How to Hire Your First Virtual Assistant (A CEO's Complete Playbook)

Sean Weisbrot: Welcome back to another episode of the We Live To Build Podcast. Hiring a virtual assistant used to be difficult for many reasons, but it's become more popular over the last few years. There are many professional groups, platforms, and agencies that can help you find the person or people you need with the right skills to make sure you're successful in growing your team and your business.

Sean Weisbrot: Today's guest is Pavel, the founder and CEO of Esk, a subscription based personnel solution for small and medi sized businesses. They've been around for five years and have over 600 employees working full-time for clients around the world, we talked about why did you wanna work with VAs and help them find jobs?

Sean Weisbrot: How can VAs help you scale? How can you go looking for VAs to hire? Are contracts necessary? What are the most common methods of payment? How do you handle weird payment requests outside of normal payments? You'll also learn things like how do you prepare yourself for hiring a va? Hire for your weaknesses, not your strengths.

Sean Weisbrot: Why you need standard operating procedures. Why you need to create job descriptions, why you need hard skills tests, why you need to talk about their personal life in an interview, how to determine fair market value, and how to establish accountability. So I hope you enjoy this episode and let's get to it.

Sean Weisbrot: Why don't you introduce everybody to who you are and what you do, and then we'll go from there.

Pavel Stepanov: We provide virtual assistance for small and medi sized businesses and, we've been in business for five years. It's gonna be on December 1st, our anniversary, fifth year anniversary, and that's who we are.

Sean Weisbrot: I believe you have several hundred employees, is that right?

Pavel Stepanov: That's correct, yeah. We have over 600, employees in the Philippines and in the United States. So we are multimillion dollar company. We've made it to Inc. 5,000, this year.

Sean Weisbrot: Congrats on the recognition and on five years, that's definitely a long time to be doing anything I think these days.

Pavel Stepanov: Everybody wants to build a business model, wants to exit and cash out. Not me. We're still doing it and kicking it.

Sean Weisbrot: So what made you want to get into working with VAs and helping VAs to find work?

Pavel Stepanov: Well, I was a real estate agent at a time. I hired a virtual assistant myself for my own business to help me with prospecting administrative work. frankly, because I was so overwhelmed at a time that I was working about 70, 80 hours.

Pavel Stepanov: A week and doing selling real estate and staying up till like three, four in the morning, catching up on paperwork, running marketing, and I figured, listen, I'm doing it. Actually, I'm making good money. However, I have no time to enjoy what I'm doing, to enjoy the money, to actually spend time with the family.

Pavel Stepanov: So my greatest obstacle was actually how do I make sure that people that I hire. Do as good of a work that I would do or I want 'em to do, because in my mind was like, okay, nobody can do it better than me. So that's what actually pushed me to the level that I need to hire somebody to do it and teach them what I know so they can be a clone of me.

Pavel Stepanov: And when I hired my first virtual assistant, I realized that this is how I can truly scale and spend more time with my family and actually delegate more tasks. That helped me to actually grow as a business person and grow my company. So from that, the idea of actually building a virtual assistant company was born, and since I had the connections in the Philippines, I was able to do that.

Sean Weisbrot: If I wanted to start with a VA just on my own, or anyone listening, how would you start it? Would you focus on what kind of a personality you want? Would you focus on what needs you need to have? dealt with, like, how do you prepare yourself for working with the va?

Pavel Stepanov: Hire for your weaknesses, not for your strengths.

Pavel Stepanov: Usually if you're a good salesperson, but you're not good at analytical stuff and the administrative work paperwork, hire people to do that, to do admin work, paperwork. The best way to do it is to sit down and write down on a piece of paper, what are your daily tasks? What do you do during the, the day?

Pavel Stepanov: Like I wake up, I have to send emails, I have to, you know, make those phone calls. I have to set out those Zoom calls. So once you actually figure that out, I. You'll see, okay, those tasks can be outsourced to somebody else. Create some sort of like a standard operating procedure for your business, your SOP and what things are actually delegatable and found Some things are not, so those can be delegated.

Pavel Stepanov: You actually delegating to somebody. Those are not, they stay with you. That's the best way to start to figure out what you need to be done.

Sean Weisbrot: So once you know what the operating procedures are that can be delegated, what your weaknesses are, how do you then go and find someone that could potentially do this for you?

Pavel Stepanov: Once you figure out what tasks you're going to delegate, you need to create a job description. It's like. The type of person you're looking for, the job duties, and you post a job description and, different, virtual assistant groups on social media or on, hiring websites. You can go to online jobs.ph, you can go to Indeed or whatever.

