Home Care U - Why You Might Consider a Virtual Assistant for Your Next Office Hire (Regina Ascunsion)

Episode Date: September 16, 2024

Virtual assistants are transforming some home care businesses, from recruitment to on-call support. Regina Asuncion, CEO of a leading virtual assistant firm, shares the honest truth about the pros, cons, and everything in between when it comes to outsourcing critical home care tasks. Whether you're curious about the cost-effectiveness or the challenges involved, this episode will give you a clear picture of whether or not you should consider virtual assistants for your home care operation.Enjoying the show? Send me a text and let me know!Learn more about Careswitch at: careswitch.comConnect with the host on LinkedIn: Miriam Allred This episode was produced by parkerkane.co

Welcome everyone to Home Care U. I'm your host, Miriam Allred. It's great to be back with you. I hope everyone's having a great week. I know fall is setting in, back to school. It's a busy time for everyone, but I hope things are going well for all of you and it's a pleasure to be back with you. Today, I'm really excited to be joined by maybe a newer face, our voice in the industry. I recently got acquainted with her and have heard a lot of good things from a lot of the home care owners, operators, experts, vendors in the space. And so I thought it was fitting to bring her on today. So today, I'm joined by Regina Ascension, who is the CEO of Ascension Business Solutions. Regina,

thank you so much for being here. Hi, Miriam. Thank you so much. I'm excited and extremely honored to be a part of this podcast. Of course. Like everybody knows, this is a really casual conversation where I'm just going to basically pick your brain on something that you're an expert on. So I'm excited to dive in and get to know you a little bit better and give our audience a look into all things virtual assistants. I'll just briefly share my perspective here. Since the pandemic, there has been a big push for virtual assistants inside of home care, outside of home care. I read a lot of forums, Facebook groups, just more talk of virtual assistants.

And so that's something that you're an expert in and run a business all about. So I'm excited to learn. And I think a lot of home care owners and operators are also considering and looking into virtual assistants. So I hope we can answer a lot of the questions, maybe demystify some of the unknowns and really just bring some good education to our audience. So before we get into the topic, I want you to go ahead and just introduce yourself. Give us a little look into your background and your personal story and why you're doing what you are today. Yes, thank you. Well, my name is Regina. I have been in healthcare for going on 17 years now. The very first time I started a company was a home health agency back in 2008. There wasn't a lot of playbooks written to be successful. A lot of the times,

we were still trying to figure it out and how to do things. There weren't podcasts like this one. There weren't a lot of coaches. So it was very much figure it out on your own and stay within compliance. We started our hospice branch in 2017, and we sold that company in 2019, right before the pandemic. And then in 2020, I was asked to start another home health agency. I wanted to start with telling you guys a little bit of a story that leads into how and why I started my own company. So when I started this company in 2020, here in Denver, Colorado, which is where I'm from. Like you said, it was so hard to find people. A lot of people really wanted to enjoy their pandemic life, enjoy some unemployment. And so the talent pool is really shrinking, especially because what we do, home health, hospice, and home care, it's such a niche. In 2021, I was finally training

someone to take over a position because when you're a small business owner or a small team, sometimes you wear a lot of hats and all of a sudden you're not working 40 hours, you're working 60 hours, you're working seven days a week because your budget's really tight. And that's just how startups are. In 2021, I started training a young girl to take over a scheduler position. I trained her for about three weeks and I was super excited because I was going to Tennessee to take my kids to Dollywood. But instead of me being on all these roller coasters with my kids, picture this. I was passed out underneath a tree alone on a bench on a hot summer day.

And you might be wondering why was I under this tree passed out? Well, it was because I was exhausted and I just had a very emotional breakdown because the lady that I trained for three weeks was calling me and texting me nonstop. Instead of trying to troubleshoot through these issues on her own or ask the two or three other people available to her. It was just a barrage of questions. And I'm 100% sure I went over these with her over the three weeks of training. I can still hear my kids in my mind saying, OK, mom, that's enough screen time. And the second day of doing that with her, she went to lunch and never came back. And so you guys could imagine how frustrated I was.

