In this informative episode, host Rudy Rodriguez has a heart-to-heart conversation with Austin-based entrepreneur Tim Francis. Tim is recognized for founding GreatAssistant.com and Profit Factory, and he also operates his own advisory board format, aimed at helping small businesses scale and grow.

The crux of this episode revolves around the importance of efficient delegation in managing event logistics. The objective here is to enable event leaders to generate increased income, make a more significant impact, and avoid the stress and burnout associated with event planning. Tim openly shares his experiences from various events, including the notable "80/20 Summit" where he featured Perry Marshall as a speaker.

Throughout the conversation, Tim expounds on the substantial role his assistant plays in event organization, managing everything from administrative duties to coordination responsibilities for various events. This discussion brings to light the crucial aspects of event leadership such as fostering relationships with attendees and speakers, and parallels are drawn between event leaders and surgeons, with a focus on strategy, high-level skill, and access.

Tim also emphasizes the need for event leaders to establish a budget and decision-making guidelines in collaboration with their assistants to lay down a clear vision for the event. The episode concludes with Tim reiterating the impact of effective delegation in focusing on high-impact tasks, thereby leading to the success of events without any associated stress.

The episode also presents some invaluable takeaways. These include the emphasis on aiming for excellence in every aspect of the event and the introduction of the concept of "360 delegation." This approach involves clearly outlining the vision, necessary resources, and defining what a successful outcome would look like for every component of the event. It is also suggested that tasks requiring high-level skills such as negotiation or strategy should not be delegated, but instead, resources and teammates should be directed towards supporting the assistant.

Rudy recounts his positive experiences after hiring an assistant. His successful hiring decision led to their most financially productive month in business YTD. Rudy also advocates for the values of humility and patience in the process of finding and training the right assistant.

In this episode, listeners can find an array of insights and practical tips on effective delegation and event planning. The discussion offers an in-depth understanding of the value of a great assistant and the massive boost in productivity they can provide. So, tune in to this enlightening episode for more!

Want to connect with Tim?

Website: https://greatassistant.com/

3 Steps to Effective Delegation: https://greatassistant.com/3steps

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/realtimfrancis/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/realtimfrancis

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/realtimfrancis/

If you'd like to be a guest on the High-Profit Event Show, click HERE.

Hey, Rudy Rodriguez here and on today's episode, we have a very special guest coming in from Austin, Texas, Mr. Tim Francis. Welcome to the show, sir. Definitely excited to have you here, especially with your show topic today on how to delegate logistics of the event so that the event leader can focus on more income and also more impact and reducing that stress and burnout and quite frankly, post event hangover that many event leaders have been known to experience. Before we jump into the episode, I do want to highlight a couple of bio points. I do have the honor and pleasure of actually knowing you personally as well. So what I know about Tim is that he's a great volleyball player and you recently got back into playing volleyball. I knew you were a collegiate athlete as well for a period of time, which is really cool. Tim, you and I have also been on The Chairman's Council with Keith Cunningham for a couple of years and we learned tremendously from mutual mentors. You've gone over the last several years and built quite a remarkable business with greatassistant.com, helping over 500 entrepreneurs get a great assistant and be able to delegate effectively, including myself as one of your recent clients and customers. You also are the founder of an organization called Profit Factory and you run your own format of like board of advisors as well, where you've been helping many small business owners grow and scale their businesses as well. So it's been a pleasure to watch you over the last several years, grow and expand and I’m really excited to have you on today, sharing your experience with events.

Thank you. It's one of the best parts of having been in business for a little while is getting to grow with your friends, isn't it? It's been likewise very cool to watch your growth too, Rudy, and all the phases and chapters of life. So honored to be here and honored to call you a friend.

Same here, man. Let's jump into some great value content. I know you're a man of value and I’m really excited to hear your topic for today. So my understanding is that you've done several events in the past and one of them in particular, I think it was called the 80/20 Summit where you flew in Perry Marshall and you had that experience. I'd love for you to kind of, however you want to kind of come to that event, to share maybe some of your background with events and then that event and how you were able to delegate the logistics. I think the listeners can really appreciate and relate, especially if you can share some of the stressors or the challenges that you had before you finally were able to crack the code and start to delegate effectively.

