EE058 – Daniel Ramsey

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Tony Winyard 0:00
exceeding expectations Episode 58. Welcome to exceeding expectations with me Tony Winyard. This is the podcast where we give you ideas on how you can give your customers better experiences and the benefits to your reputation far exceed the effort you put in, you get better reviews, referrals recommendations. If you liked this episode, why not share it with someone who you think may get some value from it. I will be great if you could leave review for us on iTunes. And if you’ve got any suggestions on people that you would like to hear interviewed on this podcast, please do let me know you can send an email to Tony at exceeding expectations.me or you can just pop into the Facebook group which is called exceeding expectations and put a post in there about any particular people you would like to hear interview. This week’s episode is with Daniel Ramsey so from Daniel

My guest today is Daniel Ramsey. How are you, Daniel?

Daniel Ramsey 1:09
I’m great, Tony. Thanks for having me.

Tony Winyard 1:11
No problem and you’re in, I presume sunny Sacramento.

Daniel Ramsey 1:15
Yes. It’s beautiful here in California and the weather is awesome.

Tony Winyard 1:22
And it’s a tell the listeners who aren’t familiar with what you do, what is your background? What is it you help people with done you?

Daniel Ramsey 1:29
Sure. So, again, my name is Daniel. I own a company called my out desk. And we’re a virtual professional company. And so for folks that you’ve never heard of a virtual professional, basically, we we help businesses scale by providing high calibre leverage. And that leverage is, in our case in the Philippines.

Tony Winyard 1:55
And how long we been doing that?

Daniel Ramsey 1:56
Yes, so we’re on our 12th year right now. I started using virtual professionals back in 2007. And we got our first client in April of 2008. We have a check hung up in a in the office and, and so yeah, we’ve been doing this for 12 years.

Tony Winyard 2:15
So how did that come about?

Daniel Ramsey 2:18
That’s a great, great, great question. Well, I’m an entrepreneur. And what’s great about being an entrepreneur is you know, we have a DD and we’d like to start things and we don’t like to finish things and we typically have 12 irons in the in the fire at any one given time. And

Tony Winyard 2:35
have you got a camera looking into my office?

Daniel Ramsey 2:38
Yeah. Well, I’m probably if you’re listening right now, and if you own a business or you lead a business in any way, you absolutely know what happens to your to do list and, and so the origin storey it’s pretty simple. I’m on my honeymoon. And you’ll love this Tony. I’m in Guatemala, and we’re in a Ford Coppola. resort like so we’re in the, in this rain forest kind of place. And you know, we’re overlooking this huge lake and we’ve just gone to to call which is, you know, kind of Mayan ruins and we did this whole day of touring and I’m newly married, I’m on my honeymoon. And my wife is back in the room. It’s one in the morning and I have this photo of myself working at the at the bar basically, with candlelight, my laptop and I think, you know, the bartender is speaking Spanish, and I speak a little bit of Spanish and basically, he’s making fun of me because he knows that my beautiful wife is back in our bungalow, and I’m there working. And so, at that moment, I knew something in my life had to change I needed to have more freedom and I needed to be able to take vacation and you know, keep I wanted to stay married, you know, and so We got back from that trip and I completely changed everything about how

how we ran our business.

Tony Winyard 4:08
And how easy or difficult was that?

Daniel Ramsey 4:11
It was hell, I’m not gonna lie. I mean, it was really hard and and, you know, for your listeners, I mean imagine if you are and there’s probably some people that are listening to this and, and this is your storey I was doing everything I was, I was selling I was delivering I was you know, looking at the financials and I was putting together the marketing and I was making sure that everything was working correctly and the clients were happy that my employees were happy. I mean, I was I was just I had my fingers in a lot of different pots which served my add which hundred percent and but what it wasn’t serving was you know, I didn’t go on vacations often. I wasn’t getting to the gym. I you know, weighed I was the heaviest I’d ever been in my life. All of these things compounded to me knowing I just I needed to make a change.

Tony Winyard 5:07
And so what what was the first step? I mean, how did it come about the you ended up working with people in the Philippines?

