The CEO’s Secret Weapon: How an EA Can Help You Buy Back Time & Scale Faster with Tricia Sciortino – EP 227

Justin Donald: What’s up, Tricia? So good to have you on the show.

Tricia Sciortino: Hi, Justin. How are you?

Justin Donald: Good. Good to have you back. I know we featured you for a Lifestyle Investor Mastermind session. Inside of our community, we took a deep dive with you and BELAY. And I’m just a raving fan, so it’s great to have you on the show.

Tricia Sciortino: I love it. I love you, guys. I’m so glad to be back. I’m so excited to chat with you today.

Justin Donald: Yeah, me too. So, I think what you and your company provide are literally hands down one of the most important things that people in the business world have. If you’re an entrepreneur, I think this is a must. And if you’re a high-ranking business professional and I don’t even want to say high ranking, but if you have a lot of responsibilities on your plate where you just have a lot of work that needs to get done, I also think this is a must, and I’d love to talk about your perspective on why you think someone should engage with your solutions and hire, at a minimum, an executive assistant, although you have tons of positions beyond that and even above that because you do a lot of C-suite stuff, too, and fractional roles. But let’s just start at the beginning with someone who maybe has never hired someone or isn’t currently working with any sort of assistant. Why you? And why even have an executive assistant?

Tricia Sciortino: Yeah, great, great question. I love it. I think, what we have seen, we’ve been doing this for 15 years now. This is our 15th year, which is amazing, and it’s been an honor. But I think what we see when we speak with people or questions we get around people really reluctant, if you will, to kind of make that first hire, hire that EA, bring somebody on to help, it’s a couple of things that we’re seeing. First and foremost, there’s this illusion of what the cost is, like, what this is going to cost me? And I get that, right? There’s cost to anything we’re doing. Any person we’re bringing on board, there are costs associated with that. And do we want to burden that cost?

I think, for me, and I have witnessed this so many times as it relates to cost, having an EA as an entrepreneur or a business owner, actually, to me is a growth lever. It’s not a cost center. It is actually an investment of reallocating your time, which has way higher ROI when you’re looking at administrative time. So, if you think about like, what your hourly rate is as an executive or an entrepreneur, 100 an hour, 200 an hour, or 1,000 an hour, it depends on how your business is going, and you’re the one booking travel, answering emails, doing expense reports, like you’re spending how many hundreds of dollars an hour to have this administrative work done when you can hire somebody for a fraction of the cost to take that off your plate.

And the reason I view it as a growth lever is because if you just had, imagine like just 10 hours a week, if you have that back as an executive, what that could do to your business. Like, the amount of focus time you could spend on strategy, growth, sales, marketing, making big decisions, like if you had 10 hours back, wouldn’t that be a growth lever for you? So, that’s the first thing that I see is like, they get hung up on costs without realizing it’s actually costing you not to do it. You are a very overpaid assistant. If you don’t have an assistant, you are the assistant and you’re overpaid and you’re probably not the best assistant. I’m just going to call it out. You’re probably a sh*tty assistant.

Justin Donald: Yeah, I totally agree with you on this. I think that, and by the way, I feel like I’ve lived in the world where it’s like, I don’t know. Do I really need someone? I don’t know if I can justify having someone full time. Well, the beauty of what you guys do is also that you can have someone part time, you can have someone super part time. You have different kind of amounts or allotments, whether it be 20 hours a week, 30 hours a week, maybe even 10 hours a week. I think at one point, you did something like that.

Tricia Sciortino: Yeah, still do.

Justin Donald: Yeah. And so, to me, it’s like a no-brainer that anyone in any professional role probably needs to have the support of an executive assistant, at least at 10 hours, if not 20 hours.

Tricia Sciortino: Absolutely. Absolutely agree. I mean, again, it goes back to imagining what is possible if you had 10 hours back for you and it’s true ROI time, it’s true time to do the things that do grow your career, grow your business, grow your role, grow yourself. The second thing we see outside of costs being something that people bump up against is literally their self-regulation is what I’m just going to call it. Like, we don’t want to let things go. Most of us maybe started businesses from the ground. We had to do all the things. We had our hands in everything. We were the one holding all the spinning plates.

So, to let go of our baby, the things we’ve created over years is hard. So, people have a lot of what I like to call control freak issues when it relates to their mindset that there’s work that they’re doing and holding on to for a few different reasons with this control freak mentality. They just think like there’s so many myths around control freak-ism. We think nobody can do it better than us because we’ve created it and we’re the OG.

