IAM1934 – CEO Helps Businesses Leverage the Remote Workplace

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Daniel Ramsey 00:00

This fight of being an entrepreneur and being a CEO and you need a tribe. You need people like you helping others get drawn up. I know I got help.

So we're here to help everybody that we can find leverage, hire virtual professionals, and really help scale and grow their business.

Intro 00:20

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview?

If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of.

This is the I AM CEO podcast.

Gresham Harkless 00:47

Hello, hello, hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast and I appreciate you listening to this episode. If you've been listening this year, you know that we hit 1600 episodes at the beginning of this year. We're doing something a little bit different where we're repurposing our favorite episodes around certain categories, topics, or as I like to call them, business pillars that we think are going to be extremely impactful for CEOs, entrepreneurs and business owners, or what I like to call CB Nation architects who are looking to level up their organizations.

This month we are focused on innovation, disruption, women entrepreneurship, DEI, gig economy, remote economy, even the cannabis industry. Think about these industries and these disruptive technologies that really sometimes aren't as disruptive, but there are people that are just paying attention to what the market needs and they're providing that. So really think about the things that are quote and quote outside of the norm, but really help entrepreneurship to grow and fully develop.

I think it's an extremely exciting time when you're talking about any type of innovation or disruption, because I think that there are so many opportunities and needs that aren't felt that are starting to be filled by different groups, different organizations, or even different industries. So what I want you to do is sit back and enjoy this special episode of the I AM CEO podcast.

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast, and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Daniel Ramsey of MyOutDesk. Daniel, It's awesome to have you on the show.

Daniel Ramsey 02:09

Thanks for having me, man. I'm excited to be here.

Gresham Harkless 02:13

Yeah. I'm excited to have you on as well too. You're doing so many phenomenal things. What I wanted to do is just read a little bit more about Daniel so you can hear about some of those phenomenal things that he's doing.

Daniel is the founder and CEO of MyOutDesk, the highest rated virtual assistant company in the marketplace with over 500 five star reviews and over 13 years of experience serving more than 6, 000 clients. Daniel founded MyOutDesk during the first global financial crisis of 2008 to help businesses leverage the remote workplace and scale businesses with virtual assistants.

In 13 years with MyOutDesk, Daniel has helped thousands of clients scale their business and grow to profitability. He's worked with some of the largest companies and some of the fastest growing industries. Daniel has had the opportunity to work with many of the largest sales organizations, technology, startups, insurance, real estate and healthcare companies and he's willing to share these lessons with all of us.

Daniel, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

Daniel Ramsey 03:05

I'm so excited, man.

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Gresham Harkless 03:06

I'm excited too. And I love that you've contributed on the site before. I wanted to hear, I know I touched on a little bit, how you got started. Could you take us through what I call your CEO story?

Daniel Ramsey 03:15

I love it. It's a simple story. I know you're going to like relate because this is the normal entrepreneur CEO story. I literally was in Guatemala on my honeymoon. So I'm in a Francis Ford Coppola resort. Okay. So check. So that's jungle monkey swinging around this huge lake in front of us. My wife of three days, we just trekked through the rainforest and saw the ruins and just had a wonderful time. We have dinner, go back to the room and then I snuck out of our bungalow at one in the morning to do work and I'm at the bar because it's the only place with Wi Fi.

I'm at the bar and the bartender who's gotten to know us because we've been there a couple days now starts making fun of me. He takes my cell phone, snaps a photo and says, stupid white boy, like beautiful bride back in the room, what are these dumb Americans doing? And so this is the story, man. Our company was founded to help entrepreneurs and CEOs buy back some of their time. With time, we can do anything man. Anything is possible with more time. So literally in that moment when the guys make fun in front of me in Spanish, I'm hanging my head and I'm thinking, you know what, I don't want to have my business own me, I want to stay married, have kids, I want to have a life.

And so I came back to the U. S really focused on what it would take to scale and grow the business so that I wouldn't have to be in production in the day-to-day, and and now we teach entrepreneurs how to do that.

Gresham Harkless 04:47

Yeah, that's so powerful. And I'm sure that you probably weren't the only person that was at that Guatemalan bar that was doing the exact same thing, which is why we say thank you. So many other people, have to really understand how important time is.

Even on a deeper level, what we can do with that time and how we hope to envision our life and our businesses and so on and so forth.

Daniel Ramsey 05:05

Yeah, in that moment, it was so much pain, personally, because I had grown up one of those strange kids, in like 6th, 7th grade. I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I knew I wanted to own my own business. But I had no idea what that meant. I didn't know it meant weekends, evenings, no vacation time, employee challenges, systems and tech and who's on the team. How do I delegate? There's just so much. One of my favorite stats is the U.S we have 28 million businesses yet 96% of them are under a million dollars. The vast majority of businesses are small mom and pop, not a lot of employees, not a lot of revenue.