And what do I do when I'm frustrated or sad or overwhelmed? I typically do two things. I either eat or I try to put myself to sleep. And so there I was on a bench, sleeping away my pain and disappointment and sadness. And so I wonder how many of your listeners have felt that way of being unable to show up for the relationships that matter in your life because you're just working nonstop. Or the fact that if any of your main key players at work take time off, all of a sudden that their workload gets onto your plate. In the following year, February of 2022, I started my own virtual assistant firm because I knew there had to be a different way. There had to be hope. There had to be a way to overcome the challenges that the pandemic put on us. That is where my company

started. We've been in home care since 2022, and we're home care specialists. And I'm just really excited to be here. Amazing. Thank you for sharing that. I think everyone that listens to this will relate to that story. I think everyone, no one is exempt from having those down days where the work, the people, the fatigue, the mental, physical, emotional exhaustion wears you down. And so I think everyone will be able to relate to that story. So thank you for sharing. I know that was vulnerable, but ties a lot into your why and why you're doing what you're doing today. So we'll talk a little bit more about your business as we go throughout this episode, and then I'll give you some time at the end to be able to speak to your services and how

that works. But let's talk in depth about virtual assistants. Again, it's kind of an up and coming or hot topic in the industry right now. And so I want to give you some time to talk about what it is, how it works, what are the benefits, what are the benefits, what are the cons, just really kind of unpack all things virtual assistants. So why don't you start by just actually overviewing what are some of the most common roles that virtual assistants are filling inside of a home care business? So some of the most common roles that we see home care use virtual assistants are virtual

recruiting. The reason why is because I've read several articles and they say that the caregiver turnover rate is anywhere between 97% and 73%. So that's a bit of a variety there, but it's still really high compared to pre-pandemic. Let's say in 2018, that rate was around 63% turnover rate, meaning let's just say 77% of your caregivers today are going to quit or leave your company within the next six months. So what are your strategies to ensure that you have a healthy pipeline of active caregivers to replenish those numbers? So that's the number one thing I see virtual recruiting. And the second one is scheduling. Scheduling to me is one of the hardest jobs in home care. It's like a constant game of Tetris. You have these falling parts, you're trying to move things

around, you're trying to fit things up. And at the end of the day, for no reason of your own, it could all blow up, right? Scheduling, and it also requires a very specific type of person, someone that's very good at time management, problem solving, and communication. So it's been really hard for owners to find people that want to do that job on a consistent basis, day in and day out. Another role that we see is on-call services. So after hours, let's say your office closes at 5 p.m. on a Monday, and then they open up at 9 a.m. the next day.

That is a really hard position to fill and keep filled. Also weekends, Saturdays and Sundays, 24-7, holidays, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's. And so who typically ends up doing these positions are the owners, unfortunately. After they've worked their 40 plus hours, now they have to be on call and or they will utilize their in-house staff to do this. But virtual assistants, you can have a dedicated team of VAs, but they're not just picking up the calls on a midnight on Friday because a caregiver didn't show up and say, okay, we're going to call you back on Monday morning. VAs are really schedulers, but for different timeframes. They're there to actively troubleshoot and resolve those problems as they arise, as they receive those calls.

So on-call is definitely a big way people are using virtual assistants. Another way is virtual receptionists, people there to just support your in-house team, and sales assistants. Sales assistants can do some evergreen marketing strategies like building newsletters, social media calendars, anything to really promote your brand and your company on an ongoing basis. because another really hard position to fill is business development and marketers. For some reason, there's not a lot of longevity within those roles. So having virtual assistants, being able to continuously provide those marketing strategies throughout the year, regardless if you have a marketer or not, is really important to some owners. Yeah, that's a great, great overview. A lot of different

functions that they can assist with in the office. The one that I would add that I know you've talked about is also just data migration. As you scale your home care operation, you'll be surprised at just how much data and information and profiles and schedules and invoices. You really do start to accumulate a lot of data and information and paperwork, if you will. And so a lot of people use virtual assistants even just to help kind of manage all of the paperwork that is in a home care business. So let's talk about the advantages. So traditionally, in a home care business, people hire these positions as full-time employees or maybe part-time employees. But there are some apparent advantages to hiring virtual assistants

