How to Scale Your Business through Networking and Virtual Assistants

He is the CEO and founder of scaling with systems. And we're going to be talking about bootstrapping your way to millions. So he is a law school dropout. And he builds profitable companies using vas virtual assistance, which we have gotten into a little bit a couple years ago. And it's really changed my world and changed all of our companies that that I'm part of. And so Robbie, welcome to the show. Angela, thank you so much for having me here. That's quite the introduction. I hope I can, can follow through on I will say, you this is the first time I've ever had to fill out what I felt like was a dating profile before I got on here and then also be called the nerd within the first, you know, 10 words, but I am super excited. I'm a big fan. I heard you for the first time for you actually had another I think her name is Margo. The last name slips my mind. But you had another sales person. Yeah, sales funnel person on here. And that was actually one of the first times I heard your podcast. And so I'm super grateful to be on here. Thanks so much for having me. Of course, I'm super excited. So before we jump in and start talking about scaling, and leveraging and building lead generation, take us back to how the hell did you get here? Like, what got you interested? I'm assuming you went to law school. But how did you get to where you are today? Yeah, it's an awesome question. And I appreciate you giving me the opportunity. And you know, if you're listening at home, I'll keep this relatively short. But whole life I was going to be a lawyer. That was the number one goal for me, you know, not because I had ever actually worked for a lawyer. But just because I'd watched every episode of Law and Order and suits and I just thought I knew what it was to be a lawyer. And I worked for the governor of Florida for a few years. And so I graduated college and the goal was to essentially take a year off and study for law school. Well, about three days, I'm a graduate from college, I get a phone call from my dad, who lives in Atlanta, Georgia. And he told me, he was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer. And it kind of threw me for a little bit of a loop. And he didn't have anybody with them at the time. So I actually had to pack up myself. I probably just unloaded from college and then move in with him. And Angela for an entire year. I was doing law school studying and
taking my dad to chemo and radiation five days a week. And you know, thank God, a year later, he actually went into remission. I took the test, I got into the top 10% of test takers in the nation. I got into all my dream schools, but the whole process just was opened my eyes. I was talking about making a YouTube video yesterday called I love cancer. You know, I like to do a lot of conflicting stuff, I guess you could say But yeah, and and the fact of because I'm super grateful my dad's in remission right now. And it really it stopped me from I don't want to say making this mistake because I really don't believe in mistakes because you just learn from them. But it stopped me from going down this hole. And it forced me to throw the brakes on and be like, is this really what I want to do? You know, I'm, I'm sitting in this chemo and radiation unit with 30 year olds who thought that they have their whole life ahead of them and stage four lung cancer.
It's a pretty serious one. And so long story short, I came downstairs one day told my dad, I was not going to go to law school, he was incredibly, you know, disappointed just because he wanted what was best for me what he thought was best for me and move back to Florida moved on my brother's couch worked as a dishwasher in his restaurant. And I googled how to make money online. And, you know, a few programs later, a bunch of bumps and hiccups later, now we were at where we are today, I have two businesses, clients all over the world, I have just over 35 employees. And we've we've held a service between both companies about 900 entrepreneurs globally. That's amazing. So I have a very similar story in that it, you know, kind of sucks sometimes to for life to feed us something of like, oh, a family member or a loved one. And they're suffering for something, and it completely changes the trajectory of like, what you think your future is going to be. So my dad started out with
throat cancer, and fought it for five years, and then it moved into his lungs, and something that could have prevented it is if the hospital would have just told us they would do a scan every six weeks of just his throat. And when I asked the doctor at Vanderbilt, like, well, how would you know if it moved down to the lungs, and then he got lung cancer? And then it was just too late? And the doctor said, Well, if we would have been doing a scan from the the, the entire torso, then you know, that's a different story. But your insurance didn't pay for it. And I'm like, fuck insurance, I would have paid for it. Why the hell didn't you tell me that? You know, so. But it's like that those whole five years, I did something similar, where I helped take care of my dad and my mom worked to pay for insurance. And, you know, his his his fight was over. And I will pray for your father that but just make sure that those scans get done. It's know what you don't know, right? But it really forced me to think about like, okay, life is short, Thomas short, how can I impact more people to be more productive out there. And so it really changed, like, where I wanted to focus my time. So sometimes it's a good thing that these happen, and it takes something like this for us to see what we need to do with our