Hasty Treat - Hiring an Assistant

Tolinski to Syntax. On this Monday, hasty treat. We're gonna be talking about hiring an assistant, which is something that is if if you are working as a solo dev, an entrepreneur, you're working as anybody, it's actually shockingly more affordable than you can imagine, and it makes your life a lot easier. This is one area of my life that I am struggling with so so much. So we're gonna hear all about, West's experience hiring an assistant, talking a little bit how they get their workflow going, and just generally how we get that productivity up. My name is Scott Tolinski. I'm a developer from Denver, Colorado, and with me as always is Wes Bos. Hey, everybody.

Hey, Wes. How's it going? It's going good. Going good. I

don't know what to say. Cool. Well, this episode JS about to blast off, and we're gonna be doing so with a rocket. A rocket. What kind of rocket? A log rocket. A logging rocket. A logging rocket. Now what is log rocket? Well, you're gonna wanna head it to log rocket dot com forward slash syntax, and you're all a little bit learn a little bit about LogRocket. You'll get 14 days for free if you hit that URL. LogRocket is a service that allows you to stop guessing why bugs happen. Right? Even with a text trail of a bug or an error log, it's still difficult to always understand exactly what's happening in your application.

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Alright. So let's get into it. Let's talk about hiring an assistant.

This is something that I've done for probably about 2 years now.

I know a lot of people sort of ask me questions about it, so I thought I'd detail as to how do you find someone, and, what do they do and how do you delegate tasks and whatnot? It was a big step for me because, like, I'm I'm not running a business. I know there's probably people listening that have, like, 7 people that work underneath them, and they have to delegate all that stuff. I'm very much I just want to work on what I want to work on, and I want to put my head down and just code the day out. And when the administrative side of running a business gets in the way, I find that to be a little bit frustrating.

So about 2 years ago, I hired an assistant, and, they have done an awesome job at sort of helping me out and doing the work that I don't want to do. That frees me up to do this podcast and things like that. So first of all, there's sort of 2 different types of assistant. You can get, like, a in person assistant, someone that lives locally.

And then you can also get a virtual assistant, which can live anywhere, but it's pretty popular to get someone from countries where the cost of living is lower, like the Philippines and and things like that. Philippines is really big country.

Personally, my assistant lives locally, which is very handy for some of the stuff I'll talk about in a second that needs to actually happen in Vercel. But there definitely are benefits to having somebody that is virtual, whether that is someone that's in the same country as you or somewhere around the world, just because, like, if you offset time zones with somebody that is helping you out, that can be a a benefit because then, okay, then you're being able to monitor email for 14 hours a day instead of just 8 hours a day. Or you you wake up and there's a bunch of questions already, something like that. So that's definitely a a help. Personally, my my assistant lives in the same time zone as me, though. You've been thinking about getting assistant as well. Right, Scott? I have about

15 to 20 applicants in my inbox for virtual assistants.

I'll domestically, some of which are even here in Colorado, which is Node.

But I struggled and fell short when it came time to do the thing that I would like an assistant to do, which is go through all of them, evaluate them, interview, email them, and whatever. Once I got those, like, you know, 10, 20 applicants, I was just sort of like, Node what? I gotta give them a task. I gotta figure out who's reliable. Gotta do all that stuff, and I just, believe it or not, didn't have the time to do it. So, I'm a victim of not having an assistant already and really need to work on that aspect of not only my business, but my life in general. Yeah. I I feel that way too. Like, I don't ever wanna take on something that

becomes a project for me. The reason why I want an assistant is so that you don't have to spend time on something. Right? And you don't have to check-in with them every single day, answer all these questions. Like, just like I was very clear up front. I'm like, I just Scott that I want to be left alone. I didn't say that, but, like, I need to be able to do my work and have somebody take the reins on the stuff that I can't do. So what type of stuff is that? What what types of tasks do you delegate? So I do a lot of support JS is delegated, so not technical support because my system is not a coder, not a developer. Right? But more things like administrative support, receipts, amendments, little refunds to these are the types of things that are death by a 1000 cuts where it's Mhmm. It's not it takes me 42 seconds to refund somebody $10 because they forgot to type in the coupon code or, switch over a course from Node to another because the one that they bought was too advanced, and they need the beginner one. Instead, all things like that are so minimal, but they they eat me up by just doing them over and over again. And I just also don't like to do that type of stuff. Do you wanna how I solve some of these problems myself?

