Leveraging Virtual Assistants and Work-From-Home Strategies | Natalie Guzman

David McBee: Hello and welcome to Simpli.fi TV. I'm David McBee. Our guest today is Natalie Guzman, CEO, and co-founder of Nadora.org. Natalie's company empowers businesses with unlimited website creation, email services, and automations. Additionally, Natalie is the proud owner of a virtual assistant agency and thriving marketing agency. Notably, she achieved six figure success for her marketing agency within three months while being a stay-at-home mom with two children. Natalie's true passion lies in helping entrepreneurs bring their dreams to fruition, offering unwavering support and expert guidance in launching websites, courses, and summits.Natalie, welcome to Simpli.fi TV. Natalie Guzman: Thanks, David. I'm so happy to be here. David McBee: Well, real quick, how old are your kids? Natalie Guzman: My kids are five and six. David McBee: All right. Well, hopefully they'll make an appearance while we're doing this interview. Natalie Guzman: Hey, you never know. David McBee: So you have a lot of expertise on a lot of subjects, and there's one thing in your bio... Well, two actually that kind of jumped out to me. One was your ability to build your business while working from home with two kids. Wow. And two, your virtual assistant agency. So can I assume that leveraging VAs helped you accomplish your goal with two little ones in the house? Natalie Guzman: Yeah, it's actually a crazy story, David. So, we had a lot of hard time getting pregnant and building our family, and when I finally realized we were in the safe zone I told my job and they told me I had two days to give birth and then I'd have to go back to work. Of course, I quit immediately. I said, "I can't have that. No way. Can't. That's not supportive of my family." I started looking ways to make money from home, and I found being a virtual assistant, I could make my own hours, I could choose my own clients. But I was too good at what I did because I got seven clients within a week. And so I had to hire 2 people within 30 days, we hit 6 figures in three months, and it just kept growing, growing, growing. And this was before the pandemic. So you can just imagine once the pandemic hit and how many online businesses started, how my agency even grew from there. But yeah, so it was a really crazy journey in raising two children and they were 12 months apart and they were both preemies with a lot of health issues. It was not easy, and I had to really learn, one, how to delegate to how still be present for my family and for my husband. And then three is just organization, creating processes and systems within my business, but also at home was super important. David McBee: I think with a lot of marketers and, well, people in general working from home, you've probably got some great advice for folks. Anything just off the top of your head that's like the one or two most important things for working from home? Natalie Guzman: Yes, it is really, really important to establish routines because routines become habits and it becomes something you don't think about and then it's not as hard. So creating routines in your daily habits. It's also really healthy for your family too because they know when you're going to be working, they know when you're going to be cleaning, they know when you just need rest. Schedule rest. Schedule that time. I schedule a time for me to read books so my family knows at 8:30 after I put the kids to bed, my kids know I'm reading a book and that's mama's time. So it's really important to establish those routines, your personal routines, your work routines, even when it comes to your employees. All my employees are virtual, and so I have routines and meetings always set at the same time, same day, and that really just helps everyone know what is going to happen and when. David McBee: Perfect. All right. So regarding this virtual assistant thing, I hear a lot of people complain that they can't use a virtual assistant because they think that the task is just easier to do themselves than try and teach someone else to do it. So what is the trick to training a VA quickly and how do you get them to do the task as good as you would do it yourself? Natalie Guzman: Yeah, so I'd first think of all the major companies, they all had to... My husband runs a prison, so they had to create a system, they had to teach them that system, and then they have to trust their staff. Those are the three key points in building a team and growing your company. Because you're not going to grow without help, you're just going to continuously stress yourself out, and you may just fail unless you have some sort of really great business model where it doesn't require help. So what I always say is have an SOP for everything in your business, that's a standard operating procedure, is a list of steps and exactly how you would do it. Mine are so detailed that I even say, click the button in the right-hand corner that says this. It's very, very particular. And then I couple it with a Vimeo recording of me doing it because I have different people on my team that learn in different ways. I have some that are dyslexic, so we need to really make sure that we are training them in the way that they're able to learn. So we do video, I even have the audio recordings, and then I have written as well, and we have charts and spreadsheets and just anything to really... We're always continuously update them because it's really important as I get a new staff that learns a different way I just want to tweak it so they're able to really understand it. David McBee: So let's say that I own a marketing agency. I'm running digital campaigns for 150, 200 clients and I need help. Is that something that your virtual assistants can do? Natalie Guzman: Yeah, so we have lots and lots of marketing agencies as clients, and I opened my own. And so that's how they were originally trained, was my own marketing agency. And now we've created systems and processes where they're able to help multiple agencies all over the world. We've had clients in the US, we have clients in Germany, Australia, all over the world, and our staff is just really amazing at what they do, and they're able to easily adapt. David McBee: What do you say to someone who has hired VAs in the past and had a bad experience? Why should they look at it again? Natalie Guzman: Sure. So first thing is I would look onto yourself. Did you communicate with them? Did you check in? Did you spend the time to really nurture that relationship? When you have kids, you have to put in all that time and energy into teaching them and training them, making sure they have the support they need. I always schedule the first 30 days of hiring someone to really focus on that person, so that's blocked out in my calendar just to really nurture it. Because if I just take the time for those 30 days to really spend on teaching them and building that relationship, it's only going to help it flourish in the future and I'm not going to spend as much time in the future fixing mistakes because I took those first 30 days to really nurture them. David McBee: And I just tell you, I love that answer. That was a very politically correct way of saying it was user error. Natalie Guzman: A lot of times it is us, and I had to learn that myself. I told you I hired 2 people within 30 days of starting, and I had never been a manager, I'd never been a supervisor. I did like a lot of project management admin task, but I never been in charge of someone and I was in charge of a new baby. So I made a lot of mistakes in the beginning. And I think that's something entrepreneurs, we don't always like to look onto ourselves, but it's something we need to do. David McBee: Before we go I like to ask all of my guests, was there a book or a podcast or another tool of some kind that really helped you gain the success that you've gotten? Natalie Guzman: Oh, yes. So Chalene Johnson, who was the Beachbody infomercial girl, especially in the early 2000s, she built something called Build Your Tribe, and so that podcast is. And her MIA, Marketing Impact Academy, has been really influential on me. David McBee: I hope people will check that out. If someone watching the show now wants to reach out to you, what's the best way they can do that? Natalie Guzman: So you can find me on social media, It's Natalie Guzman, I-T-S Natalie Guzman, and also my website. Itsnatalieguzman.com, you can find all my businesses there, and I'm happy to chat with y'all. David McBee: Perfect. Natalie, thank you so much for being my guest today on Simpli.fi TV. Natalie Guzman: Yeah, thank you so much. I had a blast. David McBee: And thank you guys for watching. Simpli.fi TV is sponsored by Simpli.fi, helping you to maximize relevance and multiply results with our industry leading media buying and workflow solutions. For more information, visit Simpli.fi. Thanks for joining us today. I'm David McBee, be awesome, and we'll see you next time.