rather than hiring people either full-time or part-time in-house, what are some of the key advantages that you would call out of hiring virtual assistants for these positions? Miriam, I agree with you. I feel like home care owners, there's a lot more challenges that are stacked against them, especially if we compare it to pre-pandemic times. We see them struggling with how to compete in a highly saturated industry. So many new home care owners are popping up, whether it's franchise or individually, privately owned. We're finding that it's very difficult to find professionals to fill these roles that want to be in these roles and that people want to stick around for longer than three to six months. They're also struggling with high turnover rates for caregivers and increasing cost of doing business, which ultimately reduces their

profit margins. And so utilizing virtual assistants is the great way to increase your efficiency and cost effectiveness. Those are super crucial in doing business and home care today. So here are some of the ways that VAs really streamline and allow business owners to thrive. The number one thing is streamlining operations. The best thing that you can do at any company really, but especially with home care, is to automate and streamline administrative tasks. These tasks are like what we mentioned, recruiting, scheduling, on-call, data migration. But when you can streamline by building standard operating procedures, you really take out the guessing work. You can ensure that your VA is actually aligned with what your actual practices are. So that way you're minimizing errors and you're improving overall efficiency.

The second advantage of using a virtual assistant is in the recruitment and onboarding. So again, there's a really high turnover rate for caregivers. Using virtual assistants to really get the heavy work out of the recruitment process. I'm talking about posting job ads on Indeed and PreIntent and Hierology and MyCNAjobs is important. You have to make sure that those job ads are compelling and competitive. So many times I've seen that my clients are simply posting a job description on these platforms and expecting people to be convinced to work for their company. But that's not best practices.

We want to ensure that these job ads are written so that way you're even telling your side of the story. Because again, it's competitive. Most of these caregivers, the best caregivers are already working for another agency. And so you want to show them why they would want to work for you. Doing the initial screenings, going back and forth, scheduling interviews is so time consuming. And also just conducting the interviews as well can be very time consuming for your staff. Managing, collecting all of that onboarding documents. And really, when it comes to recruitment, you have to handhold caregivers through the process.

If you don't have someone doing follow-ups and emails and reminders, even texting them and saying, hey, don't forget, we still need your social security card or your driver's license. By the way, the two reference checks that, or the two references that you provided us are your mom and dad. We need two professional references. So there's a lot of touch points that go into recruitment and onboarding. Another really key advantage that I see is cost management, of course. When you utilize virtual assistants, that is a great way to manage and offset the rising cost of doing business. It's a great way to ensure that you get the support that you need while you increase your profit margins. Typically,

you can see an average of 61% of savings when you use a virtual assistant versus an in-house hire, but also there's a competitive edge when using virtual assistants. In a very saturated market, offering seamless and efficient services can set a business apart. VAs enhance customer service by providing 24-7 support, ensuring that clients' needs are met promptly and effectively. Yeah, I want to dig into two areas of things that you mentioned. The first one being streamlining and automating processes. There might be owners listening to this that that is their strength, and there might be owners listening to it, that that is their weakness. A thing that I want to call out is I know you train and teach all of your VAs how to build out SOPs or standard operating practices. And so if that's a weakness of you as an owner, or maybe even some of your staff members that isn't one of their strengths, it's a great opportunity to bring in a virtual assistant to absorb your processes, your culture, your operation,

and help you define and document all of those SOPs. Because like you mentioned, in home care, there's so many menial tasks. And that's usually the hardest part if someone comes in and then leaves and then you know the training the sops just the streamlining and automation can all go out the door with with a hire and so i think it's so important that you can even use a virtual assistant to help you define and document your sops to help future hires future operations go a lot more seamlessly. So anything you want to share on how you train your VAs to help document and define SOPs? Yeah. A big part of what we do is that all of our VAs undergo 80 plus hours of training. It could be 80 hours. It could be 120 hours. And this talks about home care from its very basic level. What is home care? Why is that different from home health and hospice?

