This is The Perfect RIA, in case you didn’t know. Bringing you all the strategies to help your business grow. Are you happy? Are you satisfied? Are you hanging on the edge of your seat? Sit back and listen in while you feel the beat. Another myth bites the dust…

Micah Shilanski:  Welcome back to the Perfect RIA podcast. I am your co-host, Micah Shilanski, and with me, as usual, is the legendary Matthew Jarvis. How’s it going, Jarvis?

Matthew Jarvis:   It’s good, Micah. I’m excited to do another podcast episode and really excited today to talk about delegation, which is probably one of the core foundational things of having a perfect RIA is the ability to delegate. Would you put this before surge meetings? I feel like surge meetings is probably the number one thing, but this has got to be right up there.

Micah Shilanski:  Boy, but how do you do surge meetings if you don’t do delegation? It’s a chicken and the egg concept right here. But if you don’t have delegation in place, how could you set up to effectively run surge meetings? So, man, I don’t want to say it, because I think time blocking and surge meetings are number one, but delegation is probably is going to trump that.

Matthew Jarvis:   That’s true. I mean, because there’s no way you could do five or six or seven meetings a day if you’re also doing the case prep, if you’re also doing the followup, if you’re also seeding people, doing scheduling, so this could actually be number one.

Micah Shilanski:  It could, and there’s so many misconceptions that come around delegation, right? And I really want to dive into these because so many people think, “Well, when I get to some magical mythical level, I’ll be able to delegate” or they have a misconception of delegating as negative, that something’s not worth my time, and so they’re going to put some negativity towards it. I kind of hear that when I’m talking to some other advisors in other cases, and these are some things that we need to talk about.

Let’s dive into these top five mistakes that advisors make, really across the board in delegating things, whether it’s in their personal life of things they should delegate, or their business life and things they should delegate. How’s that sound?

Matthew Jarvis:   That sounds great. And in fact, as we went through these before we hit record, these are mistakes that you and I continue to make, hopefully, at decreasing levels, but they’re definitely mistakes that we’ve made along. So this certainly isn’t us preaching from the pulpit. This is in the trenches. This is what we’re dealing with every day as we work on our own practices and we work with advisors.

Micah Shilanski:  I’m laughing over here. What we should really do is have Victoria and Coleen come in after this and say, “All right, this is what you and Micah said. Pause the recording. This is really what happened.”

Matthew Jarvis:   Well, we do have later this month, this is a shameless plug, later in August, we are going to have Coleen and Victoria do a webinar for the TPR Nation. And Mike and I have committed not to interrupt that episode, so you’ll get the straight news on that.

Micah Shilanski:  All right. So let’s dive into this. The top mistake that I see across the board when it comes to delegation, it’s right out of Jocko, it’s excuses and not taking ownership. We see this time and time again, and the excuses can be in so many different ways. You could say, “It’s not worth it to delegate.” This is an excuse. “I’ll delegate when I get to XYZ level. When I accomplish X, Y, and Z, I’ll delegate. That can’t be delegated.” All of those are classic mistakes that right off the gate, that people don’t delegate because of those things. So if an advisor comes to you and they say one of those things, Jarvis, what are you going to turn around and tell them?

Matthew Jarvis:   I’ll throw one more on that list. “I can’t afford to delegate.”

Micah Shilanski:  Oh, yeah.

Matthew Jarvis:   And this goes to what I tell them. I say, “Hey, you can’t afford not to. Your practice will never ever get to the next level unless you’re delegating these key duties.” And something that I always try to keep in mind myself, whenever I’m hesitant, when I find myself making excuses about delegation is I try to think, “All right. What is Richard Branson doing,” the executive to all these different Virgin, his whole empire. He’s clearly not writing the employee manual for Virgin Airlines. He’s not deciding what color the train should be painted, or how many rooms the cruise ship should have. This guy has to be a master of delegation. Ron Carson could be another example. I don’t think Ron Carson’s out there doing paperwork. Maybe he’ll call us and tell us we’re wrong. This all can be delegated. It’s, I’m the limiting factor here.

Micah Shilanski:  Yeah, that is so, so important, that aspect of it. So this is going to actually tie into one of our action items. But you need to constantly work on upping your game in delegation. So whether you are not delegating or you are today… Now, by the way, here’s a total myth that’s out there. Some myth out there is that we don’t delegate. Everybody delegates, everyone across the room.

