of experience with GHL and most of them have been in the tech world in some way. So they're going to have Zapier experience.
Some of them are very versant make pably all of those other automation tools out there. So that would be the majority of our team close bot is because it's a newer platform. We've actually found that there's not a lot of vis out there who are familiar with closed bot. Now, I know theres a couple others whove been around a little bit longer, like Zappy chat that I think some people are a little more familiar with, but we actually saw an opportunity there. We reached out to the founder of Close Bot, Bryce Decora, and just threw the idea out there about working together in some capacity. And so we actually have become preferred partners, and we are the only VA agency on their preferred partners. Listen. And so we get special access to additional training with them every month.
Just some special perks of being that preferred partner. And with that, we were training up our Vas to become close bought experts as well.
Again, I would say most of our GHL experts are, sorry, most of our vas are GHL experts to some degree, but we have been branching out in other areas. Another big one for us is account managers. So that's where they're actually getting in there and they're working with your clients. If you're running a GHL SaaS agency, they are the front line, so they're daily communicating with clients. That's actually kind of where we started, was looking for an account manager to remove us from being that go to person every time a client had an issue, you got to have somebody who can. We're busy building the tech, we're busy doing sales calls, all of that kind of stuff. We needed somebody to step in and be there to be that frontline communication. So we have a lot of agencies as well who are now using account managers, and we find that the GHL expert plus the account manager, the two as a combination.
Two separate roles is a great combination for agencies.
[00:24:09] Speaker C: That's one of the hardest functions to delegate in an agency, is the account manager. Where are your account managers based? Does it matter what country they live in?
[00:24:18] Speaker B: Um, most of them are in Pakistan, actually, so, uh, we have a few from the Philippines as well. But, um, I think, uh, I think the most important thing is their ability to communicate properly, because they're going to be client facing and understand how to, um, how to communicate with excellent grammar and how to communicate in a way that it makes sense and also someone who's a positive. So we actually just brought on an australian account manager for the australian time zone, because we have about five or six different vas working in that time zone. So we wanted to be able to provide the same service for australian clients as we do our north american.
So it's been pretty exciting for us just working with her and account managers.
They took a huge weight off my shoulders. Because I'm the people person. Uh, they communicate with our clients every day. They serve as kind of the intermediary between me and the GHL expert, or whoever it is, and the client. And it's. It's just amazing. It's like they're, it's like the GHL manager and the account manager. It's the, it's a magic formula for growth of an agency. It's the, we call it, we call it the formula to term proof your agency.
[00:25:41] Speaker C: Actually, it is. I mean, our agencies that we work with, it becomes the last role that the agency owner is still occupying that they want to delegate, is that account management piece. I'm curious. One of the questions that I get asked a lot, and one of the conversations we have a lot in our group is I can't delegate the strategic thinking to anyone else because I know the clients really well. I know their business model. I understand the culture. I understand whats happening in our local economy. Is that true?
Is an agency owner whos been working with their clients for the last ten years, and they have all that intimate knowledge of their clients businesses. Is it impossible to delegate that strategic thinking to someone else? Or have you found that with the right training and the right person, it is possible?
[00:26:30] Speaker A: I would say it's probably one of the most difficult roles to outsource even myself. I've been using highlevel for five years, and so on a daily basis, I don't think there's a day that's gone by that I haven't been inside of high level doing something every single day. And I try to stay up on all the latest features, everything that's coming out. And so with that, it's a little bit different than strategic thinking as far as marketing strategy and business growth and things like that. But I, for me, it was really hard for me to let go of high level tasks. I think a lot of agency owners go through that. They're like, well, I really know how to do this. I have a very specific way that I need it done. And I was the same way. And it took me a long time to have the confidence to really let go of that and trust somebody else in doing that. And I think even more so, that strategic thinking, that critical thinking is even more difficult to let go of. And that's something I would say, to be honest, we're still working on. It is a matter of definitely finding the right people. We do have some fantastic talent on our team that we trust that are ultimately more like a project manager, and we can actually give them a task and say, hey, like, I'll give you an example. We just had a meeting with a client who provided us their pitch deck that they're using. They gave us a couple of call transcripts from calls that they had with the client and a couple of other documents outlining what it is that theyre looking for. So we handed that to our project manager and our project managers actually going through all of it right now and doing that business strategy level stuff right now. So hes going through, hes mapping stuff out in kind of a mind map to strategize what is the best approach to this? What kind of systems are we going to put in place here? So theyre definitely harder to find, but theyre out there. Its a matter of finding the right talent to fill that role.