Daniel Ramsey 5:12
Yeah, no, I mean, it was it was a pretty simple step. We put on job out there in the Philippines we just put a you know, hey, this is the role that we wanted to fill and you know, we had somebody answer who was who was actually really talented and and, and my first you’ll love this storey because my first job was business cards and kind of rebrand of my business and at that time, this is you know, 2007 you know, the world was crashing and falling apart everywhere. And so I had to rebrand my business to take advantage of that. That changing atmosphere and I paid a company in California thousand dollars to give me some options for the rebrand and this this virtual professional in the Philippines, you know, charged me on my Close to nothing and provided multiple options and to be honest, the thousand dollars that I paid the the California based marketing firm who had all the street cred, and and all of that, you know, my virtual professional did a much, much better job of, you know, creating that vision for us.

Tony Winyard 6:21
But did you have initially any sort of qualms about all Philippines? I’m not sure if they’re going to do a good job or you know, what was your feeling about it?

Daniel Ramsey 6:31
Yeah, you know, I honestly, I rejected the idea front. At that time, my brother and I were working together, we had purchased a bunch of real estate. And, you know, he had brought the idea and I was like, and so I get it when a client says, Well, I don’t know how you’re going to do this work virtually, like I don’t understand how that’s going to happen, because I was that guy. I was that guy back in 2006 and seven, who was like, I don’t think that’ll work. You know? So it took For me, it took crisis to you know, and it took getting married, realising that I wanted to stay married, and maybe one day have some kids, you know, and it took that crisis to really kind of changed my mind about global talent. And back then, I mean, internet wasn’t awesome. And Skype was brand new. And, you know, so there were there was limited ability to really take advantage of this global workforce. And that’s really what we’re talking about doing. If you’re listening right now and you have own a business, you can buy a soda in the West, it cost to US dollars, right? What regardless of where you buy it, it’s about two bucks. You go to the to the southeast Asia or any other you know, what we would consider developing country and that same sodas is 50 cents. You know,

Tony Winyard 7:53
I lived in San Francisco for seven years, so I know exactly what you’re talking about. Yeah.

Daniel Ramsey 7:57
Right. So food and drink and help in the end. in your office, everything’s just a quarter of the cost. And so, you know, what I did is I said, Well, I need to grow my business, I’d like to scale and Gosh, I get to save all this money at the same time. And so yeah, it just at some point, it just made a lot of sense.

Tony Winyard 8:20
And so how long did it take you before you realise that there was an a, you know, a dearth of global and sorry a surplus of quality in the Philippines, you know, a lot of talented people.

Daniel Ramsey 8:31
Um, you know, I’ll give you an example. Last year, we had over 30,000 applicants apply to work for our company. And so if you’re listening to this, this podcast, you know, my favourite, my favourite comparison is like if I if I want to hire somebody today, I have to write a job description, you know, get in writing ad which is different than a job description. Then put out there online than I’ve got to do a phone interview with, like 150 people who apply, I find out that half of them work for McDonald’s and aren’t real sales people. And then I get down to 10 or 20 that I want to interview, then I schedule an interview, then I do a background check and all of that. And all of that takes a lot. A lot of time as an entrepreneur. It’s just it can be 30 to 40 hours an entire day. And what we’ve done at my desk is we’ve created a process. So all of that is cut down to two to four hours, because we’ve we’ve systematised putting ads out in the Philippines, doing the phone screens doing doing the FBI, great background checks, you know, doing all that work, and we had last year close to 30,000 applicants, and yet we only hired 2% of them. So we put together a really kind of streamline process for sorting, who’s really a sales person who’s really a marketing person and who’s really an administrative assistant. So those are the kind of three areas that we help. And, you know, honestly, it was immediate, because when we put an ad out, we get hundreds, if not thousands of applicants for each ad. So the available talent pool just in one city is, you know, hundreds of thousands of people per skill set. So it’s pretty wild, actually, Tony,

Tony Winyard 10:25
and to us supply people just sort of a one off job. So is it for kind of full time work or what is it?

Daniel Ramsey 10:33
Well, we’re full time employer. So we’re thinking of us as a staffing company, we help entrepreneurs find and, and staff talent, and we do it really quickly. So there’s a lot of companies out there, one of my favourites is 99 designs, if you need a new, you know, and this stuff didn’t exist when we first started, you know, 12 years ago, but now it’s pretty prevalent. So, you know, there’s a lot of project based company But there, there aren’t very many what we call ourselves marriage sites, you know, for virtual talent. So, think of all the other ones is dating sites and we’re really a marriage site.

Tony Winyard 11:14
And so what, what would be the benefits of using someone from you know, that you supply over hiring someone in your local town?