Justin Donald: That’s right.

Tricia Sciortino: Yeah, there’s a lot of ego in that, right? And I can admit this, I had this happen to me, being here for 15 years, over those years as we grew, I mean, I had to continually let things go and let others own things and do things for me so that I could grow, so the business could grow. And so, really, the mindset of letting go is not weakness, it’s strength. Delegating to others is enabling and empowering a team to rise up. It’s not stifling, it’s not a negative, it’s a positive thing. And transparently, there are people out there who are just wired to love doing administrative work, like love to do expense reports and love to do outlines and take notes. Like, this brings them pure joy. It doesn’t bring joy to me to take notes or work in spreadsheets or things like that.

Justin Donald: Right. They love it and they’re good at it.

Tricia Sciortino: They’re good at it.

Justin Donald: And most people that are moving up in the business world, most professionals, they’re not good at it. And if they are good at it, they don’t like doing it and they do it out of necessity.

Tricia Sciortino: Yes. Or they do it because it’s a comfort crutch.

Justin Donald: They’ve always done it. Yeah.

Tricia Sciortino: They’ve always done it. It’s comfortable. I can do it in my sleep. Why not just keep it forever? But if like, you had five of those things, you got five little tasks that you did forever because it was easy and it was quick, like even if you just let those five little things go, you’d be amazed at what that feels like on the other side of letting things like that go.

Justin Donald: Yeah. And to expand on this a little bit, I feel like sometimes it’s hard for people that think super linearly to rationalize. So, you had made a very powerful comment where you basically said a lot of people look at it as a cost or an expense, but the right way to look at it is an expense or a cost if you don’t have it. And I think that’s so true because early on, before I ever hire, and by the way, I’ve had some form of executive assistant since 2005. Okay? So, I can’t even imagine life without an executive assistant. I don’t know how I would function without having assistants. I mean, my executive assistant has virtual assistants and all of my other assistants have or different roles in our different organizations have executive assistants or virtual assistants. And so, I just can’t even imagine a world where I didn’t have that support.

But I do remember early on where I was like, I was only paying attention to the dollars. It’s going to cost me this much to do it. But then, you do it, and like for you, with BELAY, you can dip your toe in and do 10 hours. And that’s actually how I started with you guys, is I dip my toe in because you hire, you train, you do all this work so I don’t have to do the work. And so, I’m a huge raving fan of what you do.

But I mean, it was literally within the first day or two where I said, oh, my goodness, why have I been (a) trying to hire executive assistants on my own, (b) train them on my own, (c) even dragging my feet to have one? Because it was clear as day, within just, I mean, a handful of hours, how much more productive I was, how much more I could focus, the whole Pareto’s Principle, right? What’s the 20% of activities you do that generate 80% of the results? So, it’s like, how do I continue to spend more time, identify that 20% and live in that 20%, and delegate out the other 80% to someone else that’s really good, competent, probably better than me in the long run, even though I could justify that maybe I’m better than them in the short run, right?

Tricia Sciortino: For sure. And sometimes, that’s true, right? I mean, sometimes, there is this opportunity where, I mean, believe it or not, it’s hard to imagine for some people, when you bring somebody new on, they have to be trained.

Justin Donald: Yes.

Tricia Sciortino: I mean, I know it stinks, right? We can’t just hire people and they just know everything the first day. And so, I think a lot of people feel like, oh, my gosh, I don’t have time to train an EA. I don’t have time. I can’t do it. I’m going to have to wait till the season slows down and then I can on board the person at. I’ll onboard them in Q2 because that’s my slow season or whatever the thing is. The truth is like, if you’re growing your business, there’s never a slow season. You hope there’s never a slow season.

Justin Donald: That’s right.

Tricia Sciortino: There’s never a great time to bring on a new team member, whether it’s an assistant, a new manager, whoever that is inside your organization. But I can say this, it’s always better to make the hire sooner than you think. I don’t care what role it is. Like, typically, we wait until there’s so much pain. We have to have a hirem and then there’s the whole process of vet the hire, onboard the hire, train the hire. So, the pain has just endured...

Justin Donald: Cross the fingers. Hope the hire works.

