Read The Transcript Below:

Steven (00:52):

Hello everyone and welcome to the next episode of the Retirement Tax Services podcast, financial Professionals edition. I’m your host, Steven Jarvis, CPA, and this week on the show, I am excited because we have someone who’s not a CFP or a CPA, and I love getting different perspectives on how we can all level up what we were doing for our clients, for our businesses. So really excited to welcome to the show Lisa Seal, who is the Chief Revenue Officer at BELAY. Lisa, welcome to the show.

Lisa (01:19):

Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Steven (01:21):

Love that you’re here. Obviously, we love our partnership with BELAY. I use a BELAY virtual assistant myself. Any longtime listeners of the show will remember that we’ve talked about BELAY at the summit last year. You guys are going to be back again this year. Lisa Z was on the podcast earlier this year, so clearly we’re fans of all things BELAY,, because it provides this great opportunity for people to take action on a concept that I feel like can get thrown around as a buzzword if people don’t have specific ways to go about it, and that of course is this idea of delegation.

Lisa (01:53):

Absolutely. For some reason it’s the biggest struggle I think for leaders delegating.

Steven (01:58):

You know Lisa. It really is, and I’m sure it’s a combination of a lot of different things. I can look at my own journey of things I delegate today that a couple of years ago I would have never guessed that those are things that I could delegate, things like my email and my calendar and these things that having a virtual assistant is phenomenal for. We also want to talk today about bookkeeping. This is another topic that probably needs to get delegated more often, but before we dive into all that, Lisa, just give us a little bit about your background and your role at BELAY just so that everyone listening knows where you’re coming from as we have this conversation.

Lisa (02:30):

Sure, sure. So I have been with BELAY for 10 years. My background, my career background has been all things sales and business development. From a young age, I got into sales and became a sales leader. Very young. Yeah, so it’s just, it’s been that journey of all things business development and really focusing on growth for businesses. I was lucky enough to stumble across BELAY back in 2014. I got to do some math there, where I started off selling and we were a rapidly growing, very small and mighty little scrappy business, and I think I was the 20th employee and just have climbed as the company grew and leadership needs grew with that. I grew in my career with that and so eventually became the chief revenue officer overseeing all things sales, business development and marketing for the company.

Steven (03:22):

That’s super exciting. Just for context now, you’ll have to correct me if I’ve got this wrong, but you were the 20th employee of a company that now has, I don’t think I’m exaggerating, like 50,000 virtual assistants on your team, right?

Lisa (03:35):

Yeah, we have thousands of virtual assistants and we have our corporate staff is just under 150 employees.

Steven (03:43):

Wow. That’s super exciting. Lisa, over that time, what are some things that come to mind of maybe things that you were even surprised of when you came across from the first time that people were delegating?

Lisa (03:54):

I would say personal tasks was really surprising to me. In my previous careers, I’ve had assistance and that was always kind of a no-no, especially for some reason when you’re in person as a leader asking an assistant to order your white flowers or make a dinner reservation or I can’t, numerous things. Putting your child’s sports schedule on your calendar so you don’t miss a soccer game. That was kind of a no-no in office settings, or maybe that I’m dating myself. Maybe that was kind of like the nineties that it was just kind of seen as below or beneath an employee. But here at BELAY, we really believe that we’re serving the whole person. My leadership doesn’t end with my nine to five, and so I am super fortunate to have an executive assistant who serves all of me, whether that’s my kids’ school calendar, ,or making my hair appointment or whatever it may be. She serves me and there’s no negative connotation around that. It’s just truly a servant hearted way of thinking, if you will, and I love that that’s accepted and actually encouraged here.

Steven (05:05):

Yeah, it clearly is. I mean, you mentioned your hair appointments. That’s actually one that’s recently been added to my VA’s list. I know it doesn’t seem like I need a lot of upkeep, but my problem in the past was it was never that important to me, and so it’d always go further than it should have, and so now my VA has it on a set schedule and coordinates it around the rest of my calendar and it’s fantastic and it seems like this silly little thing, but it was a pain point, something I didn’t like dealing with, and now it’s super easy and you really casually mentioned in there, which makes it clear that this is an integral part of what you do. Delegating some of these things allows you to be the leader you need to be, that you’re a leader from more than just nine to five, and that’s really what delegation comes down to is allowing someone in a leadership role to focus more of their time and energy on the things that only they can do.