Daniel Ramsey 11:25
Well, there’s a tonne. I mean, first of all, you know, like, the first thing that we talked about was just the time frame it takes to find somebody in your local office, you know, all the damage and headspace of just hiring some someone physically, and depending on where you are in the world, there are a lot of labour laws that apply. So, you know, with us, you know, labour laws apply. We’re an entity in the US to be in contract with our clients and then we’re an entity in the Philippines to be in contract with our people. And we comply with all the labour rules over there and we have you know, All the insurances required a CPA and attorney on staff and you know, we give them medical pay and vacation pay, and all of the things that really, really matter to keep somebody happy, because as an entrepreneur, the biggest, you know, I guess, challenge to scaling a business is is employee turnover. And so our whole world is around creating indispensable virtual professionals for our for our clients. And so when you think of I don’t have to buy him office space, I don’t have to buy him a computer, they provide their own internet, you know, I don’t have to worry about workers comp or the government insurance, Daniel and my out desk takes care of all of that there’s there’s a load of positive reasons to actually explore our opportunity.

Tony Winyard 12:52
And then on the as far as actual pay is concerned, I suppose is a big difference there as well.

Daniel Ramsey 12:57
Yeah, and in here’s I mean, our So we did a survey last year and just asked our clients like, hey, how much have we saved you? Like, what if you were to just because, you know, we serve people in Canada and the US. Sounds like we might even have some people over there in England now, now that we’re doing this with you, Tony.

But, yeah, the the,

our clients last year told us that we’ve saved them a total of $55 million US dollars in in just the comparison and, and are, you know, 60 to say, you know, 70 ish percent is typically, you know, is of the cost of hiring somebody local is typically what what we charge.

Tony Winyard 13:47
So what I mean, you know, say someone listening to this is thinking it sounds interesting, but I’m worried about communication, there is a communication going to be a problem. What would you say to that?

Daniel Ramsey 13:57
Yeah, you know, in the beginning, you’re spot on. You know, back in 2007 2006, when we first started kind of doing this for our own business, for our own entrepreneurial journey, I think that would have been a real concern. But now, you know, you have zoom, you have Skype, you have ringcentral, you have all these video platforms and phone systems that make communicating. You know, super easy. So a free one is Google Hangout. I mean, you can literally feel like you’re right there in an office with somebody doing a Google Hangout. It’s completely free. You know, you have FaceTime on Facebook. I mean, there’s just a whole host and we give people a guide to virtual success because it really is Tony One of the things that we help people with it really is a challenge to convert. And here here, here’s a really interesting kind of stat, you know, fortune 500 and the fortune, you know, 2000 across the world. They’ve been outsourcing since the seven 20s and 30s. So they’ve been doing some version of virtual professionals since the 70s and 80s yen entrepreneurs, the small and medium sized businesses, the businesses that make up the majority of the businesses out there in the in the world globally, we haven’t really embraced this concept of labour arbitrage where you’re going to multiple countries and getting the best talent at the best price. And so that’s what we’re helping people do.

Tony Winyard 15:29
So if someone was getting interested now, what would you say a ballpark figure, what we’re sort of where they expect to start? What will prices start from? Roughly?

Daniel Ramsey 15:40
Yeah, so you know, you can get a full time person for roughly 1700 and $47 a month. So when you think of this, there’s 172 hours it’s roughly 10 bucks an hour so 10 US dollars an hour and you know, you think about this Again, we talked about turnover being the enemy of scale. And, and the reality is what helps a company scale with simply creating leverage and process inside your business. So, and people it is not that hard, it’s actually it can be fun. I actually really enjoy it when when I do it for my own business, because then I know things are being handled correctly.

Tony Winyard 16:25
And how, how multi skilled would a person be?

