SHOWNOTES
Can you leave for vacation knowing that your business is fine without you?
Well, yes!
I just finished a one-month European tour and it was amazing - it was a true vacation! Meaning, I left my laptop at home.
I was able to do this because my team kept the business running without me.
If you are ready to ditch the laptop and hit the highway, but are unsure what you should expect from your virtual assistant or from your team, this episode is for you!
I also share:
✈️Why I don’t recommend the "laptop lifestyle".
✈️Why you don’t have to worry about traveling for a month or so
✈️How your VA should protect your time while you’re on vacation
✈️Why your VA should handle your inbox
✈️The magnificent "catch-up" list
Don’t miss this episode and let me know your thoughts after you listen. I always love hearing from you. If you have any questions about this episode, comment below or DM me on Instagram @jen_lehner
RESOURCES
The Ultimate Way to Manage Your Inbox with Your Virtual Assistant https://youtu.be/J4oMD5GUfO4
TRANSCRIPT
[00:02.590] - Gary Vaynerchuck Hey, guys, it's Gary Vaynerchuck, and you're listening to the Front Row Entrepreneur Podcast with our girl, Jen.
[00:10.850] - Jen Lehner I just got home from a month of traveling and it was going glorious, and I was calling the trip the Front Row European Tour, and my plan was to meet up with members of the Front Row community all along the way and love on them and just get to know them better and just enjoy their company. But unfortunately, I got COVID in Dusseldorf and my plans got interrupted a little bit. It still ended up being a great trip, but I just didn't get to connect with as many Front Rowers as I would have liked. Now, what I want to talk to you about today is what you should expect from your virtual assistant or from your team when you're on vacation.
Read more...
[00:49.730] - Jen Lehner And first of all, you might be like, what? I could take a vacation? Or you might be saying, what VA?, it's just me. I don't have a team.
[00:57.840] - Jen Lehner And if that's the case, you want to make sure and go to my free master class. I talk all about how you can hire your Perfect Match virtual assistant. Just send me a DM on Instagram. I'm Jen Lehner. And that's spelled Lehner.
[01:12.280] - Jen Lehner And I'll send it on over to you. It's totally free because I want you to be able to take a vacation, and I want you to be able to take that vacation and have it be a real vacation. Okay, we're not talking about the laptop lifestyle. Did you fall for that one early on in your business like I did? I fell hard for that promise.
[01:32.350] - Jen Lehner Yeah, laptop lifestyle. I thought, how glamorous. I could just work from anywhere and I could bring my laptop and open it up on the beach. Well, guess what?
[01:43.030] - Jen Lehner I learned pretty quickly that I don't want to open my laptop up on the beach. I mean, not unless I'm going to be watching Netflix. I'd really rather just be on the beach reading a book or taking it out.
[01:56.210] - Jen Lehner So this Front Row European Tour was pretty spontaneous, and in fact, I booked a one way ticket and didn't really know when I was going to be coming back or where I was going to be flying back from. And I was able to do this because I have a really good team.
[02:10.440] - Jen Lehner So I want to share with you a little bit of what that looks like and what you can reasonably expect from your team when you take a real vacation. So first of all, the most important thing is that they should be protecting your time and your vacation at all costs. So that means that they're not sending you a Vox or a WhatsApp message or a Slack message or an email unless it is truly urgent. And how do they know what's truly urgent? Well, that's up to you.
[02:40.280] - Jen Lehner You have to let them know. So for me important would be something like a really wonderful opportunity that comes into our inbox and it's really time-sensitive. Like Oprah Winfrey wants me to be on her show. That would be really important, right? But that pitch from somebody who wants to be on my podcast wouldn't really be something to send over to me.
[03:00.640] - Jen Lehner And in fact, we have lots of template responses for those types of emails. So my team is more than prepared to answer just about any email that comes through. And it's not that you don't have access to your email or that you don't look at your email. You still might be logging in once a day, but you don't want to be expected to keep up with that email, right? So as those customer service emails come in and all of that other email that hits your inbox, your VA is going to deal with those.
[03:30.330] - Jen Lehner Now it might be that your VA is not currently managing your inbox and the thought of someone else managing your inbox might just make you a little queasy. But let me just tell you that it is the best thing I ever did. It is a true game changer. Let your VA handle your business email box. And if that sounds daunting to you, just relax.
[03:51.900] - Jen Lehner I promise it is not as difficult as it sounds. And in fact, I'll put a link in the show notes to a training that I did on this exact topic and it walks you through every step of the process. Now the other things that your VA is doing while you're on vacation is basically keeping the business running smoothly. That's all the things. So again, answering all of the emails, answering questions that might come up if you have an online course and you've got questions that come up inside the course, like in the portal or in that Facebook group, your VA is answering those questions.
[04:23.440] - Jen Lehner Your VA is posting content, sending newsletters, engaging with your audience, sending out products. If your business ships out inventory or physical emails, maybe. My head VA Neeca also has access to our business credit card. So should something need to be paid while I'm away, she can take care of it. And if the thought of handing over your business credit card worries you, all I would say is that you aren't working with just anyone. Whoever you hire is your VA should absolutely be someone you would trust with your credit card and really just about anything else for that matter.
[05:02.990] - Jen Lehner This is why I always talk about hiring your Perfect Match virtual assistant. This is not some random person, this is a person that is part of your business. Okay? If it's your VA's first day on the job, maybe you don't get the credit card, but eventually it will probably be necessary unless you want to remain the bottleneck in your business. So while you're on vacation, your VA can manage your communities on Facebook and on your Facebook business page as your business avatar.
[05:31.890] - Jen Lehner So it is the business that responds. It's not your VA's personal picture, it's the business avatar. And honestly, if your VAscatch-up are prompt and knowledgeable in their replies, most people won't even know you're away. And the last thing I want to share with you is the catch-up sheet. What is the catch-up sheet?