Lisa (05:52):

Or only things they should be doing. I think that’s key and I say that because I actually really like booking my own travel, I really like it. I love going on to the Delta website and picking my seat and looking for the best deal and all of that, and I could get lost in that, but BELAY is not paying me to book my own travel, and so my time is worth a lot, and so if I’m doing that, that flight just got really expensive and it’s not the best use of my time and I shouldn’t be doing that. And so really letting go of the things that you have no business being involved in that don’t actually require you to do it.

Steven (06:30):

I love nerding out on these one-off things, but before I get too carried away with asking about the exceptions, I should tell our audience that if you text RTS to 55123, BELAY will actually just send you a list of 25 things that advisors should be delegating to a virtual assistant. There are some core things that everyone should be delegating, like email and calendar booking, travel, so text RTS to 55123, and you’ll get a copy of that checklist and that way, Lisa, you and I can keep talking about some of these exceptions because it is always interesting to me. I’m constantly learning from other people about ways that they’re leveling up, and a lot of times these conversations for me at least, they’ll start almost with like a chuckle of it and no, you can’t really be delegate, and then it’s like, oh, actually that makes a ton of sense. Yeah. You mentioned using VAs in your personal life. I’d be curious how you help people or how you personally navigate the balance with your family with a significant other, with kids of what’s that balance of: Hey, I have this VA who does all these things for me, but not making them feel like you’re creating a barrier for your family to interact with you.

Lisa (07:36):

I don’t make them call Lindsay to see their mom. I don’t do that, but they know exactly who Lindsay is, and so there are times where I have two college-age kids, and they may be asking for something that they know I don’t have time with, and they’ll say, do you think Lindsay could help with that? So they’ve gotten used to actually leaning into her as well, not directly but through me, so I’m protecting her and yeah, so I think it’s just become part of our family, if you will. I know that sounds crazy, but I’m in Michigan, Lindsay’s in Atlanta, they’ve never met her in person, but there is a connection that she has to me, which in turn means that she has a connection to my family. So yeah, it’s just something that we talk about on a regular basis and they know I lean into her, and so they’ve gotten comfortable to talk about it in that way and to really lean into her as well.

Steven (08:29):

There’s so many things in life, whether it’s tax planning or financial planning in general, these different things that we do. Certainly onboarding a VA that comes down to setting clear expectations and having really great communication. I just fess up that I got this a little bit wrong when I first started working with a VA. As far as how I present to this to my family, my intention, I travel a lot and my VA books, my travel, and so as I travel, as I speak, as I get on stage, there’s times where I’m just not accessible, not very often, but I don’t bring my cell phone on stage. And so what I intended to do was present this to my family as: Hey, if I’m ever traveling, you’re not sure where I am or what I’m doing or need to make sure I’m okay, then Danielle, my VA, this is who you’re going to reach out to and here’s how you’re going to reach out to her. And as I repeat this back to you, that sounds super clear and concise, whatever I said the first time it was heard as, if you want to know about what I’m doing or where I’m going, you will have to check with Danielle, this person you’ve never met and have no idea who she is. If you would like to have any information about the travelings and whereabouts of Steven Jarvis, wait, time out. Yep. Nope, this isn’t what I meant to do. So there definitely is this, you can have a better outcome if you’re really intentional with your communication.

Lisa (09:41):

Yes. Yeah. One of the things that I have my assistant Lindsay do for me is if I am traveling, which I travel quite a bit as well, I make sure that she sends my husband a calendar invite to his work calendar so that he is aware of my comings and goings. He knows when I’m going to be out of town. He knows when I’m planning to leave, and he has it on his work calendar. And so it’s little things like that that she’s able to do to keep my family informed of my comings and goings as well. So I understand that completely.

Steven (10:11):

,Let’s change gears here just a little bit because this whole conversation about delegation, it’s not just focusing on the things only I can do, but maybe things that I should or shouldn’t be doing. And so what I see a lot is people, advisors who will hold onto things longer than they really should. It’s not that much time I can handle. It’s not that big of a deal. And so this creates two problems. One is taking away time from things that we otherwise could be focused on. And number two is that it probably has us doing things we really aren’t as good at as we think we are. And high on my list of those things, especially for small business owners is bookkeeping because this is one of those things that everybody knows that they’ve got to have some level of bookkeeping, but especially as a small business, you’re already now, if you’re a solopreneur, they’re go, I don’t need to go pay someone to do this. I opened a bank account and to track my receipts. It’s no big deal and I’m actually in full support on day one. Maybe you don’t need a bookkeeper, but Lisa, what I find is that people get to year 10 and are way past when they should have converted over.

