SFR 12: Interview - Jen Goodwin Gives The Goods On Her Secret Virtual Assistant Empire

STEVE:
Welcome, everyone. Today I have a very special guest. I'm very excited. I actually have only met her only two weeks ago. It was pretty cool actually. I felt an immediate connection. Anyway, this is Jennifer Goodwin.
How you doing?

JEN:
Good. How are you?

STEVE:
Fantastic. I'm doing really, really well. I was scrolling through Facebook, it was about two weeks ago, and ... I don't know if I've told you this yet, but I was scrolling through Facebook, and I saw an ad that you had out. It was ad for vets. I can't remember exactly what the ad was saying, but it said something like, "Hey, here is a way for vets to launch their businesses online." I immediately was like, "Whoa, this is so cool. Someone's going for this market?" I didn't know anyone who's been going for that. It's such a needed thing, being in the military myself. How did you even get into that?

JEN:
Absolutely. I grew up very patriotic. I didn't realize until this year that the veterans were my ideal client. How it happened was, I was always trying to help veterans that were, military guys and gals that needed help with the internet marketing and getting themselves to the next level. Most recently, I was volunteering at a local homeless veteran shelter where some guys and gals were in transition. I said ...

Well, a little back story. Three years ago I was on a motorcycle, my first ride, and I was life-flighted off the highway.

STEVE:
Oh, my gosh. Three years ago?

JEN:
Three years ago. Twenty-five, 30 minutes into my first ride with a friend on Highway 95. We were set at 70 miles per hour. Road debris came out of everywhere. An 18-wheeler had blown his tire, and we couldn't avoid one of the pieces. It flattened the back tire. Needless to say, I took a nice, pricey helicopter ride to the trauma center, so I actually lost my business.

I was down for a lot of time. Financially, physically, emotionally, I had to go through that trauma. I had a lot of time to think through in recovery, and I made a few decisions about my business when I got back to it, which I really just got back to it full-time this past January. I decided that I was going to partner with the right people and never sit on my ideas and make sure that I was launching all the things that I had written down in a book and that were collecting dust.

One of the other pieces was that I was going to give back. Even though I was sort of starting over, I knew what I was doing. I had 15 years in the business. I was relaunching, but I still wanted volunteering and giving back to be part of that.
I was literally driving to a veteran center in Jacksonville, Florida and just camping out in the chow hall every Thursday and saying, "Whatever you have, just bring it to me. Just bring me your website needs. Bring me your resume needs. You got a new computer and you need to know how to run it? Just bring it to me." Even some of the staff there who weren't veterans would say, "Hey, I'm going for this other job interview," and so I just made myself available every Thursday. It didn't feel like work.

Then fast forward a couple months. A friend of mine that's pretty well-known in the veteran space, he's on the History Channel and got quite a following on social media, said, "I've got four veterans that need, like, yesterday." Just working through those clients, it just didn't feel like work. It just felt so easy, because they're so loyal. They're so grateful. Usually what they're inventing, we're writing about, is something I believe in, so I re-branded my business to be all about serving veterans.

STEVE:
That's incredible. I love that. I've noticed that a lot of the people that I interview, they never ask permission to go do something like that. You just showed up. You just sit down and every Thursday ... How long did you do that before you went to that re-brand?

JEN:
I only did that for a couple months, because I actually ended up moving out of the area and haven't found a new local shelter to go help with. Let me see. I believe I started ... January, February, March. Probably about two and a half months into that I re-branded. I was also talking with some coaches. Actually, one of the coaches I was speaking with, a female coach, she was a veteran ... or she is a veteran. She said, "Jen, I got my start helping my fellow Army soldiers, starting their businesses when they got out." I said, "This is my ideal client, the more I think about it." I said, "Is it that easy?" She said, "Yeah."

Literally, within 24 hours ... I couldn't even wait to re-brand everything. I went to the team and to the social media images, and I started changing it all up. The first batch was a little bit rough and amateur. I just wanted to get camouflage in there.