Here’s a really easy example. Do you grow your own food? No, you probably don’t. Do you harvest all of your own meat? Do you sew all of your own clothes? All right. This is delegation. You totally have already delegated a tremendous amount in your life. Now the question is, in order to get better, what else should you delegate? And this is something we constantly have to work on.

I know personally, Jarvis, one of the things that I like to do is every now and again, I’ll take something that I think is frivolous or that I think can’t be delegated and I’m just going to do a hard line and I’m not going to do it anymore. About a year and a half ago, I just decided to give up doing paperwork.

Matthew Jarvis:   That’s right, yeah.

Micah Shilanski:  And not just in the business life, because the team takes care of that, but in my personal life. So I have a personal assistant that really takes care of a lot of the stuff. Whether I have to go in for a doctor’s appointment, whether I go in anywhere and they asked me to fill out paperwork, my answer is, “No.” I will absolutely sign things and date it. Other than that, I don’t fill it out. Oh, by the way, in this period of time, I’ve had to have multiple medical visits for all sorts of fun things, for stupidity, but I don’t have to fill out paperwork when I’m there, because you just say no. So what is the hard line that you’re going to draw and fun ways in order to get better at removing that excuse of, “I can’t delegate?”

Matthew Jarvis:   That’s awesome. All right. Mistake number two, not managing expectations. And this I think is where almost all delegation fails, and this is where you really have to empower your team. So an example of not setting expectations would be for me to say… Let me use a really simplistic example. “Hey, Coleen, would get me lunch today?” And I just leave it there, and I don’t say, “Hey, I hate sandwiches or I don’t want a burger,” or whatever. I don’t manage expectations. And so I’m saying in my mind, it’s perfectly clear, but to the person to whom I’m delegating, it’s as if I’ve said, “Go buy a car.” A car, a truck, a big car, a small car, green, blue? We have to manage expectations and we can’t assume that whatever’s in my mind is what’s in their mind. Actually, we can assume that it’s not what they’re picturing. We can virtually guarantee that whatever I have envisioned in my mind for this task is not what they have envisioned unless I’ve spelled that out.

Micah Shilanski:  Yeah. And this, this happens so much. I’ll give one total example right here of something that I’ve done recently. So of course, it’s the summertime, we travel a lot in the RV, we’re out doing a whole bunch of stuff. And this past week we were doing a TPR webinar. We were doing one of your one-page financial plans, breaking everything down, and as we started that webinar, I got an alert on my iPad that says, “Hey, you only have 20% of your data left.” I was like, “Okay, well I should be fine.” But I emailed Victoria real quick. And I was like, “Hey, you need to go renew my data plan because I’m about to run out of data.” Well, I didn’t tell her that I was working off my iPad. She just assumed it was my cell phone, so she went and renewed my cell phone plan that didn’t need to get renewed because I hadn’t used the data, and didn’t renew my iPad plan, which was running out of data.

Three-quarters of the way through the webinar, I got another message, “Hey, only 5% left.” I’m like, “Hey, renew this,” while we’re trying to do the webinar. Going back and looking at this, because in my mind it was very clear. I was very clear in my instructions on what to do. And as I read back the messages to her, it was totally vague. How on earth was she supposed to know this? Because I was in a bit of a rush, I didn’t stop to think through what I needed to effectively communicate, so that she could be successful in that task. Totally my fault.

Matthew Jarvis:   And there’s a couple of other tools that are really easy to implement. One is that when you’re delegating, just say, “Hey, what else do you need from me to be successful at this task? What else do you need from me?” Not, “Do you need anything else?” Because the yes-no is going to be a no. “What else do you need to be successful in this task.” And then really being open. If I delegate something to Coleen or anyone on my team, if they have a question for me about it, I have to be 100% open, even if in my mind, that’s an irritable question, and it’s an obvious question. It’s a no-brainer. If I respond with any kind of… Aggressions not the right word, but any kind of negativity, that’s going to kill that delegation. Delegation is a very much a two-way street. It is not a poop runs downhill expression. It’s a, “Hey, we have to be a team here. Yes. I’m giving you responsibility for this task,” but it was initially my task. And so I still need to keep ownership of it.