Lisa (11:11):

Yeah, absolutely. Which is exactly why we started our bookkeeping service line shortly after we started our virtual assistant service line. So that was the second service offering pretty quickly after we started our business back in 2010. And what we find, we serve very small businesses in their bookkeeping up to larger businesses, but we are able to serve pretty small startups, if you will. And the reason is ,because most people don’t go into business with that being their specialty. Now, financial advisors, maybe they can do it for a while, but is that what you went into business for? Is that really what you should be spending your time just because you can, and one thing that we always see a client come in where they’ve gotten to a point where they’re saying, my CPA is asking for a report that I don’t know how to run, or I actually don’t have any of the information they’re asking for, and now they found themselves in trouble when it comes to quarterly tax payments or whatever else that might be happening. They don’t have clean books and then they’re scrambling and trying to get them clean, and it’s a problem. We find that really, with both our virtual assistants offering and our bookkeeping services is simply people don’t go into business to do all of this themselves. They had a product or a thing or a service that they wanted to make more accessible to the world. And if you are burdened by the administrative tasks that come with running your business, then you’re not actually serving your clients well and you’re not growing your business. And so that’s where our services and our offerings really try to help our clients maximize that.

Commercial (12:40):

Hey there, advisors, this is Jamie Shilanski. You might recognize my voice from my Worlds to Conquer episode over at The Perfect RIA podcast. I get a lot of questions from my financial advisors about what type of continuing education should they attend, how should they dedicate themselves to professional development this year and what conferences are really worth going to. Well, I’m going to let you in on a little secret. The one conference I will not miss is the Retirement Tax Services Summit this September. It is going to be held in Phoenix, Arizona, and this is the most sensational conference I go to, and not because of all the fanfare involved in being in Phoenix, but instead about collaborating with like-minded individuals. And these are people that have legal expert tax planning advice. These are people that do qualified accounts, big retirements. They are creating five and 10-year tax plans. They have guest speakers that talk about hyper-efficiency and the things that you need to know to keep you on the cutting edge of being a financial advisor. It is certainly where I will be. You don’t want to miss this conference, so make sure that you jump over to retirementtaxservices.com and register to attend this summit. I know it’s where I’ll be this September.

Steven (13:50):

Well and Lisa, this is why we love partnering wIth BELAY. I was excited to have you come on the podcast because I spent all my time talking about tax planning, but these things that we’re talking about that could potentially be delegated, these are things that get in the way of advisors adding tax planning or expanding their tax planning. We’ve got to create a place in the day for this to live, because what I find quite often from advisors is these things that you’re talking about. Again, people know they need to get done, so they do them themselves or they just pick someone on their team who may or may not have the expertise and say: Hey, go figure this out. And so I know one of the hesitations to work with an outsourced firm on bookkeeping or even an outsourced virtual assistant is just getting your mind around the logistics of, well, right now, it’s easy to go to Scott in the corner of my office and say, great, do the bookkeeping. You’re already here. You have access to all the records and trying to wrap your mind around, wait, I’m going to give someone that I haven’t met who’s not in person, that I didn’t screen myself. I’m going to give them access to sensitive client data to sensitive business data. So maybe talk about how BELAY, they’re sensitive data, but I think the biggest thing to think about is to structures this because I know this is a huge priority to make sure that that sensitivity is there.

Lisa (14:55):

Yeah, that’s a great question. So for one, we do background checks on all of our bookkeepers. Obviously they’re sensitive data, but I think the biggest thing to think about is take a step back and think for a second. We’re all hiring people, right? Yeah. You’re hiring employees every day or every year we’re hiring employees, and you do your own due diligence on who that person is, and you might call a reference and you might do a background check, but really what do you know about them, right? So we’re taking risks every day. The difference with hiring a company like us is that we’ve taken that risk for you, and we are the ones that are responsible for it. If you hire a person directly and they do something fraudulent, you are the person that has to go after them. You’re the person who owns that, right? You made that hire. With BELAY we carry that burden for you. And so you have a company that is the umbrella over these contractors that have access to this information. Of course, we do all of the legal necessary things. We have NDAs and ICAs and every contract that you can imagine, and of course we have all the insurances that you need to have as well, but really the risk isn’t any greater hiring a contract. As a matter of fact, when you hire it through a company like us, it’s actually a little bit less because you’ve got a company, a corporation who’s responsible for that contractor.