What is a caregiver? Why is it different from a CNA or an HHA? And even talking about your client demographic, what is Alzheimer's and dementia? What happens if someone's sundowning or they refuse to take their meds at this time? What would you do? Because let's say we provide you with a virtual recruiter. How would they know what a good answer is if they don't know or if they don't have this baseline knowledge of home care? But in regards to building SOPs, providing VAs is just the surface. VAs should address the critical issue of knowledge retention in the home care industry, where high turnover

rates can lead to a free fall in productivity. I mean, how many people have experienced this? Their key employee leaves, and that person takes all the valuable knowledge with them. This can cause so much disruptions and can hinder operations. We should underscore the importance of capturing and preserving knowledge to ensure continuity and stability in the face of personnel changes. By harnessing the power of virtual assistants to develop standard operating procedures, we can address this challenge head-on. SOPs serve as a lifeline providing a structured framework for documenting processes and best practices. They not only mitigate the impact of turnover by retaining critical information, but they also serve as a roadmap for training and onboarding new staff. So what we do at my firm is that starting day one, your virtual assistant will record everything that you teach them.

And we use that recording and AI to analyze the workflow. Then we transcribe that step by step. We use screenshots. We can use the recording and archive it, hyperlink it into that SOP. We archive every one of those SOPs into a company manual that we have created for our clients. And what that does is that, again, we transfer the knowledge from up here down onto paper. It shows your team that we understand the process and we are aligned with your processes. And that will give us so much better outcomes because we're consistent. And we can use that company manual as like a playbook for success, where we could give it to other VAs if you were

to hire another VA. Or in a lot of cases, we've actually used those SOPs that we've created to train other in-house team members. So these SOPs are so important. I love this. I personally think this is such a valuable use of virtual assistants because there's a lot of owners that come into this business with a specific skill set. And again, documenting processes very quickly falls to the back burner. There's way higher priority, urgent issues, phone calls every minute of every day. And so documenting processes very quickly falls to the back burner. But like you said, it's so important to document every single task so that whoever it is, the virtual assistant or the in-house employee isn't

figuring everything out all of the time. It's okay, There's this situation. Here's the SOP. I know exactly what to do in this moment. And so there's just so much room for automation and streamlining. And it starts with documenting really good SOPs. So I think this is a great, great, great use case of virtual assistants for a lot of owners and operators in home care. The other thing that you mentioned that caught my attention is cost. Hiring someone full-time in this environment, in this economy is really expensive. And you said at the start, the margins are so tight in home care. And so hiring a full-time employee is challenging for a lot of owners and operators, especially at the front end of starting a business. It's really a big investment to make

that first hire and to start to build on an office team. So the cost of hiring VAs is a fraction of what it can be to hire someone full-time. Can you share the numbers again? I know you actually have like a state-by-state breakdown that you showed me about cost specifically, but just kind of ballpark numbers. What can the anticipated cost savings be for a virtual assistant rather than an in-house employee? So in April 2024, this year, I went on to ZipRecruiter and I downloaded by state how much a typical in-house recruiter or an in-house scheduler would cost. And then I did an average of that. And so on average to hire an in-house person would be around $56,000 a year. Again, this can go

way, way up in states like California, New York, and Maine, and it can go a little bit lower in some of the other states. So you're looking around $56,000 a year, but there's a lot of other costs that owners sometimes forget to include, mainly payroll taxes. That can be anywhere from 10% to 20%, depending on which state and city you live in. You can expect to pay employee benefits for anywhere from $2,000 to $6,000 per year per person. Also, we must not forget overhead costs, the cost to hire and train and manage that person throughout their tenure. Also, laptops, VOIP systems, tracking systems, monitoring systems. So there's a lot of costs that go into an in-house hire. If you were to compare that to virtual assistants, it's about 61% more cost effective because we are a 1099. We are not an employee. And as contractors,