What's even wilder is the IRS says that 60% of those businesses don't actually report income. So, that's a big deal. Most businesses are small. Most businesses never cross that million-dollar mark. And the IRS says, most don't make money. And so this fight of being an entrepreneur and being a CEO and like it, you need a tribe. You need people like you helping others get drawn up. I know I got help. And so we're here to help everybody that we can find leverage, hire virtual professionals, and really help scale and grow their business.

Gresham Harkless 06:19

Yeah, absolutely. So I know you touched on a little bit, could you take us through a lot of what you have and what you're doing with your company and how you're serving these clients that you're working with?

Daniel Ramsey 06:27

Yeah, it's cool because, whether you're an insurance person and we have a boat broker in Florida, like he sells like 5, 10, 30 hundred million dollar boats. The reality is business is pretty much similar. Everybody's Oh, I've got a special baby. No, you don't, you don't have a special baby. Most of business is just blocking and tackling. And so in most industries, you have sales, you have marketing, you have operations like administrative work, and then you have service and support. So those are the kind of four areas that we really help people grow and get leverage in their business.

The wildness is, as an entrepreneur, one of the things that I learned early on was there are only certain things that we have to do like talking with you and relating and talking about being a CEO. I can't have one of my employees do that. They're not the CEO. They don't know this is one of those things that like literally I need to do. I need to hang out with you and be buds and get on your podcast, talking to a customer, servicing an account, doing our financials, writing a blog post, all of that is happening right here in our office and it's not me.

So the one of the fastest and easiest things to do is what do I have to do? What are the things that are only that only I can do and what things can I give away to someone else? A great example is, billionaires, right? They don't buy a sports team and then say, I'm going to go run that sports team. They buy a sports team and then they say, who am I going to get to manage that person so I can go to the NFL and win the Super Bowl or get the World Series.

So why do we as entrepreneurs think that we, it's just ludicrous. And so one of the things that we do is really in a console with our customers, we really focus on what's the most important work, what can you delegate and what kind of systems and processes do we have to make in your business so that it's possible to hire virtual assistants?

Gresham Harkless 08:14

Yeah, that's so powerful. And I think that's true for everybody, but I'm a huge Cowboys fan of the Dallas Cowboys. Our owner lives everywhere.

Daniel Ramsey 08:21

Watch out.

Gresham Harkless 08:22

But no, you're so right. But you definitely know that the people that are the most successful and however you define that a lot of times are in their zone of genius. They understand exactly what that is. They understand exactly what they can do and have to do that. Nobody else can.

That's how you truly win. That's how you build these phenomenal businesses that are really impacting the world.

Daniel Ramsey 08:41

Yeah. We wrote a book and we're going to give it away to your audience at the end. But in that book, we talk about the seven figure business roadmap, and it's something that we've done. I needed something to help our salespeople understand the different levels of growing your business. So we've broken it up into three. So I do it like brand new in business, learning your industry in your whole world is just learning. How do I sell a client? How do I talk to people? What's my place in the marketplace?

I do it at some point, we do it right. And then it becomes all about systems and process because now you have a team all of a sudden as an entrepreneur, you have to extract all that gold out of your brain. All that tribal knowledge has to be documented, and then you can hire somebody to help you do it just like you want it done. And so It's systems and process and that they do it. It's who you have on the team and what the vision is and your core values.

It's different in each level. It's a different game. And so we help entrepreneurs understand where they are in the fight, so to speak, right to get over that million dollar hump and then what they need to do to really grow and scale. That's super fun for us.

Gresham Harkless 09:49

Yeah, absolutely. So, I wanted to ask you now for what I call your secret sauce. This could be for you personally or your business, what do you set you apart and makes you unique?

Daniel Ramsey 09:58

Yeah, our biz. One of our core values is that we're really a servant heart driven company, meaning when our customers come in or our virtual professionals, we call them virtual professionals, by the way, the market calls them virtual assistance, but we don't have assistance. We have professionals. So we hire really smart, talented people and then we help businesses grow and scale. But one of the things that differentiates our business and really who I am is we're here to serve. It's how we start every conversation. It's why we exist in business is to help businesses grow.

And so it makes it really simple. It's all about the entrepreneur. It's all about the business owner, the CEO, what are their needs, what's in their world. So I think that's really clean. We all have been on a sales call, right? Where the salesperson just starts blabbing and talking. Doesn't ask you any questions. You're like, dude, what are you doing? And so our world is really simple. We're here to help companies buy back time, grow and scale. Maybe save costs. Sometimes companies come to us and say, Hey, we want a blended mark model where some people are in our office and in house and some people are outsourced and virtual folks. So we'll help them reduce costs.