Not having an assistant JS to see how many of these things that I can, like, identify these death by a 1,000 cuts items, right, and identify how I can write a tiny bit of code to make those things way easier in my admin platform. And this is the benefit of owning your platform. So many people talk about, oh, I started doing this on Teachable or or any of these other platforms. And it's like, well, what happens if this situation comes up? Well, now you gotta you gotta have an assistant do it. You gotta do it. You gotta spend the time. But for me, if I have a standard situation, which is maybe somebody asking for a refund, I built, like, a one click thing here in my interface. I just type in the order number, click the refund button. It processes it all, deletes it all, then does everything for me, sends out the emails. Yeah. Whatever. It's like a one click solution, and that to me frees me up so that, sure enough, it is like a context switcher. I'm having to do that myself. I'm still having to go look up the order and delete it, but it's opened up the door for an assistant or somebody to be able to do that foolproof way of solving these problems. So if you can, like, write a code solution to a lot of this stuff, that could even open you up, JS, like, an assistant to your assistant.

Totally. I I think, like, what I did for years and and what anyone should do before they go ahead and hire someone is figure out how do you automate that. Because, like, not only does that JS that not free, but it also takes any of the room for error Yep. Out of the equation because it's it's automated. It's tested. It just works like that. So, I've built a whole bunch of tools that are just for my assistant to use. And then under the hood, it does a lot of the stuff like my assistant's not going to log in to PayPal and find the transaction and make sure they they work up. It's just a button that they click on to to to make a refund or or something like that.

What else? Email replies, big one for me. So for the email for me, it's it's either taking a big email. People write books to me and distilling ESLint 1 question that I can answer or the opposite, which is me writing a very terse reply and having her extrapolate that in a kinder way. And both of those are great because I don't need to spend my entire life reading this big book. And often often they're they're very emotional too. I got fired from my job. I can't afford this thing. What's going on right now? And I love seeing those, but I can't I can't read, like, 6 or 7 a day. It's just too much for me to put myself in a state like that. So I can just have the the Wes, Wes, can I offer a refund on this course even though it's a year old? Yes. No. Yeah. Yes. No. Yes. No. Right. Or even just like I I'll talk about SOPs in a second. I don't that question doesn't even come in to me at all. Or email replies, I'll just write, like, a quick, like, sorry. Can't do this. And then she'll extrapolate, like, hey. Thanks so much for emailing.

Unfortunately, not able to do this because of x, y, and z, but we can do these the following things for you. So that cuts down my email quite a bit. I still do get more email than I could ever could possibly want, but, that totally makes the processing of it much faster.

Also, email goes through my assistant first.

So any email that comes in is is processed, and anything that she can deal with gets dealt with before it even hits me. And then anything else that needs to go through to me goes goes through to me.

I'm interested in hearing a little bit more about that process if you have the time to do that right now. Yeah. Because I know we both use the same app to do this, which is Missive.

Node there are other email apps that do this kind of thing, but I'm interested in hearing a little bit more about your Missive workflow because the way I have mine set up is that I have my inbox, right, which is just my standard inbox, and then I have my unassigned, which every single one, like, a customer service request or something right now goes into unassigned because Yeah. I'm the only person in here. Well, actually, I think Courtney and Eric are both in here as well. But for me, the way I was trying to get it set up is when you have something come in through your your email or whatever, does it automatically get assigned to your assistant? Is that what happens?

So I've got 2 email addresses, and I'm not gonna say what they are because people will figure out how to actually, no. This I don't care. Like, if you email me directly, you you will get a much slower reply. Yeah. You can. Care to say this. So I've got I've got my personal email, which is wes@westboss.com, and then I have my support email, which is hey@westboss.com.

So personal email comes into me first because things like, lawyers and whatnot, that's that's private stuff that needs to come through me first. And then piece by piece, those ones I can then surface to other people. So my assistant. And then I have the support email, which JS, hey, at West Bos. That all goes. That's where most of the support and stuff comes through. That's like the publicly listed email. All of that goes through the assistant first, and then stuff that can't be dealt with gets sent through to me. So, basically, we each have our own inboxes, and we can each give each other things, and it it works out pretty well that way. So do you do you use the assigned to 2 thing at all, or is it just based on okay. Okay.

