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Steven Jarvis, CPA (00:51)
Hello everyone and welcome to the next episode of the Retirement Tax Services Podcast Financial Professionals Edition. I’m your host, Steveen Jarvis, CPA. And very excited for this week’s conversation because we get to get in the trenches and talk about a topic that’s come up quite a few times, but to hear firsthand from someone who’s adopted this, applied it, and really benefited from it. We’ve talked many times about our good friends and partners at Belay doing so much to help advisors with finding ways to effectively delegate and finding resources to make that happen. So joining me this week is Tushar Kumar from Twin Peaks Wealth Advisors, who is a proud happy customer of Belay. So, Tushar, welcome to the show.

Tushar Kumar (01:30)
Steven, thanks for having me. This is the first time I get to chat with you, but I’ve spent some time with your brother Matt over the past couple of years. It’s kind of funny to see how similar you guys sound, which is what a lot of people say about me and my twin brother. But I love what you guys are doing at the Perfect RIA and at RTS and just happy to be a part of it. And I too am lucky enough to get to work with my brother at my RIA, so I’d love to see the brother duos winning together.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (01:54)
Yeah, well, I appreciate the kind words about what we’re doing. And yeah, I had a chance to meet your brother at Future Proof last year. I don’t know that I realized you guys were twins. My favorite joke when people ask if Matt is my brother, or usually it’ll be some vague question, but hey, do you have a brother in financial planning? I always say which one, cause I actually have four brothers, none of them twins. But yeah, is a lot of fun to get to kind of do some of these things alongside family at times. So appreciate you being willing to come on and glad that you’re getting a lot of value out of what we’re doing. So for our conversation today, I I’ve talked about on the podcast before I’ve used Belay in the past for virtual assistance for finding resources to help delegate. Actually, one of our team members came directly from Belay. So we’re huge fans of what they do. But wanted to hear from someone else, especially on the financial advising side of what that experience has been like. And really just want to start with and we’ll come back to how Belay specifically makes this so successful, but just in your experience, why even consider getting a VA? What was it that pushed you to, hey, I need somebody else on the team?

Tushar Kumar (02:50)
Sure, yeah, I I always like to start with why, like why did I convince myself to kind of go down this path and actually it was your brother who ultimately pushed me over the edge with Belay in particular, but look, my goal for my RIA was to grow it very sustainably at 20 to 30% per year. I run a $500 million RIA based in the Silicon Valley. We work mostly with tech employees, but what ended up happening as a result of us just being in business for a while was that know, capacity became a constraint. That was one of the first things that made me realize that I need some additional help. I just didn’t know exactly how to go about getting that help. But the two other things that made me realize it was time to start delegating was one was just advice from others. You know, I looked at other advisors and what they had and I always look, I think your brother and I share this idea, but we always like to look at who has done what we’ve, what we’re trying to do and just sort of copy them. And many of them had hired VAs or full-time assistants. And so I figured, you know, why recreate the playbook? Yeah, so, and then actually one last thing to add to that was I always felt like there was a lot of friction to getting that help, but you know, with services like Belay, you know, they sort of reduced that friction and it kind of made me realize that it’s gonna be a little bit easier to do than I had initially.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (03:58)
Well, and I’d be curious, excuse me, I’d be curious your thoughts because for me, it wasn’t hard for someone to convince me that a VA would be a good idea. Like having someone who’s gonna do all the things I don’t want to, yeah, that’s an easy sell. The harder sell for me, and you started talking about it there, was something, and it really just turned into mental roadblocks of in my head, it was gonna be so hard to find this person, to train this person, there’s no way they could possibly do it better than I could, like all those kinds of things. Was there anything in particular that helped you finally get over that hump of, yeah, this is going to be worth it, the cost and time and all of those things, I’m going to be better off, I’m going be able to accomplish more of my goals.

Tushar Kumar (04:30)
Yeah, certainly. Like for me in particular, I’m a very quick decision maker. So coming to that realization that I need help was easy. But I also like to start small and sort of de-risk some of these big moves that I’m making. And I think Belay and services like Belay make that possible. And so while I was onboarding with them, I basically realized that there wasn’t a whole lot of friction there. Like they basically let me onboard on my own terms. It was a very low dollar commitment, very low contract commitment. So I think they sort of de-risked that decision for me and allowed me to kind of dip my toe in the water before going all in. And I don’t know if that answers your question, but that’s, know, I think having their help for that onboarding and de-risking it for me made it much, much easier to say yes.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (05:13)
It absolutely does. And for anyone listening who’s also a quick decision maker, you just want to skip right to the end, you can text RTS to 55123 and you can get scheduled with Belay. If you’re like Tushar and just ready to go, just jump right in. But we’re going to continue this conversation. I think there’s a lot of other great things to pull out of here. So when you hired your first VA, because before we hit record, it sounds like you got multiple people on your team who have VA’s now. But for you personally, what was the first thing you delegated?

