Reducing Your Workload with Fractional Executive Assistants with Valerie Trapunsky

hiring hiring employees Dec 30, 2021

Whenever we pursue our entrepreneurial dreams, there’s always that administrative task that gets in the way of our management. Instead of focusing on building your business for growth opportunities, you spend a significant amount of time with micro-specialized workload. By hiring fractional executive assistants to assist you with workloads, you can drive your business forward and navigate through the redundant workload that dim your entrepreneurial passion.

In this episode, Valerie Trapunsky, the CEO and founder of ChatterBoss, shares the importance of hiring assistants to reduce executive workload.

She talks about why successful people need to hire fractional executive assistants for their businesses to thrive. Finally, she explains the responsibilities that hired fractional executive assistants may offer to ease your business processes.

If you’re interested in learning the advantages of hiring an assistant to ease your workload, this episode is for you!

Three reasons why you should listen to the full episode:

Discover the importance of hiring administrative assistants for work.
Learn how ChatterBoss helps in assisting executive admin burden.
Find out more about how you can effectively delegate tasks to your executive assistants.

Resources

Episode 272 - Creating Wealth Through Smart Decisions with Christopher Melcher
Connect with Valerie: Twitter | LinkedIn | Instagram
Grow your business with ChatterBoss
Delegate your way with assistants to freedom with Get Staffed Up
A platform built for a new way of working with Monday.com
SaneBox

Episode Highlights

Valerie’s Early Career

As a former personal executive assistant and a Chief of Staff, she has teamed up with A-list celebrities and high-net individuals.

Through her observation, she learned that successful people always had at least two fractional administrative assistants of distinct skill sets.

With her entrepreneurial passion and niche, she took the experience and offered it to business owners.
Her team provides the best medium for individuals when working with EAs and the Chief of Staff.

Building Staff Support for Clients

Business owners burden themselves with fractional administrative tasks. Seeking help from executive assistants could ease their trouble doing micro-specialized tasks.

What Valerie’s team does is pair entrepreneurs to on-demand executive assistants that matches their personality and character.

Hired assistants do the majority of the tasks. If the assistant needs support, the additional team members would execute the task.

Valerie bills her clients by the hour. Once her clients register an app portal, they could monitor the progress of the project in real time.
The minimum time for staff support is five hours per month.

Valerie: “Even if you are handing off one small executive task that takes an hour, there is consistency. We are continuing to stay in contact with you. Then, we are designed to grow with you.”

Executive Assistant: Levels of Support

ChatterBoss has three levels of support; partner-level, pro-level, and admin-level.
The partner-level support is a do-it-for-you solution. You place your full trust in the executive assistants in doing the job.
The pro-level support is a do-it-with-you solution. The assistant and business owner work side by side to fulfill the task.
The idea of admin support is to delegate tasks for executive assistants who are best suited to do them at the lowest price point.
During the onboarding process, they review the specific needs of a business to determine the levels of fractional delegation.

Compatible Pairing with Hired Executive Assistants

ChatterBoss uses sophisticated technology to perform character assessments for business owners and executive assistants.
A business owner will be paired up with an assistant according to their compatibility.

Action Plan for Executive Task Delegation

There are aspects that cause stress in a business operation, and executive task delegation is usually an unacknowledged problem.
Valerie’s team observes the priorities of the business and creates a strategic plan with the delegation coaches.
From the strategy session, the business owner must be clear with the tasks before entrusting them to their executive assistants.
Within a week of the plan, the entrepreneur will guarantee a six-month road plan for the business.
The session is a step-by-step process to ensure it’s not overwhelming for entrepreneurs.

Transparency of the SOPs

The clients receive full visibility of the operating procedures when hiring executive assistants.
The SOPs serve two purposes.
Firstly, the SOPs act as a contract between you and the assistant. As you communicate your needs, the executive assistants would record them as their SOPs.
Secondly, you’ll be warranted a backup assistant just in case your executive assistant is unavailable. The SOPs are their reference to produce a standard quality of tasks.
Clients are advised to frequently review the SOPs to avoid misunderstanding.

Hiring an Assistant to the Business

Valerie’s ultimate goal is to perform for entrepreneurs and business owners with the highest level of integrity and keep their businesses moving.
Clients can directly hire executive assistants to their team if both parties agree with the decision.

Valerie: “If the assistants want, and you want to work together, yes, there's an opportunity for that, and we will help facilitate that.”

