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Hey guys, this is Dr. Mike. Welcome to another edition of Bootstrap MD, the podcast for physician and healthc care entrepreneurs. Probably one of the biggest questions that I get is, I have my business, but I can't do it on my own.

How can I get a virtual assistant? How can I have somebody to help me on my business? I'm just too busy. I am proud to say that we have one of the experts who's been doing this for quite a long time.

and she's the founder and CEO of hiremymob.com, which I love that domain name, a service connecting small businesses with virtual professionals across the country. She began her work at home career in 1996 with the launch of her first website, Homebased Working Moms. Ladies continued with her passion of helping moms find great work from home jobs while helping small businesses hire these talented professionals for nearly three decades now.

She was named one of 50 women entrepreneurs who inspire us by Self-Made magazine. I'd like to introduce to the program Leslie Pile. Leslie, how are you today? I'm doing great, Mike.

Thank you for having me. That's amazing. And again, just to age ours a bit, I wasn't been on the internet since like 1995, 1996. We have listeners who were not born in 1990.

This is going to be a fun and exciting story. So again, almost three years ago, the internet was barely a thing. I don't know. I was still dialup modems, but it might have been just a little bit close to that.

Certainly no iPhones or anything like that. So what was happening back then? If I could take you back into the Clinton administration, what was going on that made you start think I need to start a website for work at home moms? Yeah.

So my journey began. I had just finished my master's degree in public relations and marketing and I was actually studying in Scotland at the time on a scholarship. And when I came back, I was ready to hit the ground running and start my corporate PR job. I had big aspirations.

I was first generation college student. So not just finishing my bachelor's, but then getting a full scholarship to study abroad for my masters. You can imagine it was just such an exciting thing for our family. And so when I came back and I began, I got my very first job in PR and it was actually working for a golf school in Austin, Texas.

So it wasn't quite the big PR job that I'd hoped for, but it was a start and I really enjoyed it. I was promoting their golf tour clinics across the US. And during that first year in my time there, I got pregnant with our first child, which was our plan because, you know, all that school and all that time, we were ready to start a family. And so I, you know, I talked to my employers that yes, I'm planning to come back to work, no desire to be a stay-at-home mom.

That's not quite what happened. When my daughter was born, I really had such an attachment where I wanted to be the primary caregiver, but I also wanted to work. So I was trying to figure out, and this was back in 1995. So as you remember, Mike, working at home was not a thing.

Anybody that worked from home back then was considered unprofessional sitting around watching soap operas and eating bon bon. And I thought, okay, well, somehow I've got to make this work. So, I went to my employer and I said, is there any way for me to work some kind of flex schedule from home a couple of days a week? No, they weren't open to that idea.

So, did a lot of praying and a lot of soulsearching and came to the decision with my husband that I would begin freelancing. It was the only way, only path forward I could see where I could continue my career, but I could also be the primary caregiver for my daughter. So, it was hard. I don't have to tell you that there was no social media.

There were no cell phones. There was no even Uber. There was nothing. And I say Uber because when I decided to quit my job, we sold one car.

So, we became a onecar family. We gave up every bill that we could like cable TV. We ate ramen noodles, which we were used to from putting ourselves through college. I just a determination to make it work because I obviously let go of my salary in order to jump in with both feet.

So when I say there was no Uber, it meant that when I did have a client appointment, I always offered to meet at their office because I didn't want to admit that I worked from home and they were always happy for me to come to them because it saved them time. So what that meant was my husband would have to take off work, come pick me up with the baby, take me to the appointment, and he would wait and take care of the baby while I had my appointment. Then he would take me back home and go back to work.

So that's how it all began. It wasn't easy at all, but I had that determination, and I think that's what really helped me launch a freelance career. But in that, I was thinking, I cannot be the only mom, the only woman trying to do this. There must be other moms.

Where can I find support? Where can I network? Where can I find these people so that we can learn from each other and grow each other's businesses? And so, when I didn't find anything, I thought, well, maybe I should start one.