Tushar Kumar (05:38)
Yeah, the first thing, there was a few things that I delegated. So the first thing was gifting and mailing for prospects and clients. So we like to send every prospect that we meet with a handwritten card. We often send them a gift such as a book on a topic they might be interested in. And as the firm grew, it became more difficult to continue that level of personalization at scale. But we felt because of the nature of what we do that we really wanted to continue doing that. It just didn’t have to be me or someone on my team physically doing that anymore and going to FedEx every day. It just became to be, know, started to be too much. I also have Karen, my VA, helping with some light calendar, candle calendaring, scheduling help. For me, we run our business primarily on Zoom, but we like to do relationship-building stuff in person. So once a month she sits down with me and she says, hey, give me the two to five clients that you want to meet with in person, I’ll go ahead and schedule the lunches, the dinners, whatever you need to get that done. And that’s been a huge help because I felt like I had so much decision fatigue around saying, I want to meet you for lunch in Beverly Hills or in Palo Alto and then scheduling and rescheduling and reservations. It caused me to not want to do it, but now she does all of the heavy lifting there.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (06:49)
Yeah, well, especially if you’re maintaining a 20 to 30 % growth rate, those things are adding up. What might have seemed like a great way to have a high touch experience for a client early on suddenly becomes prohibitive if you’re trying to do it all yourself. And I love that you’re sharing specific examples because especially on a podcast, it’s easy to talk just in like big picture of, hey, you should have a VA is going to free up time. But when we can get tactical and say, okay, you here’s something very specific. It’s one of the things I really like to talk to advisors about specifically around, I mean, my favorite topic, which is tax planning, like, because I know it’s, it’s a huge time commitment. And some of that time has to come from the advisor. Some of it can come from other teammates, but only, only if we have people on the team that we’re able to delegate to and that we have a system that they can follow because at least In my experience, when you look to hire a virtual assistant, you’re not hiring a replacement for yourself. This isn’t somebody who can come in and do all the client interaction. They can’t come in and make the decisions for you, but they can execute, and they’re great at it. And it allows you to kind of take things off your plate that sometimes you don’t even realize how much of your time it’s taking and frees up time to do other things. So, Tushar, for you, what are those other things that you’ve been able to spend more time on because you have a VA on your team?

Tushar Kumar (08:00)
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, for me, I think about the highest value of work that I can do is to nurture relationships and spend time with my clients. So anything else I try to delegate to either relationship managers on the team or the VA, I’ll give you some examples of other things that I’ve offloaded to my VA. And I would say to anyone listening, would say think bigger about what a VA can do for you. That’s something that Megan and Lucy at Belay told me in our initial sales call, but they said it’s not just your business stuff, it could be even like your personal life. So for, I’ll give you a concrete example, me and my cousins, we do a quarterly dinner, just the adults, no kids, and it’s a big eight to 10 person group. It’s tough to get a reservation that size consistently, but Karen does the research, she calls the restaurants, she gets the private rooms, and she books everything for us, so it’s really not just the business side of things.

(08:46)
You know, to more clearly answer your question, we’ve progressed from simple administrative tasks to operations now. So Karen’s actually working with Katrina, our COO, to help with some light operations work on the backend with our portfolio management software. We have hired two additional Belay VAs for two of the other advisors on the team, my brother being one of them. And we more recently just hired the, or we signed a contract to hire the social media strategies that that belay offers as well. So gradually just trying to give more of these functions off to people who can spend some time on it more intentionally.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (09:22)
Yeah, it’s all about spending time intentionally, whether that’s you as the advisor and spending time on your highest and best use, but it really it applies to all of our team members. And I love the different resources that Belay is coming out with. One of the things I really appreciate about being able to work through a service like Belay is, mean, we work in an industry with sensitive information, with confidential client data that we have access to and so this isn’t as simple as putting an ad on Craigslist and taking whoever has an extra 20 hours a week like we need to make sure that screenings done that we’re high they were getting quality people on the team So that we’re building intentionally as we go and yeah, I’ve had nothing but great experiences doing that. I like your comment about thinking beyond just the business. Mean, these might seem like silly examples, but they’ve made a difference for me. One of the things that my VA started doing for me was scheduling my haircuts. People are listening to this, not watching it. I don’t have a particularly complicated haircut, but it’s just not something I really care that much about. And so it would go too long before I would do it again or I just wouldn’t think about it. And it seems silly, but it’s one less thing I have to worry about. On the other end of it, I’ve been impressed over and over again about how deep I can go and how complicated I can get at times with my VA. I have her now do outreach for me for potential guest spots on other people’s podcasts. And we work together on an email template, and then she does all the follow up because some of these things can take multiple times to get in front of people. now that’s not me spending the time on executing it. I can go identify other podcasts I want to be on just as kind of a a range of examples here.