Pavel Stepanov: So be prepared to receive thousands of reses. Once you actually get the reses of people, look at the relevant experience that those candidates have, and schedule interviews with those people. Look at the personality, look at what they've done, look at if they have any prior work experience like which you're requiring, and just do interviews like you would be for any kind of person who would show up at your office for a job interview.

Sean Weisbrot: Are there any specific questions that you think someone should ask a potential VA in an interview or. a specific kind of a skills test that could, should be administered and like, how do you think about and plan for those?

Pavel Stepanov: Well, if you're hiring a virtual assistant who's located in the Philippines, look for a relevant experience of them working on a call center, because when they hire people at call centers.

Pavel Stepanov: They conduct English aptitude tests and those call centers usually service Fortune 500 companies like Bank of America, Amex, Comcast. Once you actually hire somebody who's from a call center industry, then those people will have great command of the English language. At the same time, they have experience working at a US company and they understand American mentality better.

Pavel Stepanov: Once you schedule interviews, the questions you should ask, obviously about relevant experience, but keep in mind that it's actually good idea to ask them about personal life, about their interest, about what they like, because everybody can actually get prepared for a job interview and talk about stuff they did, stuff they didn't do, stuff they know how to do.

Pavel Stepanov: That's not hard to do, but once you actually start engaging person in more of a non-official setting, ask about, okay, what do you like doing? What do you like watching? Do you like watching sports? What's your favorite team? Who's your favorite player? What kind of plays you like? So that lets the person open up a little bit more to you because they subconsciously get to you on the level of more of a, like a friend than a potential boss.

Pavel Stepanov: So that lets you. Evaluate them better in the sense that they can be opening up better than compared to what they actually prepared for job interview.

Sean Weisbrot: I love specifically asking people strange questions they've probably never thought of before, just to catch them off guard and see how they think.

Sean Weisbrot: Like I'll ask them, if you could move through time, where would you go? Why would you go there? What would you do? Like what's your goal next? Things that like the average person never thinks about on a daily basis, but really challenges them. And I think it's important because. If you're gonna be working with this person, you're probably gonna be working with them a lot.

Sean Weisbrot: And if you don't like them as a person, you probably won't wanna work with them.

Pavel Stepanov: Well, that's true. You gotta, you gotta basically like the person who working with you. I don't, I don't say work for you. I say you're actually working with you all the time. That's what I tell my employees. We work together. I, there's people working with me, not for me.

Pavel Stepanov: The reason being is because, again, I want to. Make sure that people understand we're all working on the same team. We have the same goals, we have the same work tasks, pretty much, and that's exactly what I want 'em to do. I want 'em, I want people to open up and be able to have a decent, meaningful conversation.

Pavel Stepanov: Not just say, yes, sir, you know. No, sir.

Sean Weisbrot: Which is very common in the Philippines. I have 9 or 10 team members from the Philippines. They're calling me Boss. I said, please don't do this. I've been called Sir in interviews and I'm like, look. Come on. I'm your age or younger. Come on.

Pavel Stepanov: Yeah, they call you Sir. We try to eliminate that as it's not part of our culture. So those who work with us for a long time, for like five years, they already know that. They just call me by my first name.

Sean Weisbrot: Go back to something real fast. You had said it's important that everyone know that you're working together, not working for you. Have you ever heard of someone say that they work for their employees?

Pavel Stepanov: Oh yeah, of course I've heard it. That's how I feel because like I know they're busy doing their very specific things, but in the background I'm hustling, trying to get more money for the company, trying to make sure that I can feed them every month, and that's what I do every day when we travel for all those conventions exposed, we actually spending almost every day in the airplanes. Yeah, we are working for our employees.

Sean Weisbrot: I remember before I started my entrepreneurial journey, I always complained about how my bosses sucked and they didn't treat me very well. And then I became one and I was like, actually, I can understand what they're going through, but still be cognizant of like being nicer to the people I work with.

Sean Weisbrot: Exactly. So we have an idea of who we wanna hire, why we wanna hire them, what we need them to do, how we're going to interview them. The next and most important thing I think people need to think about is. Contracts and wages. And what are some things people should be thinking about when putting together a contract for working with a va?

Sean Weisbrot: Are they a full-time employee? Are they an outside contractor? Are they a freelancer? Like how are they considered legally?

Pavel Stepanov: If you're hiring somebody in the United States, that person can be a contractor.

