Sam Fuchs of iCare Financial shares how they are able to introduce significant cost savings by utilizing virtual assistants in the Philippines. Do you want to increase growth in your business by leveraging a global network of the highly talented on-demand virtual workforce? Download our FREE guide here: http://bit.ly/Download-FreeGuide
Full Video Transcription
I’m Sam Fuchs and I run iCare Financial here in Atlanta, Georgia and we are a patient financing finance software. I’m part art of a brain trust group here in Atlanta and it’s about 30 or 40 CEOs and they have different speakers come in from time to time and they hay Brad Stevens come in from Entreholic (Brad Stevens Training) and we were very excited about the information the way he presented it. It opened our eyes of a lot to things we were totally missing because there are so many tools out there online and we immediately knew we needed him in for a workshop into our business here in Atlanta. Once he showed us how he’s using them, it lit us up because we were able to actually hire some VAs. And we really were able to take advantage of the costs savings. As we spent a lot of money over the last two years on consultants and they basically showed us what time our watch was or told us what time our watch was. The unique part about Brad’s workshop is that he spent the time ahead of time.
Delve into our company and find out what our real needs were. So he was really able to custom tailor our workshop versus just coming in and giving us you know put a bunch of information for us and hope that we get it. The best part was watching the reaction of our team. We had four or five managers in here and they were all thinking they were so excited they were writing notes to the whole seminar like we didn’t want to leave. As a matter of fact, we ran over probably an hour and a half because we couldn’t get enough that day and it wasn’t just that day it was the follow-up and the implementation that took place in the next 30 days after that. So we’re really excited about having him. One of the best parts of the seminar was he didn’t just disseminate information and hope that we ran with it. The best part was Brad challenged us, daily. He broke it down so precisely where we think we could we could benefit from having implemented these tools. So that was part of the best part was even myself as a CEO he challenged me to figure out where we could use some of these tools. And he did that with everybody on our team. Brad had spent a lot of time talking about outsourcing and we started challenging ourselves to look at each department not just a virtual assistant for the CEO or my partner or whoever. But what we started doing was challenging each department manager and saying, “where can we do some outsourcing?”
The inefficiencies that we had in our own personnel were substantial. And once we started doing some outsourcing we found out that not only where the dollars being saved but also the time being saved. Each one of our managers has truly benefited in their own departments based on the outsourcing. Brad’s team taught us how to do it. And he taught us how to do it properly. My fears were mainly not having the employees on site. I thought you’d be major communication issues. I thought there’d be time zone issues and we have found just the opposite. The ones that we’ve already hired, they are number one very excited to be working with us. They’re very loyal just in the few short months and they’re actually a joy to communicate with and they do it very very well. We’ve given them some small projects and they are jumping on them like no tomorrow. In getting back feedback that we’re getting back to how well these projects are being accomplished our team our department managers are now really jumping and going. What about this? What about that? What about this and what we’ve done is looking at the numbers that I calculated about four hundred fifty thousand dollars. In savings for 2018 and what that does to a business like ours in the 5 million dollar range, it jumped out our net gain of over 10 percent for next year. I mean we didn’t even know that existed. So we’re pretty excited about what we’ve learned from the seminar. Also here and I feel we’re launching a new business model and we looked at all of the cost involved from Website design to landing pages and all we’re going to spend right at thirty thousand about twenty-eight five. And once we did our outsourcing and looked at everything we got pretty excited. We did the complete package for four right at thirty-one hundred dollars and it is a complete project as of today. Unbelievable. And now Brad’s team has come in and shown us how to take advantage of those. There are faster better ways to do things.
I’ve been an entrepreneur twenty five years had five different startups and they’ve all been successful. But now the Brad has come into our business we’ve had a lot of consultants. He (Brad Stevens) is a game changer in the way we are able to escalate our profits and our savings and our company. One of the reasons other entrepreneurs need to know this information is because it would bring them out of the Dark Ages of what’s really going on. With the resources available now and Brad has put them in a nice package to be able to actually use them. He doesn’t just tell you what they are. He shows you how to use it. So if you’re an entrepreneur and you’re looking at different ways to escalate your business tenfold. Bring Brad’s seminar in your in your business.
My name is Alice chan. I am the sales manager for iCare financial. So I’m actually also the director of business development. The way Brad showed it with his presentation was actually very informative and I had legitimate evidence to back up the ideas but I wanted to be implemented but didn’t have the right I guess case studies to really back it up. I had no idea of some of the categories that we could outsource so it was very intense in a good way because I keep using that word because I remember at a certain point I was just overwhelmed but it was the combination of a lot of I guess neurons being ignited all at once over the possibilities of things I could be doing.