STEVE:
Yeah. Yeah.

JEN:
That's probably one of the ones you saw or maybe one of the newer ones. Yeah, it was pretty quick.

STEVE:
Yeah. That's incredible. It's interesting that that's the way it worked out. I remember when I went through basic ... I'm obviously business-minded. I really enjoy it. It's my obsession a little bit. I was going through basic training, and it's hard at certain points. One of the things that kept me going mentally and emotionally was talking about business ideas with all these other guys. I ended up having it, and all these guys that would sit around, and we would just talk about some different strategies. To this day, I still talk to some of them, and they're trying to do business stuff. It's definitely clearly an awesome market. A lot of them are go-getters. Anyways, that's super cool. That's fantastic.

JEN:
Yep.

STEVE:
One of the things I've noticed too, though, is that immediately ... You were doing the same thing with me. I was blown away with that, "Hey, do you need help with this? Do you have VAs for this? I have teams for this." You are an absolute master with VAs. How did you get that way?

JEN:
Thank you for saying that. I love helping people. They ask me, what's my agenda sometimes, very few, but I say, "I just like getting a break from the paying clients, who are so demanding." It's like a break to just pull away and just go help people for free with no expectations, so thank you for that.
I have been an entrepreneur my whole life. My father was an entrepreneur, made some money in the door and window business. Very early on ... Well, not too early. I guess my late 20's, because I went and got an architectural degree, a drafting degree, from 26 to 28, but as soon as I came out of that, I worked for someone else for six months, and that was it. I had worked for people previously, from 16 to 28, but I knew at that moment I did not want to work for somebody else, and I couldn't work for somebody else. It just felt like my soul was in jail.

STEVE:
Yeah. I like that.

JEN:
I left the corporate world, and I was working for an engineering company, and I co-advertised. I didn't even think you could do this, but I rented an exhibitor space at the kitchen and bath show in Orlando, Florida, way back when, and shared it with one of my competitors. I was turning away 95% of my lead. I was so lucky, because what I was providing was CAD drawings and artist renderings to interior designers and kitchen designers. They didn't have anybody that was serving them. Usually people that were drafts people were going to work for architects and engineers, and so the designer industry was left hanging. I filled that void.

I was turning away so much business, I knew back then that I had to learn how to scale my business and learn how to use the software that was out there that was going to help me scale my business by leveraging the tools and the people. Very early on I started to outsource to other drafters and just caught the bug of outsourcing and marking up the work and being the middle man really. I was outsourcing right away. I ran with the CAD services for about four or five years. After teaching myself everything on the internet, everything that I could at that time ... The internet was much smaller then.

STEVE:
Yeah.

JEN:
It was easier to master. I re-branded into Internet Girl Friday, and I've been doing that ever since. Again, I did lose my business for about two and a half years, but I've been back at it now, and I have virtual assistants and developers. It's great, because in my mind that's the only way to scale your business, is to have a team to support you. That's what we're doing.

STEVE:
Yeah, and you clearly have that. It's so fascinating, though. I wish I could pull up the text real quick that you sent me. It was a long list of stuff that you were asking me if I needed help with. I was like, "Man, she's got the hook-ups."

JEN:
Yeah, I would say, if it touches the web, we can do it and mean it. People come to me and say, "Well ..." I have friends that, you know how the friends and family never know what you're doing with the internet, and they don't get it.

STEVE:
Yeah.

JEN:
I have a friend that called me. I said, "Listen, I've got 20 minutes to talk. What's up?" He said, "Sounds like you're too busy and you can't take on my work." I said, "No, I have a team for that. I can do it. We can do it." I'm hiring people all the time. There's no shortage of people out there that want to work, whether they're US-based or they're offshore. There's hundreds of thousands of workers out there that ... You can go to Fiverr. You can go to so many different sites and get people to help you in your business, and I take advantage of that.

