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Chris: Thanks for joining us today. I’m Chris Malta. My co-host, Rob Cowie, is off on business for worldwidebrands.com, but he will be back with us in a few weeks. This segment of the Entrepreneur Magazine E-Biz Show is brought to you by LearnKey.com, just in time training to learn QuickBooks quickly. Have you ever thought that you could really use some help in your small business, but you just don’t want to go through the hassle of actually hiring a person to come into your office and work there. Or maybe you work from a home office and don’t have a place to put an employee. Well there is an answer. Whether you need an assistant to handle some of the more mundane chores in your business or you need more specialized professional help to build your business, virtual staffing is a concept that’s really coming into its own. Gayle Buske, president and CEO of TeamDoubleClick.com is here with me today to explain what that is and how it can work for you.
Chris: Gayle, thanks for being here today.
Gayle: Good morning, it’s a pleasure to be here, thank you.
Chris: Pleasure to have you. The first thing I’d like to ask is if you could give us an overview of what virtual staffing and virtual assistants are.
Gayle: Absolutely. Virtual assistants are typically independent entrepreneurs or independent contractors and they provide administrative assistance similarly to how an in-office administrative assistant would work. The biggest difference is that they work from their own offices which are typically home offices.
Chris: Which saves you a lot of overhead.
Gayle: Absolutely. It certainly does. Virtual staffing is basically the act of matching and placing those virtual assistants with clients and small businesses and entrepreneurs that need administrative assistance, but maybe don’t want to have someone come into their office or into their home or maybe they can’t afford that much overhead.
Chris: So what does Team Double-Click do?
Gayle: We’re a virtual staffing agency.
Chris: Excellent. I guess I should ask you, to a small business what are the benefits of hiring a virtual assistant?
Gayle: Well, one of the big differences is, as you eluded to earlier, reduction of overhead or avoidance of overhead. Virtual assistants have their own computers, their own software, all of their own technology, so for a small business when you want to toy with the idea of bringing in a new staff member you don’t have to factor in the cost of buying a computer or a desk or providing heat or electricity for that person. You can focus more on their skills and what you’re looking for there and focus on the person rather than all that extra overhead. You don’t need to pay for social security taxes and income taxes, vacation pay, holidays, sick pay, all those things, because that person is also an independent worker.
Chris: See, you’re scaring our staff who are listening to our show right now (laughter).
Gayle: (Laughter).
Chris: We’ve got a lot of great people on staff at Worldwide Brands and I could tell everyone from personal experience that it is wonderful to have all these people with us, but if we were a smaller business, you know, it is very expensive to actually maintain offices and staff. You have all kinds of considerations that you don’t even think about when you first go into it, including right down to from telephone lines to insurance.
Gayle: Oh absolutely.
Chris: It’s unbelievable. So how did you get started with Team Double-Click, where did this come from?
Gayle: We actually started in 2000 doing basic virtual assistance and graphic design and in the beginning of 2003 we really discovered a lot of people out there that wanted to work from home, they had excellent skills, they were good virtual administrative assistants, graphic designers, and they were people that didn’t necessarily know how to go out and sell and market themselves. So we kind of took that idea and that need and started taking our marketing and sales skills and marketing and selling to small and home-based businesses these wonderful people that we had available to do that work and it’s just grown and snowballed from there. We’ve currently got about 2,400 independent contractors, virtual assistants and graphic designers in our pool now.
Chris: Wow. That’s fantastic. What kind of different skills do your people have?
Gayle: You know what, it runs the gamut. We’ve got everything from graphic design, web design, general virtual assistants, real estate assistants, data entry people, people that can answer phones, really a little bit of everything. And the people that make up our group are really…you know, clients ask quite often, are these the leftovers of society that other businesses didn’t want, is that why they’re wanting to work from home?
Chris: (Laughter).
Gayle: And it’s really not the case at all. In fact, if you look at some of the resumes of the people that are in our group it’s really amazing. Some of them knock your socks off. We’ve got PhDs, MDs, primarily women, it’s not that we don’t want men, we just don’t see a lot of men coming through. But a lot of people that work with us have been career women, they’ve climbed the corporate ladder, they’ve gotten very far in their careers and they made a conscious decision at one point or another to stay home and raise their kids which is very noble, it’s a good thing to do. But then they’re finding as the kids get a little bit older or there’s so many times they can clean the house during the day and they hunger to get back in the work force.