Tricia Sciortino: Yeah. Please. So, we’ve tried, our organization has really tried to simplify that, make it short and sweet, and give everybody the tools and resources they need so that the pain and the relief you feel can be as quick as possible, right? So, like you’ve said, we’ve pre-vetted, we’ve picked the right talent, we’ve interviewed all the people. You don’t have to do any of those things. We’re coming ready to deliver a fully managed fractional service to leaders who just need help because we’ve watched and seen the pain. We’ve been through it ourselves and we provide so many resources, training documents, training tips, onboarding tips. We provide resources on how your EA can manage your calendar, how they can manage your expense reports, different ways that you can delegate to help get you started. But I think the biggest thing is you just have to start. There’s never going to be a good time. Never.

Justin Donald: Yeah. I mean, that is so true and the timing is never ideal. So, it’s like you just got to jump in with both feet and do it. But I can tell you at every level, this has been such a powerful move for me. Like, I mean, it’s true leverage, right? So, I think step one is have some sort of an executive assistant, try them out for 10 hours a week. You’ll find yourself probably pretty quick saying, oh, I need more hours. Let’s up it to 20. Let’s up it to 30. Let’s up it to 40. I think that that’s a natural progression.

I was wondering and curious, do I even have enough hours to give someone? And I just noticed that the better they did with things, the more I wanted to give them and the more I wanted to live in that top 20% and delegate even more of the 80%, but delegate it to the right people, qualified people. And I think it all starts with that executive assistant. And so, I remember for a period of time, and all of my assistants, I want to hire people that I think can grow with me. And way back in 2005, so 20 years ago, I had an executive assistant and she has grown with me and basically, she’s amazing. She’s grown in every business I’ve ever had.

But I remember there was a season where I eventually... she ended up going on to run our real estate portfolio. And I was in a season where I didn’t have an executive assistant again and I was like, “Oh, wow! Well, do I really need one?” Because at that point in time, I’d taken the year off. We were traveling. We literally were traveling the globe, went to 13 countries, just having a blast. So, I made the argument that I didn’t need someone.

But then I had these ideas and after taking this time off and reflecting on what I really wanted to do, that’s when I created the Lifestyle Investor. That’s when this brand, this idea, the book, the podcast, the mastermind, everything came into fruition. And in the early days of that mastermind, it was literally me. And then I brought, I’m like, I can’t do this all myself. So, then, I brought on an executive assistant, right? And so, it was fun having that relationship. That’s where I met you, guys. And so, it was neat building something.

So, for a long time, the Lifestyle Investor Mastermind was really just my executive assistant and I, and then we just continued to grow and then it was, “Hey, we need to move some other people into some other positions.” And so, it was like fractional COO and then it was fractional CMO or head of marketing and then it was full-time positions and full-time COO. And then it was fractional CFO and then it was fraction... And then, it’s like, let’s hire a full-time person there.

And then, eventually, the next level, that was a game changer for us. So, I do think the first game-changing level for me was hiring an executive assistant and hiring them full time, even though for me, I started at part time. But I actually think the next biggest game changer was getting that operator and I have an operator in every business, whether they’re a COO or just an operator. I have someone that runs operations, and then we have CFOs or head of finance in each of the businesses. But to have the next step being like, a family CFO that oversees all of the other CFOs and all the other heads of finance, like that was another huge key. And for me, it’s not that I didn’t know how to do it. I actually have enough skills that I can do it. That’s the problem. The problem is I’m good enough to do it.

Tricia Sciortino: Totally. Yeah, you could do it. Yeah.

Justin Donald: Right? But it’s not where I excel or where I love to spend my time. And so, I could give the example of when we brought on our family CFO, that was a game changer because now, I could get out of doing these things that he’s not only good at, he’s better than me with better ideas, better systems, better mechanics, just better everything. And now, I don’t have to worry about any of it. And I can spend my time more on the vision side of things and on the strategy side of things and on strategic partnerships, which is a high... that’s much more high value use of my time.

Tricia Sciortino: Exactly, exactly. And transparently, we have a very similar story. BELAY was founded on the owner and me, the first virtual assistant.

Justin Donald: I love it. Yeah, and I do remember that because I actually interviewed Bryan, your former boss, and now, good friend, business partner.