[00:28:20] Speaker C: Yeah, but I can tell you something, they're hard to find. Whether you live in Melbourne or Bangkok or da nang or manila or Los Angeles or San Diego or Manhattan or London or Poland or Spain, they're hard to find anywhere.
[00:28:32] Speaker B: Right.
[00:28:32] Speaker C: Because, and I'm, you know, I mean this with as much respect as I can. I've just been doing this a long time, and most people just don't want to spend that many calories thinking about those problems, right. They would rather just do the repetitive tactical work because it's easier. Like, thinking about strategy is hard. It requires energy, it requires deep thought, and deep thought is exhausting. And you get home at the end of the day and your partner says, what do you want for dinner? I'm like, you could feed me dog food right now. I just don't care. I don't want to make another decision because I have decision fatigue. I've been making decisions all day, and not lightweight decisions, but deep thought decisions. So I think the economics of having certain team members in what I call emerging economies like the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Pakistan, India, the economics makes sense, but also the talent pool makes sense. Australia is a very small country, and I've been through this process with multiple agencies, is their bottleneck, is their team. And the moment they start to build a remote team, I'm not going to say outsourced because they've actually, they've insourced really. They've built a remote team of team members in India or the Philippines. The moment they do that, they unlock a constraint which has been restricting their growth because now they have a bigger talent pool. But I think the question is, there's a lot of fear around this for agencies that maybe have done it before and been burnt or have never done it.
What are some of the things that agency owners need to be thinking about before they start to bring on vas in remote parts of the world to join their team so that they don't make the same mistakes that most people make? How do we set them up for success to begin with?
[00:30:35] Speaker B: The biggest thing I do is I do have a conversation with all of our clients before they come on. I had a great conversation with you and signed, um, I like to. That's what I like to do. I like to do that because I'm.
I'm from the generation where we did discovery calls and intro calls, like, for the. For the high ticket coaching, so I did all of those. So I. I love talking to clients, learning about their business, and, you know, like, in, in the call, we. We always go through how to, if they do decide to go with the VA, how do you be prepared for success? So I go through a process with our vas to set them up for success, and at the same time, we do have some onboarding with our clients to help set them up for success.
We are a big fan of not micromanaging. We don't like to micromanage our Vas.
We encourage them to be accountable and to be proactive and also to have communication.
I always let our clients know that 50% of what we look for is the skill. The other 50% is their ability to communicate and their, uh, I guess their ability to communicate, too. So if we have those two, then there's going to be great communication in the channel. We're here to manage them for the clients so that they don't have to worry about managing them. They don't have to worry about micromanaging them, because we have a system in place where they know what our Ghi expert or whatever VA is doing. As long as they communicate with us in the channel, in our slack channel.
The only times we have problems is a lot of people have worked with other vas where they have had to micromanage, and they start micromanaging our vas.
And we can tell. We can tell within the first week or first couple of days, we can tell what's going on.
Joe and I, we don't have a problem reaching out to the client to have a little talk so that we can understand how to work together better or understand how to get the best out of the VA. So that's something we're proactive in doing. We're in the channels, our project managers in there.
If any flags come up, she'll let us know, too. She'll be like, hey, should I talk to the client? I'm like, sure, reach out to the client.
We have a lot of feedback from our vas, too, about what's going on and what's going right, what they like, what they think could be better. So we take constant feedback, and we take it very seriously.
