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Welcome to Make Your Passion Pay, hosted by LuAnn Buechler, a seasoned leader with a master’s degree in Hospitality Administration and a recipient of the TLC Award for Leadership. This podcast is designed for business owners who have left toxic environments to create their own thriving workplaces but find themselves struggling with team building and mindset. Join LuAnn as she shares insights and strategies to help you cultivate joy and a positive mindset in your business and personal life. Drawing from her experience working with renowned leaders like Dr. Ivan Misner, LuAnn guides you in building a supportive community and mastering the art of people management. Each episode offers practical advice and inspiring stories to empower you to transform your work environment into one that reflects your values and passions. Tune in to discover how to lead with joy, foster meaningful connections, and truly make your passion pay.
Welcome everybody to Make Your Passion Pay podcast. Today, super excited to be here with you. Here we talk about the six C's of making your passions pay, the playbook as well, we call it, and those six C's are clarity, connection, community, collaboration, creativity, and commitment. And as my avid listeners know, we find a lot more c words in the process, which is super fun. So today I have with me Anna Brambilla. I made a mistake, it's something. Um, and Anna knows how powerful the right support can be because it changed everything for her. When she hired her first virtual assistant, she wasn't just trying to lighten her load, she was trying to reclaim her time, her energy, and her love for the business she had built. What she didn't expect was how dramatically things would shift. Within just a year, she had tripled her revenue and gotten back 10 to 15 hours a week, but the biggest change was she actually started enjoying her business again. The experience was the spark behind her company, Virtually Aligned. Love the name Virtually Aligned. It was built to help other coaches, solopreneurs, and consultants find the same kind of transformational support that Anna got. She also brings 25 years of experience in career transition, including recruiting, outplacement, job search coaching, and relocation services. She spent almost eight years as a top performing career ownership coach, guiding thousands of professionals through moments of uncertainty into new paths, many of which included business ownership. Again and again, she saw brilliant purpose-driven people trying to do everything all by themselves, exhausted and disconnected from the very mission that inspired them to start. So through Virtually Aligned, she and her team offer a personal, thoughtful, and flexible approach to finding a virtual assistant. Whether clients prefer direct hire or managed support, each VA is carefully selected to match their specific goals, work style, and needs. Welcome, Anna.
(00:07:29.000) Anna Brambilla: Thank you so much. What a great, great introduction. I appreciate that. I'm so excited to be here with you and your team and your audience.
(00:07:36.700) LuAnn B. Make Your Passion Pay: Well, I am so excited to have you. I know it took me a very long time before I was willing to opt in for a virtual assistant. And I think, for me personally, at the beginning, it was a concern about finances, right? And would I be able to consistently be able to pay that virtual assistant? You know, I find with my small business owners, the type that I work with are always very concerned about the people they're hiring when I need to make sure that I can pay them because now I become responsible for their income and their life, right?
(00:08:17.200) Anna Brambilla: Go through. Yeah.
(00:08:19.000) LuAnn B. Make Your Passion Pay: Yeah. So tell us your experience of small business owners either jumping into virtual assistants or mistakenly not jumping in.
(00:08:31.100) Anna Brambilla: Yes, that's always the question, right? When do you bring somebody on? And obviously, every business is different, and every person is different, and every entrepreneur is different. I recommend bringing somebody on sooner rather than later. Get your processes set up, get somebody, you know, get sort of an idea of what you're doing and how you're doing it. But really, at that point, start focusing on the things that only you can do. And there are some phenomenal virtual assistants out there, but really think about somebody who's going to grow with you and partner with you, who is going to be taking on some of those mundane, those routine tasks, but who's also going to be your second brain. And somebody who is going to really help you think through what's possible and how to do things. Actually, so many people, myself included, have a million ideas, right? I could do this and I could do that and I can do these other things and they're fun. The question becomes, where do you focus on first and how do you capture those things that you want to do? A really good executive assistant is somebody who is going to partner with you and keep you focused, make sure you capture all of those other ideas, but is going to bring you back to the things and then start to take your ideas and implement them. So my team does this phenomenally well. You know, I can't tell you the number of times I've said to them, you know what? I've been thinking we could go in this direction and then the next thing I know is like, oh yeah, we already thought of that and here is your, you know, 10-page proposal of how we're going to implement it. Like, they read your mind in a way that is so, so powerful and so game-changing, honestly, and that's really something. So bring in somebody sooner rather than later. Think of it as, yeah, you know, we help you. We do that deep matchmaking. We take up all of the pain and the hassle of how, what do you want that person to do? How do you want them to do it? How are you going to train them? You know, how are you going to find those people? I mean, I know so many people who are like, yeah, I know I need to, but I don't have the 20, 30, 40 hours it's going to take to find somebody. That's where we come in. You know, hire us to do all the heavy work so that the hardest decision you have is which of the three phenomenal candidates do you want to hire?