Steven (16:12):

Again, let’s maybe go back in the conversation just a little bit. You talked about how you see a lot of people come to you because they’ve got a question from a CPA, they don’t know how to answer, or they’ve kind of got this messed cleanup. What else should either advisors listen to this thinking about their own situation or thinking about for their clients? I know we have a lot of advisors that listen that work with small business owners. What are other indications that an outsourced bookkeeping service, whether it’s BELAYday journal entries and the day-to-d or someone else, what are those things that they should be looking for to say, Hey, it’s time to look into this?

Lisa (16:41):

Yeah, I would say, are there chart of accounts clean? Are they assessing it year over year? Are their reconciliations clean? Are they able to ensure all of the journal entries are done every month and are they reconciled at the end of each month? It’s really that clean books that you feel confident when you have to give those reports to your CPAs to file your taxes, to do all of the higher level things is really when you need to be sure that it’s handled between accounts payable and accounts receivable. Obviously that being actually handled on a timely basis, but it’s the reporting that we find is the most valuable. It’s not the day-to-day. That’s part of it. The day-to-day journal entries and the day-to-day reconciliation. But it’s really that month end reporting, am I starting the next month with clean books? And oftentimes when you’re the founder or owner doing it yourself, it’s the one thing you’re like, eh, I’ll get to it next week. And then the quarter goes by and you’ve got a mess on your hands that you now need help cleaning up. So we get a lot of those calls too. I’ve been doing it myself for two years and it’s a mess and I don’t have time to do it, and here’s my stuff in a shoebox.

Steven (17:50):

That’s really helpful context. The audience here are all financial professionals, so of course we got to talk about the numbers just a little bit. So talk to me about the economics of this, because again, when I get questions from people about the topic of outsourcing in general, you got number savvy people. It’s okay if somebody else is going to do this for me. There’s got to be some kind of markup. They want to make a profit too, so how does this make sense to go and hire a third party to do these things?

Lisa (18:14):

Yeah, so I feel the biggest thing is taking the understanding that we’re a fractional service. So most small businesses do not need full-time. If you need a full-time, you’d have a financial department or you’d have an administrative pool to pull from if you’re large enough. And so we serve businesses that are in half a million in revenue, up to a billion in revenue. But it really, especially in our bookkeeping side, if you don’t have a finance department, this is really in a cost-effective and efficient way to get the support you need because you don’t need that full-time person. And the minute you all hire a full-time person as an employee, you have the employee burden costs on top of it. So since we don’t have employee burden costs, it actually is about a wash. If you’re looking at hiring a full-time accounting professional, at a bookkeeper level, you’re probably looking at 60 to $75,000 a year before employee burden costs. You have that on top of it, another 20 to $30,000 a year in employee burden costs. You’re really up there in a full-time employee status, where with us, you’re contracting with us and it’s a contractor service. Not only that, we are guaranteeing those contractors’ business, so they don’t actually have to go find the business themselves. We’ve vetted the client just like we tell our clients, we’ve vetted the contractor for you, and we’ve gone through all of these things to assess them and do all these background checks. So by the time they get to you, they’re a proven person. Well, we say the same thing to them from the client perspective. We have vetted this client. We know one they can pay. They’re a nice person, they have a business we believe in, and therefore we feel good giving it to that contractor so the contractor doesn’t actually have to go find their own work, which is a huge relief to a lot of them. Some of them come to us from being former contractors out on their own and trying to be a freelancer, and that’s a struggle that they are having to drum up their own business and this way through BELAY, they don’t actually have to do that. We are giving them vetted clients.