I'd actually interned in college with an association, so I had some kind of understanding of what that looked like. So, I decided I'm going to start an association for moms who either work at home or want to work at home. And it would be similar to a chamber of commerce. That's was my vision, but all virtual.

And so, that's when I was learning about the internet. It was brand new, at least to me, back in 1995. And so, I did what any aspiring freelance mom would do. I went to the office supply place and bought a program in a box.

So, you remember this, Mike? Oh, yeah. It was back when you actually bought software in a box. So, I bought Microsoft Front Page and learned how to build a website because I didn't have any budget to pay anyone to do it.

So, back then websites were way less complicated, you know, than they are today and I needed something. I didn't need anything that had high tech capabilities. So, I created that website. I used my PR background and got it launched.

Thankfully, since it was very novel, I had a lot of good publicity in the early days, like Baby Magazine, picked up on it in several regional magazines and newspapers and things like that. So, I was able to get a lot of good publicity early on, which really helped me get recognition across the country and develop a business through that. So, I slowly started letting go of my freelance clients and focused exclusively on this new website venture and I had a free membership and I also had a paid membership.

So, I was able to monetize the paid membership and then I was also able to monetize advertising. So, anybody that was looking to hire someone back then there weren't a lot of jobs. I would say almost no jobs hiring from home, but there were those companies like Creative Memories, Pampered Chef, Avon, Tupperware that were recruiting moms to do home parties, and that was kind of the best you could find back then unless you were willing to start your own business.

So, I was able to monetize it through that. So, I did that homebased working mom for about 14 years. Then I was like noticing that the culture, the business environment was shifting and people were becoming more open to working from home. And I thought, wouldn't it be great if I could create a platform where moms could actually find legitimate jobs from businesses that were looking to hire someone, whether that's a virtual assistant, a bookkeeper, social media, copywriter, now whatever it is that they need, they could come to this platform and hire them.

And that's where hire my mom. The whole idea was based on that idea. And I knew I already had an established audience of moms. I just needed to create an established audiences of businesses.

And initially when I launched it, I made it free to post a job just to prove the concept. So the businesses would say, "Okay, well, what do I have to lose? Let me just post a job here." And thankfully the concept proved to be valuable and the rest is history. So here we are 18 years later.

Haram mom is nationwide. So we serve the US and Canada. So we're not worldwide. So that's one of the factors that makes us a little bit different than some of the other remote hiring or freelance job sites.

First off, I love the domain name as I mentioned on there. Did you have that at the beginning or did you have to buy that domain name? It's so catchy. Yes.

Initially, I tried to buy hire aamom.com, but it was taken and I don't remember how much they wanted for it, but I wasn't willing to pay it. So then the next idea that came to was hire my mom because I just thought that the kind of fun twist on, you know, a kid saying hire my mom so she can be with me is kind of the idea that was running around in my mind at the time. So I'm just curious, you know, we've seen everything on the internet.

You take me back to the days when I started my own business. I had a business that I was helping international physicians to get work in the United States and my first guide was remember Kinko's remember? Oh yes. Yes.

I used to go there often. Yeah. And I would publish it because there was no PDF back then and I would mail it to them. And mine was so bad.

This is how inequated mine was. I couldn't take credit cards because you know there's no PayPal back then, right? Right. And I would either they tell me over the phone or fax me the order, but I would have to call them to like you have to let me know so I can put the plug in the fax sheet.

Yeah. Oh gosh, I love it. Yes. I can identify.

But that's why I did my business bootstrap it because I truly sympathize with those who bootstrapped it. Yeah. So I am curious as to what has changed. Certainly I'm sure with co now everybody wanted to work from home and now it's almost like per se but yeah back then you know it was unheard of and professionally as you mentioned maybe you could point to maybe some pivotal points in your business that either started things moving around getting traction what could you point to or if you can yeah definitely co was like proof of concept for me even though my business was already doing well and growing It made businesses that weren't open to remote hires have to be open to remote hires.