time and how we're going to make the most difference in the world. I think I just want to throw on top of that, too. I think that, you know, and I love the story that you just said as well. And I think that a lot of what this does, especially people that have listened, listen to this and can relate just like you and I, it also just prepares us for everything else that life throws at you. And and if you're an entrepreneur, that's like 10 times more, in my opinion than everybody else who's able to clock in clock out, don't have people relying on them, you know, don't have employees, when the whole world shuts down, you have to make sure that they're still getting paid every single month, right, even though you might not be getting paid. And so I just I am grateful for it. And it sounds like you are kind of too because I think not only did it force us to kind of reevaluate things, but it just almost I don't want to sound cocky, but almost after that, it's like, well, there's not a whole lot else that can get a lot worse than that. Right? It's like, pretty bad stuff. So everything else you got to throw at me is gonna be kind of easy from here on out. Right? So when you decided like, and I'm self taught, like you are from an online business perspective, but it's like, what was the first thing that if you did that, if so, if someone's listening, and they want to start an online business, what what's the first thing that you did? That was like the introductory of like, okay, I can make money doing this shit? Yeah, it's funny. And it's Yeah, you're right. Because sometimes I do have to pinch myself like, how am I doing this? Like, I'm, like I told you, I just moved to Miami literally yesterday. And but for me, I think I had a little bit of a head start if I'm being honest with you, just because I was reading personal development books back before it was kind of cool to do that. I was reading it in high school people were making fun of me How to Win Friends and Influence People. I was listening to Les Brown every single day during my dad's chemotherapy and radiation. And so for me, I think the mindset if you're listening this right now, it's the technical stuff we can talk about in two seconds, but and it sounds super cheesy. And the reason why it sounds cheesy is because it's the true and that is that you really have to get your mindset, right. I mean, you really have to believe that, you know, you deserve this, you really have to believe that it's possible you really have to have the right people around you the right environments, and you kind of have to fight and you have to be selfish and they'll be willing to be selfish for a little while and understand that you know, in order to help others you kind of have to help yourself first but once you understand the mindset aspect of it and and the fact that you deserve all this and you can have all this then for me, just like you would kind of reference at the beginning of this podcast and honestly it was literally free Facebook groups, free
youtube videos and that got my feet wet to the point that i was thought that okay i'm capable enough now to go up to the first person and say hey i can run ads for you online and get you new clients would you be willing to do it for $1,000 and it was a it was my girlfriend's dad at the time and he ran a plastic surgery company and i still remember i stayed up all night grabbing this 40 page proposal for him auditing on and i go there and in the morning and before i even put the rules in front of them he hands me a check for the i'm like well okay i mean yes
proposal but uh and that was i that was the first time that it had it was proven to me like cash in my hand oh my gosh someone is well i don't even really know what i'm doing and someone's willing to pay me imagine if i actually figured out what i was doing and so then i wasn't sure with you i just kept on reinvesting more and more back into my business and back into the growth process and that's kind of what i had here but it honestly all started from like books and from free content online so what's interesting too is your first like real client so if y'all are listening to this don't feel bad asking family people to help you because if they're owning businesses as well somebody is going to believe in you so don't be afraid to try and so i know that you teach people how to scale their company and making sure that they're profitable but if somebody wants to do that how would you do that without any startup capital yeah it's an awesome question and i actually really am not a big fan of startup capital so i've worked with a few fortune 5000 companies we've helped a few companies grow and exit for multi eight figures and i think that startup capital just kind of what you had said one second ago you know when you start and you're able to start at 00 dollars you kind of have to get it right from day one and you're also a lot leaner and you're able to figure things out a lot faster i know people that have you know funding series a series b funding 5 million $10 million and you know they don't really know they have a product market fit they don't really know what their customer successes they don't really know how to run ads how do you be profitable how do you put $1 in and get $3 out and six and a half days and because of that like you're kind of just like in this fairytale land for one year two years three years and then all of a sudden you're at the end of this you know rope and you're bleeding cash every single day and you have 30 days until they come close the doors on you and you're trying to figure out everything that you should have figured out three years ago and so the first thing i'll say is