Shownotes
In Episode 104, we explore the profound concept of designing your life and unlocking the freedom to live on your terms. Tobe Brockner, founder of Katuva, emphasizes the importance of choice in shaping our work and personal lives. The episode touches upon the challenge of giving oneself permission to break away from traditional norms and adopt a more flexible and intentional approach.
Tobe shares a personal realization about the ephemeral nature of life, urging listeners to prioritize what truly matters. The episode highlights the significance of working within one's zone of genius, leveraging strengths, and delegating tasks to virtual assistants.
The conversation delves into the productivity benefits of virtual collaboration, particularly the freedom to work without constant interruptions.
Listeners gain insights into the diverse skills and positions virtual assistants can handle, ranging from marketing and database management to unique and specialized tasks. Tobe shares anecdotes, including an unconventional request for a funeral plan, illustrating the breadth of possibilities when leveraging virtual assistance.
This episode is a must-listen for entrepreneurs seeking to embrace a mindset shift, design their lives intentionally, and unlock the true potential of virtual collaboration. Tune in to discover how the power of choice can lead to a more fulfilling and productive business journey.
https://learn.katuva.com/300-tasks-ebook?am_id=isabel425
https://learn.katuva.com/exploratory-call?am_id=isabel243
Transcripts
Welcome to the Lift As You Climb podcast, where it's all about the
Speaker:journey and the joy of discovering who you are now, deciding who you want
Speaker:to become, and embracing your genuine identity, influence, and impact.
Speaker:In each episode, we'll explore how life's experiences have prepared us for what
Speaker:we choose to do next and how to create our Encore, write our own script, and
Speaker:star in the next stage of our lives.
Speaker:I'm your host, your Encore strategist, and transformation catalyst, Isabel Alexander.
Speaker:Hey, welcome.
Speaker:I'm so glad to have you here as I introduce the fourth in our series of
Speaker:interviews about virtual assistants with my special guest, Tobe Brockner, the
Speaker:founder of Katuva if you haven't seen the first 1, 2, 3 episodes of this series,
Speaker:I encourage you to double back, they start at episode 101, and also to share
Speaker:them with anyone in your network who would benefit from knowing more, opening
Speaker:up their aperture on what a virtual assistant can do to improve their life.
Speaker:Particularly favorite part of this interview is how Tobe shares that
Speaker:because he's changed his perspective on time and priorities and freed himself
Speaker:up by using virtual assistants in his business, in his personal life.
Speaker:that it gave him a remarkable opportunity to be present and enjoy a very long
Speaker:conversation with an 87 year old man that had some very interesting stuff to share.
Speaker:If you'd like your life to be interesting and more spontaneous, then stick around
Speaker:because we have some great suggestions for you on how to do that, how to
Speaker:live a much more Autonomous Fulfilled Life by Leveraging Virtual Assistance.
Speaker:We've got one more episode after this one, unless, of course, I
Speaker:convince Tobe to come back for a bonus and that might just happen.
Speaker:All right.
Speaker:See you soon.
Tobe:And that, I think that's a key underscore is that it's your choice.
Tobe:It really is.
Tobe:There are obviously, some jobs that require you to be available during
Tobe:certain periods of time, but just there are some times you're required
Tobe:to be face to face with a client.
Tobe:About 90 percent of the time you don't have to be, and so that 90
Tobe:percent is open to interpretation.
Tobe:You can create it and live it however you want.
Tobe:One of the hardest things for me personally was giving myself
Tobe:permission to think that way.
Tobe:Not just think that way, but actually act that way because that
Tobe:was such a foreign concept to me.
Tobe:For the longest time of, if I didn't get up at 7:00 AM and clock
Tobe:in at work at 8:00 AM every day.
Tobe:I had to, I felt guilty about it and, because I'm always running around,
Tobe:I'm so busy, and I'd wear this busyness badge, like a badge of honor.
Tobe:Almost, and it dawned on me at some point, I don't know when the flip
Tobe:switch, it probably wasn't as dramatic as that, it was a gradual flipping of
Tobe:a switch, but it was, I'm going to die one day, and they're going to staple my
Tobe:To Do list to the lapel on my jacket, with all the things still undone that
Tobe:I unchecked that I didn't complete.
Tobe:And so who cares?
Tobe:Obviously there are things that have deadlines and you have to get things
Tobe:done and certain time periods, but a lot of it is If I get these three things
Tobe:done today, my life has gone really well, my workday has gone really well.
Tobe:If I didn't get to these other three, I'm not gonna beat myself up over it.
Tobe:That's crazy.
Tobe:Like I'm just gonna take it as it comes.