you can sidestep really high salaries, taxes, unemployment insurance, benefits, and overhead because we are responsible for that. We are responsible for providing your virtual assistant with all the tools and technology that they need to be successful. For example, every one of my virtual assistants is provided with a laptop and this laptop is secure. You cannot use it for other purposes outside of work. They're also provided with a noise-canceling headset. We install monitoring systems on their laptops to ensure their productivity throughout the entire day is being met. We can track it down to which websites they're using, how long they're on each one of these websites. If they're idle for more than 30 minutes, it notifies their team leads. And we can also provide them with a VOIP system, like we use RingCentral. And we can program that to whatever area code that you would need. And we provide them again with 80 hours of upfront training

and continuous training throughout the year. So all in all, I think it's a great way to get premium services, premium support at a fraction of cost. I think that's great. Again, just another alternative for people to consider as opposed to a full-time or even a part-time hire. I want to ask the question that you probably get most often and probably is one of maybe the top three questions

that people ask when thinking about virtual assistants, which is the language barrier. That is, you know, a lot of these virtual assistants are overseas. And for many of them, English is their second language. What should people look out for when it comes to finding these virtual assistants overseas? And how can they, you know, ensure that their communication is up to standard with their business here in the United States? I think that's a very great concern because a lot of times your VAs are the first people that potential caregivers are interacting with. If they're the recruiters, if they can't understand your recruiter,

it's not giving a good first impression of your company. So that's a very valid concern. And to answer that is all of my virtual assistants are from the Philippines. And the Philippines was actually a territory of America, of the United States after World War II. And during that time, our governments decided that we're going to teach our curriculum in English. So starting grade one, we are taught our curriculum in English. With that being said, the bare minimum requirement to work for my company is you have to have a bachelor's degree. By having a bachelor's degree, that signals to me that you have been utilizing English consistently for many, many years at that time. But we also do heavy vetting and our interview and recruitment process is very thorough, meaning that if we do aptitude tests, IQ tests, communication tests, and if you have a thick accent, unfortunately, we cannot hire you. Because again, I understand the importance

of putting your best foot forward and having the right virtual assistant is important to that. And so you can also ask to see an introduction video from your virtual assistant so that way you can see and hear what they sound like before you hire them. I think the beauty of your services are that you do all of that vetting on behalf of the agency. I know a handful of large home care businesses in this country that outsource their own VAs in Latin America, the Middle East, some parts of Asia as well. And so know that, you know, while we have you here and you're representing your firm, there are home care owners, operators that go out and seek out their own virtual assistants.

But like you mentioned, there needs to be this really thorough vetting process because like you said, they can often be the first touch point of an applicant or a prospect with your business. And so you want to put your best foot forward and you want to make sure that they can communicate well. And also one of your value adds is home care specific knowledge. If you go out and seek out your own virtual assistant online or in another country, chances are slim that they'll know the nuances of home care. And so you want to ensure that they can communicate well, properly, but also have the knowledge of this industry and the nuances that there are in home care specifically. So thank you for addressing that and talking a little bit about

your VAs. Again, I've heard a lot of great things about owners and operators that have worked with Regina and her VAs. And I can testify that your VAs are vetted properly and do a really great job at all the things that we've mentioned thus far. The next question I want to ask is about integrating them into the business. Again, these are people that are virtual. And so they're not there in the office. It's a little bit tougher to integrate them into the business, the office, the culture, let alone into the actual operations. For many owners, this is probably going to be their first virtual assistant hire ever. It's a newer concept. And so when they're going into it for the first time, what's some advice or best practices for integrating

these people into the business culture and then into the operations? What does that integration process actually look like? Yes. What I've learned is that you cannot just provide a virtual assistant and say, tough luck. See you later. Good luck. And let's just see how it goes. Right. You have to have a very thorough onboarding process, kind of like with your caregivers. I feel like caregivers would be more successful and have longer retention if they feel supported up front during the orientation process. So we have learned to have a very streamlined onboarding process. And what that looks like is even before the start date, we're going to send our clients a request for initial information. And what that does is that allows us to gather some really essential information that would help our VAs prepare. So what that looks like is we would ask them for what territory do you cover?

