Today I want to share with you some concrete suggestions to save time, get more done, and improve your results by leveraging a personal assistant.

For too many people, hiring and working with a personal assistant is a scary or intimidating process, yet when you really understand it and implement it in a systematic way you’ll not only find your income will dramatically increase, but so will your free time.

“But I Don’t Know How to Find the Right Assistant”

First to dispel a common myth – “It’s hard to find a great assistant.” This simply is not true. If you know how to look and what you are doing it is not only a simple process to find a great assistant, but one that you can implement in 2-4 weeks!

Here is the outline for my system for hiring a great assistant is simple, and one that I’ve refined over the past 5 years:

Step One: Create a clear and winning “Assistant Wanted” ad for you to use on Craig’s List and your local newspaper’s online job listing. (We have the word-for-word ad in the course noted below.)

Step Two: Have all applicants email in their resume, cover letter, and salary history to your office (I suggest you set up an “assistant@...” email address for them to do this.

Step Three: Do a quick sort down to 8-12 “A” candidates.

Step Four: Do a phone sort down to 4-5 “A+” candidates.

Step Five: Select 3 for live, in person interviews.

Step Six: Select and hire your top choice.

Plus, it has never been easier to find a great assistant than now. The current state of the economy has really opened up the marketplace and made it easier than ever to affordably hire a full or part time assistant.

Here are what two of my Maui Mastermind® clients found when they implemented our system for finding, screening, and hiring their personal assistants:

Dear David,

Just a quick note of thanks– I knew I needed to hire a PA/EA to enable me to leverage my time to balance fulfilling my real estate obligations, earning income and launching Protégé Performance.

It was tremendously helpful to not have to create anything – rather I just leveraged your material fully, I used your Craig’s List ad as a starting point, adjusting it to meet my particular circumstances – rather than think through the right interview questions, I simply used your first and second round list and I even used your application, and contract form to further expedite and simplify the process.

In particular, I found asking for three pieces of information, cover letter resume and salary history, extremely helpful in screening the volume of responses I received – great tip and I sure did use it.

Ultimately, I narrowed the field down to 5 for first round interviews and then conducted the face to face interview with the leading candidate – she meets my needs, I extended an offer to her and she accepted.

Or listen to the experiences of Ryan:

David,

I just wanted to say thank you so much for sharing your PA recruitment ad. With a few minor customizations it was ready to go for me and made all the difference. I got probably 70 resumes, a tenfold increase over the last time I tried to hire an employee in the Teton Valley area. Probably half those submitting applications commented on how drawn they were to the ad.

My new assistant just started last week and she is going to be awesome. She is a corporate refugee so to speak who moved out here from Philadelphia with her husband for lifestyle but is tremendously talented and is going to allow me to offload projects for her to manage beyond just doing assistant related tasks. In any case thank you 1) for inspiring me and encouraging me to commit to hiring an assistant and 2) giving me the hiring system (ad) to get it done with. I had 5 or 6 candidates that all would have been awesome and my greatest fear prior to running the ad was not finding anyone remotely qualified.

I hope you see that finding your assistant is actually the easiest part of the equation. We’ve made it a total “paint-by-numbers” system.

Which leads me to the next area I want to talk with you about…

How to Effectively Leverage Your Assistant

Once you’ve found the right assistant it becomes critical that you establish an effective pattern for how you work with him or her to hand off projects and “to do’s” for her to handle.

Here are a few quick tips on how to do that more efficiently and effectively:

One: Have them create and keep a “Master Project List” that keeps in one place every item you’ve handed over to them, its priority…status…and key notes.

Sandy (my assistant) updates her project list daily. So at any given moment I can pull up her spreadsheet and see where she stands on any given project. (We’ve created a template Excel spreadsheet that we use for this Master Project List.)

Two: Make sure EVERYTHING gets on that list! No matter how big or small, if I hand it off to Sandy, it needs to get on that list—immediately. Why? Because if it doesn’t get on the list it may get missed. That’s the real value of having a trusted system—as long as you follow your own system you’ll eliminate most “gaps” so you get the results you truly want.

Three: Meet regularly with your assistant to “hand off” multiple projects and tasks. I meet with Sandy about once a week in person (normally she works remotely from her own home office.) We spend about 40-60 minutes with me handing off a variety of projects and tasks to her.

Four: Record your handoff meetings so that your assistant can review your instructions as needed. I am a fairly detailed kind of person so when I hand off in one concentrated session that’s a lot of information for Sandy to take in. Because we record the conversation she can review the audio files (she records one task/project per file and keeps track of track number as she takes her written notes to faster reference) as needed.

Remember, your assistant may bill at $10-20 per hour while you may value your time at $50-500 or more per hour, so having your assistant take an extra hour for each hour you meet with them to review the recorded conversation is a GREAT way to get the most from your time.

I hope the idea of teaming up with a great assistant is becoming more real and less intimidating for you. It really will make a huge difference in helping you upgrade your use of time and quality of life… plus you’ll be able to reinvest that saved time to create many-fold more dollars than the small investment to get the right assistant.

Thank you for listening to the ideas I shared today on getting more accomplished with less time and effort.

I will talk with you later.

My very best to you,

David