(00:11:02.300) LuAnn B. Make Your Passion Pay: So.
(00:11:02.900) Anna Brambilla: And then the cost.
(00:11:03.700) LuAnn B. Make Your Passion Pay: And what you're talking about is collaboration. Yes, collaborate with Virtually Aligned. You find the right assistant. You have a VA that will work for you. Now, I have a question. So are you hiring people or, I'm sorry, you're fine-tuning down to a level of two or three choices and then I, as the business owner, pick. So then, are they on my payroll or am I paying Virtually Aligned to pay them?
(00:11:42.700) Anna Brambilla: We have both options. The one that I think is the best option for most people is pay us a recruiting fee. Pay us to do that deep, deep background check, you know, finding out that they're going to be the right fit. We have a 20-step process and I can go into that another time. But pay us to really sort through the hundreds of candidates. For example, on average, we get between 600 and 900 applicants for every job that we post. I don't know about you, but I sure as heck don't have time to go through 600 applicants not knowing what I'm looking for. Who are they? What are their skills? All of that stuff. We take care of that for you. So all you have to do then is find and hire the person that you want to hire. We have a couple options. We can do what's called managed services, where we pay them, give them the technology, manage them, have backup if that's what you need, have teams of people if you have multiple needs. But most of our clients say, you know what, I want to manage that person directly. I want to have that relationship. I want to pay them, give them raises when I want, and give them bonuses as I feel is most appropriate. And that's called the direct placement, and that's what most of our clients go through and find is the most cost-effective. And then, keep in mind, all of our VAs currently are in the Philippines. We're exploring other areas as well, but all of our VAs are in the Philippines, and for them, making 10, 12 dollars an hour is a phenomenal rate, which for us in the US feels like peanuts. But if you are willing to pay a really top-notch person 10 to 12 dollars an hour and give them bonuses on their birthday or Christmas or back to school, you will have incredible loyalty at a cost that feels very cost-effective for most of our clients.
(00:13:49.600) LuAnn B. Make Your Passion Pay: Yeah, that's amazing. That's amazing. So, there's a time difference.
(00:13:56.200) Anna Brambilla: Yep.
(00:13:57.000) LuAnn B. Make Your Passion Pay: Is there a language barrier challenge?
(00:14:01.000) Anna Brambilla: Neither, none of those are applicable to our team. So we absolutely have a lot of VAs who are not only willing to, but wanting to work what's overnight for them. I've heard this again and again: I love the night shift. I love the overnight shift, they say, because it allows me to, you know, it's quiet. I get to partner with my client much more deeply. I get to focus on what they need. I know my hours and then I can, you know, I'm awake when the kids wake up. I take them to school, I do my errands or whatever while they're at school, then I get to sleep and then their whole, you know, I'm home for the kids when they come home or whatever it is. So they actually prefer to work overnight. So that's so, you know, they can work whatever hours you want. Some people are like, you know what, as a client, I don't care if they're awake when I'm awake or maybe we have an hour or two of overlap, but that's, you know, whatever works for you and we can certainly screen for that. The other thing is, I swear they speak English. I mean, you know, native born, they speak English, read, write, better English than I do. So, but that's one of the things that we test for. You know, sometimes they have an accent, sometimes they don't. We've been able to find some phenomenal candidates. For some people, they really don't want to have to work with an accent; that concerns them. So we have phenomenal ways to test that. The other thing that we do that I think my team does phenomenally well—my team does a lot of things phenomenally well—but one of the things that they do is that when it comes time, when we've screened everybody and it says, okay, these are the candidates that we want to introduce you to, we create a really cool card. And in that card is a video of that candidate speaking, so you can get a sense immediately: is this somebody whose accent is overly strong and you have a hard time understanding it, or is this somebody who's like, oh yeah, no, I can't even tell, or somewhere in between?