Sometimes their team all went home. But, you know, there was a lot of fluctuation and people coming and going at that time for various reasons. So, that was like, you know, I was like, thank you. I mean, I hated co I hated everything about CO, but I loved that it allowed people to get a taste of what remote work was like.

And of course, it's not the best fit for every business in every role, but it works fabulously for a lot of small businesses. And I will tell you, I hear over and over again that their best remote hires are moms. And I'm sure there are great remote hires in every category. But I think what my theory is on that is that moms are so incredibly grateful for the opportunity to have that flexibility that they go above and beyond to do the best job they can.

I know that was me initially when I was freelancing. I was so thankful for those clients because I was like, you are giving me the gift of being able to be with my child and work around her schedule. And I will tell you that most moms like myself when we do work from home with kids. It's not what some people think where you've got kids jumping on your desk and on your head and everything.

you know, I had a season where she was an infant and, you know, I could work with her in my office. But as my kids grew, that no longer worked. It wasn't feasible. So for me, what I did, I had a family member come basically nanny for me, but I was still there with her, so it felt right for me.

And then as they got a little bit older, they had a what's called Mother's Day out. I don't know if it's everywhere, but our church offered a program where they would do fingerpaints and play-doh and, you know, church music and things like that. So, it gave me freedom to let them experience some social activity while I worked. So, like I said, I think just having that flexibility is so valuable for moms that I think they really do go above and beyond.

So, you spent nearly three decades, you know, watching small businesses struggle with pretty much the same problem. They need help but they're not in any position to afford traditional hiring. So tell me about like what are you seeing now? Again my audience are mostly physicians healthcare.

We have some dentists but a lot of them want to start up their own side visit. They've got an idea. It's just amazing but they need help with the implementation. Tell us how with your experience how can we best support and help them?

Yes. And we actually that's one of the industries we serve quite often is dentists and doctors who what you just mentioned they are you know entrepreneurial at the same time but they know they can't do it without help. So a lot of times the person will realize that either they're wearing too many hats and they don't have time to do what they love and what they're good at.

They're working too many hours or they don't have capacity to take on new business. So those are all signs that people say I need to hire. And typically the first hire that a business will make is a virtual assistant. I know that was true for me.

And a virtual assistant can be a gamecher for an entrepreneur because it frees up time, it reduces overwhelm and it allows them to focus on growth instead of getting buried in dayto-day tasks. So what can a VA do for you? Well, let me tell you, they are a lifesaver. They can help with administrative support.

They can manage and respond to emails and inquiries. They can schedule your calendar, your meetings, your calls, your appointments. They can handle booking, travel if you need them to do that. They can also research and do other administrative duties.

In addition to that, my VA helps tremendously with customer support. So, every email that comes in through our contact us form, she helps respond to it. She handles all the phone calls. They can also handle any kind of order tracking or appointment confirmations.

They can follow up with leads to keep your relationships warm. They can also help with marketing assistance and lead generation, such things as posting content on your social media platforms, creating basic graphics in Canva, managing any kind of newsletters or email campaigns that you have, researching potential clients and industries, reaching out to prospects, managing your CRM. So, I could go on and on, but there's a variety of types of VAS and roles that they can help fulfill, but I would say that's the number one role that the businesses, doctors, dentists typically hire.

And then from there, it gives them the freedom to move on to bigger things and then hire additional team members. Yeah, we just recently got on the conference and we just talked about the benefits of virtual assistant. And what I'm seeing and I'm wondering the same as well is there's been an also need of assistance getting very comfortable with AI with artificial intelligent using chat GPT. Are you seeing similar trends in the clients that you're working with?

Yes, I think definitely learning AI getting more familiar with it even taking online courses to because I think we're only tapping the very basics of what AI can do and I know that there's so much more potential. So anybody that's interested in virtual assistant or working in a remote position, I think if you're learning AI, you're going to have a leg up on a lot of other candidate. You know, you work with a lot of different businesses.