what you had just in the beginning of this which was don't be afraid to ask your friends and family that's why network marketing and mlm businesses work so well is because you actually can sell your friends and family really easily and it's actually really recommended if you you really know that you're not going to abuse them and you're going to take care of them no matter what but for me i was like look man if i don't know how to do this i will give you all of your money back but i'm pretty sure i can figure this out and he was willing to take the risk on it for me because and that's what you have to go after first because if you don't have the expertise and the case studies and the testimonials then you have no trust and the biggest mistake i see people if you're listening this right now and you're wanting to start is they go they're so afraid and this is me included you know i jumped ahead i it took me six months to ask my girlfriends that to be my client the first six months i was doing cold calls and cold emails and everyone was like i didn't know who you are and you have no proof why would i why would i work with you and instead of going after nobody everyone who didn't know me and i had no social proof i went after someone who did know me and i had no social proof and he was like look maybe he felt bad for me you know my second client was my cousin i don't know what it is but they're just like yeah i'll let you i'll pay you this money if you can potentially get me these results and so if you don't have any money first thing you should do is sell it to someone you know and just be brutally honest with them then use that experience as a case study and feedback as does this actually work can actually deliver what i'm saying and then once you get this first client and you actually have success you create an actual case study around it and then you're able to take that case study whether it's written form video form however you want to do it and then for $0 you can post it across all of your social media your youtube your facebook your instagram your linkedin that's gonna get you a bunch of inbound leads right off the bat especially if you had some really great success with a case study and then now you're starting just like on linkedin to get to your secondary degree connections third degree connections fourth fourth degree to connections and at that point you can start taking the next case study you have the next case study you have and you're approaching the total cold market right the people who have no idea they don't know the difference between you and a hole in the wall and you're saying hey you know here is all these case studies here's all these testimonials you all this training you love watching my youtube videos like you had said at the beginning of this and they're going oh okay this person actually knows what they're talking about and they have proof i'd be willing to get on the phone with them and hear what they have to say and so you know you can definitely shorten that process but that's essentially it start with warm people that know who you are even if you don't know what you're doing and then as you build
social proof and credibility we're going to go to colder and colder people until they don't know who the heck you are but you can't deny the results that you've had for your clients and that's how you're able to start turning complete strangers into paying clients in a few days which is awesome and so one of the most important things that you said that i want y'all to make sure you understand his case studies meaning track your numbers know your numbers know the outcomes sometimes they start off not so good but then you take that data you turn it into something better and that's what's going to teach you if you're not tracking everything stop now don't do anything or spend any time or money or effort until you're tracking everything which turns into a case study and i didn't really understand that when i used to launch funnels years ago when i got into this whole marketing world which is like a completely different language all i'm like what is evergreen mean i'm like sticks that snow good in the christmas trees and they're like angela does not what evergreen means in this world and so i had a lot to learn but things started to do better and sell better once i could show people the proof so that's one of the most important takeaways there for me and then how did you start to learn that the most important thing was really pre qualifying people to make sure that they were either qualified or not qualified and if someone's listening who's thinking about doing this sales funnels online business what would you tell them the first thing to do to qualify a lead yeah so for me personally what happened was once i really started understanding i hired my first virtual assistant i started playing around with paid ads i have an advertising agency called prospect social and what we started doing is we started sending 3000 cold emails a day we sent 200 messages on linkedin a day 50 facebook messages 50 instagram messaged my virtual assistant was doing all this and we were turning on paid ads and i was the only salesperson at the time and i just literally physically did not have enough time to get on the phone with all the book appointments i had my calendar and i know everyone's listening to this and the product rolling their eyes like wow what a great problem to have and i do recognize that however you know expert sales people understand that just appointments on your calendar really don't mean anything because to be honest with you the people that really don't have a whole lot to give you are mostly the people that