Tricia Sciortino: Yeah, business partner. So, yeah, it was us lifting it off the ground. It was nothing. He needed me to help him start. And I think more people having that mentality like, oh, the assistant can actually help me start this business. The assistant can actually help me create this business. I was creating the first email campaigns. I was creating our first CRMs. I was doing all the backend stuff of the business. We were setting up LLC and all this stuff. Like, I was able to help him so he could go out and get those first clients right out of the gate so I could do all the backend work. And I also had the opportunity to be a virtual assistant for Michael Hyatt. And so, Michael Hyatt’s another one, right? He’s a pleasure. I worked with him for about three years.

Justin Donald: Amazing.

Tricia Sciortino: And he did the same thing. When he left Thomas Nelson Publishing and started Michael Hyatt & Company, which is now Full Focus company, when he left and started Michael Hyatt & Company, the first thing he did was hire a VA. Me, first. He was blogging and he was writing. He wasn’t making revenue. He was just starting this business. But those stories, your story, my stories with Bryan and with Michael are just testimony that having an assistant early can actually help you grow the business and create the business. So, I always say, look, wherever you are in your journey, you’re already late.

Justin Donald: Yes, so true. And I just can’t recommend enough to go back and listen to or watch the Bryan Miles’ podcast interview, which is just such a cool, just foundational story of like, going from 0 to 100 and really having incredible business with BELAY and the expansion and everything that happened with it. And then go back and check out the podcast I did with Michael Hyatt. I mean, two amazing people that I consider friends and just really gifted individuals. And so, I love that you got exposure to those two, young in your life, that they’re actually in your ecosystem and you got to learn and train and grow with each of them. I mean, they’re both powerhouses. And it’s no surprise to me that you were able to rise through the ranks and now, run the company that you helped start.

Tricia Sciortino: Yeah. I truly feel like, the opportunity I had to work with both of them, it was easy for me to watch, learn, and replicate some of their habits. I mean, the thing that they most have in common is they were excellent delegators. Excellent. If I could pick whatever genius, if multiple geniuses, right, both of them, but they really understood, no, no, Mike knew. My lane is I’m a writer. I’m writing and I’m creating content. That is my lane. And I want to spend as many hours as possible in my 40-hour workweek doing those things. So, I’m going to need somebody else to handle email, handle travel, handle booking his keynotes, handle all those other things. I’m going to have a bookkeeper handle all the books and the finances because I’m the writer. Like, he knew very clearly what his role was from the very beginning, and it was a gift.

And so, I think, for me, even today, leading the organization as CEO, this will be my fifth year as CEO, it is very clear to me what my job is and isn’t. It certainly is not filling out expense reports. I have thousands of people counting on me to lead this company well and make the right decisions that we continue to prosper and grow for the benefit of many, many team members and clients. They’re counting on us. I should not be spending my time doing administrative tasks. That should be the last thing I would... None of our clients should want me as CEO doing expense reports. I should be doing way bigger, exciting things. They’re going to help keep this organization grow. Make sure that we’re focused on quality of service, make sure we’re focused on our message and our market and all those things. So, I think, whether you’re a small shop just starting out or you’re a big corporate organization, the art of delegation is truly going to be the limit or the liberator of your organization.

Justin Donald: That’s great. Our delegation is going to be the limit or the liberator of your organization. So, help me understand. And for me, I had to do this as a process over time. But how does someone get better at delegating? Obviously, you need the person there to be able to delegate to. So, even if you don’t know what you’re delegating, hire someone so that you can delegate to them. But I’d love your thoughts on that. And then maybe, afterwards, we can talk about just responsibilities that you see your team filling for those that have hired them.

Tricia Sciortino: Yeah, absolutely. I think as far as delegating and knowing where to begin, I would always recommend somebody doing a time study. So, I know it might sound ridiculous. You’re an executive or an entrepreneur, you’re a business owner. It sounds silly that I would sit down and analyze my time, like I’m in kindergarten, but I’m telling you, it’s a really worthwhile investment for you to just track what it is you’re doing, probably over the course of two weeks. Like, write it all down. I spent 10 minutes in email, I spent 5 minutes doing expense report. I spent one hour in the sales meeting. I spent, like, documented in an Excel spreadsheet or whatever. If you hate spreadsheets, write it on paper, whatever it is.

Document your time to first clearly... I think the first thing that will happen is we’ll very clearly see in buckets how much time you are wasting or spending on not the things you think you should be doing as an executive. So, then, it will become very clear to you what you could easily delegate. So, let’s say you’ve decided you’re going to delegate some administration. Delegating itself is hard. There’s steps in delegation. So, there is the first step is watch me. Then we’re going to let you try and then I’m going to watch you. So, watch me do something. Then you’re going to do it yourself, and then I’m going to give you feedback. So, there’s this delegation. You’re teaching. Watch me do it.