But what do you think are like one of the biggest mistakes that you often see when someone's posting like for a job for a virtual assistant? What makes you cringe when reading some of these job postings that you see out there? Yeah, one of the main things is just they rush the process. They don't take their time to hire.

Well, and they don't realize the mistake that a bad hire can cost them. The first one is the numbers. You know, a bad hire can cost as much of 30% of that person annual wages or salary. And it also is a time drain.

You know, that's the bigger casualty because when you're onboarding, you're training, you're fixing mistakes, then you're back at square one when they don't work out. It also can affect if you have a team, it definitely affects the other team members when you have somebody that is not a good fit. Maybe it could be that they don't fit your business culture. They don't have the same type of mindset or skills that your other team members have.

So, it's really important to have a wellthoughtout job description and not just touch on I mean, we get job descriptions sometimes that are only one or two sentences and I'm like, my VA, she knows now that's not going to work. you need to ask them more questions. And we have a job description template that we'll send people so it kind of prompts them on what is good to include.

And you don't have to include everything because you don't want to write a book. Then nobody's going to want to apply if it's too much information. So there is a a happy medium there. And one thing that we started doing about four or five years ago is now we offer a concier service.

So for those businesses that are either too busy to hire, they don't like hiring, or they're not good at hiring, they may have made a bad hire and they don't want to do it again, they can use our done for you concier service. So, we have an HR professional who will write your job description. She'll post it. She'll collect all the resumeumés.

She'll create interview questions, interview them, and then she'll cultivate the top two or three candidates and send that to the business owner. And then they can interview those candidates and decide. And she'll set in with you on those as well and help you decipher, okay, which one do you think is the best fit for your role? And then from there, you hire them.

And we're not an agency or a staffing firm, so we don't charge commission. We just charge the one fee upfront for that service. Great. Great.

So, let I'm sure you've had amazing success stories. Maybe if you could just tell me one, maybe an example of a small business owner who may or may not have been hesitant getting their first hire. Their business thrived and it changed everything. Could you share us a story?

Yeah, there's one e-commerce business that has come to us. They probably made at least five hires with us now. They actually use our concier service because their business has really taken off and grown and they attribute a lot of that to the fantastic hires they've gotten because they were able to delegate a lot of the responsibilities they were doing. It's a husband and wife team.

They were able to delegate that to these new team members and focus on growing their business. And that's what's happened. Their business has really taken off. That's amazing.

That's amazing. Now I do have to talk about sometimes the push backs that I get for VAS and yes the number one is usually I can't afford to hire yet and I'm sure you've heard this and again I think the real cost is not hiring. How do you make that case? So sometimes requires the person to take just a tiny pay cut so that they can invest in that VA but instead of looking that as a loss look at it as an investment.

So, a VA can save an entrepreneur anywhere between 10 and 40 hours a week. So, ask yourself, what can I do with an additional 10 to 40 hours a week? And you may be paying that VA 15, $20 an hour. A higher level VA may be $30 an hour.

So, when you look at it, the big grand scheme of things, it's a very small investment because of all the timesaving that they can bring you. And you can hire through us, a US-based. And that typically fits businesses that have either tried overseas hires and it didn't work out, or they're looking for someone that's customerf facing, and they want someone who's fluent and native English speaker, or they want someone in or near their time zone so that they can collaborate and work easier.

And they also want to make sure that there's no issues with electricity and internet. And I know some of these foreign countries any kind of power outage or internet outage I understand can last month or more. Yeah, that's amazing. So another kind of push back that I see here is the trust issue.

I don't know what they're doing. I don't know if they're actually wor working if I can't see them. What are some maybe systems or mindset shifts that you've incorporated before that needs to happen before someone hires their first virtual assistant? Yep.