So there's a learning process. We explain to our clients about that the first week or two. It's about a learning process. We don't always get the right fit. So within the first two weeks, if we find that the VA might not fit what they're looking for, or they might note, I be able to build the relationship.
I'm proactive in making a change, too. And we always make sure the client is whole. So we try to take as much fear out of the process as we can and work together and be there for the clients through this process.
[00:33:46] Speaker C: And what about role structure? One of the mistakes I made, I had my first VA in the Philippines, and their job was to fix things on our website, edit all of our videos, write all our social media content.
I had this laundry list of all the things I wanted them to do. And the guy that ran the agency over there, he was a friend of mine. He got on the phone with me, and he said, listen, I see what you're doing with this VA. And he said, I'm just going to ask you a question. Could you hire someone in Australia to do all of those things?
And I said, no. He said, well, why do you think you can hire one person in the Philippines to do all of those things? He's not a unicorn. Like, you need to get a bit more specific about what the role is. And I. This is. And I think this is because, you know, the tyranny of distance. Well, they're out of sight, out of mind. We just throw a whole bunch of shit at them and expect it to be done, you know, yesterday at a five star quality, you know, for $10 an hour, what. How do. What's your message? When someone turns up and they says, well, this is like, for example, the GHL expert and the account manager. They're two different roles.
A lot of agency owners would expect the GHL expert to be able to interface with the client and answer all their problems and never talk to me. How do you manage those expectations? And how do you get agencies to kind of just rethink, you know, this role is this, and this role is this. And really what you're looking for is four vas here, not one.
[00:35:10] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm actually really glad you brought that up, Troy, because I think that that's one of the biggest mistakes that we see out there in the communities when people are looking for vas, is they're expecting them to be able to do everything and be an expert at every single task. And like you just said, if you think about it from that perspective of, could you hire somebody in Australia to do those tasks? Could you hire somebody in North America to do those tasks? Probably not. And if you did, they're not going to be an expert. A jack of all trades is an expert of nothing. Right? So we see that all the time. And I think that Lawrence covers this a lot when he, again, because we don't just have a process where you can just come to our website, sign up and pay and get a va. Right. We do have a bit of a vetting process ourselves of making sure that what you as a client are looking for is actually a good fit for how we operate. And so a lot of those expectations, Lawrence is going to set that in those initial conversations. And there will be a lot of times where I think just the other day, he sent me a message from a client with all these things that he was talking about needing. And ultimately, the conversation ended up leading back to, I think what youre looking for here is multiple different vas, because these are going to be specialized roles like GHL experts. There are some who are fantastic, who both know GHL and can onboard a client and are comfortable doing Zoom calls and being client facing. But then there are certain members of our team who thrive at being completely behind the scenes. They just want to do the technical tasks, and that's what they're really good at. And so, again, it depends on the use case, but having somebody who's a GHL expert and an account manager and running your social media and fixing your website and doing all your SEO and strategizing and running Facebook ads, it's just not realistic. I myself wouldn't want to do all of that work.
[00:37:00] Speaker C: No. No. Because your task switching, you're activating different parts of the brain. I mean, account management's very much a right brain activity, and GHL expert is very much a left brain activity. Right. It's a rare bird that actually can do both of those things well without, you know, frying their brain. I think also, as you grow, it doesn't matter what kind of business model is as you grow. When you first start out, everyone does a bit of everything, right? Because there's, like four of you sitting around a table, trying to hack your way to relevance. And so everyone's just doing everything. You send the invoice, you chase the payment. I'll do that. Right. And as you grow, you realize that you need, what you need is you need more and more specialists to own certain outcomes and to stay in their lane and just to have really good communication across department. But I, you know that one of the growing pains of growing a small business is when your generalists don't want to become specialists. And we've had to off board people from our team because, you know, they're a generalist, and they just, that we just, you know, we outgrew. We outgrew the fit because they didn't want to become a specialist, and we needed them to become a specialist. I need you to become the best client success manager in the world.