Tobe:Just the other day, a guy was like, hey, want to meet up?
Tobe:And we were talking and he said, I said let me look at my calendar.
Tobe:We'll see what I have.
Tobe:And I opened my calendar and he was looking at my phone and
Tobe:my calendar was just blank.
Tobe:Even starting this podcast, you're like, thanks so much for taking the
Tobe:time, I was like, actually, I have the time, I do, because I've intentionally
Tobe:created my life to be this way.
Tobe:That's how I've lived my life, that's how I've set it up.
Tobe:I I set schedules, times like meetings and things obviously, but if I shouldn't
Tobe:be doing it or don't have to do it and that can be handled by somebody else or
Tobe:by a system being automated, whatever, then I'm going to choose to do that.
Tobe:I'm going to use my time the way I want to use it.
Tobe:Just yesterday.
Tobe:I was working on that document that I was just talking about for that client
Tobe:in a cigar lounge, having a cigar.
Tobe:I was sitting there, it was two o'clock in the afternoon.
Tobe:I finished the letter, send it off to Ivan to, to design up, close my laptop,
Tobe:and a gentleman sits down across from me.
Tobe:He said, anybody sitting here?
Tobe:And I said no, sit down.
Tobe:He's 87 years old.
Tobe:And he just moved here from Texas and we talked for three hours just about life.
Tobe:He was a petroleum consultant and he was telling me all these crazy
Tobe:stories about digging for oil back in the seventies, eighties in Dallas.
Tobe:And it was like something out of that TV show.
Tobe:It was like the Ewing's were fighting again.
Tobe:He was like telling me all these crazy stories that were real life.
Tobe:And I've never laughed that hard in my life, in recent memory, listening
Tobe:to this old guy just tell me these battle stories of when he was younger.
Tobe:It was so immensely gratifying and enjoyable.
Tobe:As I was leaving, I gave him my business card.
Tobe:I said stay in touch with me and email me or text me, if you're
Tobe:going to be back here and smoking a cigar, I want to come hang out.
Tobe:And he's Oh, you can just get away like that.
Tobe:And I said, yes, I can, because that's how I've set my life up
Tobe:and that, I think, is the key.
Isabel:You are so very right!
Isabel:The gold here for everybody listening is when you give yourself permission to
Isabel:do it differently, to think differently, to step out of the workhorse traces
Isabel:and go, I can do as much and probably more when I stay In my zone of genius.
Isabel:I'm a proponent of the StrengthsFinder, and do the things that I am best at and
Isabel:delegate the things that somebody else can do better than me, to set up, and also you
Isabel:used the word systems, and I think that's really important to highlight here, that
Isabel:none of this will work unless you set up the systems, and you help with that
Isabel:within Katuva, so that those ideas that you have, are conveyed to the people that
Isabel:can execute on them and create the value.
Isabel:And it's a fabulous working relationship!.
Isabel:I have a confession here for everybody.
Isabel:I've also found it much easier in many cases to work with somebody who isn't
Isabel:walking into my office, or staring me in the eyes, in person in my room.
Isabel:I don't have to say, I'm sorry, I can't talk to you right now.
Isabel:I don't need to pretend I'm too busy to take the time out for whatever
Isabel:their issue is at the moment.
Isabel:And I don't have to think, okay, now, how will I come back to where I left
Isabel:off on that really important thought process and pause to talk to you
Isabel:because you haven't interrupted me?
Isabel:I like to talk don't misunderstand, but the fact that I don't have that
Isabel:break in when I'm working on something now, unless I choose to do it myself,
Isabel:has also made me much more productive.
Tobe:Yeah, it's funny you mentioned that too.
Tobe:That's actually been a fairly common thread.
Tobe:We just had a client sign up about a month or so ago and
Tobe:he said the exact same thing.
Tobe:He's a contractor in Maryland I think or somewhere.
Tobe:He said, I don't want to have anybody in my office with me.
Tobe:I just want to be in here by myself to get my work done.
Tobe:I'm out in the field, I'm out in the field doing work.
Tobe:But if I'm here, I don't want to have somebody sitting next to
Tobe:me that I feel responsible for.
Tobe:That distance gives them that permission to hire someone without feeling obligated
Tobe:to have them in the same room with them.
Tobe:So it's funny that you had mentioned that as well.
Isabel:Yeah.
Isabel:I think there's all kinds of aspects and maybe we haven't been entirely honest
Isabel:with ourselves as business owners.
Isabel:Certainly I told myself all kinds of fairytales about,
Isabel:really what works for us.
Isabel:Because depending on what business book flavor of the week you read, they
Isabel:prescribed walk about your people, be best friends with them close your office
Isabel:door, open your office door, whatever.