STEVE:
That's amazing. When I was in college, that's really when I started getting the bug for this. Well, that's when I started getting traction, I should say. I always had the bug. I went and I started hiring these different VAs. My buddy and I, we were building this Smartphone insurance business, and we went and we hired out this guy. He was just like, he wasn't very good. We paid him $500 to build this really small thing. It wasn't big at all, and we got it back and it was awful, like, "What the heck?" That's why I started using click funnels, so I could do it on my own.
Then another time came up and another time came up. I was like, "Man, I'm really striking out with these VAs." I'm curious how it is that you actually go find good ones, because that's a skill in and of itself that I don't think people realize you need to have. Not all VAs obviously are built the same. What process are you taking up? What are you having them do? How are you vetting the VAs for your vets?

JEN:
There's a couple different ways. I hate to say this, but I don't like the big outsourcing sites. I think it's really hard to find that needle in the haystack, and you have to spend a lot of time sorting through people that are really just looking at the dollars per hour; right? They're like, "No, I can't make anything less than $8 an hour." They overbid. I just don't like those sites. I never had great luck with them ever.

STEVE:
That's totally the opposite than what everyone else says, so that's interesting.

JEN:
I've done it for 15 years. If I had an army of 100 virtual assistants, do you know how much money I'd be making? If it was that easy, I would have just hired a team of people from there, but I've spoken to people for 15 years from those big sites.

What I find works for me is I enter a couple of virtual assistant groups on Facebook. Whenever I have a need for somebody, I post the job on my blog post, and I'll send a link out to the virtual assistant groups and say, "Hey, by the way, this week I'm looking to talk to people that have skills in ..." whatever skill I'm looking for that week. That's worked out well, because I only get a handful. I might get 10, 15, 20 applicants. It's totally manageable. I have a forum on the blog post. I'm not going to field emails or phone calls or be scattered.

I want them to just dump their info into a form, and then I can go back and look at, and I can say, "All right. I'd love to talk to these three out of 10 on Skype," or somehow. They say, "Hire two and fire one." Try a couple people out just on a small ... I work through baby steps when it comes to hiring a virtual assistant. Let's take one tiny task, not, "Oh, I found you. Here's all my money. Here's all my tasks. Talk to you in a week." That will just go wrong every time. You want to start with, "Can you contact me on Skype," because that's a requirement. That's my office.

If they tell me they don't have Skype, they're out. It's that simple. You have to work my way in my company with my tools. I'm flexible, but you have to show up in my time zone. You have to speak my language. We start at the very beginning and make sure that those pieces are there before moving on to, "Okay, here's how you get into my project management system, and here's where you find your first task." I work closely alongside them and say, "Stay with me right here on Skype. Tell me, 'Jennifer, I'm starting Task A right now, and I plan to be done in 15 minutes, and I'll ping you back when I'm done, so you can review it.'"

It's really micromanaged in the first week. As you get more comfortable and as they're trained a little bit more, then they can work on their own time. I literally do that every morning for about two hours, Monday through Friday, from, roughly, 9 to 11 every day, which is a lot of time when you think about it. I'm also mentoring virtual assistants, so I'm not paying the ones that I mentor that I identify in the group as being really smart and might have come from 15, 20 years of past corporate experience, so they have skills. They just don't realize how to translate them to the internet.

Again, I love helping people, so I say, "Come on in as an apprentice. You can follow along. You can invite your friends to sit in your house and watch. It doesn't matter." I've hired people from that group as well.

STEVE:
Wow. That's fascinating. If the person is good, they might have friends that are good. Might as well bring the friends along and train them too.

JEN:
Yeah. I tell them, "Listen, I'm looking to build teams, so if you already know someone ..." I had this conversation just last night with one of Filipino VAs. She's amazing. I said, "I'm about to hire a few more, so if you know anybody ..." She's like, "Well, actually, I do have three assistants, and they work in my house with me. It's my goal to help these single moms that need some more income to get going." I said, "Great. Let's ramp them up." Yeah.