Tushar Kumar (10:45)
Right, yeah, that operational leverage is incredible.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (10:48)
Yeah. Yeah, that’s super exciting that you’ve started adding other team members as well as getting that help because, you mentioned my brother as we kicked off. Mean, he’s probably more aggressive than I am on this topic, but I totally agree with him that there’s so much time we don’t even realize we waste as the lead advisor, as the CEO, as the founder. When you’re in that leadership role, it can be really easy to spend lots of time on email and calendaring and booking your travel and all these things that you don’t think really add up until you can delegate them to someone else and realize just how much time you can spend on these bigger things that only you can do.

Commercial (11:19)
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Tushar Kumar (12:58)
It adds up so quickly and for me one of the tipping points was I finally looked at what is my hourly rate based on what our firm is doing and I did the math there and realized, oh wow, so every hour that I spend doing this, that and the other, it’s actually costing me money. was a… Go ahead.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (113:14)
That’s a really good point because when I first started delegating, I first looked at what are the things I really don’t like doing? And those were easier for me to delegate. Some of the ones that were harder were things that I kind of took a little bit of guilty pleasure in. I used to really love doing travel logistics. Like, oh, let me get on the app and poke around and find flights and hotels. And where can I get a good deal? And I just enjoyed doing that. But then like you, when you think about – Okay, what’s my hourly rate and my highest and best use? Okay, maybe I shouldn’t be poking around for the best flight options. Like I can give some of my preferences and they can take care of that.

Tushar Kumar (13:46)
Right, exactly. That’s still sort of my guilty pleasure. I probably have Karen book 30 % of my flights, I still enjoy booking some of them. But on that topic, my mom called me the other day and she had just gotten off a plane and she said, I’m not getting mileage credit for this flight. There’s some issue with United. I’m really frustrated. And I happened to be talking to Karen that day. So I said, hey, any chance you can follow up with United to get my mom her mileage credit? Because I wanted to solve this for my mom, because she’s my mom, but I didn’t necessarily want to be on the phone with United for an hour. So she took care of that and made my mom happy. Yeah, so again, goes beyond just work.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (14:27)
I love that example. are some other things that maybe surprise you about delegating as far as like things you could delegate or what that experience has been like?

Tushar (14:34)
So one thing that really surprised me was that I wasn’t aware that a VA would be able to do stuff for me or my firm in person. I always had this thought that, this person just has to sit behind the desk and only do desk work. But with Karen in particular, we sent her a bunch of our company swag and client gifts, and she stores that stuff in her house, which is very kind of her. And she goes to FedEx in person four days a week to mail stuff out for different advisors in the firm. And that’s something that I didn’t think that we were allowed to do or that a VA would even do, it feels like such a simple thing, but I just had no idea that that was possible.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (15:07)
Yeah, it’s fascinating. Yeah, because it turns out when you do something over and over and over again, you get really, really good at it. And so we all, as advisors, as we run companies, as we lead teams, we have this list of things that we think we can’t delegate to someone else because no one else could do it as well as we can. But when it’s the exception for us, of course somebody else can do it better. Like it only makes sense that someone who does that thing all the time. One of the things that surprised me early on, I’d be curious your experience, and this was definitely an early really big selling point for me with Belay. When I first went to onboard my first VA, it was in February. So right as we’re going into our tax filing season, and I didn’t think I had any time to bring someone on and to train them and to figure out what I could even delegate. And my VA, as they started, they did all that work for me. So they filled out my onboarding packet with Belay. They set up all my preference. they had actually, obviously I had to some input from me. But I was I was surprised over and over again of how much of the delegation process my VA could drive for me Which he seems kind of counterintuitive, but they really helped every step of the way

