TGP #50 Get Staffed Up With Brett Trembly

January 29, 2022

You don’t have to do everything in your business. The more tasks you have, the less you can focus on the things that matter. Stop drifting, start delegating, and get staffed up. Take advantage of the virtual tools in this day and age and start growing your business through virtual staffing. Join your host Aaron Civitarese and his guest Brett Trembly, lawyer and owner of Trembly Law Firm, as they talk about business growth and delegation. Managing a business in this pandemic can be difficult. As the Delegation Expert of Get Staffed Up, Brett shares tools to grow your business by hiring virtual assistants and delegating. Find out how you can delegate everything so that you can focus on what you can do best. Get staffed up today!

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Get Staffed Up With Brett Trembly

Virtual Staffing For Lawyers And Small Business Owners

I realize this has been a long time coming so thank you for your patience! This is episode 50. Get Staffed Up with Brett Trembly.

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I’m here with my guest, Brett Trembly, Cofounder of Get Staffed Up, something that everybody needs and something that not everybody understands. Myself included when I was new to the journey. Brett, welcome to the show. It’s a pleasure to have you here.

Aaron, it’s a pleasure to be on with you. Thank you so much for having me.

We were getting to know each other before, talking about the necessity of people understanding the value of outsourcing and all these things. I’m pumped to pull some knowledge out of that noggin of yours. This is something that’s necessary for people to understand, but before we get into the business model and all that stuff, tell us a bit about you. Who are you?

By education, I am a lawyer in Miami, Florida. We have 10-attorney, 26-employee law firm. We hit the Inc. 5000. We represent business owners, employers, and franchises. We do litigation, but for the most part, we’re trying to keep people out of the courtroom. I have a business background. I tried making my own money when I was a kid in first grade.

One of my mom’s favorite stories, she was like, “Where did you get the Coke?” It was me and my older brother. I was the younger one. My older brother was like, “Brett bought it for us.” She’s like, “How the hell did he do that?” I was stealing the pens from my dad’s jewelry store and selling them to my classmates to make money.

That story was always okay for me, but now that I have kids, it makes more sense, because I couldn’t imagine my own kids doing that. To me, that always made sense. You try to make money. Being an entrepreneur, I happened to run a law firm for a while. I still am very actively running that law firm. Late 2017, my friend found out about offshore staffing and had an idea. We would have breakfast once a month. It helped us get on the same page over the years.

We’re not planning to do business together, but that’s the way it developed. We started Get Staffed Up and we do offshore staffing for business owners and we focus on law firms because we’re both lawyers. That’s what our niche of marketing does. We got some infrastructure in place for the first six months. July 2018, we started trying to make sales and run the business. We’re blowing up in a good way. This business is growing like wildfire. That’s me.

I can understand why it would be wildfire, especially we’re doing this show during the COVID pandemic stuff. If people weren’t working virtually before, they weren’t zooming and having VAs and stuff, they sure as hell do now. You’re in the thick of it now. Tell us a little bit about why do people even need these types of assistance? What’s the difference between a brick and mortar law firm or a business conventional versus having someone on the other side of a computer? Why is that something that someone would want to do?

I want to point out that it would be easy for me to kick back and be like, “I got this great business. because I knew this COVID thing was going to happen and we’re ahead of the curve.” Before COVID, we were having to convince people what I’m about to explain to you. Whereas now people get it like, “I have to work virtually, remotely or my people want to work that way.” It makes a lot more sense now.

Back in the day, when you were launching and when you had this idea with your buddy over breakfast and stuff, you were discussing the idea of it, you’re putting it out there to your network and your friends and your colleagues, what was going on in your mind or what was going on internally when other people were not seeing your vision?

You can be comfortable in the spot you’re in right now, but don’t lie to yourself about where you really want to be.