I think we see, a lot of times, we skip that step. We go right to you just jump in and figure it out and I’ll let you know if you’re right or wrong. So, that’s another version. We see a lot of this. Hey, figure it out. Tell me what you think, and I’ll let you know if I agree or disagree with that method. There are some things in some cases where that’s actually okay. That’s the second method. Like, “Hey, here’s the problem I’m having. See if you can solve it. Come back and let me know what you think, and I’ll let you run with it or not.” So, it’s like the gut check way. So, those are two ways to delegate, right? Like, watch me, or you go first and I’ll let you know.

Then I think if you walk through those processes and you get into a really good feedback loop, that’s where delegation becomes a really good engine that starts building momentum. The key is always the communication piece and the resetting expectations in super high frequency so that people aren’t going down the wrong pathway for too long. So, I think we see a lot of people who are frustrated. They come on, they maybe hire their first assistant. They’re really not great at delegating. They’re easily frustrated and they want to quit. They think, this isn’t for me. This isn’t working.

Typically, what we see is a lot of the time it’s not working because there’s communication gaps. Like, did you clearly set an expectation? Did you give the feedback that it missed the expectation? That’s hard for a lot of people, for somebody to say that’s not what I was looking for, try again. Like, that’s hard for a lot of people to say.

But as the person on the other side, it’s actually the thing you need to hear so you can do it better the next time. So, then it becomes a lot about being a really good communicator and getting really comfortable with giving feedback. And honestly, that’s just like Leadership 101, whether it’s your assistant, your CFO, your CMO, a marketing manager, like being able to give feedback even when it’s not positive, has to be something you become really comfortable with or you will stifle. Everything will be stifled.

Justin Donald: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. I love your points there. And I want to walk through an exercise that I did that was a game changer for me. So, I love that you outline, like make a list. It’s kind of like, you have a food diary and you’re writing down every single thing that you eat over the course of the day. But it is, it’s a work diary and you’re writing down everything that you do. And I like that you talked about adding up the hours, like how you’re spending it, right, from a time management standpoint.

What I also did with my list is I allocated an amount of dollars per hour that I thought it would take to get it done. So, now I know all the activities that I do in a given week or in a given month. I know how long I do them and then I can assign a dollar per hour to it. So, it’s like, oh, I was doing spreadsheets. Okay, that’s like $15 to $20 an hour, unless it’s super complex, right? Oh, this was data aggregation. Like, this is super... I mean, this is like $15 to $20 an hour work. I mean, some stuff, it’s like, oh, this is $10 an hour work.

And then it’s very clear, why on earth am I doing this when I can hire this out to someone who’s (a) thrilled to have that work and (b) like, better at it, (c) faster at it, (d) putting it in like a much more manageable format in the spreadsheet or whatever it is? So, that was powerful, but it also helped me realize, oh, here’s my $500 an hour work, here’s my $1,000 an hour work, my $2,000 an hour work. Like, those activities generate the most revenue, like that’s my top 1% or 2% of activities that generate the most revenue. I need to be doing more of that, and that’s harder to delegate. And if I were to ever delegate it, it’s going to take a much more trained professional to be able to do it.

And so, I just think there’s a lot of clarity when you do that audit of your time, of your... And by the way, do that same audit in your personal life because that’s where... it’s like I don’t ever make reservations for restaurants or doctor’s appointments or any of these things that I used to do because I have an executive assistant that can easily handle it, and like managing the calendar and managing email and managing travel, I mean, the list goes on and on. And in fact, probably, Tricia, we should jump into some of the things that people can utilize executive assistance for. So, I’d love to hear your list of what you have, what you’ve done, what you’ve hired executive assistants to do for you, what other clients have done, because I would just love our audience to say, “Oh, yeah, I would do that,” or, “Oh, I never thought about that.”

Tricia Sciortino: Yeah. Gosh, there’s limitless list. So, we’ll hit the basics, right? The list is limitless. And what I found is over time, you kind of mentioned this earlier, as you become better at doing this, you actually find more things that you can add to the list to delegate. So, I think, first and foremost, and you’ve kind of mentioned them, there’s like the typical to be assumed things, your calendar, managing your calendar, scheduling everything, personal and professional. I’m with you, Justin, I don’t schedule any of my personal appointments either. I’m one person, so they’re scheduling everything for me. I don’t ever touch my calendar. I put nothing on my calendar.