But typically we're focused on our clients. When? What? What would be a big win for your business? How would you double? What would it take for you to double or go win the World Series or in the Super Bowl? What would it take for that to happen? And then we work backwards and create a plan. That's really the differentiator.

Gresham Harkless 11:24

Awesome. I wanted to switch gears a little bit and ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, book or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

Daniel Ramsey 11:34

Yeah, we have a thing and I'm going to give this away because I think it's such a big deal. We have a thing called the sticky challenge. It's basically as entrepreneurs, we get a ton of people call. They're like, I don't know what I want to give up. I'm not sure what I can give up. And so one of the easiest things and fun actually for a team, whether you're a small, medium sized business or large is to have everybody grab a stack of stickies and then follow yourself around all day long.

You're basically going to write, am I doing dollar productive stuff or non dollar productive stuff? You're gonna write what discipline in it. It's in maybe admin work. Maybe it's on social media work. I don't know what it is, but you're gonna go, is this dollar productive? Am I helping drive revenue and create scale in the business? Or am I doing busy work stuff that I probably shouldn't be focused on? And then you just follow yourself around for a week or two. What's fun about this exercise is you will walk away knowing how much time you're actually focused on it, your customers, your internal employees to help them grow and scale versus all this busy work.

We had a great client come through and she ran a huge investment company in South America. And she's like Daniel, I work 80 hours a week. She did it for two weeks in a row. She's like I work 80 hours a week, and you know what? I only spend 15 of them on really client revenue-driven activities. I am like what do you spend the rest of your time on? She goes, it's crazy, but I'm wasting a lot of time.

Gresham Harkless 12:59

I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. This could be a word of wisdom or a piece of advice that might be something, if you hopped into a time machine, you would tell yourself, or you might even tell a client as well.

Daniel Ramsey 13:11

Yeah I've got some nuggets, man. One of my favorites is, when you're onboarding a new employee, so much of that is time intensive for the leadership team, for the CEO, especially to make sure that they're getting set up for success. One of the hacks or one of the nuggets that we use here is, we create something called play pause.

To do so, every job is documented fully in paper, but we also have different people on the team demonstrate that job and then record their screen when they're demonstrating, whether it's a call, whether it's an admin job, a marketing job. So it's very clear what the role is and how to do the job.

Once you've documented it, and then you've put a video together of 3 to 5 examples of how to do the job. Now somebody can sit in the corner, download, watch those videos, look at the document and two or three days is saved in repetitive training. So, play, pause, do. It's gold, man. It's a good little nugget.

Gresham Harkless 14:04

Yeah, absolutely. Now I want to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping to have different quote and quote CEOs on the show.

So Daniel, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Daniel Ramsey 14:13

A lot of service, man. We're serving others. And it's the highest calling as a human being. You can't get messed up in that world. So as a CEO, I'm in service of my employees. And, our virtual assistants are in service of their clients and, our clients, they're in service of their clients.

Like when you serve, all the mess, all the stuff, all the ego that might get in there, all the bravado that might happen, it just melts away because when you realize that you're in service of others, and it's the highest calling of a human being, that makes choices, decisions super clear.

Gresham Harkless 14:49

Truly appreciate that Daniel, appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional you can let our readers and listeners know. Of course, how best we can get ahold of you, get a copy of the book and find out about all the awesome things you and your team are working on.

Daniel Ramsey 15:01

Yeah, man. Thank you so much for having me today. It's been awesome to just be in your world and know all the impact that you're making. So I really appreciate you. If you're listening and you want to get a copy of our book, all you have to do, pull out your cell phone real quick. If you're driving, don't do this. Okay. If you're driving, don't do this, but save it for later. But take your cell phone, go to your text message in the message section, you're going to put SVP. So scale with virtual professionals, SVP in the message. And then the phone number section 31996, then you can get a kindle version or a PDF version of the book.

You'll also register. And in that point, you can choose to have a consultation with us and we can walk through what it would look like. Our website is another great resource, myoutdesk.com. Everything's on there. Everything that we're talking about, sticky challenge, play, pause, do, how to build SOPs, like everything that we've talked about, we've created blog posts and guides for our customers. Because, if you do this right, you really can make a big impact in your world. You can buy some of your time back and hopefully grow and scale.

Gresham Harkless 16:01

Yeah, absolutely. I definitely appreciate that Daniel. We will have the links and information in the show notes, especially for those that are driving. We'll also have a link to a lot of those resources as well, too. But I appreciate you my friend for reminding us of how important time is and also how we can leverage that as much as possible.

I hope you have a great rest of the day.

Outro 16:18

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co. I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, Google Play at everywhere you listen to podcasts, subscribe and leave us at five star rating.

Grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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