My story is I started my law firm in 2011. Years later, I discovered the reason I didn’t grow early on is I was afraid of failure. Why would you be afraid of failure? I was afraid of the criticism that I thought I would receive if I failed. This is my opinion, study, and research is starting a business is cool. You make the leap, but growing a business is much harder because putting yourself out there to start it, you can be faster than the slowest gazelle and not go out of business, and people are still high-fiving you. Especially in the law arena, you see a lot of 60-year-old guys with one paralegal, and they’ve been that way, the two of them for 40 years.

In my experience of 40 years running a law firm but why am I listening to your 40 years when clearly you haven’t figured it out in 40 years? You’ve done nothing to grow your business. You just have a job. Your job owns you instead working for someone else. I don’t mean that as if I’m better now or know things that other people don’t because I was there. I was so afraid to hire people that I did everything for the first few years. I answered on my phones, licked my own stamps, sent my own faxes, took my messages, and I could never figure out why I wasn’t growing and why people weren’t throwing business at me.

In our own heads, a lot of times, we think what we have is the greatest thing since sliced bread. I finally made my first hire in-house. It was like 30 hours a week. It was a law student who decided to work for me, which means I spent twice as much time on my legal work and I doubled my revenue. At least at that point, I was like, “This works. It’s math. Let’s not be so afraid like a lot of other people.” I went for it and I started hiring like crazy.

Fast forward to 2018, I was okay with it. I was waiting for the light bulb moment. We were talking about what to name the company before it was Get Staffed Up. It was like MakesTooMuchSense.com or NoBrainer.com because when you start to think about it and you’re like, “Instead of having this revolving door of people domestically who don’t want to make $10 an hour, nor should they, because they can’t live off that, I can hire someone off shore who’s friendly, smart, and happens to be born in a different country. Why does that make them any less intelligent than us? The only barrier is language sometimes, but let’s find those people that speak good English.”

When the light bulb goes off, it’s like, “Why wouldn’t I do this? Let me get 3 or 4.” We were having to explain this to a lot of people. There was skepticism, especially from the older crowd, but then it starts growing and then you get a little bit of market acceptance. Now, it’s so easy for us. It’s basically, “How fast can we grow this company?”

There is fear when there is uncertainty. You being able to go out and hire your first in-house legal aid secretary, you broke down that fear and you smashed through and you said, “I’m going to do it,” then you saw the numbers worked. You’re like, “Wait a minute,” then you went for it hard. Do you feel that parallels in life and in other ways? Maybe in health, relationships, or people going after their dreams.

A lot of the people reading this or in growth mindset, personal development, they’re always striving to be the best version of themselves, but in doing so, you come across self-sabotage patterns and loops and things. Did you find yourself in any of these types of loops in the early days of scaling your team and growing your business?

Yes. There are terror barriers that people get to. I’m in an organization where people are taking their businesses, the goal is to go from wherever you are, but 80% of the people are about like $200,000 to $300,000 or $400,000 in revenue and they want to get to $1 million. A lot of people hit that million-dollar mark and they act as if they have it all figured out and they’ve made it, but they stagnate, depending on how big you want to be. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with getting to a level that you’re living a comfortable life and you don’t need to push yourself there. What I have a problem with is most people lie to themselves about where they want to be.

When I had a $300,000 law firm as its total annual revenues, a small operation, I was asked, what I want to do and what I want to be, and what my goals are. My goals were small because I couldn’t perceive myself being that big anyway. I thought, “If I had a million-dollar law firm, where’s my helicopter going to land?” Can you imagine how incredible life is going to be? It’s so immature to think that way, because this is revenue in, it doesn’t mean you’re making all that money and you’re taking it home.

Early on, they don’t take risks because they’re afraid of the criticism of failure. I didn’t want to hire, because I couldn’t pay that person. I was waiting to have this arbitrary amount of money in the bank before I could hire that person, which is silly because that person will make you more money. I was afraid that if I couldn’t pay them that the whole world will be like, “Look at Brett, he had to fire someone. What a loser.” People are too busy to focus on you.