have all the time in the world to book an appointment your calendar and it's really easy to get them on the phone but the people that are at least for me that were doing well in business they didn't necessarily have a whole lot of time to be able to get on the phone and so it was harder to reach them but they were higher quality clients and so for me what we started doing was adding what i talked about inside of my programs getting more systems a little bit of friction inside of there so instead of just letting anybody respond back and put them on our calendar we started having applications to book a time in our calendar and we started asking how many homes did you sell last month right you know have you ever spent any money in paid marketing before how much money have you spent you know how much would you be willing to invest how much money do you have on hand to invest and most people are just absolutely terrified to ask these questions and you know in the beginning you have to remember you know this point i'm 22 years old you know green around the years i have no idea really what i'm doing and i'm asking these veteran business owners so how much money did you make last month and frequently people were going that's none of your damn business and i was like okay sorry my bad i'm just reading the script here and but people that actually understood it and they got offended because they weren't making any money if i'm being honest with you and the people that did understand it that were like yeah like if i'm trying to increase your money i need to know where you're at right now they started filling out the applications and i started getting more qualified and qualified people and instead of having you know some people like i can't close any deals i have a 10% close rate if you look at it it's most likely because you are pitching totally unqualified people they they don't they have no intent on buying from you they have no intent on being qualified and so that was a big difference for us now our company we have 15 salespeople we close on average 40% year to date and like i said in the beginning that video which was a youtube video we canceled 68% of applications that come in so we're really really rudel for this qualification process just to make everything more streamlined for everybody but if you're listening this right now and you're like okay i get that i understand that qualification but how do i actually do it in that video that i talked about on youtube and you can check it out but one of the biggest recommendations i have is starting a little earlier in the qualification process so everyone kind of knows like there's a big saying in the software worlds called bant budget authority need in time but even before you get to the point that they're booking an appointment in your calendar if you're doing some of this outbound prospecting or doing some of this online targeting you kind of want to start finding people that are already showing that they are potentially interested so let's say you run an online
advertising agency and you're trying to work with real estate agents well you know i think it's some number like 65% of real estate agents make less than $40,000 a year and for a lot of my clients that are doing multi six figures a month they're their high ticket prices are like 20 $500 for three you know a month every month so to ask a real estate agent to give up all you know a quarter of their annual salary on this thing is kind of a big deal and so what we needed to do was starting to prequalify earlier on in this funnel process and not just reach out to every real estate agent but what if instead we went to zillow premier which is zillow is paid you know marketing program and they literally identify hey these are the real estate agents that are paying to be on this program these are the number of transactions are having these are the number of views they have these are the number of the average review rating they're having and what if we said hey instead of going out for every real estate agent only be the ones that are on zillow premier so we know that they believe in paid marketing to get ahead i only do the ones that have over 100 transactions last year as we know they're an active agent and only to the ones that have 4.6 4.7 stars and above so we know that they know the value of social proof and we know that they're doing well and they're honest obviously someone fun to work with
and if we can figure that out and do that earlier on in the process it'll make it so much easier by the time we actually get on the phone with them to have really quality people that are interested in what we have to sell
it's so important i had a consultant i was working with a couple years ago and she said you asked too many damn questions on your website form and i'm like i change my website form like it qualifies people if you can't take three minutes to fill out my form and also i'm using the subconscious level of how you fill out my form it tells me what color you are in true colors which puts you in a funnel with the appropriate copy that you need to get and so i'm like i didn't hire you for that i don't need you for that but thanks but this isn't going to work out so the more questions you can ask up front and prequalify them before they get to you yeah i mean your your sales conversions are going to just go way way up so how did you first start using virtual assistants and like i know a lot of people listening i know everyone has heard of va s by now if not you're living under a rock and you're not listening because we work with a lot of people in other countries we work with v's all over the world i don't care where you are what