The endless cycle of working 60-hour weeks as a business owner is exhausting and unsustainable.
We can try to “do it all,” but eventually you run out of hours in a day and you realize you are doing $10 an hour tasks that are making your business a $10 an hour business. That’s not a good place to be,
Bob Lachance, former professional hockey player, real estate investor, and owner of Reva Global, saw the time and money he was spending doing tasks himself that he could delegate to someone else. This is where his idea of starting a virtual assistant staffing company came into play.
In today’s episode, Bob shares his journey and the lessons learned about leveraging virtual assistants to streamline operations and reduce workload. This episode is packed with valuable advice for any business owner struggling to break free from daily operations or those looking to expand without increasing their hours.
Bob’s Links:
Reva Global Virtual Assistants
Linkedin
Hockey stats (you know, because I know someone is curious)
Listen here or watch on YouTube!
TRANSCRIPTS
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Those are really the two things that we look at. One is, what do you want in the end of the day? Is it time? Is it freedom? Is it scale?
Speaker 2 (00:09):
I’ve noticed with myself, and I’ve heard a lot of other business owners have this,
Speaker 1 (00:13):
One of the things that I always do, and this is one thing I had to do in my own business, I had to take a step back and start,
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Hello, my fellow Ripples. This is Chris Miles, your cashflow expert and anti financianal advisor. This show is for you, those that work so hard for your money and you’re ready for your money to start working harder for you today. You want that freedom of cashflow now, not in 30, 40 years, but today. So you can live that life that you love with those that you love, but it’s not just about getting rich, about living a rich life because as you’re blessed financially, you now have a greater capacity to blessed the lives of those around you. Thank you for tuning in today. Appreciate you guys binging and sharing these episodes with others as well. Guys, this ripple effect could not happen without you, so thank you for allowing me to do that through you today. As a reminder, if you haven’t done so, go ahead and check out our website, money ripples.com.
(01:14)
We’ve got great, great content on there for you everywhere from infinite banking to passive income, anything that you’re trying to do, especially if you were trying to break free of that nine to five grind or nine to nine grind, whatever it might be, you’re looking for that time freedom of money freedom right now. Check that out today. So I’ve bringing on a repeat guest today. I had ’em on a few years back, but I’m excited to have ’em back again because I know that especially if you’re someone that’s a business owner and you’re wondering, how do I have more time freedom, not just money freedom on business, but time freedom. How can I scale this and actually make it work where the business doesn’t own me, but I actually own a business, not just owning a job. That’s why I brought Bob Lachance on here again to talk to us about today.
(01:55)
If you don’t know, Bob Bob’s actually the CEO of Reva Global, which is great virtual staffing or virtual assistant staffing company that he’ll talk about here today. He’s actually a former professional hockey player. He was on the ice there. He was there for almost 10 years, and then of course after his retirement went into real estate investing where he is been in the last 20 years as well. So lots of great experience in the real estate side, which I know a lot of you guys are also real estate investors too. So he’s got that experience he has to come from and even as a co-founder of a company called Perch Rock that he has there in Connecticut. So Bob, well, our show today,
Speaker 1 (02:30):
Chris, thanks for having me again. Appreciate it. It was great seeing you at the last mastermind as well.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
Yeah, man. So catch us up. Let us know about your life. I mean, actually I want to hear this, I mean, we know that you obviously have a virtual assistant staffing company and whatnot, but tell us about when you went from professional hockey to real estate. What was that transition like? What was it that inspired you to do it in the first place?
Speaker 1 (02:53):
Yeah, I mean, just like every business owner, it’s not the easiest thing going from one industry to the next, right? Making that I left school early to classes ashore to get my degree, so my transition wasn’t the easiest. I couldn’t fall back on a degree, so I had to jump into an industry that had zero bears of entry. So which means that obviously you don’t need a degree to jump into. So did a lot of research just like you notice there’s many people in the real estate industry that are very, very well off that live life like you talk about all the time, money freedom, time freedom, et cetera. And that’s the end goal for all of us as we get older. I just turned 50 years old this year, so as every year we get older, our lens starts to change. So I noticed that 20 years ago that the real estate industry does allow for that to happen. And of course, I layered different businesses on top of my real estate business, which obviously fast forward to where we’re at today
Speaker 2 (03:54):
Now at least. You didn’t do every other hockey player, you didn’t name it hat Trick real estate or something like that, right?