How egocentric is that I thought the whole world was going to sit around and think about me? It doesn’t work that way. People reading this have probably taken some risks, but then like, “I made it. I took my risks. I’m okay.” A lot of people fail to continue to push the envelope and take more risks. I’m not saying that you can’t live life doing that and getting to a comfortable spot. People lie to themselves and they’ll take some calculated risks, but then they’ll stop at some point. That’s where you mentioned the self-sabotage.

GPA 50 Brett Trembly | Getting Staffed Up — Getting Staffed Up: Starting a business is a leap, but growing it is much harder—some people just like being faster than the slowest gazelle out there and not going out of business. Don’t let your job own you.

The old saying, “If you’re not growing, you’re dying.” They say in business, “If you’re a horizontal line, it’s eventually going to go down. Gravity is going to pull that thing down.” It’s the same thing in life. Let’s talk a little bit about your personal development and stuff. Do you have any routines or books or personal development things that you partake in that have helped you in your journey to become the man and the business owner that you are?

Have you ever read The Miracle Morning?

No, I read The 5AM Club. Is it similar?

I haven’t read The 5AM Club. I’ve learned that there are common principles. Maybe it’s not all that unique, but a guy named Hal Elrod wrote the book and there’s a big community. It’s essentially doing six things in the morning before 8:00 AM. Some people get up at 5:00 AM, 5:30 AM, or 6:00 AM, but if you can do these six things before you even get your day started, you’re going to conquer your day and not just put out fires and be reactive to your days. You can switch up the amount of time. I know other people have different routines. They do journaling and one other thing, but it’s meditation, affirmations, your vision board, exercise, reading, and scribing.

I was introduced to this by a good friend at a presentation back in 2016. It helped me because the law firm was growing at that point. It helped me gain control of not feeling so overwhelmed and stressed with the growth because I had young kids. I have three kids now. There is a lot that goes on and you can’t do everything. I’m changing my life around. I’ve always been a night owl.

I’m on a five-week vacation. I’ve slipped back into staying up late and getting up much later than I would like, but for my mental health, that routine, the meditation, the journaling and the exercise, when I do those things in the morning, I know I’m going to have a great day. It never fails. When I don’t, sometimes I have good days, but I can’t guarantee it.

Having a solid morning routine 100% changed my life. That is non-negotiable. My calendar is not open. This is crazy as an entrepreneur, business owner and stuff, but I’m in a place now where my team is very small. There are four of us. I’m getting the ball rolling with my online journey. I don’t have this massive conglomerate thing happening. I can afford to spend time on myself, especially in the morning.

In the morning, I don’t have anything on my calendar until 10:00 AM, which sounds insane to some people, but I simply don’t. You cannot get on my calendar before 10:00, it’s blocked. You’re not getting there. It’s for me. I get up at 5:00 AM or 6:00 AM. That’s a long period of time. If I get up, I love how I feel after I run. I’m more like, “I got to go for my run. Damn, it’s raining,” but I do. I go out and do my run.

I love listening to Jim Rohn and stuff mixed with techno, which is crazy, DJs mixing personal development work high BPM music. Spotify has got it. I go do my thing. I come back. I have a similar routine. I’ll journal and set up my day. I’ll write out my tasks. I’ll do a gratitude exercise and vision board type stuff. I meditate 2 or 3 times. Different types of meditation, some guided, some pure inner breathing style, yoga with my wife if she forces me into it. I hate doing it, but I love how I feel after it.

If she asks me with her pretty eyes, I’ll do it and I’m like, “I feel so good.” The morning routine changes everything. There’s something about conquering yourself and your discipline, and smashing that out in the morning. You feel like you’ve got it now. The rest of the days, it’s a cakewalk because I conquered myself. When did that start for you?

This was in late January of 2016. I then introduced the book to my now business partner. He read the same book and he’s way more disciplined. He went 900 days without missing one time. I’m doing the full routine. I cheat. I do the minute routine here and there. We read that same book. We started doing the morning routines at the same time. We had our monthly breakfast and we read other books. That process unknowingly aligned us to become business partners. Without that book, I don’t believe Get Staffed Up even exists in the first place, which is pretty wild.