Isabel:In working in this virtual relationship, and it really is a relationship
Isabel:for us with our staff our VAs, everybody gets very clear about
Isabel:what their responsibilities are.
Isabel:,And with the systems in place we bounce back and forth on "in
Isabel:progress completed, approved, no, I'd like to make an adaptation to it.
Isabel:" I am much, much more productive, as I said, than I was last year when
Isabel:I was trying to do the same amount of stuff, but trying to do a lot
Isabel:of it by myself or trying to manage contractors that felt they were much
Isabel:more autonomous in the relationship.
Isabel:Cherry is one of my VAs that I've hired with you.
Isabel:I call her part of team success She makes me feel successful, I make her
Isabel:feel successful, because we each have our own individual areas of strength,
Isabel:and it's a good match because of what you do to pre qualify people.
Isabel:And there will be subsequent hires.
Isabel:I've already determined that there is additional capacity,
Isabel:which kind of takes me to one of the other questions I had for you.
Isabel:What are the types of positions and skills?
Isabel:It's pretty common in my work for people to say my VA does my social
Isabel:media, but what other skill sets are you placing with clients?
Tobe:It runs the gamut.
Tobe:There's so many different things that VAs can do.
Tobe:And very niche, esoteric type positions.
Tobe:Just give you some of the more sort of Outlier on the bell curve type positions;
Tobe:we have a guy who runs a commercial real estate investment company, and he's
Tobe:looking for a financial analyst, somebody that can do the financial modeling on
Tobe:commercial properties to see whether they're viable investments or not.
Tobe:There's so many variables involved.
Tobe:not just the purchase price and, the rent.
Tobe:It's there, there's property taxes and vacancy rates and, all
Tobe:these different things that the VA has to take into account when
Tobe:building these financial models.
Tobe:That was a unique one.
Tobe:More common sort of down the middle of the plate type stuff is marketing.
Tobe:That's a big one.
Tobe:Most people need help with their marketing.
Tobe:They're very inconsistent with it or they Confuse being tactical with being
Tobe:strategic, and so they you ask them, what's your marketing strategy, and
Tobe:they say, oh, I run Facebook ads, or I do networking meetings, and those are
Tobe:tactics and so having a strategy in place, and then hiring the VA to implement on
Tobe:the tactical side, that's very popular.
Tobe:Big one is database management and CRM, types, automation, workflow type stuff.
Tobe:A lot of people have these databases that they've never actually contacted.
Tobe:They get them in, maybe it's past clients or maybe it's leads that
Tobe:they've generated at some point.
Tobe:They never talked to them, even a simple email.
Tobe:My philosophy on marketing is when people say, how long
Tobe:do you follow up with people?
Tobe:It's until they buy, they die, or they tell you to go away.
Tobe:Those are the rule of thumbs for me, and so we have three stages,
Tobe:short term follow up, medium term follow up, long term follow up.
Tobe:And when you combine them all together, it's about five years worth of follow up.
Tobe:And I'm sure two or three or four years from now, I'll extend that out to longer.
Tobe:But My VA went and built that entire workflow out for us.
Tobe:We use a CRM tool called GoHighLevel.
Tobe:It does everything you could possibly imagine it could do, and so
Tobe:everything is set up inside there.
Tobe:It's email follow ups, text message follow ups phone.
Tobe:I've recorded voicemails that just drop into their inbox or their voicemail
Tobe:box, so their phone doesn't even ring.
Tobe:It just gives them a voicemail and they can listen to it.
Tobe:Obviously, all of this is permission based marketing.
Tobe:They opt into my list and those types of things.
Tobe:We try not to be too intrusive, but we do follow up aggressively
Tobe:and somebody has to build that all out and my VA's build that all out.
Tobe:They run social media.
Tobe:We have a graphic designer, video editor.
Tobe:I'll do a batch of videos.
Tobe:I'll shoot four or five videos, just short little 30 second, 45 second videos on my
Tobe:phone, and then I'll upload those to a drive folder that say need edited and then
Tobe:Ivan will pull them out and he will edit them into TikToks and Instagram Reels.
Tobe:I don't even see them until, I don't see the ones on TikTok because I
Tobe:never get on TikTok, but they're all posted on TikTok and on Instagram.
Tobe:So all that's handled for me, I just do the video itself and
Tobe:upload it and I batch them so that it doesn't take me too much time.
Tobe:Bookkeeping is a big, getting to be more and more popular as that was one that you
Tobe:came in on as well and needed help with.
Tobe:Most of us, our books are not as pristine as we would like them to be.
Tobe:Virtual assistants are great with that!