Micah Shilanski:  Now, on that, this is another thing that comes up with not managing expectations is two things. One, not setting deadlines, realistic deadlines that are going to be there, but then also, what is your way of tracking or putting in a status update, if something is going to be a longer task that’s going to get done? If it’s something super simple like, “Hey, get lunch,” it’s pretty obvious it should be back at lunchtime, but you might want to specify that. But you don’t need to check up on and say, did they order lunch? But if it’s a bigger task that’s out there, what is your status point, especially with new delegation? So when are you going to have a check-in, or what tolerances do you need to give them to check in with you?

For example, “After you spend an hour and a half or two hours on this, I want you to come back with me and tell me what progress you made and where you’re at. After you’ve done X, Y, and Z,” or, “by this date, I want to know where you’re at.” And this will really help in a couple of things. If all of a sudden they start going crazy off the rails in some unknown directions that you didn’t foresee because you failed in communication, you can now get a course correction before the task is supposed to be deadlined.

The other thing that goes along with this is making sure you have a system of tracking this, whether it’s a Google sheet, whether it’s in your CRM, what task manager, but you are still responsible. If you delegate something and you do not put it in a tracking system, it is not your assistant’s responsibility. It is your failure for not having set those expectations that you’re following up on these tasks.

Matthew Jarvis:   Another tool that works really well for managing expectations is the 80% rule. So if it’s something that we do all the time, refill my cell phone plan, I don’t really need to put a lot of detail in there. If it’s something new, that’s going to require some creative thought on behalf of my team, I’ll say, “What I want you to do is just take this to 80%, and then come back to me and we’ll take it to 100% together.” Because usually that last little bit is the hardest and I can get that last 20% done in a second. I can just look at it and say, boom, boom, boom, done. For them, they might spend hours, days, weeks trying to get it to perfection. I don’t need it to perfection. I just need the bulk of the work done.

Micah Shilanski:  Jarvis, and one of the things I remember, I was at your place in Moses Lake. I think this is shortly after we met. And you were having some contracting work that was done there. And Jackie, your wife, was talking to the contractor and ran into a problem. And she said, “Hold on a second, I have a professional problem-solver here. Let me get him on the line.” And she handed the phone to you. What the great part about this was is it really highlights some of our unique skillset, which is high-level solving problems. This is what we’re good at.

Make sure your team knows that because if they run into a problem, they can come back with you because you’re really good at solving high-level problems, then they can move forward with it and they don’t get stuck.

Matthew Jarvis:   Yeah. Well, I think this transitions smoothly into mistake number three, which is things will go wrong when you delegate. By the way, things will go wrong when you do them yourself. But for some reason when things you delegable go wrong, it’s like-

Micah Shilanski:  It’s so much worse.

Matthew Jarvis:   It’s like, “I make mistakes. You’re an idiot.

Micah Shilanski:  That’s right.

Matthew Jarvis:   There’s a whole thing there. So mistake number three is blaming the person before taking extreme ownership for the system. So if I ask Coleen to do something and it goes wrong, and that happens, by the way, I just, for me personally, I have to step back and make sure that I am totally cooled, no emotion involved before I discuss it with Coleen. And I’ll confess, sometimes that takes a little bit of time. Sometimes I can’t address it until later in the day, because in my mind I’m thinking, “How in the F did this happen. This is ridiculous.” I’m kind of running it through. I step back until all the emotions are gone, and then I say, “Great. Where did I, Matthew, not create an effective system for Coleen to be successful? Where did I set her up for failure in this?” Micah, do you see this? I mean, you run at perfection anyway.

Micah Shilanski:  No, it’s absolutely perfect all the time. I hope Victoria… Oh, wait, my wife’s right here. She’s hearing this. Nope. She’s shaking her head, no. Absolutely not perfect at all. These are things that you’re going to have mistakes. And I like what you said about the emotion, having a delayed response in things. 9 out of 10 times, whether it’s in a personal relationship, whether it’s your professional relationships, really, really important in this side.

There’s only two types of problems that you have; you have a people problem or you have a process problem. And if you’ve done your job in hiring rock stars, it’s probably not a people problem. That means it’s a process problem, and the process is you. So, where have you failed in this process to make it better? And we talked about this extreme ownership across the board, but man, right here, it really matters because I get lazy when delegating. Because we’ll be on a stride, I’ll be delegating, I’ll be doing things real fast. It’ll be like, “Oh, well, let me just send her this thing real fast. Let me just send out this thing real fast to get done.” And I won’t put all the thought into it, or I won’t fill everything out like I’m supposed to, and lo and behold, it doesn’t get done the way I wanted, but I failed to communicate.