Yeah. So it's it's entirely based on assigned. Gotcha. So, basically, I'll just blow through my email. I'll either deal with it myself or assign it to somebody, and then and then it's out of my hair, and it's gone. And and it will only show up if I'm tagged in it or if it's reassigned back to me. So something like something that is is complex and we don't have a tool for, it has to be done in the database, then that'll get assigned to me. I'll do the thing. I'll do the process and then Sanity. Like, example of that is deleting someone's account. Right now, I have to write a tool to totally wipe somebody out of the out of my database. So right Node, people email us, say, hey, I request to be removed, and then I have to wipe everything from our databases, and then I'll send it back to the system. They'll say, hey. We got rid of you. We got rid of every little piece of data we have about you. Thanks for letting us know. Yep. Do you use the chat functionality? If you haven't used Missive, there's this whole chat, which allows you to chat with your team outside of an email. Do you use any of that, or do you do chat by other means? No. I do it. I do it all inside of Missive. I really like it because you can assign, like, to dos inside of the chat, like, just like lightweight to dos Mhmm. Where if if I give them something, I just put a list of things to do. Hey. Can you log this receipt and send this mail and whatever? And then I just put them as little checkboxes, and they can check them off as they finish them. So, I use that. I use the chat in line much more, though. Like, if you have a a customer email Mhmm. You can chat in between the replies with the other people that have access to it, and that's great because you can talk about how to reply to someone without the the person seeing. And then, also, you can always go back to older emails and see what you had talked about about that email as well. So a big fan of that. Totally cool.

Other things I use to get the assistant to do is mailing and shipping of items.

One thing I would like to do is is to get somebody totally separate to do that that lives in the States because I often have to ship stuff to the states, and it's incredibly expensive. So I'm thinking about maybe finding somebody that just, like, lives in the states and would wanna do that just for that.

Invoicing and expenses is a huge one for me. So, I'll just do a quick little reply on an email and say, hey. Can you invoice them for x, y, z in this currency and whether or not to include tax? And expenses is great because I'll get an email from a company that says Wes charged you $30 for this service, and I'll just assign it to the assistant. They'll take a screenshot or print as a PDF and attach it into my FreshBooks, which is great.

Research is one that I get every now and then. So, like, if I say, like previously, I've said, can you go find emails for the following coding boot camps or something like that? And then they can go out and and find all that information.

Blog post edits, sponsorships, all kinds of, like, little stuff that I don't necessarily want to do, you can just pass over to the assistant.

So one big, big way that I sort of automate stuff that can't be coded is called SOPs, standard operating procedures. So you have a big list of things that could possibly happen. Mhmm. Can you provide an example of an SOP that you've written in the show notes? Like, here's a sample SOP.

Yeah. Here. Let me let me pull up 1 right now. Just so we can get a good visual on this.

Alright. So I'm I'm just looking up my SOPs, and it's a document 30 pages long.

And it's common questions that come up. Hey, what's the difference between, beginner JavaScript and JavaScript 30? Even though that information is very clearly on the website, people email me all the time asking that. So we have just, like, a standard reply that we have for that. Or somebody has bought a 10 pack of licenses, and they say, we love it. I wanna buy 20. What do you do in that case? Or somebody has questions about how parity purchasing power works, things like that.

Questions Yarn are licenses personal, and can I reuse them? This is one thing I all the time. Can I reuse licenses when an employee leaves the company? Like, they took the course, and now they left. Do we get that spot back? Right? Questions like that.

Where are my stickers?

So you just have the answers to, like, what the replies should be in here JS well as, like, do this, do this, do this to solve them? Or is that Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's half of it is just canned replies, and then the other half of it is just like,

here's how to handle a situation like that. And anything that comes up more than 3 or 4 times, the same time over and over again, we say, let's make a SOP for that because Fantastic.

Like, I think you have to, like, stop and think, can I fix this at, like, at a website level or an application Vercel? Or can I just fix this so they would never email me in the 1st place? Because it's frustrating for someone to have to end up to email you.

Mhmm. But in some cases, it's just, that's just support. That's how support works. Right? At the end of the day, sometimes you do have to contact the person. So, if that's the case, then we we put out a SOP for that. Cool. Do you use Notion for that? What do you use for that? We use a Google Doc with a Google Docs has the ability to do, like, a table of contents. Oh, fun. And there's just we've got general knowledge, stickers, customer support, inquiries for Wes, things like that.

I feel like that's a pain. I I can't pay in Iran JS a big one.