When I heard my first virtual assistant, I didn't have any SOPs or standard operating procedures. Wasn't aware that I should create those. Now I know how important those are. But I think if you just make a list of what you do every day or every day of the week, and then you just kind of estimate how much time am I spending on these and let's just say email because email is one of the biggest time thieves for me.

how much time am I spending on email or how much in all the different categories that you would like to outsource and then estimate how much time are you spending then how much time would it take this VA to do and so let's just say it's 10 hours so you would hire that VA for 10 hours and you would have her do those things and so if she's not accomplishing all of those things in roughly 10 hours then something's not right but I always say you're not going to know unless you jump in and try it out my experience has been that they are going to do their work and do it well. I'm sure there are some fraudulent people out there, but on our platform, integrity and excellence are at the top of our list. So, if we get a negative review about a candidate, we'll do some background checks on not legitimate background, but we'll do some of our own research on them and then if we determine that they aren't doing the job that they were hired for, we won't allow them back on our platform.

The same goes for businesses. if we have businesses that aren't paying their contractors and things like that. So, we typically don't get involved in the relationship, but on the other hand, we want to maintain the integrity of our platform. So, if there's latent things that are happening, then we will step in.

In the remaining time we have here, I'm seeing if we could do like a takeway or some action steps right now. A physician much more is listening to the call right now, watching us, and they're overwhelmed. They're working 50 to 60 hours a week. They're trying to bootstrap something on the side.

They're trying to get this going. They know they need help, but they don't know where to start. What are some maybe steps, two or three steps that you would recommend that they should probably take this week that can make a significant change in their business? I would say the first thing I would recommend is set up a free consult call with our HR professional that does our concier services and let her explain to you how she can help you and how our service can help you and what type of role would best take the load off that you're bearing whether it might not be a virtual assistant in some cases it's a project manager or it might be a bookkeeper whatever it might be but that would be the first thing that I would recommend is to do that and then again you know take a good look at where you're spending your time and where can you outsource some of that because you're not going to get ahead if you're trying to do everything yourself and you're going to burn out basically if you don't take time to really offload some of that.

Take some time for yourself, for your family. I know there's been different seasons in my life where I'm like, "Okay, I'm working too many hours. I need to prioritize my faith and my family again or whatever it might So, I would say, you know, do check-ins with yourself to see where you're at, where you need to make some changes, maybe outsource, and if you're not seeing it, then ask your spouse or, you know, your friends what they see you need the most help in.

Leslie, that is so helpful. This has been amazing. Call. So, what's the best place to go to find out more about what Hire does and where can they get started?

Yeah. So, first of all, I'd like to offer we have a free download So, it's called the small business guide to hiring your first or next rock rockstar. And it comes with the step-by-step smart hiring checklist, common hiring mistakes to avoid, a sample job post template, hourly fees that you can expect to pay for different remote positions, and so much more. So, if anybody would like to download that, you can go to hiremymom.com/mpodcast and get that.

And then feel free to follow us. We'd love for you to follow us on social media. We're on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, HireMom. And then if you want to connect with me on uh LinkedIn, I'm at Lesie Pile.

And we'll have those in our show notes as well, so they can click on it and I'm there. Leslie, this has been tremendous. I think it really has again opened our eyes on this. You can't do this by yourselves.

I know many of my physician colleagues think they could do it on your own. you guys are busy, but if you really want your business to thrive, my business thrived when I started to take less control of what I was doing and really let the experts on it and and I also wanted just a shout out for hiring moms in general. There's just amazing talent that is out there that I've seen and for whatever reason life changes, life gets in the way.

They started to work, but they are still trained, you know, experts at what they were doing and that doesn't stop. And I I think I want to commend you for doing this for uh for 30 years and I'm sure we've got another 30 years more to go. Who knows? But thank you so much for spending time with us.

Yes. Before we end the call today. No, just thank you so much. I appreciate the opportunity to share what I've learned and how I can help others.

All right. Well, thank you and thank you for the listeners. As always, as physician entrepreneurs, you're going to have your ups, you're going to have your downs. Do something a little each day to get you closer to your goals and keep moving forward.