(00:16:07.700) LuAnn B. Make Your Passion Pay: Nice. So there's different levels of service that you talked about besides the difference between recruiting and managed services. In other words, there are some VAs that are more, I'll say, tactical and administrative, right, and they're really behind the scenes.
(00:16:35.300) Anna Brambilla: Yep.
(00:16:36.200) LuAnn B. Make Your Passion Pay: And then there are some VAs that are invited to do more things in front of the screen, so support even with Zoom events so that they're there monitoring, taking notes, making sure it's recorded, things like that, right? Even, I think, correct me if I'm wrong, to the point of scheduling appointments and even making sales calls. Would that be true?
(00:17:05.400) Anna Brambilla: Yes, and so much more. So we generally put our VAs and their skill levels into three different categories. If they're the generalist, the task takers, the people who are going to do the more routine, repetitive tasks—I've got a sneeze, excuse me, in a second—and those are going to be the generalists. Frankly, I was at a family reunion this weekend and somebody was asking me, well, how is AI affecting your business? And I said it's affecting it tremendously, in good ways and in bad. I'm hearing increasingly that AI is going to be taking on a lot of those repetitive tasks. Luckily, that's not always specialized in, but I do hear concern among some VAs in general and some of my team. Well, if AI is going to be doing the generalist tasks, what am I going to be doing? Well, we're training you. If you don't have those skills already, we're training you to go to the next two levels. So the next level then would be what we call a specialist. I have on my teams somebody who is a phenomenal graphic designer. I have somebody on my team who's doing my social media management. I have somebody on my team who's doing sales, you know, those specialized things. We've placed somebody who does photo editing for a professional photographer. We've placed people who do podcast management, technical management, CRM manager. So those are the specialists. They bring a brain to the table, where they really think creatively. And then we have the area that we really, really specialize in. We call the executive assistant. Somebody who's going to be your second brain, who's going to be able to think ahead, like I told you my team does. I swear, they read my mind and they're incredible, and so I can trust them. We often joke, because I'm not a detailed person, so we often joke with my team, like, listen, just go build me a house. Just go build me a house, and they know that. And they know now to come back and say, great, Anna, we'll build you a house, but how many stories do you want? How big do you want it? What color walls do you want? Do you want hardwood floors or carpet, whatever it is. So that's where an executive assistant comes in, and those are the people who are going to become even more valuable when linked with AI. Those are the people that are going to use it as a base, but you can't—I don't know about you, I use AI all the time, all day, every day, and I write some of my emails, but I can't just copy the email and paste it and put it into a client, you know. I need to massage it. I need to make it sound like me. I need to take all of its great ideas and implement them, so our executive assistants really treat AI as their best friend.
(00:20:18.300) LuAnn B. Make Your Passion Pay: I love that. Absolutely. So I actually got invited to speak at an AI Summit.
(00:20:25.900) Anna Brambilla: Oh, how
(00:20:26.500) LuAnn B. Make Your Passion Pay: Fun? I said, when I met with the producer, I said I really want to talk about human beings.
(00:20:35.100) Anna Brambilla: As yes,
(00:20:36.000) LuAnn B. Make Your Passion Pay: Indeed. Well, we need to talk about the combination, and I'm like, okay. So it is AI-powered systems, you know, AI-powered and human-centric systems that get results.
(00:20:49.500) Anna Brambilla: I love it.
(00:20:50.500) LuAnn B. Make Your Passion Pay: I love it. And really, as I prepared for it, I went, oh, I use AI way more than I thought.
(00:20:58.500) Anna Brambilla: Yeah,
(00:20:59.300) LuAnn B. Make Your Passion Pay: So many things that already exist. One of those for me was emails, and I realized that it will rewrite any of my emails. So I write it first, which I think is in my voice, and then I let it rewrite it, and it does it in the proper English language.
(00:21:16.200) Anna Brambilla: Yes. Yes. Indeed.
(00:21:18.400) LuAnn B. Make Your Passion Pay: Oh, it lost my English language skill.