Daniel Ramsey 16:30
Well, we don’t do multi skilled. So that’s an entrepreneurial skill. Like I get to wear a lot of hats because I own the business. I know the business really well. And I’m really good at being average to mediocre at everything, and knowing what excellence looks like, right? So this is the entrepreneurs kind of, I don’t know, it’s it’s a challenge for us because we think we’re great at everything and we’re just simply not. So the way we work and this is you know, all based on a client scenario. I love to tell the storey because it’s it’s really a great one we have this friend is His name’s Molly Williams. And he’s a, he’s a speaker slash coach. And he he travels, you know, the country. And I think, you know, he spent years where he’s on the road for, like 300 days a year. You know, this guy is just a road warrior guy. And he owned this technology platform. And the problem with the technology platform was it, it was older. It was it was built back in the early 2000s. And it still worked, but it wasn’t, there had been, you know, technology and kind of outpaced what he had originally built. And, you know, he and I were in a conversation. We were sharing the stage at a couple places. And he’s like, you know, I’m really thinking about, you know, just shutting this business down. And I started asking questions like, why and his biggest challenge was he couldn’t find somebody who would run the business because he was on he was on the road so often. So he’d gone through a bunch of employees and he couldn’t find somebody who was going to treat the business like it was hit, you know their own business and really work it. And he just didn’t have time or energy. And because of that technology at outpaced his, his platform, he knew he was going to have to invest half a million dollars to kind of upgrade it. And so once I found out his biggest challenge was leverage and talent, I immediately said, Man, you know, we’ve been friends for 10 years, we’ve shared the stage across the country would, would you trust me to help you with that, that issue and he, you know, about five years ago, five, six years ago, he he did, he hired a guy named Chris, who is a phenomenal virtual professional, and hopefully, maybe Chris is a can listen to this later once you post it live. But, you know, in an interview couple years ago, we interviewed Chris and Ali and said, So what happened? And Chris says, I treat the business as if it’s my own business. And I make decisions based on what’s best for the business. And so Chris is The service and support person for this platform and because Chris got hired, they hired some sales people, they’ve done some marketing, and always invested back in the platform. And since hiring us, they’ve had a three X on their revenue and growth. And so, for me, that’s an amazing storey the entrepreneur was about to give up. And we were able to serve up some good high calibre talent, and keep that thing going. And now he has hundreds of users on this platform, and it’s helping those businesses grow. So for us, it’s like, it’s a win, win win, right? You know, we’re helping an entrepreneur and that entrepreneur gets to help others and that that’s just the best feeling ever.

Tony Winyard 19:45
And so I guess the the people that you mentioned before about in a you put an ad and there was 30,000 respondents. And so I imagine in the Philippines, there’s people able to do almost any sort of skilled people are looking for

Daniel Ramsey 20:00
Yeah, and and again, you know, we don’t just service technology companies we’ve serviced. I mean, there’s been a boat boat broker in Florida that we’ve helped insurance companies. There’s a professional employment company in New York that we help marketing ad agencies. So we, you know, we aren’t limited, like, we don’t have a particular product line, what we do is, if you need administrative help, you know, like scheduling your appointments, you know, managing your calendar, just making sure projects are getting done on time and keeping timelines and maybe facilitating delivery or communication. I like to call the administrative folks like traffic and delivery, you know, they’re, they’re out there moving people around. In fact, you got you got an example, Tony, LL who is a virtual professional on our team, she booked this interview, and she’s in the Philippines and she’s part of our PR and media, her job. is to reach out to folks like you who have an interesting topics you know, exceeding expectations What a great topic and and help us get on your show and so you know, the reality is if if you need help in in in marketing we’ve got you if you need help in sales like creating opportunities within your business that’s another opportunity. So there’s there’s a lot of different avenues for entrepreneurs and the reality is the hardest part is probably creating the the outcome or the job description. Some people might know it as a job description, we prefer outcomes.

But But we help you through that so

that that’s probably the hardest part.

Tony Winyard 21:43
So how would it was associate for example, a company, they needed some help with admin stuff, they needed some help with maybe some PR and marketing and I also needed some maybe some design work. So would that be three different peeps, three different full time people? How would that work?

Daniel Ramsey 21:59
Well, it just depends. You’re need at the particular time. One of my favourites, Tony, this is a great storey and and everybody who’s listening who is in their 40s to 60s will probably remember this. Back in the 1990s. ibm almost went away like IBM on they had multiple changes and CEOs they were going through strategy change after strategy change. The board finally decides to hire Arthur Andersen and Accenture. So Arthur Andersen is going in and looking at the financial model and what they’re doing on the finance and and Accenture is looking at their org chart. And this is a really important point, Tony and this is the most of if you’re scaling and growing a business, you can control almost everything through your organisational chart. And and the way you do that is what’s the job description. You know what systems are the end like what what you know If you’re in Salesforce as your CRM, you know, then and you’re in sales, then your job as a sales rep, you’re using, you know, Salesforce and maybe LinkedIn to reach out to people. Those are your systems. And then what’s the outcome for that role in our, in our particular, you know, business, we like to set activity outcomes. So you’ve got to have certain amount of appointments every single day where you’re meeting one on one with somebody through video, and you’re you’re trying to help them scale and grow their business. That’s, that’s an example of how you would write an org chart. That might be what we call the org chart of the future, you know, because it has all everything you need, right? And if you just do that org chart, you can kind of see who’s on your team today. And then who’s on your team, who do you need to be on your team tomorrow in order to double your business?

