#17 - Karl Diffenderfer: VA Business & Social Mission

I have spoken with Karl Diffenderfer about how business leaders have a hard time delegating and how he coaches his clients to let go of tasks they don't like doing.

Video

Audio Only

Long Recap

Transcription

Short Recap

Karl Diffenderfer is a serial entrepreneur who has launched several successful companies over the last 15 years and now Business and Life Coach at High Impact and the Founder of Virtual Assistants Co. A nice conversation on the motives to move ahead with such initiative and the inherent challenges.

Timeline

01:38 Introduction
02:59 The market need leading to VirtualAssistant.com
04:20 Focus on supporting others
05:44 On offshoring misconceptions
07:10 On sourcing
08:42 On VA portfolio boundaries
09:54 Why the Philippines stand for VAs when speaking of Offshoring
11:51 On Offshoring cultural challenges
12:55 On what should be delegated
13:58 Why is it so hard to delegate?
15:11 How to promote delegation.
16:28 On dealing and overcoming errors
17:20 Training, what to focus on
19:10 The importance of “connecting”
20:32 Onboarding VAs
21:54 The Toolkit
23:14 How to assess a client need
24:50 The Horror Story
29:18 Perspective on on-line freelancing platforms
30:36 The difference of a Matching Service
33:05 The edge of enabling “hand-holding”
34:00 Virtual Assistants Co. goal
36:59 Core message

Key Points

" Offshoring allows reducing costs while maintaining quality"

" Reducing operational costs while providing higher revenue to families in other geographies is a win-win situation"

" A VA needs to share client’s expectations (goals, quality, other) or it won’t be a good fit"

" Delegation implies overcoming the fear of potentially having a 3rd party messing up what is working"

" Delegation implies training and coaching"

" It’s important to treat other people the way we would like to be treated"

" Resorting to freelancing platforms implies a trial and error process that is skipped when getting a service"

Links Mentioned

Trello - Project Management
Wunderlist - Planning collaborative tool
Google Drive - On-line shareable storage space from Google
DropBox - On-line shareable storage space
Evernote - On-line cross platforms sharing space
Slack - Real-time messaging

Guest

Karl Diffenderfer @ - Virtual Assistants Company
Higher Impact
Call: 510 687 97 37
Email here
On LinkedIn
On Facebook
On Twitter
YouTube Channel

I'm an Outsourcerer. I'm a DNN Geek. I help people with their sites @ DeskPal. I'm a #Pomodoro practitioner. I'm a husband and a father of 2 beautiful girls.