August 17, 2016

Why Outsourcing is an Investment NOT an Expense with Trivinia Barber

Nicole C

Trivinia Barber is the founder and CEO of Priority VA, a virtual assistant placement firm that matches online business owners with highly skilled administrators. Hand-picked by Trivinia, a virtual assistant herself with 12 years of executive level experience, Priority VA virtual assistants are an elite workforce who tame the madness of online business life with order, efficiency, and style.

Speakers, authors, entrepreneurs, podcasters and bloggers seek the services of Trivinia and her team to unburden them from the tasks they don’t like, aren’t good at or don’t have time for. A Priority VA assistant allows passionate business owners to stop sweating the small stuff and focus on what they do best.

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In this episode you’ll learn:

- Why to hire a VA
- Tasks to outsource to a VA
- How to make the most of your valuable time

Click to listen and Subscribe to the Blissful Bites podcast in iTunes to listen to Trivinia Barber.

Tell us a little bit about you, Trivinia Barber, and what you do.

I am a virtual assistant, and I work with high profile clients here in the U.S. In addition, I own a virtual assistant staffing company where I match awesome virtual assistants with entrepreneurs all around the world to take care of simple things like administrative tasks or high-leveled tasks like building sales calls. We do many different things depending upon our clients’ needs.

How did you start with Priority VA?

I have been a virtual assistant for over 13 years. It started as a result of me having children and wanting to be home with my kids. Priority VA came into existence because I was just getting bogged down with lots of client work. Lots of people were calling me and wanting my services. I was maxed on hours so the entrepreneurial light bulb went off. I said, “I can’t help you, but I can find someone who can. Someone who has the same character and temperament as I do. I can train them to set up a lead page for you.” That was what started it. I started hiring VAs underneath me. Once I had four or five or seven, I was starting to think that it was a business now. I was thinking, I think we need to just get an EIN and make this legitimate and so my husband and I stayed up late one night and filled out a bunch of applications online to become official and create a business name and we’ve been going stronger almost four years now.

You are famous for working for Amy Porterfield. How do you balance that work while having Priority VA?

At first, it was really easy and I was always able to give a couple of hours to my business at night on the side. As it has grown, it has been really been a challenge. I used to work for another high profile client, and I would split my time between Amy and him. It came to feeling like I was doing two full time jobs, and I was in what we call entrepreneurial space launch mode all the time. I had to let go of one of those clients and focused on serving Amy as best as I could. As Priority VA has grown, I have chosen to hire more people on my team on Priority VA site. I have many Priority VAs that help me run Priority VA. This way, I can focus on serving Amy very well.

I did that for important reasons. One, it’s important for me, as the CEO of the Priority VA, to get where my VAs are coming from. I am in the trenches with my VAs doing the things that they’re doing, but I’m also a business owner, growing a business. It gives me a unique perspective to get or understand both sides of the coin or the equation. I understand the pain for help when you don’t have the budget, and I understand from the VAs’ perspective of unrealistic expectations of clients that can’t get done in 32 seconds. It is really an interesting dichotomy of how it all works out. Second, Amy has been one of my biggest supporters. She is so great. She believes in me, in what we are doing here, and that has been what makes this work. She is not somebody who thinks that I am trying to use her or her business to leverage my own.

Can you share why would you hire a VA?

It is interesting as this VA industry has grown. It has turned from most people thinking of VAs as someone who can just handle your calendars or schedule appointments for you, like a traditional sort of secretary. Then it turned into being able to set up sales funnels and help you with marketing campaigns, strategies, and other things like graphic design and web design. It really varies. I hate to buckle it into “a VA can only do this for you.” Being a VA is more of an industry that encompasses so many things. It can be anything from booking travel and following up with client care and customer service to very high-tech things like sales funnels and designing sales pages for you. It can be a lot of different things specific to whatever the client’s needs are.

Can you talk a little bit about outsourcing when you can’t afford it to make time for things that bring bring money?

What is most important for people to walk away from any conversation about outsourcing is really figuring out what their time is worth. That’s a hard thing to do. I read a book that really honed my ideas. That’s not news at all, but a friend of mine, Kary Oberbrunner wrote a book that is entitled “From Day Job to Dream Job.” The book meant to set people up from leaving their daily job and do what they are created to do. In the book, she told a story about a woman who was going to have wood deliver to her home in a winter. She could have paid $50 to have them chopped for her, but she was being frugal and decided to chop them herself. She then realized she had to find an ax and sharpen it. It ended up taking her 3-5 hours chopping all the wood. What would have been a $50 investment ended up being several hundred dollars because it has eaten her time and she could have been working on client calls and proposals for her business. If people would have a little bit of a paradigm shift and look at it that way, outsourcing becomes an investment, not an expense. Tell people to make that shift in their mind.

If you were considering outsourcing, what are some of the first things that you can outsource?

One of the things that people do not outsource now is email. It is the last thing that people will hand over. They have a tight grip on it, and so if you could force yourself into outsource that, that will buy the most time. The quick tip that people can do is to put rescue time on their computer. It’s a quick, little free app that you can program that will track what you are doing. It will tell you how much time you spend in your email in a week. You would know that you just burned 17 hours this week just responding to emails. What could that 17 hours do? Sure, that’s a lot of time. Social media is also great for outsourcing. They are easy to outsource so long as you have your voice. If you have a brand recognition, such as how people know you, it is easy to outsource social media. If you are just getting started and you haven’t yet identified your voice, I would hold on to that for a little bit. Another thing that would be great to outsource are the things that you do not know how to do. If you don’t know how to put your Facebook pixel on your website, outsource that. You should stop watching YouTube videos or trying to click around and figure it out yourself. Get those things out off your table so you can do whatever you are supposed to be doing.

Trivinia Barber is the owner of Priority VA, a business with the goal of enabling women who dream to remain in the workforce after childbirth to achieve their professional goals. She contracts with virtual assistants to provide services to a variety of clients across the country. Speakers, authors, physicians and bloggers seek the services of Trivinia and her team to unburden them from the tasks they aren’t good at or don’t have time for so they can focus on what they do best.