Speaker 1 (04:00):
It’s funny. It’s funny. I have a company called Hatrick Hill Holding as well, so I do have that
Speaker 2 (04:07):
See called it, didn’t I? Oh, yeah, that’s awesome. Now, by the way, just as a side note, who’d you end up playing for?
Speaker 1 (04:14):
So I got drafted by St. Louis Blues. I played in their organization for two years, played two more years here in the US and then four more years in Europe and then decided I had my first kid, and so I had to hang it up.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
Nice. You didn’t end up on the Olympic hockey team or anything like that, or?
Speaker 1 (04:31):
Nope, I didn’t. I played national teams growing up, world juniors, select teams and things like that. My brother played in the Olympics, so it’s close enough there. I got to experience what the Olympics were like, and I had a great time parting behind the scenes while he was working his butt off trying to win a medal.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
Wait, did you just grow up doing hockey the whole time or what was your story there?
Speaker 1 (04:54):
Yeah, my father, he had a huge passion of hockey. So I have two brothers, so all two of them played as well. So us three played. We played every sport though. We played baseball, football for one or two years and soccer and laid on. We had everything sports.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
Yeah. Love it. And where’d you grow up?
Speaker 1 (05:15):
I grew up in Bristol, Connecticut.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
Okay. So right there in Connecticut. Born and raised, still there today,
Speaker 1 (05:21):
Born and raised. Still here today, sometimes I think, why the heck am I still here? Because of the weather we were just talking about a little bit earlier. You start looking at down south, starting to look very, very nice. Every single year I get older, but yeah, maybe one day I will buy a house down in Florida.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
There’s definitely a lot less ice down there, but hey, they’ve got hockey teams too. They
Speaker 1 (05:43):
Do very good ones too.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
Yeah, exactly. Well, tell us more. I mean, Reva Global, I know you guys definitely do a lot with virtual assistants and whatnot. What have you noticed with business owners you’ve worked with over the years? I know I’ve seen this, and I know you have too. There’s so many business owners that they can be good high producing people, but they’ve pretty much just created a very high paying, high stress type job for themselves. How does somebody really break free of that?
Speaker 1 (06:12):
It’s pretty interesting. It’s a very difficult question to answer a lot of times for small businesses because we are so stuck in our business. We’re going, you said it before, you’re either working nine to nine or 9, 10, 12 hours a day, and that’s real. That is all real. And then one day until we get really burnt out and we’re like, we have to figure out systems, processes, or we’re going to quit. So what I would tell business owners, and we have these conversations all the time and saying, all right, what do you want in the end of the day? Is it time? Is it freedom? Is it scale? What is it? So one of the things that I always do, and this is one thing I had to do in my own business, I had to take a step back and start looking at every single hour of my day.
(06:57)
So I look at my calendar, you grab your phone, you can look at any entrepreneur’s calendar. It is filled with a lot of stuff that doesn’t put money in your pocket. So what I recommend all the time, I say, just take your calendar, start identifying what you do from the time you wake up to the time you go to bed. And it takes a little time, probably takes about two, three weeks to start doing this and categorizing everything. And before you know it, you’re going to look at it and saying, you know what? I’m doing a bunch of $10 an hour tasks, and if you’re doing $10 an hour tasks, I heard this from one of my buddies, $10 hour tasks is going to equate to a 10 an hour bank account. So if you keep doing those, it’s either going to learn to burnout or it’s going to learn to either overwhelm, it’s going to learn to challenges at home, whether it’s with your kids, your spouse, et cetera, because you are so stuck in your day-to-day that you can’t even pull yourself out. So that’s what I found throughout the years, even with my own self in my own real estate business back in 2004 when I first started, I was in it. I was doing it, no kidding, from 5:00 AM to literally eight at night until I started getting yelled at and it started affecting family. But that’s normal because you have such passion in something, but it also leads to some very challenging times for us entrepreneurs.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
Well, and maybe I’m asking this question more for me than anybody because funny enough, just today I’m texting somebody about possibly getting a real executive admin, right, A rockstar. I want kind of like the Donna from Suits. That’s the kind of assistant I like. But at the same time, because I’ve done this so long, I mean, I’ve been in business for more than 20 years, just like you do it for so long, you kind of get in the habit. You’re like, can I really delegate anything? I’ll spend a couple hours a day at least on emails, and a lot of it is something that maybe only I can answer, but how do you really find a way to do that? I can find those tasks, but a lot of times in my mind it’s like, oh, I’ll just do that. That’s just easy. I’ll just add it to it and I’m sure I’m probably adding hours every day that somebody else could offload. Right?
