Episode 95: Delegating the MORBID parts of your business with Beejel Parmar – Transcript
Rennie Gabriel 00:10
Hi, folks, welcome to Episode 95 of the Wealth On Any Income Podcast. This is where we talk about money tips, techniques, attitudes, information, and provide inspiration around your business and money. I'm your host, Rennie Gabriel. In past episodes, we spoke about how to understand the numbers from your business, how to measure the level of pleasure based on where you spend your money, how to track your money in 5 - 10 seconds, what determines how close you are to Complete Financial Choice®, and how to run your business without being in your business, and last week, we had venture investor Steve Hoffman speaking about what it takes to fund a new business venture, and the idea is not the important starting point. Today we have as our guest, Beejel Parmar, and Beejel was an aerospace engineer by education. And since 2009, has been advising entrepreneurs on the subjects of productivity and outsourcing to virtual assistants. He has coached, consulted, trained thousands of entrepreneurs all over the world, on the topics of outsourcing, delegation, and productivity. Beejel, welcome to the Wealth On Any Income Podcast.
Beejel Parmar 01:31
Thank you so much for having me.
Rennie Gabriel 01:33
Well, let's get right to it with some questions. Got an idea of what you do, but be more specific, and also, why are you doing this?
Beejel Parmar 01:43
Yeah, so very simply put, I am and have been at this point, 12 years in the outsourcing industry, helping primarily working with solopreneurs, professionals, work with micro-teams - a micro-team can be anywhere from one to five people. We have some larger clients too. Predominantly 90% of my clients are in that category. And really, what we're trying to help them do is delegate the busy stuff. And I say busy stuff, I call it really the morbid parts of the business. The MORBID is an acronym that stands for the Mundane, the Overwhelming, the Repetitive, the Boring, the I don't want to do that stuff, and the Dislike stuff.
Rennie Gabriel 02:21
I love acronyms, and yours ties into someone who's morbidly obese.
Beejel Parmar 02:28
And the other part is the parts of the business, the processes, activities, responsibilities, tasks, and the software we entrepreneurs tend to spend a lot of money on, but often don't use effectively. So we look for ways of you know, finding or helping entrepreneurs find these areas of their business, that really they should be delegating out. And if we can help, you know, we have a team of virtual assistants in the Philippines that take on a lot of this stuff, we don't do everything, but we do a lot of the admin level, social media, LinkedIn, you know, billing, invoicing, you know, chat support, customer support type of stuff that, you know, we entrepreneurs really shouldn't be spending our precious time on.
Rennie Gabriel 03:08
No, absolutely right. We have no business, doing work we could farm out for, you know, $10 an hour. Now, I try and lead by example, from the standpoint that I donate 100% of the profits from the work I do to charity. Tell me what cause or charity that's important to you that you support?
Beejel Parmar 03:28
Great question. Now we have been supporting, in the year 2010, we had to leave the US. We got a call from our immigration attorney, he said, 'Hey, you have two choices, either stay in, stay in the US illegally, or leave until we refile your immigration paperwork'. Well, we don't become illegal, so we left. That took us to India, and we ended up spending five years traveling in around India and Asia. And during that time, we came across a lot of orphanages and actually ended up sponsoring a couple of, or they're actually not orphans, but low-income children with education. So, children has a, you know, a big part of our life, you know, and doing what we can to educate them. But a lot of our time, effort, and energy is going to kind of a side project, which is teaching children financial literacy. And it's going to kind of come back to, you know, your topic, you know, and what your mission on, which is, putting children aside for a second, a lot of adults, and I'm going to put my hand up as well in this, we didn't really get a good foundation of financial education. And you know, many entrepreneurs struggle with this topic of money. So one of our missions is to financially... is to help children become financially literate in the hopes that they don't go on the same journey of, you know, making money, losing money, struggling in the latter part of the life where they really should be just, you know, enjoying the fruits of their labor.
Rennie Gabriel 04:50
And while you say a lot of people didn't get this education, we're talking 9 out of 10 people didn't get this kind of education. And those are the statistics for the United States. You know, I don't know about the rest of the world, but it's probably just as bad or it could even be worse. And I know, because I've interviewed enough people, I've trained, I'm trained as a Certified Financial Planner. It wasn't in my coursework. The foundations of handling money are not in the coursework of Certified Financial Planners, or even Certified Public Accountants. It's just, it's abysmal. So anyway, let's get to something bad, like, what was your biggest failure, whether it was personal or business?