Yeah. People can't use credit cards in Iran. How do I get around that? I do have a credit card. My friend lives in the UK. I live in Iran. I want the Iran discount just like, oh, all this stuff. So, like, we just put that stuff into play. Cool. It seems like a really good use case for Notion because you could have Yeah. Like, accordions. You could have, like, a little toggle accordions, and you could do table of contents in there too. I'm gonna make 1 I'm gonna make 1 in Notion. I think I will move this to Notion. I I I made it, like, oh, let me look at the dates in the Yarn ages. Probably about 2 or 3 years ago, I made it before Notion existed.

Yeah. October 12, 2017, I made this. This. So I probably will move it over to Notion at some point. Cool. Alright. Last thing I wanna talk about is just tools that we use to to work with an assistant. So 1 password is big. If I Node to share single passwords to something like FreshBooks that gets sent over. If if I need to change a password, it's not like I have to, like, tell somebody I changed the password because it just automatically signs themselves in. Missive is probably the hub for everything that I do. It's an email client that allows you to assign listen to our entire show on on Missive and how that works.

Big fan of Missive custom back end tool. So I have a whole admin dashboard that's used for managing it. There's, like, a role of there's a role for someone that's an assistant that doesn't give them access to all the information, but gives them enough access to information to be able to find people and modify their accounts accordingly.

I use a Chromebook, so, like, I had to buy a computer for my assistant. Oh, that's nice.

Chromebook is, like, $2,200, and it's it works great for that type of thing because everything we use is web based and then Google Docs. But now that you say that, I kinda do wanna move it over to to Notion. Yeah. It's fun. So,

Courtney has been she wants to do, like, assistant like things for me because she sees me struggling in various aspects, and, obviously, it's like Yeah. It makes no sense for a a doctor to do that.

You know? It's like it's like that is not taking advantage of your your qualifications, but, occasionally, she'll she's diving more and more into, like, handling some of those things for me on her day off or something. So she'll be like, yeah. Oh, I booked your flight, so whatever. So I've added her to Missive, and we're starting to get sort of a flow going down with Missive, Notion, whatever. She can use it all in her iPad, And it's nice because practicing with her, it's almost like practicing for an actual assistant.

So I think I'm getting into the flow a little bit more of it, but I really love hearing this your process here.

One thing is just the vibe of the emails that you send is very important to me because I don't I don't like it. Sometimes you see people send emails that are very terse, and sometimes you see people that send emails that are very clearly fake enthusiasm.

And I don't like either of those. So I feel like I've nailed it in the middle with the way that I reply to people. At email. You are good at email.

I'm impressed. Oh, thank you. When we're on or on, like, sponsor emails, I'm like, oh, I gotta take some notes here.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Like like, that's really important to me because, like like, right now, if somebody says, hey. Can we sponsor? And we say sold out. Like, you don't just say sorry. Sold out. Like, that's a very Sorry. Even though that's true. Okay. Yeah. That's a very, like, jerky thing to do. Yeah. So, I had to, like, talk to my assistant about, like, how many exclamation marks to use and, things like that. Not because not because she was doing it bad, but, like, before we even started, I said, this is important to me, and I had to figure out how I convey my vibe. I'm sure other companies have that type of thing. I'm not even sure what that's called, that that Wes important. Yeah. It's

the character, the culture, brand culture. Yeah.

Alright.

I think that's it. Hopefully, that was helpful to the few of you that wanna hire assistant. Maybe it's interesting to everybody else. I think it's fascinating. I think there is a we JS developers, right, you have the ability

to do so much more. Right? You can create things. And because you can create things, it's really easy for people to even start companies, start businesses, and start things like this, become entrepreneurs.

So I I think this is such a key component to running an effect of anything that if if you're interested in this life, definitely might be a good way to, get started thinking about what it would look like to have somebody help you out with these things because, oftentimes, it is worth it. It pays for itself.

I should say.

So my assistant works hourly, and it's somewhat flexible in that they can work as many or as little hours as I have content for, which makes it good for somebody who has a lifestyle that is a little bit more flexible. Or maybe you're an assistant for multiple people.

Some days, like, when I launch a course, they put in tons of hours, and some days when there's not all that much, it's just a couple hours in the morning, couple hours in the afternoon. Mhmm. That's also really nice because if somebody emails me, it's likely that they're gonna get responded to fairly quickly because it's in the morning and at night or or in the morning, in the afternoon, things like that. I think that that works beneficial to both people. Like, I know there's a lot of people who wanna do the whole work from home thing, but definitely need a flexible schedule, and I think that this is a perfect use case for something like that. Totally.

Alright. That's it. Thanks for tuning in. Catch you on Wednesday.

Peace.

Peace.

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