STEVE:
Awesome. That's fantastic. That's amazing. Eventually, what started happening was I was like, man, I literally have spent thousands and thousands of dollars on VAs for stuff that was not very good work. I was not happy with it. I started going through, not the same process at all. That's genius. I'm going to have to ... That's absolutely incredible.

I'm going to have to think more about that and try and figure out how I can do that too, or I'll just ask you, hire you to do it.
Do you have a particular freelance or VA site, I guess, that you like more than others, Fiver, Freelancer, Upwork?

JEN:
I love Fiverr. Actually, this morning before this podcast, I was looking on Fiverr for a virtual assistant but only because in the virtual assistant groups that I'm in on Facebook, I saw someone saying, "I'm not getting any traction as a VA on Fiverr. What am I doing wrong?" I clicked on the link which took me to their Fiverr account, and I said, "I'm willing to try you out. Contact me on Skype." Again, that's my first requirement.

I use Fiverr for other services. If my dev team is too busy with some bigger projects, and I need to knock out some quick keyword research or a quick image, I can go to Fiverr and I can find it. It's just like any other service where you can see the ratings, but for some reason they have, they've made their user interface so easy to navigate and quickly see, "Oh, wow, they've had 200 projects. They're five stars on all the reviews for all those projects. I'm pretty sure they're returning good work, and it's dollars." Who can't lose $5; right? We spend that on a coffee sometimes.

It's different from going to the big sites like Upwork and saying, you have to put your whole job description. You have to say, this is 30 hours a month or 30 hours a week, whether it's permanent. They make you jump through so many hoops before you even find someone. Then you might get a thousand applicants, and you have to sort through all that. It's too much work, where you can go to Fiverr and just browse really quickly and click on someone. You don't even have to click on someone and contact them, but you can just put your mouse over their little portfolio image, and it shows you how many jobs, how many stars. Very quickly you can jump into having an assistant or a vendor.

I know there's a lot of controversy with using offshore vendors versus keeping it in the USA, and I do keep most of my work, 99% of my work, in the USA. Even my Indian development team is in the USA, strangely. When you're restarting, which is the mode I'm in now after the accident, you need that payroll break; right? You want to have assistants so you can scale your business, but you can't go out and afford the $25-an-hour United States VA, so it does help to go offshore. I do like the Filipino virtual assistants. They are super-smart, super-talented. Their English is perfect. They are very friendly and very accommodating. There's no language barrier like I've experienced with other countries. They're extremely affordable.

Here's a little trick that I've done. I've gone to Wikipedia and typed up, "Countries with the lowest hourly rate," and it's mind-blowing and scary that there's some countries or areas of their countries where 50-cents-per-hour is the minimum wage.

STEVE:
Oh, man.

JEN:
That's not saying you can just go there and find a virtual assistant. Virtual assistants have to be a booming industry in a certain country for it to be valuable to you, but the Philippines are great.

STEVE:
That's incredible. There's a workaround that I have found that helps. I did a whole podcast on this actually earlier, because it's a frustrating thing to go through. The biggest things I've learned from Russell, you got to have people. The biggest things I've learned from my own things, you've got to have people. Otherwise, you as the entrepreneur get bogged down. You can't handle all of the tasks. This is definitely valuable information to hear. There was a workaround that I, to using VAs that I was figuring out too. Do you use Freelancer.com much?

JEN:
I have, but, again, I didn't use it much.

STEVE:
Yeah. It's a little bit challenging. There was one feature that saved my butt on a lot of different things, and it was the fact that you can post contests. That's actually pretty cool. I needed all these different images made, or I needed a tee-shirt design. I basically said, "Hey, I really want to motivate people, so here's the prize is $100 and everyone submit your work. I'm just going to choose one guy." It was fantastic.

I got 80 or 90 submissions, and the whole week during the contest, I could talk back to them and say, "This looks good but change this." "This looks good but change this." I could rate all of their work, which was public to everyone else. All the work, the freelancers started pushing towards a different path as they watched my comments to other people.

