Connect with Jaime Jay on Linkedin tell him Russ sent you  linkedin.com/in/jaimejay
Website URL bottleneck.online/inquiry  
Twitter slapshotstudio

​Russ Johns
Welcome to the #piratebroadcast, where we interview interesting people doing interesting things where you can expand your connections, your community. #Kindnessiscool and #smilesarefree. And let's get this party started.

Russ Johns
It's like a party and it's like a party Jamie Jays in the house. So we're good brother. How are you doing, man?

Jaime Jay
I'm doing fantastic. I know it's been a while since we chatted but so cool to connect again.

Russ Johns
No kidding. No kidding. You know, I think I still see stop riding the pine come up every once in a while in my feed and

Jaime Jay
wow, that's crazy. It's been it's been a while since we stopped doing that, that that went on a run for a good four and a half years or so. And then we started culture eats strategy. So I'm guessing for about six years.

Russ Johns
So yeah, it's crazy. time flies man. So for those that don't know you kind of give a little backstory, because, you know, you've done some interesting things and you're doing your help a lot of business owners with virtual assistants. I know you know, I love the tagline. What is it removing the stop the bottleneck in your business, the bottleneck in your business? And for personal experience that has been my bottleneck in the past is it's like I can do this. I don't need to, I don't need to hand it off.

Jaime Jay
You know it. The bottleneck is usually you and me and whoever's kind of running the show. Yeah, it's tough. You develop something, you build something out, it's your baby. You know, it has to get done the way you're getting it done. Oh my gosh, who in the heck could ever do what I'm doing and do it right and do it justice and all that kind of stuff.

Jaime Jay
It's just one of the challenges that a lot of us have that fear of kind of letting go and if this is indeed what you want to do, right if you grow it's there's a definite there's a fear in starting something on your own. And there's a definite nother whole nother stage of fear and growing something when you start scaling it and oh, man, yeah, we come across that quite a bit.

Jaime Jay
But yeah, for those for the people that don't know me, I, I've known you for several years now. We met podcasting, podcast movement. Yeah, yeah. Geez. 20 maybe years

Russ Johns
14 or 15?

Jaime Jay
I think 15 Yeah, yeah. 15 Yeah. So yeah, we've been kind of hanging out a while and, and I had a creative web agency for a while, but we've been for the last several years. We started in 2016. We focused really big on virtual assistants. So a good friend of mine, Mark Hafner came up with a name. I wish I could have come up, given myself the credit for the name but he came up with the bottleneck and it just has such good fit.

Jaime Jay
And we've been growing ever since and not looking back helping a bunch entrepreneurs and and yeah, it's always Mark who's Mark doing?

Russ Johns
I haven't from Mark in a while, how is Mark doing?. I haven't heard him for a while

Jaime Jay
Mark is awesome he is so awesome. We have a big surprise coming out. Thanks to him. And for those of you that don't know Mark Hafner, he's a good friend of ours, but he's a award winning music producer. Yeah, so we've recently circled back around because he is everywhere right now. Nashville just everywhere

Russ Johns
He needs to be a pirate.

Jaime Jay
Yeah, he Yeah, he should.

Russ Johns
It would be really nice to have him on the show and have him become a pirate.

Jaime Jay
You should definitely have him on

Russ Johns
I'll have to reach out to him

Jaime Jay
We have a special surprise coming out. Probably this week. it's probably gonna come out

Russ Johns
can you share it or is it still a secret?

Jaime Jay
Oh, man. It's, it's, you know, this whole quarantine thing as of the time of this happening right now. Now, we're kind of locked down but I think we're kind of approaching the tail end of it, I see a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel. And we've had a lot of things creative. And so Mark being so musically talented and our goofy team that I love #kindnessiscool are one of our slogans is # leadwithkindness.

Jaime Jay
Everybody's just having a lot of fun, because we kind of had to flip things around a little bit. And since business slowed up, and I think for a lot of people it could but it did affect us at Sloan. We really took advantage of the time to revamp our systems, our processes, and come up with a good couple good marketing ideas. And that's one of them that mark helped get involved in and so yeah, we're gonna be on the be on the watch for a new little jingle coming your way.

Russ Johns
And if you're not connected with Jamie j Connect with him to put in LinkedIn, reach out and say Russ Sent you

Jaime Jay
That's gonna be so cool.

Russ Johns
Leave a message, leave a message, you know. So, I know that let's talk a little bit about this virtual world because, you know, I have been building out this I started the pirate syndicate before the this whole thing hit. And, you know, the pirate broadcast was essentially the, the, the testing grounds to see if I can build the systems and the process to have virtual producers build shows out for other people.