You bet. So my assistant has helped take a lot of the administrative and coordinated burden candidly off my shoulder for, let's see, probably six or seven events now that are bigger conference style events and then probably about 40 small scale dinner parties she's also helped with, which has been transformative. Goodness gracious. You know, it may sound simple, but when you've got eight high level entrepreneurs who come to a dinner and all their allergies and dietary preferences are respected, we know their bio ahead of time so I can sweep them off their feet in the first few minutes of the dinner, when they feel like taking care of every step along the way. That relationship building is just so powerful. So I don't want to underestimate the power of events even at a small scale and nor do I want to under-represent just how big of an impact your assistant can make, even if it's a small eight person or 10 person dinner party. So what I'm sharing here scales up big time from that all the way up to the biggest event my assistant has helped produce for me. I think the 80/20 Summit in San Diego a few years ago was like 300 people, something like that and definitely a very complicated event. We're talking about flying Perry Marshall, our kind of headline speaker in along with people from his team and putting them up with lodging. We also flew in our team from across The United States and Canada. So I think we had six or seven people on the team. So we flew them all into San Diego for that 80/20 Summit.

The year before that was actually in Banff, Canada at a beautiful castle in the Rockies, Scottish Baronial Castle. Our guests came from India and Singapore and all over the US and Canada. So it was really quite remarkable the way that both my assistants that I have now were able to chip in. So I think a really important teaching point on the top that I hope everyone could maybe keep at the top of their mind is a bit of an analogy to something called the surgeon in the room. So if you think about an operating room, a surgeon is not preparing the room, is not getting the tools or getting the supplies. The surgeon is not the one that's coordinating the nurses and phlebotomists and everybody else who is going to be in the room or the administration, like the legal paperwork and the financial element. The surgeon's really only doing three things, and these are the same three things that I sincerely hope entrepreneurs can do more and more of because it really is the best part of being an entrepreneur on a day-to-day basis. That's focusing on strategy, high-level skill and high-level access. So if we think about a surgeon, a surgeon's strategy is going to say, OK, what's the illness or the injury here and what is the procedure that we're going to go and do? So for us as event leaders, that might be what's the format of our event? What are we going to teach? What are we going to pitch? Anything around strategy. A surgeon in the room is going to take care of things like high-level skill. So actually doing the incision and performing the procedure. Us, the high-level skill that we have when we put on events is probably some element of networking with other speakers or with our attendees, or if we have a private lunch where we pitch our high-ticket offer.

Speaking is going to be another one of our high-level skills. Also creating our content that we choose to teach. That's going to be a high-level skill as well. Then the third area of what a surgeon focuses on and what I sincerely hope everybody listening can focus more and more and more on is actually also high-level access. So when we're having an event, it's so much about building relationships with other speakers, with attendees, sometimes even with vendors, sometimes even with the hotel that you're having at, because you may want to come back next quarter or next year. So having your time freed up instead of running around trying to figure out where the clicker is or whose laptop is being used for displaying the slides or where someone's hotel room is, instead of doing that, you can kind of relax and kind of sit into your role as a gracious host. You can welcome everybody to your city, to your event, and really create that emotional leadership of the whole event where everything feels calm and welcoming and warm instead of harried, rushed, anxious, which obviously filters down from the very top. So what if we as the surgeon in the room, proverbially speaking, are at that level when we think about an event, what would an assistant or what would other people ideally take off our plate? It'd be anything that is set up, coordination, maintenance, tech support, customer support, basic research. If there's any element of onboarding, any element of offboarding, coordinating basic tasks or errands, like getting things delivered, buying a banner on VistaPrint and making sure it gets shipped to the proper hotel on the proper time.