Speaker 1 (09:02):
What’s funny, I just got off the phone with a doctor buddy of mine and he uses a bunch of our virtual assistants. He had a friend of him that just had this same conversation. He was stuck in the office until nine o’clock at night. He noticed that over, this happened like three or four times a week, and my buddy called him up and say, listen, I have an executive assistant virtual assistant that actually takes care of so much of my admin work, because what happens, it doesn’t matter it, it could be the doctor space, it could be our real estate space, it could be whatever space it is. That’s very, very common that you find yourself stuck in the weeds. So what he does, and there’s a lot of executive assistants, first thing you have to decide is do you want that person in-house just like Donna from Suits?
(09:46)
Do you want that person in-house or are you okay with working with someone who is remote? Because remote work is getting more and more commonplace and people are more open to it and comfortable with it because of what happened, obviously in Covid, et cetera. So we’re getting more and more business owners that have executive assistants, virtual assistants with us to take care of a lot of this, and scheduling even things like podcast editing, podcast posts, things, social media, there’s a lot of stuff that they do behind the scenes that people are becoming more and more with it and more and more comfortable.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
I love it. Yeah, that’s the thing I know. So with our company too, actually, we’re all remote, so working remotes, open up more options for us. I’ve noticed if you try to limit to geography, which I can understand certain businesses do, like a dentist obviously is going to be probably more likely going to be somebody local. Although you’ve probably seen situations where someone could be virtual too, right?
Speaker 1 (10:47):
Yeah. We have a lot of medical individuals, virtual assistants that work for our clients. So for instance, doing prior authorizations, insurance verifications, front desk triage, things like that. Because think about it, are you going to pay someone in-house in office, 70 plus thousand dollars when you could pay a virtual assistant $12 an hour, as an example? You start looking at this, every business we either need to keep our capital, which makes us more money if you lower expenses or also drive revenue. So those are really the two things that we look at, right? One is controlling our expenses because in every, think about this, even in real estate, in the medical field, expenses are going up, whether it’s marketing costs, direct mail lists, skip tracing, et cetera, et cetera. So things in our costs are continuing to go up. So we as entrepreneurs have to figure out, Hey, how do we keep our costs at a manageable level on one side? And also how do we grow our business and scale on the other side? So those are the things that small businesses, I know you and I talked about this at the last mastermind we were at of what does that look like for businesses? And for me, that’s the aha moment for everybody. They have to look at their business those two ways.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
Yeah. And do you ever find that people are a little bit nebulous when they talk about scaling or they don’t even really know what that means?
Speaker 1 (12:10):
Correct. Yeah, they do, but they say, Hey, I want to grow my business, but what does that mean growing your business? That means when you grow your business, you need more capital or you need more resources, you need something to help build that. It’s just not going to lay in your lap and make it more money. You have to go and you have to risk something. So when you risk something, you also have to make sure you budget for it. It’s all in the same, it’s kind of all rolled up in one, but we forget about scale costs us something, right? It could be time with our family, time with our kids, whatever that is. It could be higher resources, but it does cost you something in order to scale. So it’s way better for us to do it in a very systematic way to where you don’t try to overly scale to where it implodes something here. It could be your family, it could be your bank account, it could be whatever. So everything that has to be done in moderation.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
Yeah, I totally agree. And that’s a tough one. I see there’s almost, I mean there’s probably more than this, but I see two very different types of people. I see the person that is more than willing to hire anybody off the street, and they’ll hire hire like crazy, but they have no profit. And then you have the other person that doesn’t really hire and probably takes on too much, and maybe they have good profit, but they’re still stuck and they can’t really get that top line. They can’t really grow more because they’re limiting their own growth, right?