What zip codes do you cover? Can you send us your job description for home care? Would you send us your job descriptions? Can you send us a directory of the people that work there? Are there any SOPs that are already in place that we can review. Your VA is also doing a competitor analysis, which is really great because we tell them to say, hey, this company is located in, let's say, Austin, Texas. Look at three other agencies within this area and do a deep dive on what makes this company better or what are some areas that they can improve on.

And so what that does is it allows us to make some suggestions and be ready for the onboarding process. But then you don't just get a virtual assistant from us. You also get what we call a success manager. And that success manager is going to facilitate the entire onboarding week. So onboarding for us is about five days, five consecutive days. And your success manager is going to facilitate that. So a lot of times people, like you mentioned, Miriam, they have no experience using virtual assistants. They don't know where to start. They don't know where to go. And so we

have a checklist and a path to success that's going to be, again, facilitated by your success manager. The first day can look something like, hey, let's do some introductions. Let's set some expectations. Let's talk about which systems you use. And let's make sure that we have all those logins day one. Also, what we do day one is I recorded a video that is shown to my new clients. And what it talks about is the importance of having a tight feedback loop. That might sound weird, but to us, feedback is so important. And I train my VAs not to take it personally. They are trained to use that feedback to improve their process. And it trains my clients to feel okay. It empowers them to want to do that because giving feedback isn't a natural characteristic or ability that most people like to do. It's actually a little bit uncomfortable

for people to say, hey, if you could change your recruiting script to say this, I think that would be better. So we want to make space and encourage that feedback to happen often and early on throughout the process. We also schedule a three-week calibration meeting. And during that calibration meeting, we show our clients the finalized SOPs that we've created. We get their approval. And once it's approved, we don't mess with it. We don't skip steps. We don't cut corners. If you say your recruiting process is 15 steps long, then we will do 15 steps long. And during that calibration meeting, it also allows us to get

feedback from our clients, whether it's good or bad. I think it's important to give our VAs positive feedback as well, letting them know that, hey, you're doing great. You're doing awesome. I love the way you're proactive about X, Y, and Z because our VAs, they want to do good. They want to please our clients and they just don't know what they don't know. And that goes into negative feedback or constructive criticism. Again, we want to use that for the iteration process. We want to streamline your processes as soon as we can. And if we can do this, if the client is dedicated to onboarding their VA, really giving them the time and the support that they need, we can typically see a virtual assistant being independent within that third or fourth week. And I do want to mention the onboarding week, we identified that no one

can just give us eight hours a day for five straight days, right? You still have daily ops that you have to do. So our onboarding, we request two hours every single day, Monday through Friday of your time, but your VA is available to do anything you assign them in their eight-hour shift, like training on how to use WellSky, access care, pre-intent, things that are very specific to your company. Yeah, that was great. That was really great. From what I'm hearing, the hiring, onboarding success of a virtual assistant looks, mirrors, you could say, the process of stood up and independent in three or four weeks, which I think is really reasonable. You know, everyone here can think of how long it's taken their hires to get onboarded and up to speed. It could take weeks. It can take months. It really just depends on the individual. But oftentimes, if you bring in someone that doesn't know home care, there's just a lot of kind of knowledge and information upfront that they need to get familiar with. But the nice thing is you can typically skip a lot of that basic information and really get into, like you said, the processes, the operations, the technology, and kind of the culture of that individual business. And so things can really start coming

together very quickly, which is great. You have worked with a lot of home care businesses, franchises, corporate franchises, franchisees, independent, small, medium, large. What are some of the comments that you've heard from owners that have started using virtual assistants? I'm sure a lot of them, again, don't know what they don't know upfront and may have a lot of reservations or be uneasy. But then they start using these VAs. What are some of the comments that have maybe surprised you from owners that you've worked with? So I think a lot of times business owners make decisions based out of fear and the unknown. And so sometimes the questions or comments that I get are, well, how will I know what they're doing if they're across the world? I can barely manage my