Tony Winyard 23:55
Okay, so you’re not just giving people one person and you’re giving them a team. People,

Daniel Ramsey 24:00
we want to help you scale your business and we go back to the IBM. So Accenture comes in. And they do a time analysis and RN, an org chart analysis of IBM thing. And what they found out is one of their previous CFO or CEOs was actually promoted from a CFO perspective. So he was a number cruncher who got put into the CEO role. And then he implemented a bunch of changes for the sales team, or the sales team had to do a tonne of administrative work. And what they were finding is that their sales team was spending 70% of their day, you know, doing administrative work work, it was necessary, but not driving revenue.

Tony Winyard 24:47
Well, I know so probably, if you’re doing something you don’t enjoy doing it. It takes 10 times as long because you just you’ve got no heart in it.

Daniel Ramsey 24:54
Yeah, and who, who among us, if you’re listening right now and you’re a salesperson. I hate paperwork. It’s not My thing I like doing what you and I are doing right now talking right. Yeah. And connecting and so Accenture comes back sits with the board the boards paying them millions of dollars and an Accenture simple one lined. You know, solution is for every two sales people hire one administrative assistant and the and the business is transformed and and IBM still around today and you know all that.

Tony Winyard 25:30
So So someone who’s listening to this who’s, you know, goes very small business. They’re not making huge profits, but there’s things they need to do and they just they don’t enjoy doing them. So they’d be able to hire well when they come to you. And they get a team of people to do various projects that they don’t like if I’ve understood it correctly.

Daniel Ramsey 25:52
Yeah, I mean, again, if, and I and I, we do serve small business, our sweet spot Is that middle of the road business, like a million to $10 million in revenue, and we help people who are below a million dollars, there’s no doubt about that. But those businesses are still challenged, understanding their value proposition who their marketing, you know, to their ideal client, they have some service and delivery and they’re still kind of growing. And we’ve helped folks that have a half a million dollars in annual revenue. But our sweet spot is that million to $10 million in revenue. Those are the guys and gals that we can really kind of help supercharge. And that and you’re absolutely right. We start with the org chart, understand who’s on the team right now. And then who do they need in order to double or scale their business? Like who who needs to be in this kind of work, by the way, is very simple gap analysis. All the major quote coaches, you know, they’ll tell you to close your eyes and think of a brighter future. The grass is greener, the blue bluer, the birds are chirping and you’re in the shade, you know that classic, you know, what would have to happen for everything to be great in your business? And then we start working backwards. What do we need to do today? Or who do we need to hire today in order to solve that issue?

Tony Winyard 27:15
So how many would you be able to estimate how many different people you are using in the Philippines at the moment?

Daniel Ramsey 27:21
Oh, yeah, no, we don’t. I mean, we keep track are. So we’ve, in the 12 years, we’ve helped over 5000 entrepreneurs, you know, just like you, Tony, and just like your audience, if you are intent on growing and scaling a business, you know, you I talked to CEOs across the country all the time. And when you ask them, what’s their biggest challenge, hands down. It’s going to be getting talent like that. That’s how you know you’re talking to a CEO or an entrepreneur is like, if I just had the right players on my team, I would win the medal every time you know. So that’s what we Do for people, much like I did for myself after my honeymoon, you know, I came back and I was like, gosh, I really, I really gotta change something here in order to really create the future that I want.

Tony Winyard 28:15
And so that’s sort of that’s your question there is are you still married?

