Episode 10 - Goldie Chan

Highlights

• Do test tasks to find your rockstar. If you want to outsource some small things and want to find a good assistant, run test tasks. Not to see how they are accomplishing it, but to see which questions they ask, if they follow up with you. Then you’ll find your rockstar for your team.
• Always balance time commitment and results. When making a decision whether or not to do a project, always consider the time you need to do it and the results you get out of it. If you don’t have enough time and resources then don’t force yourself to do it. Simply say no.

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Show notes

Juan: How are you dealing with so many different projects? What is the kind of secret sauce, fully tactical about how you think about time and how you could kind of encourage or advise others on rethinking their time and how they’re able to execute?

Goldie Chan: [01:39] So, I love this question because I literally just started doing something about three or four weeks ago as a trial and so I will share it with you now.

I have a VA who is wonderful and what she does is I have her in the morning, she pulls from a master list of to do’s that are color-coded and they’re organized by importance within their category.

For example, outreach or general work or personal life, things like paying rent. Those are pretty high-priority, so they’re in order of priority. They’ve also been categorized by myself by date, so she’ll pull from this list and she’ll also bold things and be like, ‘don’t forget that you need to talk to the caterers about your event today’. Like that has to happen, that cannot be a to-do that falls off the wagon, so I have her send these to me in the morning, she actually checks in during the day just to see if I need help or if there’s anything that she can actually do remotely.

And then at night, she sends me a follow-up email that is really adorable because she’s just an adorable person that has something inspirational on it that does a wrap-up of basically I say what I’ve actually done and this is so, so helpful because I have her send it to me around seven or 8:00 PM my time and if there is something urgent had to get out midnight and I see this list again and I’ve forgotten it, then I can do it between those hours so I can catch myself on anything that was urgent that I maybe accidentally left or didn’t do or let to the wayside. My day has become so busy that I’ve started, sometimes every once in a while I miss calls or I miss things like this, recordings, so I now have her send me my daily calendar, and once again, remind me, ‘you cannot miss your 3:00 PM call. This is so important.’

Juan: [03:32] That’s super interesting. You know, some of the other interviews that I’ve done, the way that a lot of top performers think about time is they get hyper-focused on basically selecting what matters and what doesn’t matter. And it’s cool hearing a totally different perspective, which is, ‘oh actually you can just increase your entire bandwidth by just increasing your personal team.’ It’s like your street team. It’s not, you know, people are always thinking teams in terms of like companies like, okay, you’re an individual, a virtual assistant, especially if you do it offshore, doesn’t have to cost a ton of money.

There are super smart people that have college degrees that are well-trained, that are bilingual, that are willing to work for super cheap. Especially if you live in the US in Europe and you’re working with someone even though know I’m from Colombia, you work with someone in Latin America, super cheap, top talent. So do you have any suggestions about how, how we can find talent like these virtual assistants that are just rock stars and isn’t going to actually end up taking more time to train them, more time to follow up with them.

Goldie Chan: [04:30] So it always takes, there’s always an amount of time it takes to train and find the right person. I personally use both Upwork and Fiverr as ways to outsource some of the smaller tasks that I have in my life. I found this particular person because I like to give test tasks t, e s, t space t a s, k s because those words sound very similar, but I like to give tests where I asked them to accomplish something within a timeframe.

It’s less about if they can actually do that particular task and more about what questions do they ask me if they get confused, do they follow up with me?

Do they say, ‘hey, I couldn’t actually do this because I ran into this, this, this, can we do this instead?’ And so I ran through this particular test, with about three or four different VA’s and she was the one that got back to me the most and was just like, ‘actually I can’t do this and what you were suggesting wasn’t the best way to do this. So can we try this instead?’ And that is the kind of person that you want on your team is somebody who can proactively tell you you’re being an idiot.

Juan: [05:44] You know I always remember that I learned it probably three or four years ago from someone that I really admire. He was, he would always be on this kick of, ‘I can’t work with you until I work with you.’ And basically what that means is ‘I will never commit to a macro project until we’ve done something micro together and just really enjoyed working together.’ I keep seeing this habit and people that get really, really far in life because time is so valuable and we don’t have the time to make big mistakes that are going to take three months before everyone is sick of one another. It’s better to just do a one-week project and just test the waters a little bit and look for exactly those sort of things.

Does the person I’m outsourcing to even have the time availability? Do they have the skill set? Are they proactive in self-evolving and getting themselves out of ruts, or are they just putting everything back in my court saying, ‘oh, that that was the wrong password, so I just didn’t do it.’

Like, oh my gosh. Then open a new account. I don’t know, figure it out and that ‘figure it out’ as super important when you’re working with a team, it’s really interesting to hear from you how you’ve actually done that, it’s actually through micro projects to figuring out if the talent is right for you. How do you think about prioritizing tasks, Goldie? You’re so, for those of you listening, if you don’t know Goldie, she has millions of views on her LinkedIn videos. She’s a top influencer on the platform, on of the top creators on LinkedIn. Actually, I think you have probably put out more video content than just about anyone on the platform. Is that accurate to say?