Russ Johns
Hmm. So you know, just like this, you know, you received a message you received the link to the show, you know, you received the reminders, you signed up for it, you know, all of these things are part of the process and you probably recognize that and it's pretty simple, straightforward process to be on a show today.

Russ Johns
And, then the show after the show, it's, you know, turned into a podcast, it's got a transcription that is possible populated to a post on my WordPress and, you know goes out to, Periscope, YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn, and Facebook. And so all of these things are being populated by our live stream. And so doing that for other people is kind of what the pirate syndicate is based on. So it's the same kind of thing, but it depends it's dependent on virtual assistance. So we may need to be talking here in the future.

Jaime Jay
Yeah, definitely. You know what's really cool. Yeah, I what I love about this is you made the process so easy for me. A lot of people that try to do the process on their own It is not that easy. Having the app Having a process or a system in place, that's the key for everything. There's a certain there's certain criteria that have to be met in order for this to make it super easy for the user. me. No, you have to make it third grade simple. And that it was very easy.

Jaime Jay
The instructions were clear, I knew exactly where I had to be exactly when I had to show up. And it was just a simple click of a button, bam, there was there was no downloading anything, there was none of that stuff. And it was just very clear and you set the expectations on really well. That shows me that you've invested a lot of time in the back office in the system in the building up of this and really planning it out because it's not easy.

Jaime Jay
It really isn't easy setting all this stuff up when you first go there's a lot of research, you got to test you got to do this. So it really I kudos to you for doing such a good job on the system part of it because that's everything to me is the system of prophecies and within the process these two workflows but literally step by steps. And one of the things that we do here internally and we also share with our external virtual assistants for our clients is processing.

Jaime Jay
So I may do a thing on a video and I'll record that video, step by step, go to one of the virtual assistants and they'll actually watch the video and write out we say, every time you click the mouse, because your mind every time they click the mouse, that's a step and they take a snapshot of the screen of what it looks like. That does two things. It lets me understand and know that they've gone through. And well, first of all, I'm not doing all the workflows now, which is it helps me to understand that they get it. Yeah.

Jaime Jay
The second thing is, if I see that there's a problem or a challenge there and one of the steps that maybe it was done incorrectly. Or maybe they did something that I didn't think about and they added something in there saying, hey, Jim, you should do this. I'm like, Oh, perfect. But if I see that there's a challenge or a problem in there, we can identify Right off the bat instead of waiting 2346 months down the road. Yeah,

Russ Johns
yeah, that's a great way that's checks and balances and it's like, Okay, I know that there are times, and you know, it's like, it never happens to me, right? Then I communicate something. Because it's so easy for me because I've done it 1000 times to someone else. And you know, there's five steps that are missing because I just think them, but I don't communicate them. Right.

Jaime Jay
Yeah.

Russ Johns
So so in order to really accomplish that goal for a virtual assistant or somebody that you really need, because I call it a document and delegate. You know, if you can document it and delegate it, that's the most. That's freedom

Jaime Jay
It's the last time you're ever going to do it. Document document. It may take you 1015 minutes longer to actually pull you know do the video yeah. It saves you.

Russ Johns
Well, I think it's really important for business owners to understand that it's, it might feel painful the first time. But 100 times later, when you're not having to think about it, because somebody's managing it for you and doing it for you. And you can go on and doing more creative, productive work.

Jaime Jay
Oh my gosh, and think about this, too. If you ever want to sell your business, think about valuations.

Russ Johns
You're not the link that has to be. Yeah. All of you.

Jaime Jay
There. Yeah. Oh my gosh, yeah. Why? That's why the franchise model or the licensing model work so well, because someone's taking the time to work out all those kinks. And someone goes, Oh, I want to plug and play business. Here we go. Let's do this.

Russ Johns
Yeah. So what do you recommend for people that are at the point the tipping point where they know they need Somebody because they've just, I mean, they can't do it all. It's I've talked to so many businesses, you know, freelancers, you know, independent solopreneurs, you know, they're just trying to do it all. And what you see in their eyes is is kind of like fatigue and burnout.

Russ Johns
I look in the mirror. And I'd seen this before I recognize it. So it's like, how do you talk to them? Or how does that conversation take place? And, and what's it like to to take somebody from being overwhelmed to being overwhelmed with joy?

Jaime Jay
Yeah, yeah. That's a great way of explaining it. I love that overwhelmed with joy. And if you don't mind, I would love to use that again. Yeah.

Russ Johns
So you heard it here first folks.