Pavel Stepanov: If you're hiring somebody directly in another country, the money you pay them, you would not be able to write it off on taxes.

Pavel Stepanov: This person would have no status 'cause there's no provision in the US for you to write off foreign employees or foreign contract. That's why, you know, when you hire somebody from Esk, you're basically hiring US corporation. You can 1099 us.

Sean Weisbrot: So is it necessary to have an employment contract then?

Pavel Stepanov: It's better to have an employment contract for two reasons why. Number one, it actually creates that sort of relationship in their mind and in your mind that you have certain formal relationship and certain expectations of pay, of when to pay. It's actually formalizes your relationship and second and creates that job description that you need to have.

Pavel Stepanov: You need to speak with a lawyer to discuss about enforceability. I have some doubt about that, but my hunch, you won't be able to if it's somebody in another country.

Sean Weisbrot: How do you know what is a fair market value that you can pay them?

Pavel Stepanov: Find out what other entrepreneurs like you are paying to their VAs. You can ask what they're expecting to get paid.

Pavel Stepanov: It's the same thing like when you are hiring somebody in the United States to work for your company, how do you know what to pay? You have to look at what your market is or what certain positions are being paid, so you need to like figure that out. Again, we at es, we took that guesswork. Out of the equation, we know what the market value is.

Pavel Stepanov: When we hire people, we know what are we paying them? Also, keep in mind that they're gonna be asking for in constant increases to the pay. If you hire somebody directly, it's not unusual that the aunt gets sick, uncle gets hit by a bus, somebody goes to the hospital, dog dies. So they're gonna need money for this and that, and that house burned down.

Pavel Stepanov: So expect to be bombarded, you know, with different constant weird requests. I've seen it all, to be honest with you, and we've learned how to sift through this. Yes. And we have certain policies. Sometimes they can ask you, Hey Sean, can I get an advance because I'm shopping for a car? Can I get an advance because my house burned down. I need to move to a different place. Can I get a loan from you? There are tons of mistakes that new employers can make.

Pavel Stepanov: By giving those advances, let's say somebody right now already has a VA that they've been working with directly and they start to receive these kinds of requests.

Sean Weisbrot: How do you handle it in a way that gets it to stop without ruining the relationship that you have with them? Or is that not possible?

Pavel Stepanov: It's possible to be professional and say, well, we have a working relationship. That's again, we going back to the contract and I would actually. Write it out in a contract that your pay is only going to be conditioned on those. On those terms. I would actually prescribe in the contract that there's not gonna be any advances paid out or any loans given it's against your company policy.

Pavel Stepanov: Once you actually establish those expectations right at the beginning, I think that's the way to do it. If you don't have the contract that you're paying them upon the job done, you know, sometimes it can happen. So I guess you gotta show your mental toughness and say no to this. Be prepared to lose an employee in case they decide to go.

Pavel Stepanov: 'cause again, there's nothing, nothing is guaranteed in life. If somebody's trying to take your kindness for your weakness, then probably it's best to part ways with those people from the get go. Those who are serious and they actually like working with you, and they'll be working with you for a long time, they know better not to take advantage of that.

Pavel Stepanov: And no better not to mocha for you, but if it happens, I'd say cut your losses and be prepared to do another hire.

Sean Weisbrot: We've found someone we wanna work with. Mm-hmm. We have a contract signed with them. We know how much we're gonna be paying them. What are the most common ways of paying VAs?

Pavel Stepanov: We have a bank account in the Philippines, so we pay from the Filipinos bank account.

Pavel Stepanov: But depending on your role and how many VAs you have, if you have one or two, you can obviously pay them with a PayPal. You're probably gonna have to eat those PayPal fees, but if you have several hundred, then it's probably gonna find a different way of doing it. The best is probably would be. By doing the direct wire from the bank account to the bank account in the Philippines, that's what I would do.

Sean Weisbrot: Until recently, we were using crypto, we were using, USDT Tether, and because of the Ether network becoming so clogged, the fees were getting up to $50 for each transaction. So it cost the company $900 this month for salaries, $900 for 14 transactions. So I decided instantly I'm pulling all of the money outta crypto, converted it to Singapore dollars 'cause we're a Singaporean company and I got everyone onto TransferWise.

Sean Weisbrot: So now we're gonna start using TransferWise and it's like a dollar per transaction. Pretty good. Yeah. So we deposit the money from the bank account into a corporate wise account. Mm-hmm. And then we do an inter-wise transfer to their bank account in like pesos or whatever. So we pay for the conversion, but there's no transaction fee.

