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.