you're doing you could be laying on a beach as long as the shifts can done on time i don't care where you are and so what was your first experience in working with a va and how have you leveraged like your teams to be able to keep high profits yeah so it's funny now everyone's working remote right and it's like a thing but we're doing it you know like i said in the beginning i have 35 employees in almost 12 different countries so we're all around the world but my first ever employee was a virtual assistant and what happened was it was october of 2018 the only two clients i had had in six months were the two people i said my cousin and my girlfriend's dad so it wasn't looking promising for me i was working at an italian restaurant around the corner and you know i was making $2,000 a month and you got to keep in mind i was i turned down a top tier law school for that so you know when when people asked my parents when i was doing they said that you know i was still going to law school i was just taking a little bit of a break so you know i didn't think that i think that people were kind of embarrassed i think i was a little embarrassed but i was doing but i said okay this is it i'm kind of coming to the end of my string here i'm $10,000 in debt this is not working and i didn't really understand the concept in other people's time at that at that moment and i actually ended up going to a mastermind in atlanta georgia i'm living in santa rosa beach seaside florida like you and i have talked about earlier and it was five and a half hours away it was $1,000 is pretty much the last one i had available my credit card i said you know what let me go there let me learn from some of these people if this doesn't work and that's it i'll go to law school and in the events almost every single person that i talked to that was doing 100 200 300 $500,000 a month they all had team members and every single one of them at all their team members first started with a virtual assistant because you know virtual assistants that you know you can get them for 234 dollars an hour if you depending on where you get them from they're incredibly incredibly hard working people incredibly grateful people and they're willing to do something as mundane stuff that you know if you ask someone maybe in the united states to do they'd say you know no or you got to pay me $60,000 a year and so the cost effectiveness of it was a big obviously really appealing to me and so long story short what i did was after that event i said you know what i'm gonna get a virtual assistant and i'm going to focus only their number one job is to fill my appointment book with on my calendar with appointments and i went online i hired a virtual assistant agency much like what
We are today we find and train these virtual assistants for our clients now for $2.50 an hour, I found someone to do that for me. And I paid a pretty penny for it. But her name is Mel Jane, she listens all my podcast. So I know she's gonna listen to this. So shout out to you, Melvin. But she's worked for me for two and a half years now she's the longest employee that I've had. And she has seen started from literally in the red, right, and she's actually like emails. So she saw the overdraft statements in my email coming in to where we are now running multiple seven figure companies and she's a big part of it. And the number one thing I did was got a virtual assistant and put them on lead generation, if you're running a service based business, I cannot stress that enough, you need to have someone whose full time job is keeping your calendar or your sales teams calendars full. And I essentially hired a virtual assistant to do that. And within 30 days, this is actually on my website, if you guys check it out, I have screenshots of it. We did $10,000 in the first 10 days after I hired my virtual assistant. And we did $30,000, the first 40 days after I hired my virtual assistant. And this was after doing an entire six months of $6,000 in total revenue, and that I was instantly hooked from there. And then I started like I had spoken earlier before we went live here. I actually packed up all my stuff, sold my car everything in two weeks, I moved down to Medi in Colombia. I live in Colombia for a few months, then across Central America, then I moved to Spain, and a bunch of people were just calling me and asking me, you know, we're just doing the same thing a few months ago, how are you doing this now? And I was like, well, it really came down to this virtual assistant. And anyway, long story short, that was essentially how my new company is dealing with systems were new. It's a year and a half old now. But how that came about was essentially Oh, well, they did this for me and did this me. And here, I'm going to train one up for you. And that's essentially how it launched. So you know, if you if you have a nine to five job, if you you know, you're saying you don't have time, if you have kids, if you have something that's preventing you from doing or if you just know that you're lazy, like I know that I was, and you're like, Look, I'm not gonna send these messages every single day, then I would really, really recommend looking into one because you know, for $3 an hour, you know, what do you realistically have to lose, and especially if you're in the higher ticket space, like a lot of my clients are, you know, you can pay a virtual assistant for $100 a month, and they can make you like I just said, 3040 $50,000. And, you know, I don't care who's listening podcast right now, if I said you give me $400? And I'll give you $30,000. I think everybody would say, Okay, well, let me give my checkbook real quick. Yeah, like, don't be dumb.