The bought-out executive assistants still have networking access to ChatterBoss.
All of their executive assistants at the partner and the pro-level are US-based. At their admin level, they have an office in Cape Town, South Africa.
Valerie believes that your dedicated assistants should be in the same country as you.

Demographic of ChatterBoss

ChatterBoss attracts a healthy mix of firm sizes.
For smaller firms, the executive assistants are usually the first individual they receive support from.
As companies grow, they expand their teams of executive assistants.
Sometimes, hiring and depending on a single full-time person is impractical and risky because a business operation tends to stop when they’re out.

Moshe: “I think that it's extremely powerful to empower just a line member of your staff to offload the tasks that they don't need to be performing.”

Integrating Technology into ChatterBoss

The executive assistants can plug into the software the clients are using.
For CRM and bookkeeping, the learning curve is not high especially when they’ve used other software.
In terms of licensing and getting access to the software, they may have one login for multiple individuals, depending on the client’s software license.

Valerie: “The idea is that you can treat these team members the way that you would an internal team member.”

Individual emails, calendars, and scheduling coincide with one another in project management.
You can assign your least favorite tasks to your hired executive assistants while focusing on the job that you enjoy doing.

Outsourcing Bookkeeping

Hired executive assistants don’t necessarily need to be specialists in bookkeeping.
Non-specialized executive assistants can do tasks such as invoice payments.
A specialized assistant can have access to a client’s QuickBooks or P&L to support the financial structure of the business.

Valerie: “Sometimes, it is an executive assistant that has a background in bookkeeping, and that is really nice. Now, they will not be a tax specialist, but it will be good enough for you guys to do all of the day-to-day.”

It’s extremely important to update your books regardless of tax questions.

Project-based Jobs in Law Firms

Most organizations will have a project management system. However, some founders or CEOs are not on top of them.
The role of the assistant is to participate in the system by keeping an agenda and updating the follow-ups to strive the business forward.
An assistant secures extra insurance for team members to keep track of deadlines and proactively communicate time organization.

Benefits of Hiring an Assistant

Assisting should undergo a step-by-step process. Valerie believes that it’s best to start with one or two tasks before advancing forward.
SOPs are essential to ease backup assistance.
The partnerships and external sources from Valerie’s team are sufficient to provide full assisting support for clients.
The company has a vendor list of all the individuals they’ve negotiated with that the executive assistants have rated well.

Valerie: “[Regarding vendor list] It just cuts down the time and also the risk that you're not going to go with the right vendor."

Valerie’s Preference for Systems

As part of their tech stack, a client gets access to one password and shares it in a safe way.
The team creates a Monday.com board for their clients to interact with their executive assistants.
TimeCamp is a time tracker used to record the activities of executive assistants.
Filtering email inboxes can prevent the possibility of missing important messages.

Pricing for ChatterBoss Assistance

Listen to the podcast to learn the pricing for each assistant level.
During the onboarding strategy session, the coaches will recommend the level that caters to the task delegation.
A client may set a budget, and Valerie’s team will lay out what they can expect from it.

About ChatterBoss Executive Assistants

Sometimes, an assistant may prefer a salary increase when working separately from ChatterBoss.
ChatterBoss may help in providing ideal solutions that will benefit both parties.

Valerie: “One of our core values is transparency, and for that reason, we've kind of put all of our cards on the table both for the entrepreneur and for the assistant.”

The executive assistants are 1099 contractors. The success of the company has been pairing up both executive assistants and clients that yield mutually beneficial relationships.
As clients, you may offer additional incentives for executive assistants whom they believe provide good job.
Clients have unlimited access to the client success team when they need additional brainstorming strategies.

About Valerie

Valerie Trapunsky is a former Chief of Staff and Personal Assistant to A-List celebrities, C-Suite executives, and high-net-worth individuals. After spending 7+ years as a top-level personal assistant, she discovered that she could bring the same level of excellent service to individuals, entrepreneurs, and small business owners. This is the foundation that ChatterBoss is built on with its assistants.

As a CEO and founder of ChatterBoss, she’s passionate about assisting customer needs through smart systems, smart technology, and most important of all — smart people. Her team has built a product clients can trust to reliably deliver instant, personalized, and thoughtful service.

To learn more about Valerie and her job with executive assistants, visit her Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and the ChatterBoss website.

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