Beejel Parmar 05:39
You said big, as you know, a few come to mind, but I'm going to put the one in perspective. As you know, I started a business in 2000, about 2005, I think it was, 2004, 2005. It was a Wellness Center idea and to using technology and to kind of create like a gym, but really centered around wellness and human development. And I got the idea from visiting when I was in Japan. And at the end of the day, you go to these kind of wellness centers. And they're all like spas and hot tubs and massages and stuff. Well, that's a lot of time. But what if we create a 15, 20 minute experience where you can just end the day with this kind of recharge for the body and mind using technology to keep the cost down, and so we can do it on a daily basis, not just kind of, you know, once a month treat to ourselves. So I spent a lot of money setting all that up. We had some neurofeedback devices back then, and again, this is about 2005, 2006, state of the art, cutting edge. And we got the permission too, for the visa in the US. But we had to go back to the UK to get the actual visa. So we go back to the UK, December, I think it's 2006, to get the business visa. Presented all our paperwork to the immigration officer and he goes, Well, you know, there's no precedent for this kind of business, you know, we don't have really a framework to see how this is going to go. And long story short, they denied the visa.
Rennie Gabriel 06:58
Oh, geez.
Beejel Parmar 06:59
So that, so we basically, and then we have to resell all the technology for 10 cents on the dollar. So that was a huge, a huge hit. But also kind of just like, put a kind of knife in the you know, you dream it, and you create it, and you're manifesting. It's just like I can't believe this whole next part of life, which is, that's all bullshit. And I just got to this believing all the stuff that I can learnt through the realms of personal development. It just kind of, kind of went through a very bitter period of life where we that, we thought we did all the right things. You know, we invested money, we applied all the law of attraction stuff. But when it came, when I look back at it, Rennie, is I didn't know some of the basic principles of business, right? I mean, we fall into business. We fall into entrepreneurship. We don't go to school first and graduate and are now certified to start a business.
Rennie Gabriel 07:29
Right.
Beejel Parmar 07:41
We just, we think we can learn it along the way, and hope that we'll make the right moves. And some people do. But I think again that it shows that a lot of us will take three or four attempts before we start to get it right, before we learn the principles of money, marketing, sales, you know, team building. So yeah, that was an expensive, challenging time. But out of it came a lot of valuable lessons.
Rennie Gabriel 08:16
And perfect, that lines up with the next question, which is, what was your biggest insight from that? And did you use that to create the current success that you have?
Beejel Parmar 08:27
Yeah, that we don't have to know everything. And in fact, attempting to know everything can be one of the biggest detriments. Because to try and learn any subject in business at any level of depth, or you know, trying to learn multiple subjects, at any level of depth is getting more and more challenging. Every time a new platform comes out, to really effectively use the platform, you got to go deep. And it's really not possible to go deep in every single area of business. So as your business matures, focusing your time on the best use of your time is the right, the better approach in my opinion. Everything's about an opinion and about experience. No, but if you think you can be a Facebook marketer one day, and a LinkedIn marketer the next day, and a YouTube expert the next day, and a sales expert the next day, and a network marketer the next day, and manage your finances, manage your bookkeeping - good luck.
Rennie Gabriel 09:15
Yeah. You know, I mean, that really sounds like the common mistakes that I would assume most of your prospects make. Is that right?
Beejel Parmar 09:22
Yeah, it's just a ton of work. First of all, most people try and run two or three businesses, if not more, simultaneously, and then within that business, that they're wearing almost every single hat, you know. So, and then people complain about overwhelm and anxiety and stress like, 'Well, hey, you know, go figure. We're kind of creating this for ourselves.'
Rennie Gabriel 09:44
Yeah, yeah. Well, okay. So here's something that always works well, and that is, do you have an example of a client who started with this overwhelm and trying to do it all, took your advice and what the result would be? I'm asking for a case study.
Beejel Parmar 09:59
Absolutely. So I won't use her real name, but she helps kids obtain sponsorship for colleges, right? So, but along with that, there's a few other things that she was doing. So we got her down to just focusing on that. And of that just one or two ways to market that or reach her prospects. The moment the focus changed, the results started coming in, and we've seen that happen time and time again. I'm not saying that the concept of multiple streams of income is incorrect. But what normally happens is we build multiple streams of poverty simultaneously.
Rennie Gabriel 10:36
Yeah.