Daniel Ramsey 28:20
Yeah, in fact, next month, next month, will we celebrate our 10 year anniversary? And, and, and here’s, here’s, here’s the other thing and you know, two kids 10 years anniversary. You know, I am still involved intimately in this business. But I’m, I am the CEO, I don’t take the sales meetings, any, you know, or I don’t do the sales meetings anymore. I’m not focused on delivery right now. And all of that I can credit all of that to that inner that initial curiosity. I wonder, can I use virtual professionals for this, can I can I do this and I was talking to a good friend and client couple weeks ago. And we’re talking about the challenges people have in implementing a virtual blended model. And here’s a stat that if you’re listening, if if you’re like this guy, Daniel, he’s entertaining, but I think he’s crazy. This is this is a stat by by the year 2027, over half of the US workforce will be virtual. And I’m sure it’s a very similar stat for where you are in the world. So if you think about they will be virtual in some working capacity, meaning it could be they they work virtually one day a week or several days a week or the entire week is virtual. So, you know, this study, it’s a legitimate study and, and what’s happening in our futures is this is just the reality of where businesses going. It’s not a question anymore, and you You know, we were at 1%, a couple years ago of the US population, we’re at 3%. Now and, and that prediction is to be well over 50%. By 2027.

Tony Winyard 30:12
You had told me before about, it was a famous coach who loves virtual prose.

Daniel Ramsey 30:17
Oh, yeah, that’s Yeah, his name is Bob. And he’s got a great storey. He had a huge team. I’m talking about 30 coaches, you know, coaching and candidate and us always on the stage, always travelling. You know, he had a CEO is running his company, an ops person, and, and I was just on the phone with him today. And he’s like, Daniel, you know, we’ve been a client for like, seven, eight years, and I can tell you, I only want to hire virtual people moving forward. And that, I mean, that is what if you’re listening, that is what it’s like, once you kind of once you find this blended model that we love Which is some of your folks are in your office and doing, you know, the high value stuff, the sales, the leadership, the operation lead, you know, management, and then your delivery folks and and your support staff, your coordinators, your project managers, your folks that are kind of helping your business actually deliver its product or service can all be virtual. And that’s what we call a blended model. That’s the model that the major fortune five hundreds have kind of gone to. And statistically, companies report that they see a 16% increase in productivity with virtual employees. What I mean, why is that, well, there’s no water cooler, there’s no meetings that last for four hours, there’s none of those distractions that you have inside of an office. You can just kind of grind and focus and do what you’re responsible to do.

Tony Winyard 31:58
So typically people hire in these peace professionals. They’re getting far more than they expected.

Daniel Ramsey 32:06
Absolutely, in fact exceeding expectations why I love this topic is because it has everything to do with our origin storey, you know, if you’re listening and you’re an entrepreneur, I was thinking, well, who do I need to hire back in the day, and it was really important to me that I hired somebody who felt like a partner, you know, was a was a teammate was 100%. In, you know, because this was my baby, I was building a business that didn’t exist and I needed real people who are 100% committed, right? And so we coined our kind of mission statement, which is for our virtual professionals to be indispensable for our clients. And that that word indispensable, carries everything that you can imagine with it, right? Talk about exceeding expectations. Imagine who’s indispensable in your life. that’s a that’s a big challenge. And so our measurement when we when we ask somebody to hire one of our people is, you know, Hey, is this person indispensable? Can you imagine running your business without them? And when they say no, I couldn’t imagine running it without them. That’s how we know we’ve won.

Tony Winyard 33:20
Do you ever give any sort of training to your guys in the Philippines? Or does that ever come up anything like that?

Unknown Speaker 33:27
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. One.

Daniel Ramsey 33:30
You know, one of the coolest things is that we, we have our own online platform where we have over 200 kind of training modules that our folks have access to, and they can, you know, they can do those modules at any time, whether it’s before after during unemployment kind of scenario. We’ve also created we’ve created a virtual playbook. So when you hire us, the biggest challenge that we had is like well, and I’m just going to give it to your listeners and tell them exactly how to get it and where to download it and and and hopefully they can use it. Regardless if you hire us or not this whole idea of a blended model and virtual professionals, it’s here to stay guys, it’s 100% What’s going to happen? So if they text SVP, so at scale with virtual professionals 261996, we’re going to send you a copy of our book, which is scale your business with virtual professionals. And in there, there’s an entire chapter devoted on virtual the virtual playbook, like how to make this work, how to train your in house team to be okay with it and love it, how to train your virtual staff on what the in house team needs and how to collaborate with people, what systems are really important, what processes need to be in place, but having done this 5000 times and over 12 years and I was telling you Tony before the call Look, I put my heart and soul into this book because I know how hard it is to make that transition. And so I wanted to have a very easy reference guide for anybody who is thinking about virtual professionals as an opportunity for their business so that they succeed because I really believe in the mission here of of just making the world you know, impacting the world in a positive way. And when you’re giving jobs to to folks in developing countries, you know, you’re changing their entire life, you’re changing the entire future of their their family’s life. So it’s a really important

Tony Winyard 35:36
piece for us. And so you mentioned the text number just now with that same number one for people that are outside the states.