That's really the only trick I have for VAs. I haven't done anything else that you do with it. It kind of works, but what you do is a lot cooler, actually.

JEN:
I don't know. The contests sound pretty cool. I remember seeing them on Topcoder years ago when I was looking to build a software, and someone said, "If you don't have unlimited budget to build the software, present it as a contest." I thought that was fascinating, where they have a contest for one part of the software and a contest for another part. Then they have a contest at the end to put all the parts together. I thought that was fascinating.

STEVE:
That's incredible. Hey, there's a lot of people obviously who are trying to get into this space who want to do what you're doing. I know you alluded to it before, but what would be the first step to getting a good VA?

JEN:
I would definitely check out the virtual assistant groups in Facebook. It's a close-knit community. People can vouch for other people. There's some names at the top that know a lot of the VAs in the industry, so they actually have requests for proposal boards that you could sign up to and submit your work. Then you know you're getting a qualified VA, or you can find me and I'll point you in the right direction. I would check sites like FreeeUp. That's with three E's, F-R-E-E-E-U-P.com.

STEVE:
I've never heard of it. Awesome.

JEN:
It's new. It's getting a face-lift. The site is only about eight months old, I think. They've got some big plans. Nathan Hirsch, who's out of Orlando, Florida, he's doing very well with it. You can get VAs as low as $5 and up to $50 per hour, depending on what skillset you require.

Check out the Filipino ... I can't remember the domain names off the top of my head, but there are a lot of Filipino virtual assistant sites out there that you can just Google it up, and it will pull up some of the top ones. They really are a great crowd for your everyday administrative stuff. I'm literally teaching my VAs now how to set up some of the beginning integrations of click funnel.

STEVE:
That's awesome.

JEN:
I have a checklist, and they can go through and connect the SMTP and the domain and do some of the basic setup. Then I can take it from there and build a funnel.

STEVE:
Fantastic. Just because you mentioned it, how are you using it with click funnels? I went through and looked at your site, and it looks fantastic. It's very clean. HowToGoVirtual; right? Dot-net?

JEN:
That's the academy site that we're launching. The services site, where all of our clients go through is InternetGirlFriday.com, and we're just like any other entrepreneur. We have multiple different sites.

What happened was, I needed to get all of this information into other people's hands. I've got 15-plus years on the internet. Of course, you want to package that up and provide it online as a video course or some type of academy environment. I created a class to teach people the four steps of getting your business website launched, because you know how customers get confused about the internet. The internet is so big now, and there's so many steps, and the algorithms. They get approached by so many vendors. "What should I be paying for," and I said, "I've got to find a way to simplify this."

Back in 2010, I think it was, I came up with a 12-step plan. Just a way to categorize everything you do on the internet came to 12 categories. That's it. I just wanted to show people, "Okay, Step 1 is your research and your keyword research and your competitive analysis. Step 12, at the end, is analytics." Everything falls somewhere in between, so that they had something that they could follow along. Not that every strategy goes in order, but the first four I call, "The foundation." You've got to do your keyword research if you're going to launch a website, and your competitive analysis, and you have to know what people are looking for, what your target market is looking for. Step 1.

Step 2, building your website in a blueprint first. I think that's so important, because you need to get the SEO and the keywords that were revealed in the first step into your website. If you just hand your website over to someone, they might make it beautiful for the humans, but they're neglecting what robots need to see through Google.

STEVE:
Right.

JEN:
That's Step 2, build the blueprint. Step 3, build the website. Step 4, connect it to the search engines and some directories. Now you've got your foundation to go offsite and do all your marketing with whatever strategy you're deploying. I package that up into a course. I'm glad that I had the time off that I did, because when I came back to it, there was click funnel, and it was like, "Ah." Finally there; right?

The funnel isn't new. The strategy isn't new. It's a little different, because, again, the internet is bigger and more complicated, but a sales funnel is still a sales funnel; right? We didn't reinvent the funnel. We just put the software together in one place, like Russell.
All the steps that you used to have to do, you used to have to literally build a landing page, usually in HTML, because you needed it to be a certain way. If you needed a green check-mark versus a red check-mark, it was all piecework. Then you'd have to go to the next step, and you'd have to connect your email responder.