Beejel Parmar 10:36
So it's get one thing going, get one thing running. Delegate as much of it out as possible over time, but get it to a place where it's making money. Now delegate the key, the key responsibilities. Get it to a place that you can now go from being in that business to managing. Now add in the next, you know, income streams. I call it multiple income stacking, stack income on top of each other versus attempting to, you know, if this is not making, this income stream is not making that much money or no cash flow, that's not making cash flow, that's not making . . . But you're attempting to move all of these along at the same time. That's where people struggle, get overwhelmed, and kind of, you know, fall out of love with their businesses.
Rennie Gabriel 11:18
Yeah, so what was the result of her deciding to focus on one area at a time?
Beejel Parmar 11:24
Just more consistent cash flow, and more and higher, being able to charge higher.
Rennie Gabriel 11:29
Can you talk about real numbers, you didn't use her name?
Beejel Parmar 11:32
She was struggling to get even one or two clients a month. But she's had some $10,000 months since we've worked with her.
Rennie Gabriel 11:39
Okay. All right. That's, yeah, that's something someone can hang their hat on.
Beejel Parmar 11:44
Yeah.
Rennie Gabriel 11:45
Well, let me ask this. Is there some resource that you can provide people that would be of value that they don't have to pay for?
Beejel Parmar 11:53
Yeah, absolutely. If on our website beeepicoutsourcing. So B, double E, epic, E P I C outsourcing.com. There's a guide that is called Outsourcing ROI. So our objective is to help entrepreneurs that when they start to delegate, to create that return on investment, because in a lot of times, it may start to delegate if you don't do it the right way, or we delegate the wrong stuff, the hiring a team member, doesn't matter where they sit, can become a liability, because it's money going out. So one of two things has to happen. Either by giving, delegating work out, we are getting that time back. So the ROI is time, or they're helping us generate leads or making more money. So they in that case, the return is money. So we got to think about prioritization. In an ideal world, would delegate everything, Rennie, you know, whatever we can delegate and we just do whatever we love to do in our business. But that's not the reality - reality is that we are still, a lot, most people I work with, are still very much involved in their business. So you got to be very strategic and prioritize what to delegate out to get that, the best ROI possible for this moment in time. There's just one more thing I want to add in with delegation, it's the most, you know, I have, people often ask me, you know, what's the number one thing we can delegate tomorrow?
Rennie Gabriel 13:11
You know what, I was going to ask you, what's the one question I should have asked you, and give me that answer? So perfect. Go for it.
Beejel Parmar 13:19
And it's actually going to be quite an unusual response, which is, how are we as entrepreneurs using our time? It's one thing to be delegating tasks out, but when we look at our calendar, is it reflective of our, you know, daily goals? Thus reflective of our weekly goals. Thus reflective of our monthly goals. Thus reflective of our annual goals. And thus reflective of our vision. A lot of times, you know, I can tell a lot from looking at someone's calendar, where their time, effort and energy is going, and thus extrapolate to what the result they're going to create. So one of the ways I'm using our VAs, and my VAs work with their clients, in addition to just doing tasks is helping the client make sure that they get the right tasks onto the calendar. Because a lot of us will do planning and strategizing, but the tasks, the right tasks, never make it onto the calendar. And thus, you know, we are more reactive to what shows up for the day, versus proactive and versus following a plan. And everybody talks about the value of having a plan. And yet, we don't tend to create plans. And if you do, the aspects of the plans don't end up on our calendar. And so using the calendar, as a way of really seeing what we are committing our time to is where a virtual assistant can help a lot of people listening.
Rennie Gabriel 14:01
That makes so much sense. It's, the difference between just being busy and actually accomplishing the important things.
Beejel Parmar 14:50
Absolutely.
Rennie Gabriel 14:51
Well, Beejel, thank you so much for being on our show.
Beejel Parmar 14:56
Thank you for having me. And I look forward to many more discussions on both these topics.
Rennie Gabriel 15:01
Beautiful. And to my listeners, thank you for tuning in. Next week we'll have Sheila Whiteman talking about what may sound like something off-topic, it'll be about how bladder leakage can ruin your profession, or your business, and also how to fix it. You can listen to the Wealth On Any Income Podcast on your favorite platform. And please rate, review and subscribe. And if you'd like to know how books, movies, and Society programs you to be poor, and what the cure is, then log on to wealthonanyincome.com/TEDx. You'll hear my TED Talk and can request a free 27-page Roadmap to Complete Financial Choice®, and receive a weekly email with tips, techniques, or inspiration around your business or money. And if you'd like to see how you can increase your wealth, and donate to the causes that touch your heart, please check out our affordable program, Wealth with Purpose, on the wealthonanyincome.com website. Until next week, be prosperous. Bye bye for now.