Tobe:We have customer service reps a couple of insurance agents.
Tobe:They deal with Medicare supplement type stuff.
Tobe:And so they have clients calling in, asking questions.
Tobe:And so they have VAs that have daytime coverage that will
Tobe:field those calls for them.
Tobe:We've had people do appointment setting.
Tobe:We've had people do lead generation.
Tobe:One of the things that we do internally as well as like outreach on LinkedIn.
Tobe:I'm trying to build partnerships with YouTube channels and podcasters.
Tobe:Their audience might resonate with the message that we have at Katuva.
Tobe:And so we're trying to build partnerships with them.
Tobe:My VA does all that outreach.
Tobe:So I'm only talking to someone once they've said, yeah, I'm
Tobe:interested in talking to you.
Tobe:That saves me hours and hours of time.
Tobe:We have a Facebook ads and Google ad specialist.
Tobe:Her name is Marge.
Tobe:She just runs our Facebook ads and our Google ads and she's killing it!
Tobe:But yeah, anything, like I said, you're limited only by your imagination.
Tobe:One of my VA's, her name is Gellie.
Tobe:She mostly handles our marketing stuff, but I threw her a loop one night.
Tobe:I started thinking about my own mortality and Hey, I'm going to kick
Tobe:it one day and I'm not prepared.
Tobe:I need a funeral plan and I was thinking about I need to work on that tomorrow.
Tobe:And I was like, why am I doing a funeral plan?
Tobe:I'm just gonna have Gellie do it.
Tobe:So I sent her a Skype message and I said, Hey, Gellie, I need you
Tobe:to create a funeral plan for me.
Tobe:And her response back was is this urgent?
Tobe:No, I'm not ready to kick it off yet.
Tobe:I just need to be prepared.
Tobe:And she said, this is the worst task you've ever given me, but I'll have
Tobe:it done by tomorrow and she did.
Tobe:She put a whole funeral plan together; here's, who's going
Tobe:to speak and here's the songs.
Tobe:And it was crazy and hilarious at the same time.
Tobe:But a point is you're limited literally by your imagination because you can have
Tobe:VAs do almost anything you can think of.
Isabel:That has to be the most surprising thing.
Isabel:I thought you were going to say that your VA could do for you!
Isabel:I suffer from a condition that I call open file syndrome.
Isabel:I think of it in my head, and it just continues to annoy me and
Isabel:take up bandwidth until I can do it or now I can delegate it, right?
Isabel:So that funeral plan could have been an open file syndrome that you keep
Isabel:saying, I know I need to do this.
Isabel:I'm a responsible father and businessman.
Isabel:I'm a husband.
Isabel:I should have this organized so somebody else doesn't get left with a mess.
Isabel:But when are we going to have time for that?
Isabel:So this is brilliant!
Isabel:I thought I was going to say my VA is producing this podcast that you're all
Isabel:listening to, and that is, just among many of the things that she's doing.
Isabel:And we're learning more and by example from you how to even expand that, because
Isabel:why wouldn't I as an entrepreneur, as a business owner, and as a woman with
Isabel:a whole lot of epic living left to do, Why wouldn't I want to create more time
Isabel:for myself to do things that are fun, and new, and exciting, and expansive?
Isabel:I hope you thought that was another great and resourceful interview with Tobe
Isabel:and that you're already thinking about how this information is transforming
Isabel:your life and business for the better.
Isabel:I'd also like to say thank you so much to the VAs on Tobe's team and mine,
Isabel:and all the others out there waiting to help you have one great whole life.
Isabel:So stay tuned for upcoming episodes and more information, and of course,
Isabel:be sure to subscribe so you don't miss any episodes, and to like,
Isabel:follow, and share with everyone else.
Isabel:Thank you for spending this time with me.
Isabel:I hope our conversation added value to your day and expanded your
Isabel:vision for your legacy and impact.
Isabel:Please join me in increasing my impact and expanding my reach to even more
Isabel:people by sharing this episode on social media, with friends, and leaving a review
Isabel:on Apple iTunes, Spotify, Or channel of choice to catch all the latest from me.
Isabel:Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform.
Isabel:Connect with me and others in our community Facebook group, the Lift
Isabel:As You Climb Movement, where you can engage, be inspired by and grow
Isabel:with a tribe of like-minded people.
Isabel:As I evolve as a podcaster and spokeswoman for collaboration and
Isabel:economic empowerment, your input and feedback are especially important.
Isabel:To me, I welcome your suggestions and questions to hello@theencorecatalyst.com.
Isabel:Until we meet again, please remember your success may be the foundation
Isabel:for someone else's to together we can raise success ladders around the world.