Matthew Jarvis:   Totally. I had an example of this. Recently, we were onboarding a new client and Coleen made the decision to alter our onboarding process. I won’t really go into details, and then it ended up going sideways. And when I discovered it, I thought, “Why in the heck did we abandon the system? It works so well.” But I stepped back and I said, “Great, all right, extreme ownership. I did not communicate to Coleen effectively why the system is the way that it is. And if I put myself in her shoes, not knowing that knowledge, it totally makes sense why she skipped step two and three. From a third-party, they seem like they’re not relevant, but they’re incredibly important to the process.” So I said, “Oh, extreme ownership. I have not educated Coleen well enough on why the system is.”

This will transition to one of our next questions, but great, she tried something out. The result was not catastrophic. It was not the way that I liked. It was not catastrophic. At least she’s trying to improve things. I always assume someone’s trying to work for the benefit of the team. She’s not trying to sabotage the process.

Micah Shilanski:  I like what you said right there, it wasn’t catastrophic. We feel it’s catastrophic. It wasn’t exactly what I wanted done, therefore it is the end of the world. But that’s really not the reality of things. I like inside of that, as you go through, and what are the things we tell our team time and time again, is, “Do not change any processes without running up the chain of command.” And the reason is because you may not see everything that’s going on. So sometimes we fail to communicate. We know I’m going to fail to communicate with some of our RMs or ops, why a process is a way. But we try to communicate that, “Don’t change the process because there’s a reason why. If you feel you have a better one, run it by with us in advance, before we make a change,” just little things you can do.

But really, Jarvis, this ties into our next point I think beautifully, because this gives you what I say, the problem that’s out there, you’re skipping the opportunity to mentor your team. Really, this is a huge advantage. We don’t want people with a job. We want people with a career. We want longterm, engaged employees and we want to help them not only professionally, but personally develop, and this is our opportunity to mentor our team to be better.

Matthew Jarvis:   A tool that I use all the time, in fact, we use this every quarter in our team, we say, ‘Hey, what successes did we have this quarter? What things worked really well?” And we write them all out on the wall. We get those giant Post-It Notes, and we say, “Hey, what worked really well?” And we don’t skip little things. We might say, “Hey, our client newsletter went out without a hitch, and this worked, and this worked, and this worked.” I really try to list those out. And then I say, “Great, let’s pivot. Where did we have a system that didn’t deliver the result that we wanted?” Not, “Where did somebody screw up?” Not, “Where did we make a mistake? Where did we have a system that delivered the results we want?” “Well, this client, we had to send him paperwork twice.” Okay, that’s not an acceptable result. “What breakdown in the system led to that?”

In that example, it was, “We were trying to do too much at once. We didn’t carve out enough time to make sure that paperwork got out accurately.” “Great. How do we fix that system?” And our fixed for that, by the way, was when you’re doing paperwork, that’s uninterrupted time. You’re not answering the phone, you’re not taking care of other things. You’re just doing strictly the paperwork, and then it goes out. But it would have been easy for me to say, “Well, geez, Nathaniel, don’t you read your paperwork? How did you get this typo in here? Why didn’t you do this?” Nothing good comes from that.

Micah Shilanski:  Yeah. And this brings up another point as well. We talk so much about time blocking, but time blocking with your team and having your team time blocked for these types of things. Jarvis, it’s just what you said, “Paperwork is uninterrupted time.” That’s time blocking. You’re blocking out X amount of time just to do paperwork. Billing is uninterrupted time. Door shut, no messages, this is just it.

Not to say if I catch, but if I see the time blocking being violate, especially with billing, I’m going to go ape. Because unless the building is on fire, there’s nothing that pressing. Let it be finished to make sure it is complete. And really the importance of this in the mentoring side of your team is huge because you’re allowing them to be better. And as they start moving more to surges, moving more into time blocking, they will become more efficient at their job. They’re going to produce better results, i.e., better value for your clients.