[00:38:06] Speaker B: Right.
[00:38:06] Speaker C: And they weren't able to do that because they were really happy being a generalist. And so I think that's just something that agency owners need to take into account.
A couple of quick questions before we wrap up, because I'm respectful of everyone's time. What are you most excited about with go high level? I mean, the growth of this thing is just unbelievable. I've never seen anything like it. I'm very nervous that they're going to IPO very soon and the whole thing is going to turn to shit. But anyway, that's a whole other conversation. What are you most excited about Ghl over the coming sort of three months. And what are you most excited about with Va Hub Pro over the coming three months?
[00:38:43] Speaker B: Sure, we can talk about Chl.
[00:38:45] Speaker A: I don't even know. I know that a big thing. I actually had a conversation with Sean Clark.
I did a little interview with him.
I can't even remember when it was last year or the year before. And just about what's coming up with Highlevel. And a lot of it was just the advent of AI.
Everybody was going crazy about Chad GPT, and everybody wanted AI in their business.
Ghl really leaned into AI and bringing that into their platform. So now you can generate content on funnels. You can respond to reviews through using AI. Then now they're working on their GHl, the conversational AI. And now I know they're also bringing out voice AI. They're going to be implementing that as well. So I think just continuing. We're big fans of close bot as far as the conversational AI side of things goes. But I'm still excited to see where GHL takes this in their next iterations.
The more stuff that they bring in house that can be done natively and go high level. I think it's fantastic. Obviously, for the agency, it's a big benefit because it eliminates additional subscriptions and other services required. But, yeah, I think I'm excited to see what they do with the voice AI. I know it hasn't rolled out yet, but I've heard rumblings that coming, so I think being able to have that as a native feature, as long as it's good with high level, obviously, this stuff takes a long time. They use the skateboard model, as they call it. They get something out that is semi functional, and then they start getting feedback, and then they start the next iteration of it before it really gets from the skateboard to the Ferrari. There's a lot of iterations in between.
Yeah, I think there's so many features in high level that have come out that I've been looking for and waiting for that I don't even know where else they're going to go next, so I'm excited. Lawrence and I are going to be at the summit in October in Dallas, so we'll get to see the roadmap for the first time in person. I'm usually behind the scenes. I'm the guy who's posting in the high level community just before the conference happens, finding all these little hidden Easter eggs of stuff that they have to roll out into the software before they announce it, though I'm usually posting and like, oh, guys, check this out. Check out this feature. Check out that feature. Now I'm going to be there live to see the roadmap reveal for what's coming in 2025. So I'm very excited for that.
[00:41:12] Speaker C: Just. Just on that. Before we get to Lawrence, here's where I see, really, the way that humans are going to use the Internet is through agents or assistants, right? And spatial computing really excites the pants off me, because, I mean, we could do this, and I could be walking around the street, right? With my. With my smart headset, right, that looks like these and has all the cameras and everything built in. So it's just like, projects a hologram. And I'm seeing you, and I've got my little nano pods in that are skin color that no one can see, and they're the best speakers I've ever owned. And there's a little microphone, and it's all built in, right? And then I get off this call, and I say to my assistant in Ghlhe, hey, go build me a smart list based on this criteria. And then write me a five part email sequence to send in that smart list and schedule it for Friday morning at 930 Melbourne time. And the AI assistant just logs into high level and clicks all the buttons and does it. Right. That's the future that's going to happen in our lifetime, right? I mean, this is, I think people understand this is going to be more disruptive than the Internet itself. It is going to completely change the way that we interact with each other. We're going to be liberated from the computer screen, wearables are going to become more and more smart, and, man, it's a very, very exciting time to be alive. And I'm looking forward to the chaos that will ensue. Lawrence, what are you most excited about with Va Hub pro? What's coming up?
[00:42:34] Speaker B: There's a couple of things.
What's always driven us is adding more value to the team so they can add more value to the clients.