These are the myriad, the thousands of little details that an assistant can be helping with. So I think that's what I would say if a person were to just listen to the first couple of minutes of our presentation today and they walked away and said, hey, I got to turn off this podcast. I hope that everyone could walk away with this. Let's call it the filter of looking through every task that has to do with an event. In fact, every task has to do with their entire business. So a huge shortcut, a huge shortcut that I can offer that I do every time I'm going to have a large, especially a larger scale event, and this may sound maybe mundane, but believe it or not, sitting down with your assistant virtually or whatnot and actually creating a budget. Create a super set of decision making guidelines. So if I sit down with my assistant and I say plan an event, it's doomed to fail. Like that's management by abdication, not management by delegation. One of the biggest challenges I find entrepreneurs have, and as Rudy mentioned, we've helped hire over well over 500 assistants because many of our 500 clients get multiple assistants from us, a big light bulb moment is, oh, wow, I have to really externalize my brain to my assistant. It's true. No human being can read your brain. So when you talk about what that looks like, a budget is actually a really great forcing function that causes you to sit down, open up a spreadsheet with your assistant, your assistant can even drive the bus if you hate spreadsheets, that's fine.

And say, OK, here's what I'm imagining for my event. I want pens. I want lanyards. I want tote bags to give away. I want to have two screens at the front of the room to display the camera feed or maybe you don't want cameras at all. Maybe this is a private event. I'm imagining the hotel is going to look like this and we're going to be in a ballroom or we're going to be in a boardroom. So by really being the visionary and using that spreadsheet is basically a canvas for you to download your vision for this event. You're now creating the skeleton upon which the rest of the event can be built. So once you've kind of given your wish list of what you'd like to see next up, you can say to your assistant, OK, I think I want to spend between this amount of money and this amount of money. So I'm ready to spend between 150 and 300 dollars on pens. I'm ready to spend between 75 dollars and 200 dollars on lanyards and you just go down the line. Now, if you're newer to events, you may not have some of those guidelines, in which case maybe you don't give your assistant a guideline for dollars, but instead you just give them the vision and they go find the prices. So one way or another, you and your assistant will get to a sense of, OK, this isn't really to spend. This is what the event looks like. Then after that, your assistant is going to go in and find, OK, I found pens for this amount of this style for this number of dollars. You have to buy this many quantities from Vistaprint and from Banners.com. We can get a Hollywood style step and repeat the banner as a kind of a red carpet arrival for all of our attendees.

If we go to Banners.com and we do this 10 feet tall by 12 feet wide with a red carpet in front of it. That's going to cost us this amount. Your assistant can spend a whole week just going and researching what are the various options and costs and then present them to you. You can say, oh, don't like those pens, kind of ugly, love these pens. You know what? I don't need a full color workbook. I can go with black and white. We can save some money there. Once you actually learn to lead the work that way, that now unlocks your system to go and do the work for you. And obviously, once you've selected all of the little items that fit your vision and one of the big items is what our hotel is going to be. Once you're involved with confirming that hotel, I do recommend that you are a part of those negotiations with the hotel. Then from there, now you've got the hotel, you've signed the contract, your assistant has the budget. Now your assistant can just go to town. Your assistant can make all the purchases and ship all of those different items, the pens, the lanyards, the workbook, etc., etc. directly to the hotel. And because your assistant is the one who's working with your hotel contact in the first place, your assistant is going to have that relationship with that food and beverage manager or room manager to confirm that they can receive certain kinds of items. If there's any kind of questions around timelines of when you're allowed to send things, because I mean, you can't send things three months early to a hotel, you've got to put it within a window of time. Then that's great. Then on top of that, you can also figure out, OK, here's the kind of Airbnb or hotel that we need for our internal team or any other speakers that we've got.