Jaime Jay
Yeah, there's things you have to look at to get started. And these are these are really, really, really important. There's, we kind of offer more of a premium level service. So most The clients that we're working with have been in business for a minimum of three years or so they're earning good money at this point, but everything's in chaos.

Jaime Jay
So it's it's important that you number one can afford to bring somebody else on. When I first hired my first VA, I didn't know whether or not I could afford that VA. But I went out on a limb and I tried it. I was pretty sure I could on based on you know, everything was happening. But I was worried that maybe six months down the road I couldn't. But I went ahead and I pulled the trigger and I and and off to the races and thank the Lord. And that started my business that started everything where we are today. And I'm so thankful I did it.

Jaime Jay
The second thing you need to look at is Do you have any systems or processes in place? Do you have anything because as you said before, it's super hard for people to get in to your inside of your brain and just show them that they know. The third thing is Get Ready. Set your expectations. Because when you hire somebody, it's gonna be. So when people hire somebody, there's a thing, thinking, Okay, I'm gonna hire this Rockstar, they're gonna come in and fix everything, I'm not gonna have any problems.

Jaime Jay
It's exactly the opposite, no matter how talented this person is, when you hire somebody on board, that all of a sudden you have to explain to them every single thing that you do in your business. And it's actually a lot more work for you when you hire someone on.

Russ Johns
Yes

Jaime Jay
But this is that overwhelmed with the joy, because now you have someone on your team, you have that partner, you have that person that's there to support you and do everything that you need done. Now, it's really important that you have a job roles and responsibilities and a delegation roadmap. Do we have enough time for me to go into those two things that take about two minutes?

Russ Johns
Yeah, let's do that. Okay. I think it's important and critical for a lot of people on the pirate broadcast. I do. I do want to give a shout out before we get into that Vicki O'Niel she's a rock star. Kenyatta she knows how what this feels like. Wendy are caught. David, Sherry, Nick, Roz. You know, all of the individuals that are pirates in the pirate bump in the pirate community, I just want to give a shout out to you. And we're talking to Jamie J. And he's talking about the delegation process in building your team.

Russ Johns
So I just want to if you're not connected, go Connect. Tell him Russ send you.

Jaime Jay
Yeah, definitely. Howdy, everybody. Thanks for tuning in.

Russ Johns
We'll go into this. And let's let's let's cover this because it's important for people to understand what this what this means.

Jaime Jay
Yeah, so this is definitely not a sexy topic, right? Just throw that out there right away

Russ Johns
It could be, depending where you are in your business. Yeah, but you know what? This could be the hope that you're looking for. Right?

Jaime Jay
Exactly. Here's this for me though I kind of geek out on this stuff I'm moments at select few that really enjoy process driven tasks. So I will let everybody know right now, I am not a good manager, I am not a very detailed person, I really struggle with follow up. And that been proven to me because I've taken these Colby testing and desk exams over and over again, hoping for a different outcome. And it's always been about the same.

Jaime Jay
However, because I have a personal assistant that excels in the areas that I don't, we're able to move forward without one huge, colossal, gigantic front and take on everything with confidence. And all that started for two documents. And I highly encourage everybody to go through these two exercises before you ever consider hiring.

Jaime Jay
Because if you're in a state of overwhelm, if you do not complete these two tasks, get ready your world's about to completely disrupt and then you're going to be yelling and cursing at me. And believe me, it's not my fault. If you haven't taken the steps in order to hire efficiently

Russ Johns
If you don't do your homework, you're not going to pass the test

Jaime Jay
Exactly.

Jaime Jay
Now, for me, this part of the process was like nails on a chalkboard. And it was a little bit challenging once I was done. It was like the clouds parting the sea parted, the weight was lifted off the shoulder, I felt amazing because there's two documents, the delegation roadmap and the job role and responsibilities. delegation roadmap, it's it's simple, three columns in a Google Sheet, or Excel sheet whatever you want.

Jaime Jay
The first one is task you list down every single task you do in in a repetitive nature. If you do it three times listed down there. And then two values, not one value is, is this something you must do? Is Russ supposed to do the live pirate broadcast? Yes. Does it give him energy? I think so. You seem happy right? You enjoy doing this. This is different. a task that you need to do now, what about after postproduction show notes? Anything like that? Is that something you must do? No, you don't have to do that.

Jaime Jay
Does it give me energy? I don't know, maybe it does. Maybe it doesn't. For me, it does not. So that would be a task that I would identify something I need to delegate. So you go through all of those tasks, and then all of the tasks that don't give you energy, and that you can delegate to someone else who can do the job. And here's the key 80% as good as you because there's going to be, they're never going to be able to do everything as good as you when they first come on.