I'm a firm believer in focusing on your clients, focusing on adding more value to your existing client base, because that is the easiest way to grow your clients and to grow your team. Uh, too many people focus on growing rapidly, but they don't take care of their, uh, their people, right? So Joe and I, we always focus on taking care of, uh, taking care of our people or our family. Right. Our clients. We consider our family our team. We take care of our team, the rest will take care of itself. So our vas, theyre an amazing team.
Joel and I, we try to add as much value to our team, like, as much as we can, either directly or through other members of our team who are empowered to provide the training, provide, I guess, the encouragement.
Joe provides a lot of technical training. I provide a lot of training on leadership, on accountability, because I know a lot of them aren't going to read the books. So I'm going to read the books, I'm going to read the leadership books, I'm going to do all that. I'm going to transfer my knowledge. And I know that I'm a firm believer that they're going to do about 50% of what I do right and 100% of what I do wrong. So Joel and I, we always make sure we do the right thing with our team so that we can add value to them, so that they can add value to our clients.
Immediate goal is to get up to 100 VAS that's around the corner and take it from there. We've got some exciting projects internally that we're able to build out right now, some exciting initiatives to support some of the partnerships that we've grown as well. So can't talk about that too much yet because it's still in development but its all about adding more value. Thats the thing im most excited about.
[00:44:39] Speaker C: Awesome. And where can people get in touch with Vahub pro and learn more about what you guys do?
[00:44:45] Speaker B: Our website vahubpro.com dot. You can connect with me on Facebook. Connect with Joel on Facebook. Youll probably see Joel all the time in the high level community or the close bot community I think were your community too as well Troy. So yeah they can reach out to us there.
[00:45:02] Speaker C: Awesome. And you guys have got a guide for people who are looking to hire a va?
[00:45:08] Speaker B: Absolutely. We have an eleven step guide on how to hire, train and scale with your first Va.
[00:45:16] Speaker C: Awesome. We will put a link to that in the show notes. So go check it out, connect with Lawrence and Joel and just start a conversation. It doesn't mean you need to hire someone if you have a conversation with your guys. It doesn't mean you need to pull the trigger and hire a VA. But just have a conversation about what that looks like so that you can prepare yourself internally for that first or next hire. My very simple three step process or growing an agency is grow your recurring revenue because that fixes most problems. Use that recurring revenue to hire a players and then use those a players to get yourself out of the shit that you're not very good at so that you can stay in your sweet spot and then everyone's happy. I've seen it happen so many times. I've mentored over 4500 agencies since 20, I don't know, eleven or twelve or whenever I started this thing. And it's a pretty simple process and having good team members is key. And the thing I like about working with you guys is that, you know, the problem is if you hire your own VA, you've got to manage them, you've got to build the infrastructure, you've got the systems, the processes, communication, the leadership training, the technical training, all that stuff that goes along with it. You hire someone through an organization like Va Hub Pro, you're basically renting that infrastructure that you guys have already built out. Right? And it's, I mean the price point makes a lot of sense. The support is great and so far, early days, it's only been a couple of weeks, but Asif is an amazing addition to our team and is really helping us move faster and he's got a great attitude and so looking forward to doing more of this. I want to thank you both for joining us on the agency podcast.
[00:46:38] Speaker B: Thanks, Troy.
[00:46:38] Speaker A: Thanks so much, Troy.
[00:46:41] Speaker C: Hey, thanks for listening to the agency, our podcast, and a massive thanks to Lawrence and Joel for joining us. I hope they have a blast out at the high level summit in Dallas, Dallas in a few weeks. Okay, folks, remember to subscribe and please share this with anyone who you think may need to hear it. By the way, Mavcon that we're running in October in San Diego is officially sold out. So if you're listening to this, I'm terribly sorry if you didn't manage to get a ticket, but Mavcon in San Diego is sold out, and I'm very excited to go to San Diego in the middle of October to present that event to our members. All right. I'm Troy Dean. And remember, the most, most common password is 123456.