Matthew Jarvis:   Yeah, 100%. A couple of other things I would put on this mentoring. And this takes, I would say courage is not quite the right word, but you need to be ready for this. I like to ask my team, “Hey, where am I making your job more difficult?” Where am I causing the system to break down?”

Now, I make it very clear to them that I’m always open to feedback, but I’m the one who signs the checks, I get to make the decisions at the end of the day. So if they say, “Hey, Matthew, I wish you wouldn’t delegate any tasks at all to me,” that’s not an option. But one time it came in, Coleen says, “Hey, I’m hesitant to say this, but the biggest interruption I get in my day is, it’s you.

Micah Shilanski:  You.

Matthew Jarvis:   Oh, okay, well, there’s got to be a balance there, because she’s there to take my delegation. So we agreed to, “Hey, if you need uninterrupted time, uninterrupted for me, close your door to your office, and I will know that that means don’t bother Coleen. And put your phone on mute, and I’ll know that if I try to call your extension and you don’t answer, that’s because you need focus time, and that’s fine. I’ll just make a note, and I’ll delegate that to you later when I see it.” But you’ve got to be… I wouldn’t say emotionally ready for it, but you really do. Because that can’t be a trap. If they say, “Well, geez, Mike, it really bothers me that you texted me stuff.” “Well, that’s my right as an owner to text you stuff.” Sorry, ruined it.

Micah Shilanski:  And this is a good time that you get a pause for the feedback. So when this stuff comes in, when you’re asking for this type of feedback, don’t feel that you have to respond right away. This is one where you get to pause and you get to hear what’s happening in this. Then you get to internalize and say, “What’s the best way to respond to these types of things.” So again, this is a great time, get the feedback, shut up and listen, think about how you want to implement it at a later time.

Matthew Jarvis:   Perfect. All right, let’s hit our last mistake, mistake number five, which this could fall under excuses, but we’re going to make it its own because it’s such a major thing, and that is the idea that something can’t be delegated. So this idea that, “Hey, this particular thing can’t be delegated.”

Here’s examples I hear. “I have to take care of my email. I can’t delegate that. I have to take care of cashiering requests. I can’t delegate that. I have to do scheduling. That can’t be delegated.” As we said earlier, basically everything can be delegated. If you ever catch yourself saying, ” That can’t be delegated,” you need to stop right there and say, “No. That is an incorrect belief. This can be delegated,” and really pencil out, what would it take to delegate it?

Now, you might decide that what it would take to delegate it is more than you’re willing to do right now. But this idea that something can’t be delegated, that should never be in your mindset. And here’s an example I hear from advisors, “Well, my team isn’t licensed, and so they can’t trade in accounts.” Perfect. That’s one way to have accounts traded. You could hire someone who’s licensed. You could outsource your asset management. There’s always solutions. We want to focus on solutions for delegations, not obstacles.

Micah Shilanski:  Yeah, you can even do conference calls with your team and the custodian. There’s so many different things that you could do. So the biggest thing is recognize that that is a lack mentality and we need to come at it from an abundance mentality. There’s always options. There’s always solutions. What’s the best way that you’re going to address this?

Now, sometimes my decision is this isn’t going to be delegated yet. And I like throwing the yet in there. I’m just not willing to move this. It’s going to cost too many pieces. That’s fine, as long as I’m still making progress in my delegation. And really where this is going to come in, is this is where your mastermind is going to be so powerful, that’s going to be there.

I’ll call up our mastermind. It was just so phenomenal that I was going through, it was two or three meetings ago, I was going through something. I used to do all the billing in our office. The mastermind team found out I was doing it. It wasn’t even an issue for me. It didn’t take that much time, not worth delegating. It’s really not that complicated to do. I can just do it faster than explaining it to someone else. I had all of the excuses like step one, check excuse box. I had them all. That was right there. And Jarvis, he was going absolutely nuts. He was jumping up and down. He’s like, “I found it. I found his Achilles heel. I found his weakness.” He’s crying right now, laughing so hard.

Matthew Jarvis:   Yeah. I think, “What?” I’m announcing out loud, “Micah does his own billing.”