Jaime Jay
There's that 20% learning curve that they go through, but they experience delegate all those in segment those onto a task list. Now you have the beginnings of a job role and responsibilities. Oftentimes, this is referred to as a job description. And I can't stand that term because it's not just a job description. job description is something somebody fills out for a job and what it's all about. Then they stick it in a deep dark drawer somewhere and it never gets used again, all the documents that re prepare that we spend time on

Jaime Jay
Why don't we spend time on them if we're not going to be using them as a tool in our business. So what we do is not a job description, it's a job roles and responsibilities. Yes, you're going to list out the tasks and all of that stuff. But then you're going to speed things up a little bit. By taking everything in that task list, and listing all of the things that you must have. These are the things you must delegate right away. And these are the things separate list that you have.

Jaime Jay
It would be really nice if I could delegate this, but it doesn't have to be done right now. Yeah. And then go on there every single job role and job description starts off with your company name. The next thing is a company what about who the who's the company for? If someone's going to work with you, they have to know what your company is about. Right? from, you know, three to five sentences not long, then they need to know what the vision of the company is, what does the vision aspire to do?

Jaime Jay
Then the mission? What are the daily objectives of that company when you come on? What is a good day, so that you feel successful? And the third thing is, and this is probably one of the most important, what are the core values? What is the belief system that's centered around that company? Usually from that CEO? Correct? Right? You have all of this above the job description part of it, right? What we call responsibilities.

Jaime Jay
So that that way, every time you're beginning to use this document, you're reminded of the vision, the mission, am I doing everything I can to achieve this mission? Am I doing everything I can now so that in the future, we achieve our vision? Right? Am I making decisions on all of the responsibilities you list down the responsibilities? And then there's mission vision values, are you adding all those now this job roles and responsibilities can be used for three things?

Jaime Jay
Number one, interview, right for the interview, make sure everything's done. Number two, and I'm talking really fast because I'm trying to save time here for you. Number two, when you look at it, you can use it as a Scoring mechanisms based on performance. So when you have your quarterly reviews, you can go through each responsibility there and read it from zero to five stars. How good did you do on this section? How good did you do on this section?

Jaime Jay
And this is a really good thing for your quarterly reviews. And then you can use it for Guess what? You're training, Map. You're writing out all of their tasks, there's a perfect outline for your training.

Russ Johns
So now I want to remind people also Jamie that occasionally, there's something that takes place like a new perspective comes in, and they observe how you they might possibly improve with process that you've created. And so don't think about it as everything's gonna be 80% of what you did think about it as potential opportunities to improve a process because somebody else is seeing it from a new perspective.

Jaime Jay
I'm glad you put Now there because that 20% that 20% in there. That's learning. That's real trust. That's building relationship that's improving on process. That's, that's the work that's going on. So when you hire somebody, you better have some time to, especially that first two weeks. hypercritical spend time, and daily. Well, I think

Russ Johns
I think the other side of it is, is that if you find that you have somebody that enjoys doing something that you just dragged through every single day, they will get more efficient, more effective at it because they enjoy it. They live there, then you can focus on what you enjoy. Right?

Jaime Jay
And high five. Yeah.

Russ Johns
So So I mean, think of it from a different perspective, think about all the stuff that I don't want to do. If I can document it and delegate it. It frees me up to do something that I want, I can do what I enjoy more.

Jaime Jay
That's that delegation roadmap does it work or does it not.

Russ Johns
Yeah. How does it bring me doesn't bring me energy? does it bring me joy? Or make me happy? I'm like, the answer's no.

Jaime Jay
I don't want to do this again. It's like,

Russ Johns
Can I hire somebody to go to the dentist for me? Find somebody to do things like that.

Russ Johns
Well, this has been fantastic. And so what's the I know you have some announcements coming out this week, potentially with Mark and I look forward to that. And so what else is going on in the world around you and as we're being forced to kind of rethink some of the things that we're doing and observe and change and evolve and maybe learn some new skills. Have you been learning any new skills that you want to share with anyone?

Jaime Jay
Yeah, so we've, what I've done is we're completely revamping our client onboarding, taking in or updating, you know, if things change over time. So yeah, updating that where we understand that we're shortening all of the video tutorials, where our call to actions are super specific on or making an alternative endings for social media versus the onboarding template, you know, in the back office area for our planning, and things that we continue to learn. It's just through experience on the feedback that we have with our team.