I also use an ideal workweek so a decision doesn’t have to be made about if something can go onto my calendar. So, I believe in creating the ideal workweek, which we have templates we could share. Ideal workweek. So, my assistant can just, “No, nope, she said no meetings on Fridays after two. I can’t schedule it there.” She doesn’t have to come and check things. So, have an ideal workweek, have your parameters set, get rid of your calendar. That’s so easy. Travel, easy. Like, aisle seat, like a window seat. Here’s my airline. Here’s my login, go. I prefer to fly in the morning, the afternoon, the night, like, that is easy. Get rid of it. We can scroll with every single airline and waste the time and book the cars. Forget it. Don’t even bother with it. Personal and professional. Same as you.

Justin Donald: And you can even build in, like you can get technical. Like, I have a matrix here for my EA where it’s, when I have these many points, let’s use them to buy a ticket versus paying for it. If with this airline, no need to buy first class because I automatically get upgraded, whereas this airline, I do want you to purchase first class because there is no automatic upgrade. I don’t have the points. I mean, so you can get super detailed. I always get an aisle seat. I always get extra legroom, wherever it is. If first class isn’t available, I want Economy Plus. Like, I just... and even so dialed down into like if it’s a three or four-hour flight, I have different criteria than if it’s a one or two-hour flight. If it’s international, it’s a whole ‘nother level of criteria.

So, I didn’t mean to interrupt, but I wanted to let people know, like how detailed we can get. And you don’t have to think about a thing. Like, when I’m transferring points from a credit card to book stuff, they do that. I don’t have to transfer them to the airline. They’ll look for the valuable point swaps and they’ll use Point.me and they’ll use The Points Guy and they’ll use all these hacks that we’ve taught them.

I actually have our executive assistant enrolled in a program where there’s a team that coaches them on how to get the best value or the most bang for your buck out of your points, your credit card points, your airline points, etc. So, they’re heading that up, right? But keep going. I had to interject.

Tricia Sciortino: Yeah, yeah, no, you can go deep. And I think, to your point, you can get so detailed and the thing that’s the best about that is it removes decisions. Like, they don’t have to make a decision because they actually just follow your matrix. They know exactly what to do. You don’t have to worry about a wrong decision being made and, oh, my god, I hope they don’t mess this. They know specifically what to do. It leaves very little room for error, very little margin for error, the more detail you can add to things.

Same thing with next on deck is email. Email is probably the thing that is, depending on the person, the hardest thing to let go or the first thing people are willing to let go of is their email, depends on how you’re living in there.

Justin Donald: Or combination of both, yes.

Tricia Sciortino: Yeah. It’s like a blessing and a curse? Email was one of the things that I struggled with transparently myself as a leader. It was the last thing I gave up was my email. Shame on me. But I did give it up eventually and said to myself, “Why did I not do this sooner?” The truth is we are a slave to that email. Gosh, it pings, we get notifications. We have to answer. The spam. I mean, there’s so much in there that is just unnecessary clogging our minds and brains. And so, email, even if you start small, even if it’s like filter out the garbage, filter newsletters into a read later folder, filter, reply all messages, archive them all. They can even start with some basic things and then they can eventually get into the reply on my behalf when A, B, and C happens. Reply on my be...

When I’m on PTO, reply and say I’m on PTO even though I do have my responder on. I’m still like, some people still need a personalized touch when I’m off. So, you can create these parameters that somebody can live inside of your email and they’re beautiful. And I’ve saved the most time back in a really long time because of email. So, that’s a beautiful thing.

Then I would say, what about meeting prep? Do you have a board? Do you have board meeting prep, board meeting logistics, board decks, board meeting follow-up, logistics planning, meeting spaces, lunches, team gatherings? Like, anything related to meeting logistics, whether they’re virtual or in-person, there’s so much around meeting logistics that, depending on what your organization is doing, that’s another thing off the plate.

Gifting is one, like we do team gifts, birthday gifts, anniversary, personal gifts. Help me order a gift from my husband. Help me order gifts for my kids. Help me with my Christmas shopping. My EA helped me order a Christmas tree literally this year because I was traveling over Christmas. So, like, gifting is a huge one, sending notes, note cards, things like this, whether it’s to new hires, like every new hire gets a note from me, my assistant helps me with all those things. So, there’s a lot to be said for gifting and team connection, personal and professional.