Daniel Ramsey 35:44
That is a great question. And and and you guys, if you’re listening and you’re not in the US, and you’d like a copy of the book, just please email sales and it’s Sal ES at my out desk, calm sales at my out desk. Calm and just say, hey, in the subject line, give me a copy of the book. No, like, that’s as easy as it as it needs to be. But I, you know, I know if it would work actually, Tony, you and I might have to test that another time.

Tony Winyard 36:14
Yeah, I’ll put a link below I’ll put both links did the text number and also the email address in the show notes. So people can you know, if it doesn’t work the text way, you can just do the email way. So, I mean, and on the book, you were talking, we were talking before about the challenges of writing books. So, I mean, you’ve been doing this for what the last couple of years you said.

Daniel Ramsey 36:32
Yeah, and that’s the thing is that what we wanted to do was, I’m a big fan. If you’re listening to this, and you’re like, this guy, I don’t know about Daniel here. Here’s the whole methodology that I’ve used for forever in my business. I hate the folks who, you know, are telling you how to do something but have never done it, meaning they’re there like the coaches who kind of study the problem, we’re actually rather than living The problem. So this book was really written with the idea. I’m an entrepreneur, our clients are entrepreneurs. They’re in the weeds doing the work, meaning they’re scaling businesses with virtual professionals. And they put together the right way to do it the right tricks. And so we have a tonne of like scale accelerators, meaning little tricks and tips. We have a scale community where you guys can go and kind of ask questions and do stuff. And then just scale frameworks, like there’s a lot of things that working virtually is it’s just a little different than working with somebody in your office and you can touch and feel. And yet you still have to build culture, you still have to add value to people, you still have to lead them and lead them, you know, the right way. So we provide all those kind of, I don’t know all that learning of 12 years of how to do this and do it. You know, You know, successfully because, again, you know, turnover is the enemy of scale for any entrepreneur and you really want to be able to do this correctly. And so that’s that’s why we wrote the book. It’s it’s to help everybody.

Tony Winyard 38:15
Are you familiar with Chris Ducker?

Daniel Ramsey 38:19
Oh, yeah, he’s a great In fact I almost he, he, he was actually one of the earlier voices in the virtual assistant world and he’s in the UK and he does. He does a great job of of teaching others how to, to us virtual professionals also. And, you know, what’s really interesting is we have a very different business model he and I, but I have a lot of respect for the guy and he and I have never met meaning i’ve i’ve never, you know, we’ve never talked or met but he definitely has a strong strong message and business model. And, you know, I’ve been an admirer from far.

Tony Winyard 39:06
Tony, what are your sort of just general thoughts about exceeding expectations?

Daniel Ramsey 39:12
Oh, man, it’s everything, you know. And for our clients, we got really, I think it’s a it’s an interesting, interesting topic, which is why I was so excited to be on this on the show. As an entrepreneur, we are in that process of scaling and these there’s all these these valleys and so if you’re listening, this is another one of those Daniels crazy, I should probably write this down and digest it later. But there are different business kind of valleys and I like to call them valleys of death. So that zero to 1 million is the first Valley it’s the hardest Valley to get through. And, and it’s really hard to create, you know, a product from nowhere in a market that doesn’t know you and really sell to that market. But when You crossed that million dollar market. Congratulations, you, you know, you have a real business and 96% of businesses in the US. They never crossed the million dollar mark. So, Tony, I mean, imagine that if you’re if you’re running a race and 96% of the people who run the race never crossed the finish line, that’s a challenge, right? Yeah. And, and that’s business, you know, and so, only 4% get above a million go between one and 10 million, and then four tenths of a percent. So, point 04 ever actually go above $10 million in revenue. So there’s these valleys of death. And the, you know, when you’re a salesperson and you’re an entrepreneur, it’s it’s relatively easy to get over that million dollar hump. What’s really challenging is once you get there, you realise you have to service clients. You know, whether you’re selling a product or a service or you’re a manufacturer, then all of a sudden exceeding expectations and having clients really really matters, you know your you start, I’ll give you some methodology that’s in the book and Tony, this is one of my favourite things. We have this process called the three R’s. So we’re very client driven client focused. We the three R’s are reviews, recommendations and referrals. So we measure a client success based on whether or not they recommend us whether or not win by recommending meaning will they come on a show like you and I are doing right now and and talk about their store using our product? reviews? Will they go to Google and Facebook? If you look at our reviews, we have over 205 star reviews more than any other virtual professional, you know, full time service out there. Nobody else has that many reviews. So we have over 205 star reviews and that’s simply because we have a question. SN place so that when our client is super happy, we asked them to do a review. Right. And then referrals. You know, there have been years that 70% of our business comes from referrals. And that really is when you have people, when you have people telling other people about your, your, your product or your service and your company and your storey and the vision and how you serve others. That’s how you know you really exceeded expectations because in our business, it’s a belly to belly business where a sales organisation so the more people that are talking about this, the more opportunities we have for our business and the more opportunities we create for our virtual professionals. So that’s just one example of how we take the client expectation and really kind of focus on what makes them happy and what makes them you know, you know, you basically refer us business and help us grow our business. I don’t know if that is that’s helpful

