Andy Hill is the founder of Marriage Kids and Money, a content platform focused on helping families build wealth and happiness since 2016.
Through their 5-star rated podcast, award-winning blog, and informational YouTube channel, Marriage Kids and Money offers their audience the wisdom they need to give their families a better tomorrow through financial freedom and family development.
Andy’s story is similar to that of so many busy leaders. One day he noticed that whether or not he could handle the administrative tasks he was shouldering, he shouldn’t be spending his valuable time on them.
As a solopreneur, Andy knew his time was valuable, and he had to prioritize it. Still, he was hesitant about the time commitment of hiring and onboarding the right support.
“I've worked with virtual assistants in the past, and some of the pain points of hiring virtual assistants are the training aspects as well as the paperwork, and if it doesn't work out, then I have to start all over again and find somebody else.
Those tensions led him to BELAY.
“BELAY had this system all set up where there's a lot of pre-vetting beforehand and a lot of support for the business owner as well. I kind of need to learn how to be a better business owner myself, and BELAY supported me with a lot of that. The general onboarding process has been very thorough and supportive and has helped me – as well as the [BELAY] Virtual Assistant that I work with – to be successful.”
And that Virtual Assistant was Nievecita Maraj.
Nievecita was able to relieve Andy of the day-to-day tasks that were pulling his attention away from his business so that he could get back to the higher-level work.
“Niev is fantastic. She helps to manage my email inbox and keeps me out of there, which is great because there's a lot of wasted time there. Sometimes I would sit in front of my email in the past… and then that dictates my day as opposed to what I really need to do to dictate my day. So she helps me to do that now.
“She also helps me with just the general production of the content we create on Marriage Kids and Money. So that's YouTube videos, that's podcasts, that's blog posts, and that is short-form videos. All those come together for the betterment of the families that are watching the videos, as well as the clients we're working with.
“It helped that she had a great background with that area and media, and she jumped right into it, and as she tells me every once in a while, she's really enjoying herself as well, which is great.”
Andy didn’t just hand over this laundry list to Nievecita on day one, though — he grew as a delegator and leader through the process of working with BELAY. With time, he learned the most effective and efficient way to delegate with his Virtual Assistant.
“I started off on some of the areas where I was spending a lot of my time, and I knew that with good direction and almost bullet-pointed details on how to get it done, recording myself doing it, that I could easily transfer that over, and that's what happened, and it sort of was a multi-step process.
“It wasn't like, ‘Hey, I'm going to dump everything on you right now.’ It was, ‘Hey, this month, let's work on this together. Next month, let's work on that.’ And then nine months down the road, I'm looking at myself and thinking, ‘Wow. I'm really out of the weeds with that production process that I was working on, and I'm really spending a lot more time in the higher value, higher hourly rate, higher growth revenue opportunities for my business.’”
Andy and Nievecita did run into one of the common obstacles of delegation: The myth that you could do it better yourself. Because Andy knows his time is better spent leading his company, though, he realized he needed to shift his mindset.
“What I've done to make that process easier is instead of thinking of it as like, ‘Hey, they need to do it 100% the way I would do it,’ I need to think of it like — and I've tried to do this over the past couple of years — ‘Could they get me 70% the way there, 80% of the way there?’ Because that will save me so much time.
“Will it be perfect and done the exact way I want to do it? No. But man, will it save me a few hours each week? That's what I need to change my mindset to, and I have done that, I believe, over the past few months, and that's really accelerated things again and opened up some free time for growing the business.”
That understanding is critical in the process of delegation, and it often leads to little surprises, as it did for Andy:
“Lo and behold, some of the things that my Virtual Assistant is able to do, she does better than I would've done anyway, so it's been very relieving.”
The results in Andy’s personal and professional life were clear within months:
“I would say I noticed an ROI within the first six months as things started to transition away from me spending most of my time on tasks to more of my time on income-producing, revenue-generating projects.
The flexibility and scalability of BELAY’s packages also provided Andy with more opportunities to be present with his family.
“One advantage of working with BELAY is the flexibility to increase or decrease hours as your business flexes, which is super helpful because there are some months — as I'm sort of a seasonal business — where I need a lot more help during a certain period of time, and then around the holidays I like to slow things down a little bit so that I can focus a little bit more time on my family, and they are allowing that ability to flex down as well, so that flexibility is really, really key for me.”
In addition to the time Nievecita offered Andy, he is excited about the leadership development available from BELAY.
“Outside of the account management support, there's a lot of training that goes into it just being a better business owner, and I've learned a lot about being a good business owner from BELAY, so I continue to take advantage of their free resources that they have out there, as well as almost all the coaching calls and mastermind calls that they provide as well, and I've really learned a lot.”
Most importantly, Andy would say the trust that he can put in Nievecita is the biggest win from this partnership:
“I would say the best win for me is having somebody that I truly rely on, and I have slowly grown to trust a lot over the past year or so, and everywhere from making sure our important content kits out there to communicating with clients to booking my kids' well visits at their doctor, so lots of trust comes with that.”