Then there’s the whole public persona part of who we all are in our businesses. I have a marketing assistant who helps me with my LinkedIn and my social and my public image and writing content creation, organizing content, scripting outlines. So much for my personal brands and who it is, I am in the market, so much for my content creation, the things I think and believe, ending up in content that drive BELAY, like the extraction of all that going over to the right people, that’s something that an assistant can do for you. Gosh, there’s so many more.

Justin Donald: I mean, we could go on and on for sure. And I love your list and I hope people that are watching and listening to this are saying, “Yeah, actually, I do need someone.” And I’m going to just say one other thing that has been a game changer for us, and that is teaching all of our teams, all of the people that work for us. But for me, it’s especially my executive assistant, how to better use AI to support her in her role. And that has been a total game changer for us, too, because that’s the gift that keeps giving. Let me tell you, that’s a total game changer.

And the amount of productivity that ends up being created by (a) having an executive assistant, (b) having them get good at AI, (c) having people that they sometimes can delegate to and obviously, they can always delegate to AI, but often, the executive assistants, you’re going to build up the needs and you’re going to see the value where you’re like, oh, I should probably get a virtual assistant or two for my executive assistant, not right out of the gates, but in time.

Tricia Sciortino: It comes, it comes. My executive assistant just got a virtual assistant January 1st. So, we’re just getting started, where now, she has an assistant. And number one, she was reluctant. I told her she needed one for months and she pushed back, just like everybody out there listening. Number two, as soon as she got it, she’s like, “Oh, my God, this is the best thing that’s ever happened.” And number three, she’s like, “I’m going to need more hours. I’m getting really good at delegating.” And we’re like three weeks into her having an assistant. It’s fantastic.

However, I will say to you, and I’m glad you brought it up about AI, AI is totally a game changer. Totally a game changer. Things that used to take my assistant hours now take her minutes, and it’s amazing. So, we capture, like for example, she would capture notes off of executive officer team meetings that we would have an action items that she would pull for all of us, so when the meetings were over, we all knew what actions we were taking. She would consolidate all this for me. Every meeting I was in. No longer, no more. There’s tools like Fathom and Otter who, even Zoom has an AI component now, where it can capture transcription, it can be translated into notes. You could slap it into ChatGPT, have an action item list, and email it out to your officer executive team group in the matter of literally 10 minutes. And it used to take her hours. So, there are just so many things we’re starting to leverage ourselves with our assistants being AI-enabled humans, like the power of an AI-enabled human, the productivity is now really supercharged. Totally supercharged.

Justin Donald: It’s incredible. Well, thank you so much for spending time today, Tricia. Obviously, you know your stuff and you walk the talk, right? So, everything that you’re discussing, you employ in your own life, but you’ve also been employed in a way that you have been the deliverer. You’ve been the servant of those things, right? You’ve been service oriented for however many people over the years. Now, you’re running the business. You’ve got a team that reports to you and many assistants and executive assistants and virtual assistants. So, it’s really cool to see how far you’ve come. How could people learn more about you and BELAY? Where should they go?

Tricia Sciortino: Yeah, I would say first and foremost, you can find out more about BELAY by going to BelaySolutions.com. We have an awesome resource. It’s called Delegate to Elevate that we want to give to you guys. So, if you text, I’m going to get you a text code here. If you text 55123, if you text the word “investor,” we’re going to give you guys a resource. It’s a Delegate to Elevate e-book. It’s actually practical application on how to start delegating. I think it’s going to be a great resource for anybody out there interested.

And then you can find me, Tricia Sciortino on Instagram, LinkedIn, or my website. Pronouncing of my name is never easy, the phonetics and the spelling of my name, so I’ll spell it for you guys. It’s T-R-I-C-I-A S-C-I-O-R-T-I-N-O. So, find me, follow me. I’ll be talking a lot about all the things we talked about today.

Justin Donald: Love it. We’ll list all this in the show notes so people can easily just click on it. And I like to end every podcast episode asking our audience a question. So, the question is the same each week. What is one step that you can take today, something you learned from Tricia that you can use to move towards financial freedom, move towards really building the life that you desire, buying some time back, but really living life on your terms, so not on autopilot or default, but rather, a life by design? Thanks so much, and we’ll catch you next week.