Goldie Chan: [07:05] Yes.

Juan: [07:06] Are you number one? I mean you’ve got to be top five, top 10 top creators on Linkedin.

Goldie Chan: [07:10] So I for sure have the longest-running daily channel on LinkedIn period, and because some days I get very excited and the LinkedIn team actually will send me things in Beta and ask me to test them out. So, some days I actually put out two videos a day.

I probably have the most number of videos period on LinkedIn that are uploaded natively.

Juan: [07:31] Yeah, I bet. So. Okay. So, that’s amazing. And what and what I was driving to that is tell me a little bit about how you prioritize and how you think about what is important and what’s not important, because as much as you’re increasing your bandwidth, there’s got to be at least some part of you that works as a north star of like, do I take on this opportunity or not? What is that gauge for you?

Goldie Chan: [07:52] So, when I think about what I take on in terms of what is new, because there’s always commitments that you already have. So, I think it’s always important to think holistically.

‘What am I already doing, right? What is this new thing and does it actually maybe even fit in with some of the older things that I’m doing, some of the preexisting things, can I double my work? Can I repurpose some of my work for this new thing?

Or can I repurpose some of my team, my contractors, or my employees for something that’s new, but maybe that still falls under their skillset so I don’t necessarily have to take on all of it?’ So I always think in terms of how can I allocate resources intelligently- is this something that requires just me alone and therefore that is a huge, huge spend, I guess you could say in terms of my time, or is it something that I can then give to the rest of my team and I only spend maybe additionally, a little bit more time. So it really just depends and I like to weigh decisions that I make based off of those two factors.

Juan: [08:59] So, you kind of put everything in a balance and you’re looking at time commitment and you’re balancing that with result output, essentially. So is this a 10 result output? But is it also a 10 time commitment? Maybe that’s like your steak for like the next three or four months, that’s like a main thing that you work on and if it’s like a two result but an eight time commitment, then you just wave it off and that’s kind of how you’re constantly balancing and looking at the opportunities based on those two factors on whether or not you’re going to move on something new.

Goldie Chan: [09:30] Yes, and I think that’s so important that you think about it. For example, if entrepreneur magazine, I’ll just say that comes along today and is like, ‘hey, do you want to do a new show for us,’ to me, the result of that, even if it takes me more time, that is so worth it for me to do, so I’m willing to put in a lot more extra personal time into that. However, if something comes along and say it’s a brand new podcast that just rolled out wink, wink, that’s not run by one of my dear friends, then they say, you know, ‘we need you for 10, 20 hours out of this month.’

I might have to say ‘no’ just because I actually don’t know what the result of that would be.

And if it’s also, once again, not my friends or a brand that I super like, I probably won’t take on those commitments. So, I weigh in those things as well of course, because you know, you’re always giving back to the community. So, I spend a lot of time as you know, giving back to the community and that’s important to me, but if you’re not honestly part of my community necessarily and I don’t resonate with your message, I probably will not invest my time also into a new project that I’m not sure what the payout will be and especially when people come to me and they’re like, ‘we won’t pay you.’ Then there’s no payout.

Juan: [10:54] Totally. I think this is something that is very unique about being a thought leader, a public figure, an influencer, you know, it’s known by a bunch of different names, but the more content that you put out, the more that you are faced with these opportunities at scale and the more that you have to get really good at prioritizing what you’re going to jump on and what is just a distraction. It sounds super funny and it might even sound bad or like, oh, so what? You’re literally just getting bombarded with 100 opportunities. I would assume actually at your scale, yeah, actually.

So, I mean it might sound weird or bad or wrong, but I think if we’re able to look past the, you know maybe like how that might look wrong and we just actually apply that into our daily lives, any of us that aren’t influencers, that aren’t putting ourselves out there with so much content can learn a lot from someone that’s like, ‘guys, if you don’t fix this problem, when you have 10 opportunities, it’s really  going to be a problem when there’s 100 opportunities,’ and if you’re creating something that’s valuable, whether that’s with your company, with your business, your agency, or your own personal brand, it’s something that you can be more intentional about right now if you are really betting on yourself and you really think that over the next three to five years, so you’re going to be getting to that scale of opportunities.

So, I think there’s a ton of value Goldie and learning from someone like you that is balancing 50 projects in 100 opportunities a day to say actually, you kind of have to weigh the output and the result to the time commitment. I think that’s such a good, that’s such a good takeaway from this conversation. Something that I think is super applicable for anyone at home. Goldie, so thank you so much for sharing all this content with us. What is the best way for someone to stay in touch with you, catch up on what you’re up to and learn more about what you’re all about?

Goldie Chan: [12:41] Sure. So right now the best way to find me is where I live, which is on LinkedIn. So you can always find me at linkedin.com/in/Goldie. Yes, I got Goldie.

Juan: [12:55] Goldie is G-O, can you spell it out?

Goldie Chan: [12:57] G-O-L-D-I-E

Juan: [13:00] I-E. Perfect. Thank you so much for sharing this with us.

Goldie Chan: Thank you so much for having me.