Chris: Right.
Gayle: So we pick up a lot of people that are at that point. They’ve wanted to stay home and now they want to get back into working again and for their own self-worth, but also for the extra income for the family. So we really do have a lot of very highly skilled people. It’s really amazing.
Chris: You know, I think that no matter what you’re doing, whether you’re a stay-at-home mom because you need to be there with your kids or want to be or whether you’re in the workforce, I think everybody really wants to work from home, don’t you?
Gayle: I think most people do. I run into people occasionally that will say I wouldn’t have the discipline to do that from home. I would find myself doing dishes or washing the laundry.
Chris: Or watching TV (laughter).
Gayle: Or watching TV, yeah (laughter), a very good example.
Chris: I know what you mean. It’s something that you kind of have to grow into and work into I guess.
Gayle: And you need to look at it as a real business. From a virtual assistant standpoint you really do have to look at it as, this is my job, even though I’m not getting in the car and leaving the house every morning, I’m still sitting down and working each day and this is what I do.
Chris: Right.
Gayle: And, yeah, it can be tough. My husband and I both work from home too. Our company is 100% virtual. Our core staff are in places like Illinois and California and Texas and Michigan and we’ve vowed to remain 100% virtual because that’s what we do, we’re a virtual staffing agency and we can do that. But when we first started working from home we’d find that the neighbors would stop by and they’d want to chat…
Chris: (Laughter).
Gayle: …Or family would call and they want to chat. And we had to gently tell them that this is our job, it’s our business, just because we’re here doesn’t mean we’re not working.
Chris: Right.
Gayle: And kind of curb that and say, can we chat in the evening or can we get together on the weekend, or things like that to get them to eventually realize that we really do work here (laughter).
Chris: Yeah, you know what, I work from home. I do. We have offices, we have a fantastic group of people who work with us up in Apopka, Florida, just north of Orlando. But I have a home office and most of the time I’m here at home working and I think it’s great.
Gayle: It is.
Chris: And virtual staffing sounds really interesting to me. What does your company look for when considering virtual assistants for its clients?
Gayle: Well, our interviewing and screening process is actually rather tough. And the reason it’s tough is because partially we don’t ever get to see anyone face to face so you don’t get the body language and the facial expressions to go along with, is this person up front and honest. So we’ve got to put everybody through a few more paces.
Chris: Right.
Gayle: Our screening and interview process is rather lengthy. All of our workers go through about a 9-step interview process and what we’re looking for is the foundation basically. We look for honesty and integrity, people with a helping disposition, things like that that are the foundation. You’ve got something to work with. And once they’re done with that entire process, then we put them through training. We’ve got several free training courses that we offer and we’ll put them through the training process and certify them as either general virtual assistant or real estate trained virtual assistant. And then we put them to work with our clients. So it’s really a rigorous process actually.
Chris: Well, I know what you mean about the hiring and screening process. In my previous life as a systems engineer for Kodak I was actually on a couple hiring committees. You know, we would go through and work to assess whether people were right for the positions or not. And it is important to sit down and actually talk to people face to face in that situation so I can understand how the process would be a lot more rigorous…
Gayle: Mm-Hmm, absolutely.
Chris: …for hiring virtual assistants. I’m sure your potential clients ask if it’s difficult to work with a virtual assistant who’s hundreds of miles away in another city, and we can start answering that question and probably come back to it after the break.
Gayle: It’s not for everybody. Some people find it very difficult because they can’t get past hitting the speed dial button on the telephone instead of hitting the intercom, instead of walking files into the next room, attaching them to an email and sending it. So it’s really not for everybody. But for the people that can get their brain around the concept it’s actually very easy.
Chris: Right and you know, I can tell you that working from home myself, it’s not that bad a transition. You do get used to talking to people on the phone and sending attachments via email and hooking up over different web connectivity.
Gayle: Mm-Hmm.
Chris: And actually dealing with people in other locations, so it is not that bad. We’re going to go to break now.
Gayle: Alright.
Chris: Remember You can find all kinds of free information for your home-based internet business including free printable transcripts of this show at www.ebizshow.com. We will be back after this short break to continue talking with Gayle Buske of www.teamdoubleclick.com when the Entrepreneur Magazine E-Biz show continues.
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