#113 - Paige McPheely, CEO of Base - On supporting executive assistants navigate change with technology

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to transform the way executive assistants can support their executives through courageous help and ambitious growth like never before. My guest is Paige McPheely, Co-founder and CEO of Base.

In 2013, she co-founded 33Vincent, an executive assistant service that matches busy executives with experienced and top-quality EAs. As the company grew, she got frustrated that there were no tools built for the unique workflow of EAs. That’s where she started to imagine how much more impactful a talented EA could be with the right setup. This led her to found Base in 2018, with the goal of solving this problem for EAs everywhere.

This inspired me, and hence I invited Paige to my podcast. We explore the challenge executives and their assistants face to optimally work together: inadequate technology, manual processes, communication inefficiencies, competing priorities, and so on.

Here are some of her quotes:

We were seeing more and more frequently that entrepreneurs and people even in large businesses didn't necessarily want someone sitting outside of their office. They just needed some fractional, very focused support.

We began to run into a series of roadblocks for a number of different reasons. But I'd trace it all back to the fact that there's no standard, either definition, or process on how to become an executive assistant, and how to work with an executive assistant.

We think of assistance as this luxury. That you can only work with an assistant once you've achieved a certain level in your career. So, our big idea behind that is to completely debunk that. That if you are a high performer of any capacity, you have to have at least some access to an assistant..

We actually believe it helps us to go faster. It's increasing our velocity, and it's maximizing our impact.

During this interview, you will learn three things:

1. How you can create your own category and transform decades-old approaches by taking a 30000 ft view and asking some critical (but simple) questions
2. That you have an opportunity to create your own ground swell, by leveraging abundance
3. Why the way you make a difference is not a matter of working harder, but by understanding your superpowers and using them smarter