Sean Weisbrot: And then like they pay a fee, I guess, to get it to their bank account, which is probably like a dollar. So we have an idea of how we wanna pay them. How frequently should we be paying them?

Sean Weisbrot: Once every two weeks. That's

Pavel Stepanov: what we're paying. Again, keep in mind, Sean, you need to pay how your business works, not how it's convenient for them.

Pavel Stepanov: They would love to get paid every day. You actually set up the rules. You are the employer and you set up how your company's running, not how they want to get paid, okay? You need to be firm, but nice, and you have certain rules and systems how you do it. We bill our clients in the 10th and the 25th of every month.

Pavel Stepanov: Our employees getting paid also twice a month.

Sean Weisbrot: Most Asian companies will pay once a month. I was always paid once a month. Yeah. So that's what I decided to do for my company. 'cause like if you pay every two weeks, it's a hassle to have to arrange everything every two weeks.

Sean Weisbrot: And so like once a month, it makes it a lot easier. Saves on, HR time.

Pavel Stepanov: And because you save time on billing, on HR and accounting and fees. Again, if you're transferring money in the Philippines, they have 13th month pay. Also keep that in mind.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah, we don't do that. Well, no, I know we don't. Yeah, we're not a Filipino company.

Pavel Stepanov: We also provide 'em with medical benefits, vision, dental, life insurance.

Pavel Stepanov: Yeah. Paid time off. Iff vacation pay. So this is something that our clients don't see what they have, but that's what we provide to them.

Sean Weisbrot: That's awesome that you do that. I think it's really important. I've heard so many horror stories of virtual assistants being just basically abused.

Pavel Stepanov: I know. It happens because again, people who hire them, they need to learn that they're actually han beings.

Pavel Stepanov: You know, they're not robots, they're not a service, they're not like a software. It's a han being with the story, with, with their own feelings, with their own. Fierce with mouths to feed. So I wish more companies would actually recognize that because that's just what the reality is. Just because they're in a different country that doesn't make 'em less of a han.

Sean Weisbrot: I think it's easier for you to see that because you, I believe you immigrated to America as an adult.?

Pavel Stepanov: I immigrated to the United States 25 years ago.

Sean Weisbrot: So you can see what it's like from your original country and America and the differences and of how people are treated at work. So like for like in my situation where I worked in the US and I worked in China and I saw the differences from the employee's point of view and from the employer's point of view. And so I got to understand how I can take some of that Western mentality into Asia and treat them the way Americans are treated.

Sean Weisbrot: So how can you get the best performance from a VA?

Pavel Stepanov: You gotta keep 'em accountable. I. In order to do that, you need to set certain plan. We have for different departments. Let's say our marketing, we have two meetings per week.

Pavel Stepanov: Then throughout the week, the marketing director has daily meetings with them on different projects. In the marketing department, they have. Sub departments, who's responsible for the YouTube, who's responsible for social media, who's responsible for blogging, for email content, all of that. They collaborate together, but we still hold 'em responsible and accountable on a weekly basis.

Pavel Stepanov: So if you want to see quality, you gotta actually make sure that you don't just put it on autopilot and let it fly on its own. They, you have to actually drive it. You have to keep 'em accountable. You have to. Set goals and you have to set expectations and you gotta keep 'em accountable on their goals, meetings, how they're actually going to meet their goals, what they going to do.

Pavel Stepanov: you need to let 'em think how they're going to do it, not just simply, okay, here's a task, boom, I expect it to be done on Friday. No, it doesn't work that way. You gotta keep 'em accountable. That's how you're gonna get quality.

Sean Weisbrot: Do you suggest tying incentives, like bonuses or time off for them completing projects or like with like, with regular employees?

Pavel Stepanov: Only for sales positions where actually bonuses tied to the specific performance of the sales. It's hard to tie bonus to any like admin work, something that it's not sales specific because you can throw money at a problem, but it's not gonna fix the problem. You gotta work as actually fixing the problem.

Pavel Stepanov: You gotta realize where there strength and weaknesses are of each of your individual virtual assistant, where they're struggling, where you need to fix it. Just you say, okay, if you complete this task by Monday. You're gonna get paid $200. No, it doesn't work that way because listen, they can show you it's completed, but you don't know how well it's completed.

Pavel Stepanov: If you wanna bonus somebody, of course you can. I mean, nobody's gonna say no to that, but would it fix your problem? I don't think so.

Sean Weisbrot: I'm thinking about hiring for my podcast company. I'm looking in 2022 to expand, to provide services that are money generating, because until now I've done this and, have had no focus on making any money.