(00:21:22.900) Anna Brambilla: I know. I worry about my son, who will graduate from high school on Saturday and is going off to college, and I worry about him not having writing skills and that whole generation, but that's a whole other story. But I completely agree with you. I think of it as an AI sandwich. So I go to AI and I say, these are the general things, this is the audience—you know, the family member or a friend or a business partner, whatever it is. Here's the general audience. These are the things I want to cover. And so, write me that email, but I never just copy and paste that and send it off. I have to, and I've been working with AI now for a couple years, and it knows my voice very, very well. I've trained it, but it still doesn't always capture that. And so what I have to do is then say, okay, yeah, you got the right points, but make it sound like me. I don't use this word, I don't talk like that. Make it much more conversational, and it takes a couple of iterations, but the end is going to take me a lot less time to get that email out than me thinking, okay, how do I want to put this and put, you know, so yeah. But use it as a tool. Use it as your sounding board, but sure, please do not just copy, at least for me, that doesn't work for me.
(00:22:38.500) LuAnn B. Make Your Passion Pay: And yeah, I know, don't copy and paste because the other thing that happens when you do that is if the icons that AI puts in there, you put in your email. Everyone knows.
(00:22:48.500) Anna Brambilla: yep.
(00:22:49.100) LuAnn B. Make Your Passion Pay: Yeah, you copy and paste, right?
(00:22:51.400) Anna Brambilla: So I got
(00:22:52.700) LuAnn B. Make Your Passion Pay: An email, your credibility.
(00:22:54.100) Anna Brambilla: I got an email from somebody recently and it screamed AI. Excuse me. I have to blow my nose.
(00:23:00.200) LuAnn Buechler: It's
(00:23:01.300) Anna Brambilla: Screamed AI. I love allergies, and I lost all credibility for that person. All credibility. It's like, I'm not even gonna bother reading everything and anything else you say because it's credibility. And it's, you know, it clearly didn't put any thought process into it. So I think if you use AI correctly, it can be a game changer.
(00:23:25.800) LuAnn Buechler: Yes. So, this is a hot topic, and I really want to emphasize that you still need VAs. And for the VAs out there who are listening, I don't believe you're ever going away.
(00:23:38.200) Anna Brambilla: Yes,
(00:23:39.100) LuAnn B. Make Your Passion Pay: it is that you will manage the AI components for us.
(00:23:44.100) Anna Brambilla: Yes, right.
(00:23:45.600) LuAnn B. Make Your Passion Pay: And in depth, like and the CRM for us and all those things, right? And the CRM, what's that? It's more AI, right?
(00:23:53.700) Anna Brambilla: Yeah, yeah. So true, so true.
(00:23:56.400) LuAnn B. Make Your Passion Pay: Yeah, I
(00:23:57.700) Anna Brambilla: recently
(00:23:58.100) LuAnn B. Make Your Passion Pay: Fascinating. An IT networking event. And when I got on this call, it was a Zoom call. It was people all over the country and they're talking about programming and I'm like, oh my gosh, I think I'm in the wrong place.
(00:24:12.300) Anna Brambilla: Yeah.
(00:24:13.200) LuAnn B. Make Your Passion Pay: Then when they allowed me to introduce myself and I said that, you know, I work on culture and creating joyful workplaces, they were like, I do that. And we started talking about the intersection between AI and humans, and they all were absolutely on board with the human component needing to remain.
(00:24:35.500) Anna Brambilla: Yes.
(00:24:36.200) LuAnn B. Make Your Passion Pay: And so I was super excited to see that. So I just want to share that with the audience, right? The human component will never go away. Years ago, you know, I was managing conventions and conferences. They told me when video conferencing came out, conferences were going to go away because nobody needs to get together in person anymore. It's so much more cost effective. And I knew then that was not true.
(00:25:05.200) Anna Brambilla: Yeah.
(00:25:05.800) LuAnn B. Make Your Passion Pay: We need human beings, and to have conferences still thriving even after a pandemic today emphasizes we need human beings. Virtual assistants are great human beings to bring on your team, act as a collaborator with you, and you can tell Anna on what level you need it.
(00:25:31.800) Anna Brambilla: Yes.