Speaker 1 (13:35):
Yeah. Well, we see that. I mean, a good example of scale in the real estate world is, Hey, I want a thousand doors. I want to own a thousand doors. And before you look at, I have a lot of buddies like that. They got two a thousand dollars, but they’re looking at it and saying, I’m not making any more money, but I got less hair now. So you have to understand the front end too. You got to be able to keep your money. It’s got to be done in a systematic manner,
Speaker 2 (13:59):
And you can grow a business. It doesn’t have to grow by 10 X every year or whatever it might be. Some people think sometimes it’s just a very stable, steady growth, right?
Speaker 1 (14:08):
Slow and steady. I mean, majority of the businesses, unless it’s a tech business, majority of the business are slow and steady. It really is. Because one year you got to build off each other before you know, look at some industries, it takes 10 years to really get over the hump, and that’s okay because we’re not going to, I don’t know about you, but I’m not looking to retire tomorrow. I mean, I don’t want to retire because for me personally, I like working. It keeps me younger, it keeps me, keeps me my mind sharper because I don’t know if you see our aging parents as well, you see, as soon as they stop, their health declines. So for me, I want to work until I’m 80. I mean, think about that. You don’t have to work eight hours a day, seven hours a day. You can work two hours a day if you want at that point, but it’s to be able to have the ability to do that.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
Totally agree. Yeah. That’s one thing I noticed that if I work too much, I burn out, but if I work too little, the fire burns out that passion, that meaning or purpose for life kind of extinguishes in that case. So you got to have both that balance. Exactly.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
Yep. I mean, and like we say, and I always say this, the older we get that gets more and more, that gets clear every single day
Speaker 2 (15:26):
For sure. What would you say is a good advice for people when they’re looking for virtual assistants to help really help them offload, help ’em scale so they can buy their time back? What’s the best way to do that?
Speaker 1 (15:37):
I’d first say whatever industry you’re in, make sure you know what tasks you want to outsource. But I would start just very simple. If you look at your business, create departments in your business, like real estate as an example, it’s a very easy one. You have branding, you have marketing, you have acquisition. If you’re a buy and hold investor, of course you’re going to have construction management. And then obviously unit managements, unit management as well, however you want to call it property management. I would first identify what that department is in your company or those departments are in your company. If it’s the medical field, I mean, of course you have insurance verifications, prior authorizations, et cetera. So I would start there and then you could get on a phone with our team members, get on a strategy session. We could help you build from there. But that’s what I would do first, because that’ll give you an idea of what tasks are in each department that you no longer should be doing yourself or that you want to outsource.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
Gotcha. And then from there, what do you think is a good next step? I mean, is it reach out to Reeva Global or what is it?
Speaker 1 (16:46):
Well, I would look at each department and like I said, I would identify the tasks that you want done and then look to see how much time it would actually give you back because we’re not making any more time. So if you start looking at that, like I said at the beginning of our call, once you identify what you’re doing from let’s say 7:00 AM to however time you stop working, you identify those tasks, then you put ’em in paper and then get on a call with us to see if we’re a fit for each other. So that’s what I’d always recommend because you may look at it and say, oh my, oh my God, I can literally save 40 hours a week or add 40 hours a week to my plate to be able to do A, B, C, and D. So that’s what we see. A lot of business owners have an aha moment saying, wow, I never went through that. Exercise is very simple exercise, but I never went through it.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
That’s right. And what kind of departments does your company focus on primarily or Yeah, we do everything. Cover all of them.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
Yeah, we do everything. It always has to do with the tasks that individuals want to outsource, whether it’s executive assistant stuff, whether it is branding, social media, podcast editing, submitting to all different sites, to obviously marketing lead generation like we talked about. Because none of our businesses, we won’t have a business unless we have lead generation, right? Leads coming into your business. And then on the acquisition side for my real estate company has all this different in transaction coordinating. We have accounting, et cetera. So we literally have virtual assistants in every part of our business.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
Are your VAs international or they US based, or is it a mix?