Tony Winyard 43:01
is and I love the expression belly to belly breeze is this one I’ve never heard before.

Daniel Ramsey 43:08
Well that’s crazy Americans you know?

Tony Winyard 43:11
I’m Danny if people want to find out more about you Where would they go to?

Daniel Ramsey 43:16
Yeah, go to my out desk calm. Jump on our website, look at our reviews. We have blogs there we have videos, you can follow us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, we’re on all the social channels and and it’s just my out desk calm. The beautiful thing too because we’re exceeding expectations right and one thing that we’ve done Tony and I think you’ll love this and I think this is probably where we would in in you know that our call to today. We put the clients outcome as the very first and most important piece of our sales call and our delivery once we deliver the service and when we initially make the first call our first Our first interaction face to face with a client is, hey, what would make this an exceptional call for you today? What would serve you at the highest level? So now we’re focused on them, right? And then when we decide to work together, we have something called an outcome statement. So we’re not, we’re not having like a job description, that is check the boxes, but we’re actually saying, I need you to do all these things. And it needs to result in this amount of revenue, in growth or in money saved or in a higher client experience. And so or in time, save so we measure every single interaction that we have with clients through an outcome statement. Did we meet your expectations client, did we exceed the expectations? That’s what really matters to us? Because that’s what makes long term marriages like what we have work for entrepreneurs.

Tony Winyard 44:59
Well, just before we finish So Daniel, you mentioned, I know you got a quotation that you really liked you want to tell us that?

Daniel Ramsey 45:06
Yeah, it’s, it’s a really simple one. Either you have an assistant, or you are an assistant. And that is a stark conversation for a any entrepreneur really. If you are doing $10 an hour work, then what you’re saying is that is my worth as an entrepreneur. Let me give you a little bit more context. When we talk to our clients about what their highest dollar productive activity is hands down. It’s always serving clients, selling clients and in basically creating more business and our clients talk to us and they tell us that their their hourly rate can be thousands of dollars an hour when they’re in sales capacity, meaning when they’re selling their service, talking to clients, servicing clients, just love On their clients writing, well, why on earth? If you’re worth thousands of dollars an hour when you’re selling? Why on earth? would you answer your own emails or schedule? You know, or or go on your calendar and schedule schedule calls or check in on a project management thing or, you know, post on social media or do prospecting. I mean, all those things can be handed to a virtual professional, they’ll likely do a better job than you are because that’s their one job. And then you can focus on really growing revenue scaling your business and and basically having your dream

Tony Winyard 46:38
life. Absolutely. Well, Daniel, it’s been a pleasure speaking to you. Thank you for your time today.

Daniel Ramsey 46:44
I really appreciate your time, Tony. And if you’re listening, man, I hope you can scale your business and you might try virtual professionals. I think you’d be a winner.

Tony Winyard 46:53
Fantastic. Thanks. Thank you. Next week episode The Nine is with Mike Jesowshek. He’s an accountant and he gives us some stories and tells us about how accountants can make a give a much better experience for their clients and exceed their clients expectations and also helps them to make the world of accounting a little bit more interesting in the perception many people have a mixer that is next week with Mike Jesowshek. Hope you’ve enjoyed the this week’s episode. Please do share it with someone who you think may get value from this episode. leave a review for us. That’ll be fantastic and hope you have a great week and see you next week.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai