Team Building and Virtual Assistants for Solopreneurs with Lance LeFort

Catharine O'Leary: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to kickstart the conversation today I have Lance LeFort with us and Lance has an executive background in creative tech industries, advertising, marketing, HR animation, film, TV streaming, we were just actually talking about some of the strikes that were affecting the the film world in the last little while he started his own business in 2017, to service those same industries and grew into a boutique business, catering to clients with management and recruitment challenges. So we are going to tuck in with Lance here and talk a little bit about hiring people whether or not you have an assessment form an intake form, how he works with his clients, and also maybe some tips and tricks around hiring vas, because we're talking about that briefly. So welcome, Lance to kick start the conversation.

Thank you, Catharine. I'm happy to be here. Perfect.

Catharine O'Leary: So let's just jump right in, like tell us a little bit more about what you do and how you serve your clients.

Sure. We are a boutique recruitment firm, quite frankly, that's what I've done all sorts of roles in my career professionally. But what happened time and time again, was I had people calling me and say, Hey, can you find me a you know, a good blah, blah, blah, can you. And so there was always this need for talent, right? There's always the demand. And most companies have a recruiter or an HR team or something, and they have a process for recruiting talent. But even when I was on that side of the desk, I had five or six recruiters working for me inside a large corporation, sometimes even bigger teams, 10 or 12. There's always, not always, but these things that come up where we can't fill this role. What what's wrong? So we would go to someone like myself now a specialized vendor, and say, Hey, we're having a really hard time filling X, whatever this position is, can you find us this, and we would outsource the role, we would pay a premium fee for it, because the reason we had a recruitment team was trying to keep our costs low and a number of other things. But so the job would go out to a specialized vendor, you know, give you a perfect example. My team was really good at hiring animation people and building movies and the CFO would come down and say, Hey, can you give the recruitment team or the HR team a role in finance, I'm like we can. But it's not what our team is really geared to do. So it'll take us a while. And then sometimes weeks would go by and the CFO would just come by and go, You know what, go hire a vendor, give me a specialist in HR, give me a specialist in finance, give me a you know, because that person will have a Rolodex or database just with those people. And that's what I need, I need this problem fixed in the next 10 days. So you know, and so we are now sort of 360 or 180 degrees. So you're I'm, I'm this specialized vendor, I used to hire specialized vendors. Now I am a specialized vendor. Did I answer the question? Sorry? No, that's that's 5000 words or less, Catharine?

Catharine O'Leary: I think I might have. So now you're the specialized vendor. So now you're the person that the Netflix and the Amazons and the you said something else there? Yeah. Well,

you know, just to jump in there, a lot of our clients work for the streaming companies. So Netflix would hire them to build a movie or do the visual effects on a movie or animation on a movie. And so then they if they're having a hard time finding the crew, or the leaders to build that project, we will help them find source, select screen interview, a shortlist, like we'll drill it down to three to five people for them, we present to them they hire and therefore then they can get their movie made, or their kids cartoon or animated show done and that sort of thing. Or AR VR and we've done work in technology and whatever the assignment is, we're basically, you know, Headhunter is the word you've heard a million times, probably we had hunt down talent, we say, Hey, we've got a great opportunity. And we outreach, we don't post ads. That's the big difference. A lot of HR teams, they call post and pray in the industry. We post this ad and pray somebody good finds it, right. Yeah, normally good. People are not looking at ads, they've got their head down, they're busy. If they turn their LinkedIn in on, they've got eight or 10 recruiters calling them saying, Hey, I've got a great job for you. I've got a great, you know, so good people in high demand, need an outreach from from a vendor like us, we've got to get to them. And sometimes they've also got conceptions like Well, I heard this about that company, and that about that company. So we are the first gate on information. And we have to say no, I've heard that too. But have you heard this, right? And give them some other information to see if that sways them to or you know, sometimes I just say look, you should have a conversation with them. Because you may have three pieces of information and two of them could be wrong. Wouldn't you want to check it out yourself? Right up front. Give you another one. Interesting. A few years back we had a client looking for a scene Your executive, and we presented several candidates. It's usually these industries are small, so they can sort of check with friends and friends and get references of, you know, from people they know. And so the sort of lead candidate in the search, someone at this client's business had a bad story. So the client put it to me and said, Hey, we've heard this about this individual. Can you dig in and check this for us? So I said, Sure, can we get you some other references? Because clearly, you're doing your own reference checking? And they said, Sure. So I asked the candidate, can you provide me at least three or four people who can speak on your behalf? This individual gave us like close to 10 people. Wow, that would speak for him. We call them all, we had eight reply within about 24 hours, which is always a good sign. You know, sometimes a reference takes three or four days, you're like, they jumped on, it jumped all over it. And so we presented the stories, quite detailed stories about how this person that helped their career, but a mentor to them a coach, even though it wasn't part of his official role at the company, he was one of these guys who really took people under his wings and help them grow their careers, like stellar stuff, like, I should have written a book. Right? I could have sold it on eBay, or Amazon. Anyway, long story short, when we presented to the client, it blew out the story, they had the negative story, but if we didn't have it, they were willing to ride on this negative reference, and shut the search down. And so that was an eye opener, the best line was the client, this CEO said to me, it's kind of embarrassing and a little bit humiliating, because he said, I don't think I could get eight people to say that kind of stuff about me.

Catharine O'Leary: It's, it's hard, ya know, it's, it's funny. So right now, you are likely placing people in a more senior level knows more senior roles. And a lot of my audience might be sitting there thinking, Well, you know, I'm a solopreneur, just building a team, or I'm, you know, like, just have maybe, you know, a handful of employees, or contractors or 1090 nines, as they call them in the in the US. How do you approach, you know, building that smaller team building and building out like the, the admin assistant and the VA and the, you know, like, do you do you approach that the same way you approach a senior manager for the, for the CFO?

Yeah, no, if somebody needs a support kind of person like that, you know, this, there's a million agencies across Asia right now who are already set up, and they have all the software and they have training programs and their professional services companies that have been doing this for 30 years or more in Asia. And I think in the last five to 10 years, they've gotten way better, much more sophisticated. So I've used VAs and the Philippines and India and anything from $5 an hour to $20 an hour, and depends on what you want, you know, and and some places I've worked with will prevent present three or four candidates to you. And you get to do interviews to figure out which one has the best sort of skill set for what you're looking for. Everything from, hey, I need someone just to post all my Instagram ads and my Facebook ads and just do my social media for me, if you got somebody Yes, but we want to bail you 40 hours a week. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, I need someone five to 10 hours a week tops, okay, if you can do that, I'm your client, if you not forget about it, right. And normally, the vendors will like know what we can make that work. And then you know, sit on a call once or twice a week with a person and we go over some stuff, and he or she designs some of our work, or we give them templates and say the ads have to match the standard. And then here are my logins for Instagram, and so on and so on. And they just post those posts. We've had other ones to work on scheduling, you know, here's my Calendly link and talk to this person. Just fill up my calendar, you know, I've got a crew working with me out of Toronto, and as well as Bangladesh together, they do a LinkedIn automation outreach for us right now. So they run various outreach scripts in our LinkedIn profile. If no one responds, there's an automated second response, third response, fourth response all on a sort of cadence like, if no reply, send the next one out three days later, if no replies in the next one out a week later, and then two weeks later, and then a month later, and so on. So the idea is that, you know, not everyone lives in LinkedIn. Some people probably fired up once a year, you know, other ones, turn it on once a week, or a lot of people have it on their phone now, which is great, because they'll see an alert, you know, something's in your inbox you get an email from. So that's been helpful because if you're a solopreneur, or a small business, as you know, you start out wearing every single hat you do, and we are as entrepreneurs crazy enough to imagine we can do it all. I don't know why. I, there's this kind of, you know, superhero type thing, I will do this, and I will do that I will get it all done. I'm amazing. And that's why I left my crappy corporate job. I can do this without you people, you know,

Catharine O'Leary: I'm having flashbacks to my own I own right.