Steven (20:14):

That makes a lot of sense. And again, this is touching on areas, whether it’s the services a VA provides or the bookkeeping touching on areas that a lot of people by default will just kind of like, ah, well, we’ll just figure that out. If somebody can do this on top of all their other job responsibilities, and this is something I’ve certainly noticed from having my own VA, there’s a big difference between someone who’s sort of trying to figure out what they’re doing and someone who does a thing all the time. I’m actually blown away sometimes at how much my VA knows, how much Danielle knows about doing these different steps. She’s done them dozens or hundreds of times and not just the one-off times I’ve done them myself.

Lisa (20:49):

Yeah, I completely agree. And not only that, this is their, again, it’s because of the way we assess and vet both contractors, whether it’s virtual assistant or a bookkeeper. There’s a servant heartedness that comes with that. And so if you’re just delegating administrative tasks to Jason in the corner, is Jason really going to be able to do that and is he going to put his heart behind it? So there’s that part of it that you have to be mindful of that. You mentioned Danielle, I mentioned Lindsay, it is her goal to serve me as a person, which is beautiful, and that’s not what you hire that employee for that you’re trying to delegate to. It’s not that they can’t do it, it’s just probably not their gifting and not really what they want to do. And so there’s something to be said about making sure that the person that you have doing the things that you need to have done actually likes to do it, and it’s actually their career and what they’ve made of themselves. And not only that, if you are just delegating what I like to say, peanut butter spreading the workload among your employee base, how is anybody being proactive for you? One of the best things that I’m sure you’re experiencing with Danielle, that I experienced with Lindsay is she’s in my inbox and she’s in my calendar. She’s in my Slack, the IM tool that we use, and so that she is able to say, Hey, I noticed this thing that came across. I went ahead and handled it for you. And I’m like, oh, okay. One less email I have to actually deal with because she just did it. You can’t get that if you’re delegating in-house and not delegating to somebody whose whole sole job is to do that for you, so you’re missing out on a lot. Sure, the tasks might get done, but that’s about it.

Steven (22:33):

Lisa, that’s great insight there. When I talked to advisors, I’m sure this is true outside the industry, this just happened to be the industry I’m focused on. I meet a lot of the people who have never had an assistant before, and so anytime people are trying something new, one of the questions I always like to ask is, how does this go wrong? Where do you see this not go well? Or what are some painful learning experiences that we can help people skip past in the early stages?

Lisa (22:56):

The biggest thing that I recommend is letting them in, let them into all of the things, give them access. And I know it’s so scary to some people to give them access to their inbox, but I like to use the analogy, and this again, it’s dating myself, but I’m going to do it anyway. Back in the nineties before virtual assistance were a thing and you had the receptionist or the office secretary, if you will, who sat at the front desk and they’re the gatekeeper, right? You couldn’t get to the office manager, you couldn’t get to the leader in the building because that person is the gatekeeper. They’re making sure that they’re not getting too close, and if you don’t have an appointment, you don’t get to come in, but your email is now that reception desk, everything that people, every outreach is coming through your inbox, and so your assistant gets to be the triage, what gets through to you and what doesn’t get through, what can they handle so that you’re not handling, so if you’re not letting them have access to that inbox, man, they’re not really seeing much of your life. That is where most of it is, because secondary to that is your calendar, making sure that you’re giving them access to your calendar so that they can kind of scrutinize how are you trying to schedule your week and your days? Do you have drive time blocked out in there so that everybody knows that you’re not sitting at your computer during that time, and that if somebody needs to talk to you, they have to call things like that. And so if you’re not giving them access to that, again, they’re not going to be able to see your whole world. To me, it’s access. It has to be that access from the very beginning to allow them to see what your world looks like.

Steven (24:33):

That’s a great recommendation. I won’t even try to top that because that resonates really hard with me of, yeah, that was really intimidating at first, but it makes so much of a difference just to give over complete access. So Lisa, really appreciate all the insight you’re sharing today and that you spend the time talking about all of this. We already talked earlier about the checklist that everyone can get access to by texting RTS to 55123. That’s a 25 things that every advisor should be delegating to a virtual assistant. It’s a great resource. I’m such a huge fan of opportunities like this for advisors, for leaders to be able to delegate those things that they don’t have to be the one to do so they can focus on the things that help them propel forward, really the mission that they’re trying to accomplish.

Lisa (25:17):

Absolutely. I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Steven (25:19):

Well, for everyone listening in, thank you for being here, and until next time, good luck out there. And remember to tip your server, not the IRS .