Tushar Kumar (16:01)
Yeah, absolutely. We’re actually, you know, we’re planning a client event here in October in the Bay Area and there’s a bunch of decisions that we need to make as a team around what restaurant are we going to hold it at, how many people, who’s the photographer, what’s the venue going to be. My brother’s VA is the one running with that process, but she’s doing all of the research and really distilling it down to just a few decisions that we have to make as a leadership team, that feel as amazing to outsource what would have taken us probably 15 hours to plan down to just a couple hours.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (16:31)
Yeah, and there’s the time, there’s the decision-making fatigue, there’s the brain power that goes into it as well. Those are all great things to be able to hand off to someone else on your team. Tushar, as you’ve gone through this, are there things on your list you still would like to delegate or that you still think you should be delegating? Like what comes next for what you’re going to give to a VA?

Tushar Kumar (16:49)
I think it’s enhancing what I’m already doing, so just offloading even more of the scheduling to my VA, even more of the travel booking. I recently moved to LA about a year ago and my business is based in the Silicon Valley, so I do have to go back and forth quite a bit. So think managing some of those travel logistics will be huge. I do think that I can do a better job about the personal side of things. An example I got was, why am I paying my own property tax? Teach her how to pay my property tax and you know or if I need to update an address somewhere like why am I doing that in you know this portal or that portal so some of those little lightweight housekeeping things that I’m still doing I think I can easily delegate off. I will say that one thing that did help us tremendously was that we have a standing I do a bi-weekly meeting with my VA for me weekly was overkill but I think weekly or bi-weekly is a good cadence because it just having that forced 30 minutes a week lets your mind think about things that you may not be, you may not have delegated otherwise unless you had that time.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (17:49)
Yeah, I don’t know how it is for you. I know early on, I just kind of set some almost like standard operating procedures with my VA so that she could help me improve on my delegating. So one of the things I’m really guilty of is when something comes up that I’m not sure what exactly the answer is, I just, oh, I’ll figure that out. come back and let everybody know. And so then my VA, and she was super gracious about it when she brought it up, but she said, hey, Steven, it be all right when you say those kinds of things if I at least ask if I can try? And so it was just kind of breaking my habit. And so now I’ve shifted very dramatically on that. And so in a meeting, if I ever start to say, wait, I’ll just take care of that, like, never mind. Like, hey, why don’t you take the first go? And if you need me, I’ll go from there. And it’s been amazing how much it’s shifted what I can spend my time and energy on.

Tushar (18:29)
Yeah, I wonder if that’s a belay thing or just a VA, because Karen said the same thing to me. So I wonder if they get that script. But yeah, it’s an amazing thought exercise because it really opens your mind as to what else someone could do for you.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (18:41)
Yeah, well, and to your point about, I mean, the training that Belay does, I haven’t seen the handbook. I would imagine they probably got a really good system for it. But one of the other things that stands out to me, and I think I might have gotten this from my client service coordinator potentially, but just this idea of like, you and I, as we lead teams to serve clients like that, that’s really our highest priority is creating quality outcomes for our clients. And that drives a lot of what we’re doing, whether that’s growth through new clients or serving existing clients. For a VA, their goal, when they come to work in the morning, it’s, what can I do to take things off the plate of the person I work with? How can I help them? There’s really that service mentality, but it’s internally focused within the team. And it’s incredible what it allows all of us to do.

Tushar Kumar(19:21)
Yeah, absolutely. Hey, gotta ask you, did you hire a VA first, or did your brother go first?

Steven Jarvis, CPA (19:26)
My brother went first. Yeah. I’m trying to think of the first time he hired a VA. He’s used Belay multiple times. And that’s one of the things I’ve just loved about Belay is that they’re a partner along the way with you. Mean, things happen. The last VA I hired from Belay, we ended up just buying out her contract and hiring her full time under our team because she was so great. And Belay was celebrated with us. They weren’t upset that we took one of their great employees because they’re there to help along the way as well. But yeah, Matt went first and then, geez, I’m almost a year and a half into having someone on my team in that role and it’s fantastic.