So there yeah, there's a common thread, I think with a lot of entrepreneurs is, you know, I can think of times where I've been in a room with people thinking this person makes three times my salary, but I'm way smarter. I know more about this industry, but on the pecking order of the org chart, their position demands a significantly higher salary, because they're overseeing a huge chunk of the organization. Yet there are eight or 10 specialists in the room that know their specialty, you know, like a Mensa grad down to a data last little pin. But in the value of that organization, it's not compensated the same way as the C level or VP or directors. So Anyways, long story short, as an entrepreneur, solopreneur, you have to find the five or 10 or 15, or $20 an hour type items and get them out of your hair as quick as possible. And if you're not gonna go overseas to a vendor, get some neighbors teenager or somebody in the family, who's responsible, motivated and mature, and give them a finite task, boil it down to don't give them a broad thing, give them hey, I need this done every Friday, can you do this for me, I'll pay you 50 bucks or 20 bucks or whatever the fears, right. But if it's sat, and you've ruminated over it for four or five days and not got to it, that's a sign you need to get rid of it, get it off your desk, give it to someone else, right and pay for it. I you know, I used to do all my invoicing when I started. And I thought this is great. I'm in control of my invoices. And I know how to do this accounting package I bought and it's really an a client recommended and also a fantastic package. But then sometimes the invoice wouldn't go out for six weeks, because I was busy doing other things. Now I have a bookkeeper, right, we meet once a week, every Monday, we have a chat, I pay her x per dollars hour. And even that there was a couple of companies in India trying to, you know, offshore that for me on a on a monthly average rate and they charge you know, X number of transactions per month. Here's the rate and above that, here's the rate. But it allows you as a business owner to not focus on your billing on the invoicing. And you know, there are a lot of other things like that I don't I'm not a big fan of I was a salesperson about 30 years ago. So I'd bang on doors. Yeah, I paid for that. Now I have a company that does that the automate the function. We have been building ebooks, and I'm creative. So I think I want to build my own ebook. And about three hours into reading the software. And using the software, I go, Oh, this is really cool. If I was 30 years younger, I need to get someone else to do this. I need to pay for it. Or do it on some block some time. I'm going to spend three to five hours on every Friday for the next six weeks and build these things myself if you really want to take it on. You know and I that's the balance sometimes, right? Sometimes you're like No, but I really want to enjoy this and I want to do this myself. And what I tried to do is block my week where Friday is the admin ketchup day, the demo day, the it's not the business day. It's all the support stuff happens on my Fridays. Yeah, so I work Monday to Thursday like a badger Go, go, go go, go go go. Friday is clean up the mess. Get ready for next week. Also, you know, or doctor's appointments or whatever I ever think Friday is my Doer day, my busy busy day. But Monday to Thursday, my head's on the business all the time. And that's how I've kind of scheduled it and and I picked that up from a guy in my 20s. I remember this guy saying he was a sales rep at a company I work for and he said Lance Monday I laid everything on Friday on fire Friday. I put it all out. And he said and he said if I've done it properly. I finished Friday at noon, and I'm on my way to the cottage. I'm out of town. Yeah. So he said that's the goal leave the city early on Friday, beat the traffic up north to his cottage, his parents cottage at the time. And he was a machine he it was it was admirable to watch this guy was just like Sky knows. And he was young. He was in his early 20s. But he had this system. And he played the system over and over and over again and it worked really well for him. So it was eventually he became VP of sales at that place like at a very early age. They can see it too in his numbers. His numbers are generating so many

Catharine O'Leary: great nuggets, some so there's the don't do everything. Don't wear all the hats you need to delegate and there are lots of different options for you to do that. Absolutely get creative with them and you can you can have your creativity time you can still have your I want to play with Chad GPT for the weekend, okay, that's fine, but like you know, maybe set up your You know, Doer days as you call them from Monday to Thursday and then you know your admin day on Friday, but those are some I love those those a great nugget. Thank you so much Lance for joining us today. I really appreciate it. Do you? How can people connect with you if they want to learn more or get in contact with you?

Sure, I'm always on LinkedIn daily. So Lance Lefort, or the Lefort town group, we're at triple w Lefort talent group.com Or just hello at LeFort talent. group.com is our sort of entry email. Oh, yeah, Catch. Catch me on LinkedIn. That's easiest one.

Catharine O'Leary: Catch you on LinkedIn. All right. Well, thank you everyone so much for tuning in yet again to kick start the conversation. Lance, thank you for joining us today.

Thank you, Catharine. Take care now. Bye. Bye