(00:25:32.400) LuAnn B. Make Your Passion Pay: Yeah, my VA, her company name is Run With It VA. That's all I needed. Oh, you mean I can just throw it at you and you'll run with it? Yes,
(00:25:46.400) Anna Brambilla: That's love it.
(00:25:47.900) LuAnn Buechler: I need that person who can just pick it up and go and figure it out.
(00:25:51.900) Anna Brambilla: Yeah.
(00:25:52.700) LuAnn Buechler: Right. I'm the creative and I go, we gotta do this, but I have no idea how. Yep, and goodness, she has AI to support her.
(00:26:00.800) Anna Brambilla: Yeah, exactly. Exactly right. 100% right? Yeah.
(00:26:05.200) LuAnn B. Make Your Passion Pay: I think it's really what? What Anna's clearly saying here is that what she can do is take from you my list, first business owners that have yet to hire a VA that are wondering when that step is. You gotta reach out to Anna because she'll help you to find when, and she'll help you to find out what level you need. Do you need a generalist? Do you need a specialist? Do you need an executive assistant depending on the level of what you're looking for in your business? Correct, Anna,
(00:26:35.600) Anna Brambilla: 100%, exactly. And what I love is that, come talk to us. Have a conversation. Based on that, my team will create a phenomenal job description, so it really helps clarify, and we offer that to you guys at no cost. It really helps clarify what you're looking for in that person. And if you're unclear, talk to us. We can tell you which level to look for. You know, you're looking for generalist, specialist, or an executive admin. And what I have found again and again, and we tell people, take this job description, go to Upwork, go to Fiverr, and good luck. You know, you might post that or you might try and recruit against that, and then you're faced with not only six to nine hundred applicants, you're faced with thousands of people on there. How are you gonna decide? You'll quickly become overwhelmed. And then, even if you find people that say they have the right qualifications and the right experience, how do you know that that's really true? We test for that. So then, time after time after time, people come back and say, oh thank God. I tried it. It's not going to work. You know, I'm so willing to invest in your services to save me countless hours and headaches. And even when somebody seems right on paper and they seem like the right fit and all that stuff, a lot of times it's not the right fit culturally, or maybe, God forbid, they don't have the skills that they say they do, or they don't have the passion that they said they do. We test for that, we screen for that, but we also offer a 90-day guarantee. So if that person is not the right fit within 90 days—oftentimes, well, it's only happened like two or three times, thankfully—but you know, if it's not the right fit, we will replace them for free. But we will know sooner than later, and we're with you every step of the way. So we're there to help you out and make it a seamless, effortless process for you.
(00:28:48.600) LuAnn B. Make Your Passion Pay: That is a huge benefit guarantee to say if in 90 days, you identify this isn't a good fit, we'll replace them for free. That's huge.
(00:29:01.300) Anna Brambilla: Huge, it's huge. Yes, and to be honest, the only times that I can remember that it's happened has not been for cultural fit or skill set fit. It's been because, unfortunately, something happened to the VA's family, or they had to take a step back or whatever, but I haven't heard anybody yet that I can recall that said, no, this person was just not who they said they were. That's not what we've had. So I'm proud of that. I'm proud of my team, as you can tell. I think my team is amazing. I just—I am incredibly proud of them.
(00:29:35.800) LuAnn B. Make Your Passion Pay: That is so awesome. You'll have to keep me posted. So my friends who are listening, if you reach out to Anna, make sure she knows that you came to her because you were listening to Make Your Passion Pay, so she knows where she's getting her results from. And we all should be doing that. I loved one of the things you said. You would talk about overwhelm, and I think that's a big word for everyone out there. Yeah. And to me, collaboration eliminates overwhelm in multiple ways, right? I can hand off things to partners like you who are experts in that area of work. Great minds think alike. You know.
(00:30:22.800) Anna Brambilla: Yeah
(00:30:23.900) LuAnn B. Make Your Passion Pay: Yeah. Ideas, we read what's, you know, hanging on in our brain and our monkey mind and get to talk through it with fellow professionals. So powerful. I'm going to add that to that conversation about collaboration. The other two C words that keep coming up and really my six to make your passion pay are all about building to core values and creating culture in your organization. Yeah. That's the end result we're looking for. And you talked about cultural alignment, super important. And in order to have cultural alignment, you need to know what your core values are.