Micah Shilanski:  So the mastermind really held me of saying, “This is really something you need to delegate.” And I was adamant saying, “This is stupid. I don’t need to delegate this.” Sure enough, that was what they made my commitment to me. It was a very serious penalty if I failed to comply and they gave me two quarters to do it. Within one quarter, it was done. And now, it’s great. I have a team member that does all the billing. She probably does a far better job than I am. She gets billing done like a week before I would do it anyways. So I mean, all of these things are so much better now that a team is doing it. Now we have more resiliency in our office because of this. And Oh, by the way, I still get to look at it, review it, and make sure everything’s good to go. But now, it’s another team member that’s doing it.

So having a mastermind, having a third-party, call us out on things that we don’t even think to delegate but that free up our time, because again, what are we solving for, is what is the most valuable part of our time? We can’t delegate family. We can’t delegate faith. So those types of things are absolute, that requires our personal time and commitment inside of that. But the office operation stuff, unless it’s client-facing time and you’re the advisor, man, that stuff needs to be delegated to free up your time, to add more value to your clients.

Matthew Jarvis:   Micah, if I can, with the billing thing because again, I wrote that in my journal, if I had one, any idea of how many hours a quarter you were spending on billing? It wasn’t many.

Micah Shilanski:  No, it wasn’t many. I would say I could get billing done generally in a half of a day. So maybe three to four and then maybe an hour follow followup, so maybe four to five, maybe, I would say on the high-side.

Matthew Jarvis:   Okay. So let’s call that five hours a quarter. That’s 20 hours a year. That would again be an easy one to say, “20 hours, there’s 2,000 work hours in a year.” Not in Micah’s work year, but in a work year there’s 2,000 hours. Not a big deal. But again, that’s 20 hours that now can be directed to something that’s highly valuable. It’s one less thing that occupies mental space in your mind. It makes your scheduling easier. Remember, you’d have to block time out each quarter-end to do your billing. Now, you don’t have to do that.

I just want to highlight that for our listeners, it’s easy to dismiss something and say, “Hey, this really isn’t… I can book my own airline travel. That’s really not a big deal.” Everything is a big deal.

Micah Shilanski:  And think about it from a revenue standpoint as well. That is if you will, three client slots that I could meet with clients in that time. So if I kept my calendar the same and just said, “Now, I get to bring on three more clients,” well, each client is generating at least $15,000 a year in revenue. That’s $45,000 a year in revenue just with that time. I mean, just from a revenue standpoint, that’s on the low side, that’s going to be there. So what are you paying to delegate this to someone else to get done? There’s just so many infinite things about why this is better. And this is just one example in our life, of all of the things that you can delegate.

Matthew Jarvis:   I really like that lens. How many more clients could I take on, therefore how much more revenue could I get if I freed up just an hour a quarter? That’s one more client I could take on. That’s another 10, $15,000 of revenue. Can I delegate this task for less than the $10,000 I would make from that new client? It’s a great framework. It pays for a lot of delegation time.

Micah Shilanski:  It really does. And I got to say, this is one of the things with a PD budget or personal development budget, and I know, Jarvis, you put money into, we put money into every single time we’re paid. We’re really building up a nice personal development budget. This is kind of that seed money to help pay for that. And by the way, I didn’t start delegation, I know Jarvis, you’re the same way. I did start delegation once I was making money and profitable and I had money to delegate. You have to do it before you’re there. And it’s painful. It’s painful to have it run on that credit card to do those types of things. But it is such a key element, as we were talking about before. If you cannot master delegation, you will not have a perfect RIA.

Matthew Jarvis:   That’s true. Well, I think this is a great time to transition into an action item, which to your point, every advisor, every entrepreneur has to have an assistant of some sort. So action item number one, if you don’t already have an assistant, a virtual assistant, something like that, hire that person. It’s so easy to hire a virtual assistant now. Hire that, pick a task that you’re going to give to them. Ideally, a lot of tasks, and then just commit that anytime you do that task yourself, that you take a nice crisp $20 bill and tear it up. Just shred it, which is illegal by the way, but that’s okay. We want some accountability here. So if one of mine is, I’m always tempted to book my own airline travel. So great. Anytime I book my own air travel, I just need to tear up a $20 bill. And by the way, that’s going to get me to do it.

Now, when Mike and I do extreme ownership, we do different dollar amounts. So it needs to be enough pain where you’re like, “I’m not doing that.”

Micah Shilanski:  I was going to say, Jarvis is not going to be motivated over a $20 bill. It’s got to be a much bigger number than that.