But I do want everyone that is listening, I do want you to know something that
I've had a lot of friends who've tried the VA thing. And they're like, Oh, it's blood. And I'm like, well, Tyler, wait a minute, do you have a process to train the VA, like, I have a program potty train your brain, and it's like, you have to train them. And once they are trained, which is an ongoing learning process, they're helping you build something, you help them build their education by teaching them all these things, they're not going to solve your problems overnight. So don't go hire a VA and then come back to me or us and say, Well, I tried that. And it sucked. And it didn't work. Because this is why I'm saying this, people do this to me. And it's like, well, you have to have a process. And so is that something that your current company does now where you all take that process and you help the C suite, executive train a VA, their first va? Yeah, and I'm so happy you brought that up. And that's how I know you know what you're doing, too. Because Yeah, we get that all the time as well. It's like, you know, and I literally I referenced it to, you know, having to hire, I don't care if it's a virtual assistant or a Harvard graduate, you know, hiring someone to come into your business, that's a total mess, and you have no systems on it, you don't even know what you're doing is like, you know, I'm telling a waiter at a restaurant for them to bring out their favorite meal, they bring it out to you, and then you throw it in their face, because it's not what you wanted. And that's exactly what I've seen people do all the time. And so yeah, it's really difficult, especially if you don't know what you're doing. You're like, why don't you know what I would have them if I had a virtuals. And so we do our virtual assistant, they go through a 60 day training process where we teach them, a lot of the main stuff that we focus on is lead generation just because that's about you know, about 190 percent of our clients need someone to keep their appointment books full, but we have them that run Facebook ads, I created sales funnels, but the majority of the stuff of the learning is lead generation and how to read and write slps you know, how to communicate over Slack, etc, etc. And then we also work with our clients to actually build that out. So, you know, there's a full course that we walk them through but more importantly, we work with them one on one to develop Okay, where are the big bottlenecks in your company? You know, what should your messaging scripts look like? You know, what channels should you be using? What's your qualification scripts look like? What's your pricing be? And like you just said the virtual assistant is just like anything else. It is a tool in your tool belt. It's not a you know, bandaid, you know, one stop shop, fix everything in my in my business. That's kind of what we do with you, but I wouldn't hire any employees and
i had some of that stuff down so yeah that is something that we help our clients with inside of scaling systems well and i love how you all specifically like your niche is lead generation because some of the va is that we have right now is what we're teaching them is we have one va per brand that we help manage so if videos or podcasts and so we they don't know they don't know how to do strategy and that's okay that's what we do we do the strategy the clients on board they understand how it works now they their brain is no potty trained and then the va we tell them when to post based on the analytics we tell them all these things but they're dealing with me and my team they're not ever dealing with the client because what we have found when when we flip the client it just creates massive confusion and they they don't they don't say the right things and sometimes they end up pissing them off and then it hurts their feelings you know then i go back to the colors of like well this person's blue you can't talk to them like that and then the client doesn't know that so it's been really a good process for us to be able to maintain control for our clients to be able to do that and so that's awesome i think i just want to hire you to like do my lead
marketing because it's like i'm trying to teach another one i'm like theano really specializes in legion i think all the ones that are coming to me are like that they want to post on social media they want to like make the pretty images and stuff so like they're not green they're not into numbers so that's awesome so you've got a few free courses and i would say probably the one that really where people could start with is three steps to scaling a company and y'all it like like he was saying earlier like don't sit around thinking like oh i can't make millions and it's not always about the money it's you make money to to it's a tool so that you can do more and have an impactful life so that you do have financial freedom which this is what an online business and scaling an online business can give you and so we'll put the link in the show notes about if you can go to scaling with systems.com slash three steps to scaling but again we'll put it in the show notes for you guys but if you're thinking about doing any type of funnel or anything you've got to understand how to have a va or an assistant or somebody qualified that's not you because typically what i found with the entrepreneurs that we work with you are your biggest cheerleader and the the number one salesperson in your company because you started it no one's gonna have that same emotional attachment to making sure that it's going to be successful no matter what because you got to keep going and so what's your favorite way robbie for people to reach out to you or connect with you on social media yeah and let me just wrap this up to angela by saying thank you so much for having me on here it was an absolute pleasure what some incredible questions and i love that you have a really similar story to me as well and to everybody else that that kind of lent your gears during this you know 40 minutes 30 minute podcast timeframe i really do appreciate your time i know you could have done anything else i know you listen to angela because she gives a really valuable content i rarely listen to anybody but i definitely listen to angeles podcast so make sure you leave her a great review on apple podcasts or wherever she likes the podcast reviews because i'll make i'll do a call to action for her because i know she's too humble to do it herself but yeah for me personally guys instagram facebook youtube any one of those things linkedin you can just type in my first and last name or a vi and my last name is a b you the a la and you can shoot me especially instagram i'm on there pretty frequently and you can shoot me a message let me know that you heard the podcast let me know any questions you have and i'll be sure to answer them amazing and we'll put all the links in the show notes and everybody that's listening thank you so much for your time today and make sure you tune in next week for another episode of business unveiled