Sean Weisbrot: I'm approaching a hundred episodes that are published, so I think it's a good time to start thinking about that. One of the things that I do that is very tiring for me is posting questions on help a reporter, going through the answers res, you know, filtering out who I want to contact, contacting them, making sure they agree to post it on social media, preparing the information to be published, scheduling introduction calls that could be potential guests for the podcast, doing the intro calls.

Sean Weisbrot: Doing the recordings, publishing, editing, promotion, et cetera. So as you could see it, it could be a full-time job. Just for this thing. Just for all of those things, I know that I need an editor. That's a a no-brainer. I only need one editor. I was thinking of hiring an assistant to help me with all of the non-ED editing slash recording stuff.

Sean Weisbrot: That kind of falls into everything I just mentioned, which is like preparing the articles, publishing the articles, promoting the articles, and I was thinking of also having them work on social media as well to kind of build up more engagement and create lead generation for the services that we're gonna provide, because my time will be spent on doing the intro calls, doing the recordings, and providing the services that people pay for.

Sean Weisbrot: But with that in mind, do you recommend one VA who can do everything that's not editing? Where it's like all of the admin stuff and the social media stuff, or a person for admin and a person for social media.

Pavel Stepanov: I do a person for admin and person for social media and lemme explain to you why it's different skill sets and obviously somebody who would be fully dedicated to certain department within your podcast company.

Pavel Stepanov: And it will be with the administrative part of it. They gonna be handling only admin stuff and the social media, it's mostly tied to marketing. If you are like running, you know, very tight budget, you can probably stretch it very thin and have one person do both. But again, we're talking about quality.

Pavel Stepanov: The more you grow, the person's gonna be buried would work. I. The quality will start to decline. So you wanna make sure that person is not overworked because that's, you know, it's your company. You cannot have the Jack and Jill of all traits. So you need to have somebody who's laser focused on one specific aspect of your business.

Pavel Stepanov: 'cause God forbid something happens, he gets hit by a bus. Somebody who else will step in and handle that well, the other part of your business is not being affected.

Sean Weisbrot: I was kind of hoping to have one person do both, at least in the beginning.

Pavel Stepanov: The way I run the business, I hire. People in anticipation of what's gonna be done instead of being reactionary.

Pavel Stepanov: The reason is we wanna make sure we actually have the bandwidth and we wanna make sure we have actually, we actually prepared. Because for example, we have several teams. Each virtual assistant works in a separate team of VAs. It's like 25, 30 VAs in one team. So we hire team lead for each team and then assistant team lead.

Pavel Stepanov: So the way it works is, let's say we have 40 clients right now who are willing to hire virtual assistants. We're gonna gonna get 'em. Those virtual assistants. So once we actually have those virtual assistants, we need to create a team. Okay? We're creating a team. So we're not gonna be looking for a team leader to actually take over the team.

Pavel Stepanov: We already have team lead ready to go who will be building that team. So that's what we do. We anticipating instead of being reactionary. That's how you actually grow. If you do it more of a, like a reactionary hiring, you would probably suffer with, quality of the people and the structure, because then basically you're introducing new person into the existing business instead of that person growing with you.

Pavel Stepanov: At first, it's gonna be a little bit more expensive, but it's gonna be better in the long run to actually have two people do it.

Sean Weisbrot: So is there anything I haven't asked that you think would be relevant to this conversation?

Pavel Stepanov: My mentality is go big or go home, which is kind of hard for some people to swallow.

Pavel Stepanov: In order to grow, you gotta actually think 10 steps ahead of what you're doing. You need to have a certain plan. As far as not only what you're trying to do, but a step-by-step plan of execution, your virtual assistant is reflection of your business, of how you are running the company. If you think a virtual assistant sucks after working with you for a certain nber of years, you need to look at your business model.

Pavel Stepanov: You need to look at your organization. What went wrong there? Even if that was a wrong hire, that's your fault, not your VA's fault. So think of that when you are growing, your virtual assistant is growing with, you basically delegate more tasks to them start, you know, hiring more people, maybe in their circle of friends that they have for certain positions.

Pavel Stepanov: Sometimes we've been creating positions just for the right person, right person comes along. We like him, we want to hire this person. We want him to be part of a team. We create the position for him. And guess what? Most of the time it's actually a right decision to do that. So retain good people and fire bed ones.

Pavel Stepanov: And again, probably the biggest advice that you've heard a lot. Hire slow, fire fast.