Again, because your assistant's leading the charge, your assistant can be the one to coordinate with your speakers, to coordinate with your teammates, to make sure that everybody has what they need. All their flights are booked accordingly. While your assistant's doing all of that, what are you doing? You're probably doing a few things. One is you're creating your content for the event, which is really probably a large reason why you got into this business in the first place was to create impact. You're also creating something that's valuable so you can expand income and you can work on things like your pitch. How am I pitching? What are my upsells? What are my downs? You can work with your coaches. You can work with someone like Rudy, who is quite possibly going to help support the sales at your event to say, what do we have to do from stage to help prepare your team, to prepare the wingman team? And you could help Rudy's team to generate product knowledge of your high ticket offer that you're selling from the back of the room. So you're now at that highest level where you can be inputting your expertise and your time and your energy and your talent into ensuring the highest level work is executed in excellence. Well, your assistant is making sure that a lot of the maintenance and coordination and setup is done in excellence in their own way. So at a very high level, that's how I think about it. And Rudy, I'm happy to go into any other direction or give examples from the wide range of dozens and dozens of events that I've done. Lead the way. Where do you think we should go next?

I want to recap some of the things I heard you say. I'm taking notes as you're speaking. I'm learning myself because I actually have an event that I am hosting for my team literally two months from today, January 10th in Cabo, Mexico. That's something on my plate in addition to running the company with people all over the world and all this other stuff. I'm like, wow, how in the world am I going to do this? And the answer is the only way I'm doing this is through delegation, through the assistant that you've been helping me train and proper process. The only way this is going to happen and happen well is I have to rely on that. I have to do what you're saying. Otherwise, I'm going to drop balls, important balls. I'm not willing to do that. So I'm taking copious notes here. I love what you shared about using the budget as a forcing function for what it is that I want and what are the constraints, the guardrails for the event. That's my action item right there. I just got to create a clear budget and sit down with my assistant here probably this week or Monday. That's going to be my takeaway from what you're sharing. So I think one of the things that would be beneficial is specific examples. If there's maybe something that you know that has been challenging or maybe oftentimes people don't think they can delegate or some specific experiences you have around things that can be delegated with those events, I think would be really beneficial to share.

Okay, great. So some secrets to success. Let's go that way. So first of all, I really think of business largely in terms of odds. Like what are my odds for success that something is going to turn out? Pretty much anything you think about doing in business has at least a 1% chance of succeeding. I don't like those odds. Okay, I want the 80% plus version of everything that I do as much as humanly possible. I get that sometimes it's not possible, but as you know, to whatever I can control, I want the 80% plus version. So the very first thing is I want an assistant who's similar time zone, same business culture, same first language so that we can collaborate on the fly. The closer that event gets, the more last minute details are going to come up. If I'm trying to collaborate with someone who's five time zones, six, seven, eight time zones away, it's going to be two ships passing the night. We need someone who is similar, same time zone, language and business culture as your right hand person. Second pro tip is I am probably not going to delegate being the event manager to an assistant if they're brand new to my team or if they haven't done an event with us before. So part of what made the San Diego 80/20 Summit so successful was my assistant had been more so my right hand person as I was the event producer at the previous year's Banff 80/20 Summit. The year before that, my assistant had been more just kind of like a semi arm's length supporter at the event we did the year before that.

So she graduated through repetition into being able to take care of essentially the whole event. The event's budget for the San Diego 80/20 Summit was $31,000 and she came within 1.6% of budget. There are no events that come within 1.6% of the budget. It doesn't matter if it's a wedding or a funeral or a business event, 1.6% is incredible, especially the bigger the event goes, tens of thousands of dollars, the more likely the deviations are going to get big. So I think that understanding that, approaching delegating your event as a long-term relationship with your assistant, that's my next tip. I would be thinking maybe not how can my assistant completely take over the very first event that we do together, but say like the third time, the fourth time, the fifth time we do this, I'm looking to my assistant to have understood the full lexicon of what's happening. What I mean by lexicon is what are the names of the critical people? What are the acronyms? What are the packages that we sell? Who are the key people at the hotels? The videographers, the photographers, understanding the ecosystem, and by the third, fourth, fifth event, I need my assistant. That is when I need them to be essentially maybe not executive producer, but producer of the event. My next tip is to really be very, very, very judicious about the use of a tool that I invented called 360 delegation. So if I want to take my event and I unpack it into smaller parts, I've got a welcome cocktail hour. I may have a morning breakfast on day one and going back in time, maybe there's like a load in the day before.