own team. Or again, what you mentioned before, what about the language barrier? Or another one is what time zone are they working in? If they're in the Philippines, are they working during mountain standard time, Pacific standard time, or Eastern standard time? A lot of those questions can be answered during the demos that I do for the owners and their team, which puts them at ease. So they do work during whatever time zone that you're in, whatever time you need them, Monday through Friday, nine to five, eight to four, Saturdays, we could even change their schedules to be Thursday to Monday. So there's a lot of flexibility with that. Another thing is we send very, very detailed end of day reports and end of week reports. So that end of day report is a great way for us to build transparency and trust early on, because you can see from the moment that they clock in

to the time that they clock out every single thing that they've done in great detail. So if they were a scheduler, you can see all the calls they received, what time they reached out, what time they resolved it, or how did they resolve it. If they were a recruiter, you can see how many resumes they screened, how many interviews they've conducted, what were the results of those interviews, reference checks, how many resumes they screened, how many interviews they've conducted, what were the results of those interviews, reference checks, how many background checks they've done. And so for us, it's really important that our clients see the value, not just see the price.

Again, another thing is their English. There really isn't a language barrier. There might be a slight accent, but I guess you can't have everything in one person. But it is a very slight accent. And so a lot of the comments that I get from some of our new owners is that they're pleasantly surprised about how happy they are so soon. So they love the onboarding process. They love that they just kind of have to sit back and we'll take them through this ride. They love how much knowledge the VAs have and they love how hard our VAs are working. I think there's a bit of a difference between the working culture in the Philippines.

They want to work. They want to work hard and they're very eager to please. And I think sometimes that mindset can be hard to find nowadays where people get stuck in their ways and they're not coachable. They're not open to feedback, but that is the type of person that I bring to the table. Easily trainable, open to feedback and eager to please. Yeah. Really great, great information and great points. I think what you said that resonated with me is people are pleasantly surprised. Again, there's a lot of fear. There's a lot of unknown. Again, there's a lot of fear.

There's a lot of unknown. It's something that a lot of owners, business owners have never done before. And so they're stepping out of their comfort zone to bring in a virtual assistant. But I too have heard that a lot of people are pleasantly surprised. And again, it's what you put into it, you get out of it. If you vet, hire, onboard, are really diligent about setting this person up for success, they can be successful. And like you said, you know, the working culture in the Philippines, the working culture in other countries, these people want to work and want to work hard and

want to be recognized and rewarded for this, their success. And so like you talked about before, feedback loops, these, these people really are a part of your team. And so treating them with the respect and understanding and recognition that they deserve can really create a great opportunity for your business and for your success. We're almost out of our time here. You've answered this partially, but I just want to ask, is there any other advice you would share with owners that are considering this? They're going into it with the fear, with the trepidation. Any other advice for people considering virtual assistants that you haven't mentioned already? Definitely do your due diligence.

There are a lot of virtual assistant companies out there. Just the same way there's a lot of home care agencies are out there, but not every home care agency is the same. So I think it's important to ask really good questions when you're interviewing virtual assistant firms. Ask them about the onboarding process, the recruiting and training process, what are their security measures that they take, and what is going to happen if there's questions or concerns or things might happen? What is their process to resolve those issues? Also, this is kind of an interesting thing that I've been seeing. Owners need to also prepare their in-house team. Sometimes, if owners spring it on their in-house team and not frame it as we're here to support you. The in-house team can sometimes

perceive us as a threat. I'm going to take your job versus support. Now you can take vacations with your family and you don't have to work on call weekends. And so I think it's important for the clients and the owners to really prepare their in-house team for a collaboration. We want them to be cautious of what we call gatekeeping, right? Where their in-house team is putting a lot more obstacles than trying to remove them. So that way we can integrate into their team sooner than later. Yeah, really, really good point. You know, preparing the in-house team for something that they may not have experience with either.