It was very exciting and I feel like the energy especially afterwards it really gave our company great charge of different things we could be doing differently and like really expanding the mind. I feel like the follow up was really really good. Brad really made us feel accountable to the ideas we had brought up during the workshops which was very good because our CEO and managing partner have a lot of good ideas. But unless someone else holds them accountable to it I don’t think you would move along as quickly as it did. As a sales manager. My job is to generate revenue. So having a virtual assistant helped me with the admin tasks like checking the CRM or making sure things doesn’t fall through the crack. Allows me to focus on my sales team on what they really need. Give them the support to make the sales they really need to be making. I would say from a manager standpoint, you don’t know what you don’t know. So knowing other resources out there, it’s really mind opening because for me I would say the biggest part is I would refuse to let things go as manager. Even though I know part of my job as a delegate. I almost refuse to let that go but once I’ve seen case studies brought up at his workshop on the virtual assistant helping out I was actually able to know it’s OK to let go.
My name’s Katie Kessing and I’m director of operations for iCare Financial. I’ve been able to hire four virtual assistants so that has helped us. Two of them are for a customer service position and they just started about two weeks ago and they’ve already surpassed training that I could even imagine when we would have you know normal clients come in. It’s it’s pretty incredible. We had an entire website built. We were able to do all of that get our SEO redirected all the links and all that stuff redirected for two hundred fifty dollars which I couldn’t even believe because the amount of work that that took I mean the gentleman sent me over like a 15 page word document of all the changes and the redirects and the keywords and the meta tags that they had changed and when he quoted me on the price I was just. It was unbelievable. It’s been customer service and it’s also been our marketing you know creative web site all that kind of stuff. So two different aspects that have really changed our business which has been nice. The ability to open up what how we work and function has been pretty incredible. For example we receive payment plans into our office by the hundreds and by just hiring these two additional customer service reps that are virtual. We’ve been able to continue that same day response which has been pretty pretty amazing for us because you know with with staff people don’t show up. People get sick they have to take live calls. There’s a lot that’s going on for the person that that’s here physically whereas the person virtually maybe doesn’t have those kind of issues.
Launching the new Web site that we’ve been wanting to do forever. But you know looking at the cost of that one of the quotes we got was going to be further ten thousand dollars just to build a new website. And we did it for under two thousand dollars and the migration. So that was pretty impressive. We actually found the guy from 48 our logos who created one of our logos and we ended up working with him. He built our website. He’s done our email campaigns and he’s been great. But that will be the future of how all those marketing now comes together and the money that we’re saving by being able to outsource all of that because those are monthly overheads that we’re just cutting in half. That’s not even half of what I took away from. I didn’t even realize that we could change our entire customer service platform to be something different and have the ability to hire people and get them set up so that they could help our office perform at a higher rate for lower cost. I would say the biggest impact for me would be kind of a two fold. one is not having to worry about making sure that projects are followed up and taking cared of because now I have somebody in place that helps me with that because I’ve seen the results and I’ve got a virtual assistant now.
My name is Valerie Fuller and I am the director of technology for iCare Financial. Well essentially I look for inefficiencies in the office and I try to figure out how we can apply technology to that. And make it more efficient. I was really hands on prior to Brad coming in and kind of showing us that we could outsource or have people available to us who actually had the knowledge to do the job functions that we needed. So my role kind of changed from doing the jobs everyday developing those technologies to actually saying OK wait I need to put this together. Here’s my idea. And here are all the things that go along with that idea. And now I’m going to hand that. Over to somebody so that they can actually do the implementation of it. So what I learned from Brad’s seminar was basically that I could actually outsource the job functions and that I could start being the doer of the tasks each and every day and actually outline that procedure for others to accomplish. It’s really peace of mind to be quite honest with you. It’s been tremendously helpful as far as for me because I know there’s just so many tasks that you have to accomplish every single day and that becomes stressful. Honestly it just it weighs down on you because you know how much has to be done and the fact that I had left the seminar with an understanding that wait a minute I can compartmentalize these different things assign them out to different people and and then just be the person to manage all of those things and make sure that they’re getting done correctly. That was for me, it was tremendous. I think Brad’s team was great. They were available for us whenever I had a question I could just shoot off an email get a response right away. I think that was the biggest thing for me and being able to ask a question and get an answer. It was basically a one on one interaction. So whenever I just shot something out to them I usually get a response within 24 hours it was fantastic.