Tushar Kumar (19:57)
Yeah, it’s great. And have to say, they all tend to go above and beyond. But they also makes it very easy. We did have to switch out one VA that wasn’t working out or wasn’t the right personality fit. And they made that a very seamless transition for us. But yeah, they’ve gone above and beyond. And I’ll share a story about Karen, particularly, that she did for us. But we were pitching a prospect on a Friday. Fridays are busy days. lot of tech employees work from home on Fridays. And so we have this pitch, and it’s a fairly big prospect, and our closing meeting was set up for early the subsequent week. So I shot Karen a message and said, hey, do you mind going to FedEx, sending out the handwritten notes, send them this book. I know it’s late, but we have this meeting on Monday. I’d like for them to get this touch point between now and then. And so she did it. She didn’t have to work on a Friday night, she didn’t have to follow up over the weekend, but she went above and beyond. That prospect did end up converting and becoming a client of the firm. But that’s an example of one of those kind of little fine touches that we like to put on our client experience that I’ve had to sort of move off of my plate. But I appreciated that she was able to go above and beyond for us, especially when she would probably rather be spending her time with her family.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (21:07)
I love that story because it highlights one of the things that I honestly was a little bit surprised by at first, but now I just come to expect from Belay, which is that it’s about the only like third party like vendor relationship I’ve had where the person I’m working with still feels like they’re part of my team. And that’s been my experience every time that they come in and yeah, they’re there to go above and beyond to make the results happen. So I love seeing that. Too sharp for people listening who still have that little bit of hesitation of, is it the right time? Is this really an investment I should make? What would you say to an advisor who has hesitation around hiring a VA and starting this delegation process?

Tushar Kumar (22:413)
I mean I would ask yourself why you’re unsure about hiring a VA and write those reasons down. But then I’d also, you know, maybe in a separate column, write why you might want to have one in the first place and take that list and set up a call with Megan or Lucy at Belay or whoever it is and share those concerns because, you know, that’s really what I did. I left that sales conversation feeling like I just had a very different perspective on what the VA relationship is like. But figure out what your why is, why might you want to, why might you not want to, and then see if Belay or any VA service for that matter can address some of the concerns that you have. And I think based on how the industry is now structured for VA’s, it’s a fairly de-risked proposition. If it’s not going well, you can cancel the service and maybe you’re out a few thousand bucks from underutilizing something, but it’s not like you’re out. You know, tens of thousands of dollars and, you know, an employment lawsuit or anything like that. Like, it’s just so different from hiring your own full-time person. And I think it’s great for people who want to take one step and sort of grow with their VA over time.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (22:44)
100%. Yeah, love that recommendation. And then I’ll tie it back to what you said at the top, which was you had a specific goal you want to accomplish and you needed somebody to delegate to for you to really accomplish that goal. And for you, it was the growth of your firm. Selfishly, I always hope that it’s for people to do more with tax planning, which I know you guys are very tax focused already. But whatever, as an advisor listening, whatever it is that, like when you think of a year from now or five years from now, when you think about what you want to be spending your time on or where you want your firm to go. I would just be shocked if you could convince me that you’re not gonna get there more effectively and more quickly. And honestly more happily, if you can start delegating some of these things. And so I love that recommendation to actually write it down. Because we all have those objections that come into our mind when we need to make a new investment or make a change, well, what about this and this and this? Don’t just have an internal dialogue. Take that recommendation seriously. Write those things down. And if you need somebody to talk them through with, yeah, get on that discovery call with Belay. Talk them through it with a team member. Yeah, I’m just be hard-pressed to be convinced that you won’t find value to be had in a relationship like that.

Tushar Kumar (23:40)
absolutely. And look, it’s a growth moment for anyone when they make that leap. I always am reminded of anything that you really want in life is on the other side of something that you don’t want to do or you’re reluctant to do. sometimes just taking a couple of weeks to make that knowledge transfer off to a VA is going to pay very significant dividends down the line.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (23:58)
Yeah, anything you really want is on the other side of something you really don’t want to do. that’s a great place to wrap this up. And again, for anyone listening, if you’re ready to have this conversation with Belay to get started with a virtual assistant, text RTS to 55123. They’ll get you set up with one of those demo calls, and you can get started on this as well. So, Tushar, thank you so much for sharing your perspective. I’m so glad to hear that this is going so well for you. It’s certainly been a great experience for me as well, working with the VA, and just love hearing other people’s perspective on this.

Tushar (24:26)
Thanks SteVen and good luck to you and everyone at RTS.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (25:28)
appreciate that. To everyone listening, thanks for being here. Until next time, good luck out there. And as always, remember to tip your server, not the IRS.