So as I unpack the different chapters of the event from before the first cocktail event to after the final closing remarks, like the whole symphony of the whole event, I can unpack that into the seven, eight, nine different main components. If you're going to have a pitch lunch where you invite people, you buy them lunch and you present to them your high ticket offer, for example, that would be another example of a chapter, if you will, in the story that is your event. I would write a 360 delegation for each of those. So what is 360 delegation? 360 delegation is when you clearly, so you open up a Google doc probably, and you clearly define three things. What is the vision for what you'd like completed? What are the resources that you are aware of that are required for your system to be successful at executing the vision? And what is the definition of done? What is it that you would need to see, your attendees would need to experience, maybe other stakeholders, be it other speakers or your teammates, what needs to be seen as an outcome, as a work product, as a behavior, as an experience for the different stakeholders to say, this was nailed 10 out of 10. So that 360 delegation, if folks want to see all of the elements that go into it, you can just go to greatassistant.com/3steps. That shows a 360 delegation right there. So by being very clear, and again, getting really good at leading the work, it means now you don't need to do the work once the time comes.

Another tip is the closer that we get to the event, the less flexibility that there is for curveballs and audibles. It's kind of like, if the President of The United States Of America is going to visit a country, there's an advanced team that's there 90 days in advance, scoping things out, preparing for the arrival of the president. The president can enjoy all of that leverage, as long as the president is thinking 90 days in advance. If the president wants a cheeseburger in five minutes from now, the president is not going to be able to get the benefit of all the leverage around him or her. The president is going to have to either go and get the cheeseburger themselves or just be okay with waiting 45 minutes for the Secret Service person to go and get it for them and bring it back or wait 20 minutes for the cook to make one. But leverage becomes available when we have a runway. So getting started early, weeks in advance of your event with your assistant is super important. I think that us as entrepreneurs, our job is to continually define and design, define and design, define and design. Defining, like I mentioned, what is the scope and shape and size of the cocktail party to welcome people to your event?

Then design it. Do I want fruity drinks? Do I want beer? Do I want wine? Do I want people to have a photo opportunity when they walk in? If so, am I in the photo? Am I not? Are there other speakers in that photo? Is there not? Do all my attendees get a copy of the picture? They get a copy of the picture sent to them. Something that we did at one of our events was we had a photo op on the very first day of the 80/20 Summit, the evening cocktail before the event started. We actually had our photographer quickly run then to print off all the photos. Then Perry Marshall and I autographed all the photos. Within 24 hours, we gave all attendees a signed copy of a photo of them with me and Perry. It was a turnaround, just bang like that. That was just something creative that I came up with. I know that people maybe aren't a huge fan of Tim Francis, who knows, but lots of people are huge fans of Perry Marshall. He wrote the 80/20 Sales Marketing book. He's a really fascinating guy. For them, there's people who flew from around the world just to meet Perry. That was his star power in the business environment. I knew for them to get an autographed photo with him would be an amazing personal touch. It would really be something that would sit on their desk or on their fridge for a very long time. I think that the more that we attend events, the more that we host events, the more that we can come up with our own exciting vision of what that looks like. As long as we're willing to take on the responsible role of defining, designing, and then putting it into a 360 delegation and handing it off to our teammate, almost anything can be delegated that does not require the surgeon in the room, does not require strategy, does not require high-level skill, does not require high-level access.

I'd say the other thing I wouldn't delegate is I wouldn't delegate negotiating with the hotel. If you want to be very clever, never split the difference, Chris Voss-level negotiator, that is a high-level skill. You want to keep doing the high-level skill. Don't ask your assistant to be an incredible negotiator, an incredible salesperson. Then obviously, you got to resource your assistant with the other people around them. Your assistant isn't necessarily going to be a great graphic designer, for example, or a great web developer. Make sure that your assistant is supported with the other teammates outside of yourself that they're going to need to be successful. That's a high level of including a specific tool, 360 delegation, which a person can get at greatassistant.com/3steps.