[05:52.460] - Jen Lehner I'm not talking about Heinz Ketchup, catch-up. C-A-T--C-H. Okay. And this is what was waiting for me in my inbox on my first day back in the office. I had nothing to do with this, this was all Neeca's idea.
[06:07.120] - Jen Lehner But I wanted to share it with you because I think that whether you go on vacation or not, this is something you could share with your VA to give them as an example of how they can really support you in your business. Okay, so the email says, hi Jen, I made you a catch-up list for this week, some to-do lists for you and things we need to discuss. So I click on the link that she put there and when I open the link it takes me to a Google document. And on the Google document she has a checklist and there's headings for each day of that week. And under each of the headings are checklist of items that need to be dealt with.
[06:42.750] - Jen Lehner So for Thursday, my first day back, there are two items. A board meeting at 11:00 A.M., and then next to that she wrote, here's a link to the slide deck. Please review. And then the next item on the list says Strategy Call 12:00 p.m.. And it says, here's a link to the slide deck.
[07:01.430] - Jen Lehner This was so incredibly helpful because on my first day back I had two back to back meetings with my community and obviously I needed to be prepared. So Neeca sent me really everything I needed to be right at my fingertips. Then, for Friday, July the 8th, she has a checkbox and it says Planning party at 12:00 P.M.. Next to it it says, this is for our Accountability challenge winners, four members qualified. Here's the email we sent to them.
[07:31.940] - Jen Lehner Please review. Here's a link to a previous planning party and here's a link to the Trello board that we used. So again, she is anticipating my needs because she knows that the very next day after I got back, I've got these two big calls and I've got another big call where I have to basically take members through a planning process for the year. So what's going to make it easier for me is to look at the replay of when we did this last time. So she put that link there and that was probably like six months ago, so it's not fresh in my mind.
[08:06.170] - Jen Lehner So that's super helpful. And then she sent me a link so it would refresh my memory as to what we promised them in our email to them and what they should expect from this training. And then she included a link to the Trello board, which is a special Trello board that we created for those members the last time, or not those particular members, but for this particular event. So I needed to review that to see if we wanted to use it again. Then there's a check box under that meeting, under that item that says, meeting with Felicia at 1:30.
[08:41.830] - Jen Lehner And next to that she wrote, here some links you might want to check. And then she's got all these links that are pertinent to this meeting with Felicia, who I'm working with, to Evergreen, one of our products. And then a link to the last meeting that we have with Felicia, the last agenda, so I could see where things were left off, because again, I had been on vacation for a month and I don't remember any of this stuff. It's really super fuzzy. And honestly, it would have taken me all day just to locate this stuff if I had to do it myself.
[09:11.270] - Jen Lehner Okay, there's more items on the sheet. So under that, she's telling me that I need to ship out the Starbucks gift cards for our charter members if I haven't already. And here's the link. And then when I click on the link, it takes me to a beautiful spreadsheet of everybody's anniversary dates, who gets a Starbucks gift card and their mailing address. And all I have to do, which is so enjoyable, is to sit down with a cup of tea and write out these thank you notes.
[09:34.860] - Jen Lehner And I don't have to go and hunt down the addresses because they're right there. And she just makes it so easy for me. And then next on this checklist, it says, we have orders for our CEO planners. This is ready to go in Ship Station. So, Ship Station is a software that we use to mail out our physical content planners.
[09:52.100] - Jen Lehner And I do ship those myself from my office. So I print out the labels here, but all I have to do is print the labels because Neeca has input all of the information into the software. Okay, so underneath that, it says, for discussion. And she's just saying, we need to discuss our expert trainings for VIP. And then she links me to some suggestions that she has for expert trainings that we might want to consider for our VIP group.
[10:22.030] - Jen Lehner Then under that, she says, we need to schedule our VIP Mindset moments and our VIP mixers for September. And she says, here's a few ideas for Front Row CEO, which is our signature program. She says, here's a document that I created that we can discuss together. And then when I clicked that document, she's covered everything from our Facebook group to a software that we use to communicate with our members, our CRM. And then she's got links to our survey results.
[10:50.780] - Jen Lehner The last survey that we did for the program and our debrief that we did as a team with our Facebook ads expert and other members of our team after the last launch, it's all listed here as well. And that's a lot, I know, especially if you're new with your virtual assistant. You might be thinking, holy cow, how can I ever expect to have somebody anticipate my needs to this degree? And actually, what you can do is share this podcast with them and start brainstorming and make a list of things that would be really nice for you to have. And again, it doesn't have to be for vacation.
[11:30.710] - Jen Lehner Maybe it's a list of things that you would like on Monday morning delivered into your inbox of letting your VA take a look at the week ahead based on your shared calendar and things that you need to be alerted to, and maybe for your VA to already have links ready for whatever those things are. So meetings, podcasts, recordings, your YouTube whatever it is that you do in your week, what can your VA do to make that easier for you to start jotting that down? And then at your next team meeting, which I hope you are having weekly, you could talk about this and just let it evolve. I mean, Neeca has been with me for, I think, going on seven years, so obviously she knows me really well, and she knows this business really well. But that doesn't mean that this isn't something that you can't start seeding right now.
[12:23.810] - Jen Lehner So, listen, I hope you leave your laptop at home and have a real, true vacation. Don't touch your business, and let your VA handle things until you get back. And if you want to learn more about hiring your Perfect Match virtual assistant, just DM me over on Instagram and I'll send you a link to my free master class. My handle on Instagram is @jen_lehner. So that's J-E-N-L-E-H-N-E-R.
[12:53.200] - Jen Lehner See you next time.