Jaime Jay
We're learning more about the Philippines and we're just becoming more and more in love with the Filipinos and their culture. And it's, it's, we've really done a good job of attracting a bunch of really kind people. It's easy to identify that someone that he knows the round pegs not fitting in the square holes with that and that's great. includes clients and virtual assistants. But it seems like man, we've gathered this group of people together clients and vas both that are just, I mean, we've arranged it.

Russ Johns
Is there a range of tasks that you look for in a business where you can make the biggest impact?

Jaime Jay
Yeah, we specialize in executive assistants. So have executive assistant. So say you want somebody to manage your calendar. They can book appointments for you schedule your travel when travel kicks back in You know, like manager email used to take about an hour a day or an email. And most of the time it was throwing something into a trash can or something. Yeah. I spent about five minutes now. Can you imagine that I maybe 10 maybe 10. But on a busy day, an hour a day I found back for myself. It's unbelievable.

Jaime Jay
And then we also have the integrated services program because a lot of people have that golden goose Thinking one assistant can do everything the video editing the writing that this but that you can't, you just can't find somebody like that. But find somebody that's going to personally assist you to make your life better. And then say, oh, by the way, I need you to design this flyer for me or this nice little thing that I'm going to put out on social Yeah, well, they take that task to my internal team.

Jaime Jay
So you as a client, don't ever have to worry about that. It gets done, sent back to your dedicated personal assistant, and then they'll present it to you after they do quality control, making sure all the i's are dotted T's across things like that. And that allows them to be able to have a wider array of tasks that they can complete on your behalf without actually being talented at that specific niche.

Russ Johns
So that's, that's a beautiful thing to mention. Because you know, having a almost like a traffic, somebody managing traffic is like okay, visual as tasks go over here. Verbal task over here, written tasks, go over here. In that way, one assistant can really manage a lot broader subject matter, and a lot of information can go past that whole process. I like that. Yeah,

Jaime Jay
we do a heavy duty vetting process all of our VA s are college graduates representing the universities are taught in English so we really work hard on trying to find the right VA for the good match. So yeah, it's a there's a lot of work that goes in advance but all in all, it's to make everything you know, everybody to better enjoy their work and and, and just just have a blast and, and brother companies.

Russ Johns
Well, high tide raises all boats, right?

Jaime Jay
Yes, it sure does.

Russ Johns
So, Jamie, thank you so much for being here today. I know. You know, it's it's been a long time coming and I just, you know, this is a platform that I really enjoy because I get to hang out with interesting people and like yourself, you know, it's like have conversations that are just like, helpful. Everybody else around us, you know, this conversation, you know, you don't know where it's gonna go or where it's gonna land and the nature of digital media is that it's here forever now and it's going to be, you know, out there for a while it's on YouTube.

Russ Johns
If people can understand that, they have help you have help. Someone like Jamie can guide you, through this process, mentor you through the process of documenting what you need to be doing in order to get the most out of this engagement. And then that way,

Russ Johns
you know, it's just a simple process. So, bottleneck virtual assistance.

Jaime Jay
Yep. Yeah, I'm actually doing a really big in depth article on the job roles, responsibilities, that'll be on Friday. So that might help as the time of this recording, it'll be out but that'll probably help people out and you can just find it by going to the bottleneck dot online for slash blog and see it there and I everything we talked about today. I'm putting in there.

Russ Johns
Fantastic, fantastic. Well, you'll, you'll receive for the end of the day you received the transcription and the podcast and all of the stuff all of the things.

Jaime Jay
So good for you Russ that's amazing.

Russ Johns
Hey, I just, you know, spread the word I'm building the pirate community. I'm sharing the the kindness. You know, the whole mission of #kindnessiscool and #smilesarefree. And you know the pirate syndicate. My goal is to help 100 organizations or business owners create their podcasts and their broadcast this year. So

Jaime Jay
pirate voice or something, Arrrrr

Russ Johns
Arrrrr

Jaime Jay
Exactly, exactly. Free

Russ Johns
#smilesarefree #kindnessiscool

Russ Johns
All right. Thank you so much, Jamie. I look forward to our next conversation and you enjoy the day man.

Jaime Jay
Thank you so much you too.

Russ Johns
Take care.

Russ Johns
All right. Thank you for joining the pirate broadcast. If you found this content valuable, please like, comment and share it across your social media channels. I would love the opportunity to help others grow in their business. The pirate syndicate is a platform where you show up we produce the show. It's that easy. If you want to be seen, be heard and be talked about. Join the pirate syndicate today.


Historically, pirate broadcasting is a term used for any type of broadcasting without a broadcast license. With the internet, creating your own way of connecting has evolved.  

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