And like you said, they may initially see it as a threat, but then hopefully they can quickly come to understand that these people could be hired to do the things that they don't want to do, or they don't like to do and, and free up their time to be able to take vacation, like you said, or do things that they can't otherwise do. I think that's, I think that's a really good point because that that's also common in the industry right now is for an office team to, you know, grow to a certain size. And for some reason, they may not be able to find or hire other right fit employees. And so maybe you have a team of four, a team of five, and then you start to supplement with virtual assistants,

bring them in, like you said earlier, they could be a sales assistant. You could have someone out in the field, boots on the ground, but then you can have a VA that actually does the intake and does kind of that sales support role. And so they can work really well together, having the in-house team and the virtual assistants to help assist or supplement the work that's already being done by the office. So a lot of really good points today, Regina.

I want to just give you a couple of minutes here at the end. I know we've kind of sprinkled in a little bit about your services today, but I want to just give you a couple minutes here at the end. I know we've kind of sprinkled in a little bit about your services today, but I want to give you just a couple of minutes as people are listening to this. They may have piqued interest in engaging with you and hearing more about your services. Who are the businesses that you're working with primarily? What's kind of the right fit business agency for your services or the people that you're having the most success with? I believe that owners that are new to the industry are really going to see the value in what we do because we are so process oriented. Sometimes people get into home care because

my grandma needed a caregiver and I just couldn't find any company to do it. So I started my own company. But typically those people don't necessarily have the experience or a business background. And so when our virtual assistants can come in and say, hey, we have SOPs created already for recruitment. We know what the red flags are and the green flags. By the way, this is how you really use Indeed to its fullest potential or scheduling, giving them best practices, giving them different ideas and tools and systems that they can use is really where we see a lot of appreciation for what we do. And a lot of times those owners, they might be a one-man show trying to do everything. But again, like what you were mentioning, Miriam, if we can just do all this

admin tasks, a lot of the things that they don't want to do, they don't like doing, they don't have time to do, then they can really focus on what matters to them, which is servicing their clients, but also growing their revenue, building their business, getting more contracts with ALFs and ILFs. But we also see a lot of clients that are medium, people that have experienced really exponential growth, and they want to continue growing, but that as you grow, your administrative burden also grows. And so delegating, that's the key word is delegating to the right person, and we provide the right people. Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. The new owners, operators that are just overwhelmed and need the support and the infrastructure, like you said,

you will provide a lot of the infrastructure that they'll need and can help guide them and document that and create that with them. And then also, I think that the second audience that you mentioned, people that are growing really quickly and they want to continue to accelerate. But like you said, the administrative burden, the administrative cost gets pretty out of hand pretty quickly. And so how to scale and how to grow a lot more efficiently and a lot more cost effectively. I think that's great. What is the best way for people to get in contact with you and or learn more about your services? Yeah, you guys can always go to www.ab-solutions.org. You can always call me, text me. You can use my Calendly app to book a demo with me directly. And I did want to mention that we are always, always actively

hiring and training new virtual assistants. So I can get you set up with your next rock star next week or in two weeks. Awesome. Awesome. Always recruiting just like this industry. We know, we know a thing or two about that. We'll make sure to include your website in the show notes. So if people want to learn more about their services or contact Regina directly, then we'll include those links and information in the show notes so people can get them. Regina, this has been so informative. Thank you so much. Again, I think there's a lot of unknowns about VAs.

But again, I personally also wanted to bring more awareness to this conversation because I see and hear a lot about virtual assistants popping up in the industry. And so again, want to bring awareness to owners and operators and know that there are alternatives to finding and hiring people for your office team. And I think virtual assistants will continue to be on the rise into the future. You know, I think there's just a lot of opportunities for people to consider as they think about growing their team and growing their operations. So thank you for being here. And I look forward to seeing you around the industry more. I know you have been at conferences or headed to conferences. I'll look forward to rubbing shoulders with you here in the coming

months. Thank you, Miriam, again for this opportunity. And I look forward to meeting you soon. We're going to meet at a next conference next week. So thank you again. Awesome. Well, thanks, everyone, for being here. It's been another great episode of Home Care U. Thank you for listening. And we'll look forward to seeing everybody back again next week. Take care. That's a wrap. This podcast was made by the team at CareSwitch, the first AI-powered management software for home care agencies. If you want to automate away the menial of your day-to-day with AI so that you and your team can focus on giving great care,

check us out at careswitch.com.