https://youtu.be/4T3QipuHEXE
Barry Coziahr is the CEO of Stampede Branding and owner of Freetime Solutions, a virtual assistant placement agency. We discuss how to get the most out of a virtual assistant, selling your time for the right price, and how to become better at delegating tasks to VAs.
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Crush Delegation with Barry Coziahr
Our guest is Barry Coziahr, owner of Freetime Solution, a virtual assistant placement agency. Barry, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.
So, Barry, you've got a really interesting story because your father was a serial entrepreneur himself. And in many cases when someone, at least this is how it played out in my family, when you have a successful parent, then kids can feel intimidated and then they leave for other pastures and try their strength in other areas. But you actually stayed and became an entrepreneur yourself. So tell me a little bit about your journey.
Well there certainly was some parts where it could have been intimidating, and it was. There were certain times when I was growing up where it was intimidating, the idea of doing as well or as he did was definitely a thing. But I think now it would be, I was just thinking about him the other day, I would be, I think I'm gonna dedicate my book to him because we've kind of reached the point where it's like, okay, yeah, now I definitely know that I can help you and we can learn together if he was around today, that'd be amazing. But basically, yeah, he was a salesman and a manager from when I was born.
He moved from a really small town called Galesburg, Illinois, to not that much, a small city called Peoria, Illinois. And he was put in charge of a department store, a clothing store for men and women. And he ran that for a number of years. And then eventually, I mean, and he's a salesman. So he inspired me. And so I had little businesses when I was growing up. I think I was out selling door to door stuff from school at eight years old, and so I could win contests and get money from those and had other little businesses that I started and all these different entrepreneurial ideas. And as I grew up, he ended up starting his own business and starting a number of businesses and employing quite a few people.
I don't think I'm quite there yet where I've employed as many people as he did at his pinnacle. But anyway, so it was pretty amazing. So he had all these businesses and he's quite an inspiration for that. up working for him in customer service and also in marketing. Back in the days, we had to drive over to the graphic designer's office to get the graphic design work. So that was a while back. It was back in the, what, the 80s or something like that. And so, but anyway, it was great working for him. I learned a lot about, I mean, with the internet, I developed my first website with him. We developed a website and a shopping cart back in the 1990s, as a matter of fact, when I worked for him, and I took charge of those projects. So I definitely got my start in marketing at an early age.
And then, yeah, I broke out on my own and went to work. I did a few other different sales gigs, including work for a publisher, and then worked for a non-profit for about 20-some years. And doing community outreach for them, and that was incredible. I really enjoyed that. I got my hands into a lot of different types of marketing, large scale and small scale marketing, also running teams and running groups of volunteers, and that was fantastic. Then about halfway through that, I figured out that, “You know what, I really need to make some money.”
So, I started my own business, and the business, I started a marketing company and we used remote personnel, we used freelancers a lot of the time for some of the work that we did. And my wife and I ran that company and I did that job full-time while also doing marketing company. So that was exciting. I had two full-time jobs until we grew that business up to a certain point. And we actually sold our first marketing company in St. Louis that we have for about 10 years, moved down here to Clearwater, Florida, where we are today, and we opened a new marketing company, but also opened a virtual assistant agency.
Because we decided that we were doing so well with running people, establishing great personnel, and picking great personnel, and putting the other systems, that we decided we wanted to help other businesses to do that. Because that's sort of the name of the game, is to help small businesses expand. So yeah, so we started that. My wife has coached me and worked with me all along. She's great. She's a great teammate. And yeah, and she's a full-time author now. She's doing her thing while I do this. And so we've got this great virtual assistant agency. We've actually had two of them, and we're helping tons of businesses.
Yeah, that's super exciting. I think we talked maybe a week ago or 10 days ago, and I was telling you that I'm just about to onboard a few of these virtual assistants myself. And so far, I'm very excited about the process. And you helped me as well with some pointers what to do, you know, first week, so about learning, and then the processes and go from there. And it really helped me. And I'm super excited. They are really enthusiastic. They seem to know their stuff and they really want to learn and want to do a good job.
So I think it's a huge opportunity for small businesses to tap into this resource. I think that's going to be the airplane fuel that can really give small businesses an edge that maybe big corporations don't have. So we talked about step one as being identifying the 20% that's the most important and the 80% that's not so important and you can outsource it. 20% you need to focus on. So, what's the next step when determining what you can actually delegate to virtual assistants?
So, you really look at those particular tasks for one thing and we even have a list of those tasks that you can look at we’ve got an ebook which the folks out there can get from you as well. It’s called 249 things that a virtual assistant can do for you. Between the booklet and understanding that 80-20 principle, you should be able to put together a pretty good list of what exactly you want your virtual assistant to do.
Ok, Alright. So, there are 249 different things you put it together. And, so you now have defined those functions that you want them to do. So where do you go from there?
Yeah, So basically, you define those functions using the 80-20 principle and what we’ve talked about. one other point I’ll mention too is, which I went through and explained, just the whole concept of that 20% and that 80%. And another thing you think about is the fact that your time is worth something. So, you have some tasks that are like $10 an hour pieces of work. Some are worth $100 an hour, some are worth $1000 and some of your time is worth $10,000 an hour sometimes. You obviously want to do more of the $10,000 an hour time, and you want to offload and get somebody else doing the $10 an hour time. And heck, if you can get somebody to do some $100 an hour time too that’s great as well. So that's another concept that you can think with as well, along with 80-20 principle, I just went over, and that list, and you really figure that, that you've got it nailed down exactly what kind of work you should hand over to somebody else.
Your time is worth something. You have some tasks that are like $10 an hour pieces of work, some are worth $100 an hour, some are worth $1000, and some of your time is worth $10,000 an hour sometimes.Share on X
I once read about this, that if you want to make a million dollars a year, for example, there are 2,000 hours, work hours typically in a year.
Yeah.
So, you basically have to make $500 for each of those 2,000 hours. So if you do $500 for 10,000 hours versus 500 hours, you're going to make a million dollars. And so anything that is worth less than $500, provided you can sell all your time for 500, you should absolutely stop doing it. If it's a $200 task, you should find someone else to do it because it eats into your million dollar save.
If you want to make a million dollars a year, you basically have to make $500 for each of those 2,000 hours in a year. Anything that is worth less than $500, you should absolutely stop doing it.Share on X
Yeah, it's true. Yeah, and you should be working for, you know, find some of those $10,000 hours as well while you're at it, because those do happen. You know, sometimes those do happen. I mean, if you think about it, if you close a client who's gonna pay you, you know, X amount of money, you know, every month for the next 12 months.
The lifetime value. Yeah, that's right. And it's very easy to not think about that, how valuable the selling time is that maybe we are not. That's right. But when you write the book, that's even, that could be even a bigger multiplier because then this book could be selling for years on end and without any time investment for Tyrus and from your part.
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, my virtual assistants are helping me, me and them, and we're putting together my whole book, which is great. So it's just that they're helping me to bolster that 20%. They're not taking the 80% off my plate, but they're helping me to bolster that 20%. Those key items. But I'll tell you, the next thing is who. It's not often people are like, how are we gonna get this done? It's more about who are you gonna get to do it? So we jump in and what we do is we, I mean, we've already picked the country that we like to work with for lots of good reasons that I already mentioned. Then we're also digging in with personality testing so we can find out the right, make sure those people have the right traits.
Like we want a great communicator. We want somebody who's stable, who's aggressive, who's goal-oriented, who's just a good person. And with all of those traits, we also,