Everything was daisy-chained together. It was so overwhelming, that most people didn't launch, because there was so much work. Even me, who has a team, knew how to do it for so many years, I could never launch, because it was overwhelming.

STEVE:
Yeah.

JEN:
ClickFunnels comes on the scene and it's all in one place. I don't use the term, "All-in-one" lightly. I don't give credit to many softwares. It's not an all-in-one where you're billing and all your other things are in there, but for the funnel it's all in one. Everything is literally in one place, and it's been so exciting to set up and to get going and to see that now I can literally wake up at 3 am, have an idea, and within two hours, have it going and some ads going, and it's launched. That's the exciting part. My clients are excited about it to.

STEVE:
That's so cool. That's so awesome. I remember when I first started putting things together for ... It was an artist actually that built the first site/funnel four or five years ago. I remember spending two hours ... No, it was two days, two full days, trying to make WordPress act like a squeeze page.

JEN:
I know.

STEVE:
It was the most hellish thing. It was awful. I remember just settling with something. I can't remember what it was. Neither of us liked it. I'm not a coder or programmer. I can read it. I can edit it, but I'm not at all a programmer, at all. I was like, "This is terrible." I almost gave up on the internet a little bit, because it was so hard. Then when click funnels came around, I remember I saw the presentation that Russell gave mine. I probably shouldn't have done this, but I didn't talk to my wife about it. I immediately bought it, and I started using it and building for other people. I was like, "This is the craziest thing." Now I dream in funnel editor. It's the funniest thing.

JEN:
Same thing, yeah, because back when you were creating your old landing page, which, again, is just one tiny piece of the whole funnel, I often went back and forth to, "Gees, I've got to hire a developer just to create a landing page page template in my WordPress?" Then that never got done. Then you go over to the third-party platforms that are providing fully landing pages. You're like, "I don't want to spend another $50 a month just to do this one piece, because by the time I'm done with the whole funnel, I'm spending a thousand dollars a month just to get it all connected. Yeah, it's been such a blessing, and I'm so excited.

STEVE:
I think my record so far with sitting here next to Mr. Russell Brunson, I think the fastest we put a funnel out is 45 minutes or something like that, a full one. It's like there's no way. He and I will still sit back and be like, "I can't believe we have this software," and he's the CEO of it. We'll be like, "Man, look what we just did. Look what we pulled off." He's like, "This little change used to cost me 10 grand. We're going to do it in 30 minutes."

JEN:
I remember testing my first webinar funnel, and I didn't have it completely set up, but at some point I got my reminder email, and I said, "Oh, look, how cool is that? I'm already getting the emails automatically." I didn't even set up the email, and I clicked on the link inside that said, "Your webinar is starting now." I clicked it 20 minutes late. When I did click it, it went right into the webinar that was playing, at the 20-minute mark. I said, "This is magic."

STEVE:
Yeah. So cool. I know I said we'd keep it to 30 minutes. You are amazing. I can't believe all the stuff you're pulling off is incredible, manager and builder of teams. I'm looking at all these sites right now. It's absolutely incredible and just crazy impressive. Where should people go if they want to follow you, learn more about you, even obviously use some of your services.

JEN:
Yeah. If you go to InternetGirlFriday.com, then you can find my social media, which is everywhere. We have Periscope and Instagram and YouTube and all that, and follow me on any of those. We're very active there. InternetGirlFriday.com is the service's site. You can contact me there. You can say, "Hey, I don't need to hire you, but I have a question," and I'll be glad to help.

STEVE:
Awesome. I appreciate it so much. Thanks. This is spur-of-the-moment, but this has been awesome.

JEN:
Sure. Thank you.

STEVE:
All right. Hey, we'll talk to you later.

JEN:
Okay. Bye-bye.

 

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