That was perfect, man. I've made a note here to grab the article that you created around the highlights, the seven yes tasks, 360 delegation, all of that, and include that in the show notes for today. I think that'd be a great resource for our audience. I'm over here copiously taking notes as you're speaking. I love the metaphor you said, the president's going to a country, sending a team 90 days in advance to create that leverage, but when he wants a cheeseburger in five minutes, it's going to be really difficult. I also made a note of that really clever thing you did with the photographer and getting that printed and autograph signing, given out before the event ended, how unique and memorable that is. Also, another takeaway here, what not to delegate, not delegate things that are high level skill beyond the assistants bandwidth and make sure she's properly supported, he or she's properly supported. At the end of the day, we’ve still got to do the work of the design and then responsible delegation, which is one of the things I really appreciate and took away from your course, Being a Great Leader, that I recently went through is how diligent you are about delegation being a mutually responsible thing, both from you as the entrepreneur, as well as the assistant in receiving the delegation. I have a lot of respect for your leadership and your methodology and your approach. You do your best to set people up for success, and I really respect and appreciate that about you. For our audience who's listening here, if you are struggling at all with any kind of overwhelm or stress in your business or too much on your plate, this is something I personally have struggled with for years.

I had so many psychological blocks around. Tim, you've done surveys around this too and the causal reasons why, but the bottom line is I officially hired my assistant now five and a half weeks ago, and I've been working with my assistant for five and a half weeks. I just met with the accountant just before this meeting. Last month, my first month in business with my assistant was actually my most personally productive month financially that I've ever personally done in business. I'm just now connecting the dots. I am so excited to see what we're able to create from a leverage perspective and work with the assistant over the next 60, 90 days, six months, etc. Tim, thank you for taking a stand for me and having a great assistant and setting her up for success properly. Thanks for all you do, man. Any final comments for our guests as we wrap up the show?

If anyone's ever read the book, Extreme Ownership, Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, a really extraordinary book. I think the spirit of that is breathed into this next piece, this closing thought I'll share. The first thing is that we are all responsible to fulfill our potential, whatever that may be in this lifetime. That was really the core reason why I failed five times with getting an assistant before finally succeeding. From the place of extreme ownership, I think three powerful questions we can ask ourselves, up to and including, if you try to delegate something to your assistant and it doesn't work out, I would ask three questions. Number one is, if I were to just play make-believe for a moment here and say this is 100% leadership, a failure of leadership, what becomes available to me? Whatever the answers are, guess what? Those are opportunities to get better with your assistant. Then if we say, what if I play make-believe and say this is a 100% systems issue? I missed a checklist or I didn't follow 360 delegation or something like that. And then whatever you come up with, you can use that as the next go-around. And the third is, what if this is a people issue? I didn't have the right people in the right spots. Guess what? You'll come up with another set of collections. So I think there's a humility that's required. And I think that there's a patience that's required that belays the African proverb, if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together. If you want to go far, an assistant is an indispensable person. I've told my team in no uncertain terms, if I had to let everybody go on my team, I could only keep one person. I wouldn't be keeping a salesperson or a project manager.

I would be keeping my assistant because they optimize the most important person on the team, which is not from a place of ego, but from a place of workability is me. On a personal level, me fulfilling my potential in this lifetime, it just would not be possible without an assistant. So however a person goes about finding and hiring and training, essentially training, most crucially training that person, I'm churning you on towards that. Because when you get it wrong, it is a major pain in the butt, but when you get it right, getting a great assistant will be the single biggest productivity jump of your entire business career. It unlocks the door for you to do other things that become the second and third biggest jumps in your career, like delegating your email inbox, like delegating event management, et cetera, et cetera. So thank you really for having me. It's been just a delight to watch you take the coaching every step along the way. You really embody a lot of that humility and that patience that I say over and over again, and those who take the coaching end up flourishing. I'm not at all surprised here. You just had the most personally productive month in history for you. You're just getting started. I'm so excited. I'm so excited for you.

Thank you, Tim. I appreciate that, my friend. Thanks for being a guest with us today. With that being said, we'll go ahead and call it a wrap.