(00:31:03.100) Anna Brambilla: Yep.
(00:31:03.700) LuAnn B. Make Your Passion Pay: So yeah, business owners come to you and are they able to share their core values to help you understand their business and how to align people with them?
(00:31:16.000) Anna Brambilla: 100%. And in fact, one of the things that I screen for on the clients that I want to help, you have to be purpose-driven entrepreneurs. The people who are like, yeah, I just want to sell a lot of widgets and, you know, I just want to make a lot of money, terrific. We're not the right fit for you, and I have actively screened for people against that. Nothing wrong with them. I just do best with the people who want to give back to their zone of genius and they created a business to whatever, you know, help families or spread, you know, we've had all kinds of different things. You know, real estate agents who want to help people find their dream house or somebody who's a photographer and who wants to bring out the best in people. Anything you can imagine, these are the clients that I actively work with. And what happens is, I have it happen to me and probably happened to most of your listeners. You started your business with a passion and you want to do it and you can't wait to spread your gospel to the world and then what happens is you get so overwhelmed with that and you do all the details and so all of a sudden you're doing that and you resent your business. Get back to why you love your business. Get back to creating that culture and then that's one of my teams will do is they'll screen for that. You know, we have people on every and everything and let's help us find people who are going to be your true partners and connect with that and do whatever is important for you. So then, and then the other thing is because you hire that VA directly, you set up the culture, you set up how you want to work together. That's one of the things that when I'm adding people to my team, for example, we make it very clear. We're a team. I mean, and it's so cliche. Oh, I have a team, right? But we make it very clear and we screen for that passion for putting good things into the world. You can see above my head, I have that heart-shaped ripple. That's my purpose in life. I want to be that little dot that's creating ripples throughout the world and I can go into story after story after story about that and I'm looking for other people who are looking to create heart-shaped ripples. You know, and again, nothing against those people who are like, I'm just in it to make a lot of money as quickly as possible. Phenomenal. Good luck to you. We're not the right fit for you.
(00:33:58.300) LuAnn B. Make Your Passion Pay: I'm looking for those people that are in between there. They want to be purpose driven, they want to follow their passion. They're not quite sure how. You say just a little bit not ready for you yet, right? They might be at that stage. You send them back to me and I'll send it back to you to get their VA.
(00:34:19.400) Anna Brambilla: perfect. I love that. And that's the synergies that I love creating,
(00:34:23.900) LuAnn B. Make Your Passion Pay: right? Yeah,
(00:34:25.100) Anna Brambilla: They come to me and they're not ready. Oh my God, let me introduce you to LuAnn. She's gonna help you get ready. And once you've gotten ready, oh, great. Let me introduce you to Anna and she's gonna help you find your VA. And that's the kind of win-win. And now you've got a client. We both have a client who is doing what they love, doing their business, have a passion for it, have a mission for it, and has a team that they can build to help them achieve that. And that's what gets me excited every day.
(00:34:53.900) LuAnn B. Make Your Passion Pay: Me too. Me too. Me too. Awesome. And I look forward to a long, collaborative partnership with you on this because I know a lot of people find themselves in that place of overwhelm and need that support and that collaboration. So we'll keep talking, we'll keep working together. We will make sure that all the links to engage with Anna are in the show notes to her website, her Facebook page, her LinkedIn. Do you have a free consultation or introductory session of some sort?
(00:35:31.400) Anna Brambilla: 100% get on the call and let's create your job description. Let's just do that, you know, no obligation, no pressure. Get on a call, it's a half hour. I can guarantee you, if nothing else, you'll get more clarity on the kind of support you need. And that gets people thinking too about, oh wait, I have the right person, I can do this and that and this other thing, and it's just phenomenal. I love watching that aha moment that clients have.
(00:36:00.500) LuAnn B. Make Your Passion Pay: Me too, that's so awesome. And you brought back our first word, clarity, and what they say is clarity is power. Yes. So yeah, with Anna, get some clarity around what kind of support you need to eliminate overwhelm in your business. What a powerful result from today's conversation.
(00:36:22.000) Anna Brambilla: so enjoyed it.
(00:36:23.900) LuAnn B. Make Your Passion Pay: Yeah. And so, everybody go out there, purp, and make your passion pay, and we'll see you next time. Have a great day.