Speaker 1 (18:27):
Nope. All of our virtual A systems are out of the Philippines. Literally just two weeks ago, just got back from the Philippines meeting with our team, which is pretty exciting. So everyone’s in the Philippines.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
I very recall. They take a language proficiency test too, just to make sure they qualify,
Speaker 1 (18:42):
They take, they take all that. They also do predictive index. I know you’re big on that as well. All that. And then you get to interview all your virtual assistants before you even bring ’em on your team. So we have a very, very set process. I started this company back in 2014, went through a lot of incredible upgrades from all the different businesses that we work with. We talk about this, again, off camera, about ways to better our business every single day, which is beautiful for us to be able to interact in our masterminds with hundreds of different companies out there from all walks of life. So it’s really good. You get the ad in, whether it’s customer service or you got to create different departments. So it’s really, really cool the opportunity that we get.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
I love it. Well, cool, Bob. So if people want to be able to reach out to you, what’s the best way they can do that?
Speaker 1 (19:37):
Sure. You could find me, whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn at Reva Global or my website, Reva global, REVA, global.com. If you have any questions, send a direct message to me through Facebook and I can help you out any way you need help with.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
That’s awesome. I know in my personal experience, I mean VAs have just made a huge difference in my business. So here’s the last final question I have for you. So I’ve noticed with myself, and I’ve heard a lot of other business owners have this almost aha moment. A lot of ’em were starting to talk about bringing certain things in-house where maybe they were using some company to do, in our case, we were doing podcast production outside with a different service and they were good, but we realized we could bring it in-house using VAs and control everything, get things out in a much more flexible, timely manner, even do it the ways that we want to do it, where we had more control and actually better results with a lot less effort. I don’t know if you’ve seen that happen as well, but I know for us, we cut our cost of production for our podcast by about two thirds, about a third of what the cost was before
Speaker 1 (20:52):
We saw the same thing. We did the same exact thing. So we hired a marketing company with Reva Global on obviously my VA side, to do all of that podcast editing, sending out to all different sites. So we did exactly what we were talking about. We took it in-house as well. Now we have all our virtual assistant team handle all that. We’ve also, on the property management side, we see a lot of property management companies use our service, and I know you have a lot of investors that actually have property management that have taken that in-house as well with leasing, lease renewals, maintenance calls, et cetera. So there’s a lot of stuff there in our doctor’s offices as well, physician’s offices, practices, et cetera, to where they’ve cut a lot of overhead down by taking everything. A lot of ’em used to do, use different companies to do prior authorizations, insurance verifications. Now they took it in-house and they do it themselves. We help manage it, but they do it themselves using our virtual assistants.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
I love it. And that’s the thing, I look at my business just like any kind of investment, just like real estate investment, I want to get the best ROI, but also the most assurity. I want to have the most control, less risk highest, ROI. And that’s exactly what you can do, especially when you use a service like what you’re talking about doing and having people that are very well qualified. Again, two of my VAs are international as well, and they’re an amazing investment in our company right now. So I can definitely attest to that.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
Cool. Well, thank you again. I know we’re at the top of the hour there, so Chris and I appreciate you obviously having me, and I’m here anytime you want to get me on. Again, I really appreciate it and I’ll see you obviously soon at our next meeting.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
Yep, same here. Bob, everybody else, be sure to reach out to Bob at Riva Global. If you’re looking for something like this, even if you’re just starting out and you’re looking for that first hire, this could be the very thing that you do that allows you to still have the affordability to do it and be able to allow yourself to grow and scale and create more time freedom so that you’re not just owning a job. So guys, go and make it a wonderful process week. We’ll see you later.