Matthew Jarvis:   That is the point. Though, I remember at one point in my motivation, I had Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, because that was all I could afford. And I’m like, “Hey, every time I delegate this, I get a Reese’s Peanut Cup.

Micah Shilanski:  Yeah. I love it. So whatever’s going to work on yours, but I like that. And if you have a business assistant and maybe it’s a shared assistant or something like that, get a personal one that’s going to be there. There’s so many things in your personal life that could be delegated from a virtual assistant, even an in-person one. We have a household manager. She started out as a housekeeper. I think she does so much more, more of a household manager, runs everything inside of the household. Really, really helpful to have those things done. One less thing we have to worry about. So personal and business I would think would be absolutely huge.

Matthew Jarvis:   Yeah. Those are critical.

Micah Shilanski:  Then I would say, commit to extreme ownership on these systems. So with that aspect of saying, “Well, $20 bucks or $100 or whatever it is, every time you take it back, how long are you going to do this for? I’ll give an example. In our last mastermind, we had a guest there, it was great guy, that Jarvis, you and I know. We were talking with him and we started hearing this stuff that he was doing in his personal life. And everybody jumped on it. This was one of those things that he didn’t see he needed it. Everyone else was like, “You have got to get a personal assistant. This is ridiculous.”

So we made some pretty extreme ownership that was going to be there for him to get a personal assistant. He followed up, he did it. But this is now three months later, he absolutely loves it. He’s like, “I have so much time on my hands and now it’s great, whereas before I was busy running around doing different stuff. I’ve been able to delegate stuff to that personal assistant.” Now with this commitment, we made him hire them for at least two months of work. This wasn’t temporary and this is the big commitment I want from you, when you hire that assistant, at least two months of work. And if they don’t work after two months, then pivot to a new assistant. That doesn’t mean don’t do it. I had to go through a couple before I figured it out. Looking back on it, it was probably all me, but I had to go through a couple before I figured it out, how to really do this.

Matthew Jarvis:   Yeah. Actually, we will get this in the show notes. I have a list of everything I delegated to a personal assistant over six months, and it’s an exhaustive list. It’s like, “Find a piano teacher for my daughter,” and the assistant called and found three different piano teachers and interviewed them and found out who worked best with the schedule, and different things. So we’ll get that posted in the show notes, the list of everything I delegated to a personal assistant over a couple-month period of time.

Micah, other action items that you have? Of course, that’s what this podcast is all about.

Micah Shilanski:  The other thing I’m going to make a shameless plug for, you need to go ahead and sign up for our August webinar that’s coming out, The TPR Nation. Victoria and Coleen are really going to run that. This is not just for you. Have your assistance on this as well, because this is going to be talking about the communication pains that are there, not only from how do they deal with us, Matt and Micah, on a daily basis, but really what have they got to operate on their team to run the perfect RA from an operation standpoint? So having your team members part of that, really, really important. And this is in the Whole Nation, by the way, so you absolutely need to get signed up for that.

Matthew Jarvis:   By the way, I’m going to insist that you have your team members on there because there’s a different level of credibility that comes from having your assistant hear from our assistants, then if you say, “Hey, I heard Matt’s assistant, Coleen, talking and she said we should do this.” That doesn’t have a lot of credibility. When they hear it from Coleen, when they can say, “Hey, Victoria, what do you do when a client calls and they want to meet with Micah and Micah’s in Japan?” And they can hear it from her mouth, that is incredible.

In fact, this is not in the podcast, but I know Coleen herself was a phenomenal office manager. She was very, very hesitant to do digital scheduling links, like Calendly, where they would just click the link and do the scheduling. She thought that was very impersonal. It wasn’t until I introduced her to another office manager who was doing that successfully, that she saw the light, if you will, and implemented that right away, actually before I could even suggest that we do it again. Book that. You’ll get emails on that. It’s going to be end of August.

Micah Shilanski:  Outside Authority.

Matthew Jarvis:   Outside Authority, really exciting.

Micah Shilanski:  Awesome. So those are your action items. As always, jump on iTunes, five-star review. Come on, if you’ve made it this far, we’re totally worth five stars. So we still want rate early, rate often, really important to build up those reviews so we’re growing our podcast. Until next time, happy planning.

Matthew Jarvis:   Happy planning.

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