You have to give yourself the time to seek mental clarity and find what you want spiritually in life.

You both went on the same journey at the same time. Your frequency is aligned. You became a mastermind.

You’re getting into Napoleon Hill concepts now. We operated ourselves at the same wavelength and created that third aura or spirit or whatever of a mastermind.

You created a third entity, which is you together. It came from the root of having a similar morning routine and sticking to the discipline and mutually respecting each other for doing it, loving yourself more for doing it and all that shit put together, boom, birth of a company. With morning routines and stuff, I got that from a range of places, but the book that I read that was about a morning thing was The 5AM Club.

The leverage point is you’ve got a bunch of hours on top of most of your competition. Even if your competition is yourself, it’s like your old self was sleeping, your new self is awake, crushing it. Your actual business competitors out there in the marketplace, hypothetically, they’re sleeping as well. It lays out the compounding effect of kicking ass early in the morning repeatedly.

I agree and disagree with some of that. Not with you, but with that statement, it’s nuanced because it depends on what you’re doing at 5:00 AM, 6:00 AM, or 7:00 AM. I was involved in for a long time at a networking organization that is pretty big all over the world now. It started in the US. It’s called BNI or Business Networking International.

On those mornings, once per week, you wake up at 5:00 AM. You don’t have time for your routine and this is mostly pre my morning routine. You’d show up and somebody inevitably in that room will say, “We’re here networking with the best people in the business and our competition is sleeping.” Everyone would repeat that and it would feel good. The concept is good, but I was in a group where I didn’t have hungry people around me, people passing referrals and operating at the same wavelength as me.

I was giving out a lot of business and I wasn’t receiving business in return. Maybe that makes me sound selfish or not, but it doesn’t matter because it affects your energy. I look back now and I laugh. I get so much more from being in my own house or my own world, doing my morning routine by myself with no other soul on the world. It advanced me further faster than being around other people claiming to be outworking their competition early in the morning.

It depends on what you’re doing with your time always. Think and Grow Rich, getting off the hamster wheel and giving yourself time to think about what comes next is the difference between you having this show and me having Get Staffed Up, and whatever else we want in the world and someone else waking up at 60 saying like, “I worked for someone else for the past 35 years, maybe it’s time to retire.” Unless you give yourself the time to seek mental clarity and meditate and find what you want spiritually in life, you have to have that time. Whether it’s The 5AM Club concept or Miracle Morning, whatever it is, it’s got to be alone time, in my opinion.

I would not want to be on a Zoom with a bunch of people talking about developing ourselves. We’ll do that all day in our meetings and shit. Speaking of meditating, let’s go on with that, because obviously, we both understand the immense value of going inside and listening to your emotions and slowing down.

I’ll tell you a quick story about the show since you brought it up. I came up with the idea for a show, not only for the name and the general idea of it, meaning how do people turn into the best version of themselves and how do people grow. I want to talk to experts who can tell me stories about how they did it. That’s essentially the premise, but it was more like, “Why am I even doing a show?” It all came to me during a meditative state.

My wife and I were in Asia, we had lost everything. We lost our jobs. We were consultants, we lost our consulting contracts. We lost all of our investments. All with one swoop due to politics and some disaster stuff that was happening in our reality, it all went away overnight. We were at ground zero after working for a decade at this life we constructed, which was a great life. We were gone.

We decided to leave Asia and start again in Europe, which is where I am now. I was on the plane. I had debt. I had nothing going on and I knew that I wanted to do something else. I didn’t want to do what I was doing before. I knew I wanted to be online because the future is online. I wanted to be on here and network with people that I could touch. I wanted to find myself in a new space.

On the plane, as I was flying over the ocean, I meditated for a while. I was listening to one of my guided meditations on my phone. It ended and I was out of it. I paused it and then I was silenced. I was like, “I’m going to sit in this for a moment,” as you do. I sat there and everyone was sleeping. It was night in the plane, dark. I was like, “What am I going to do? How can I talk to people? How can I get someone like you? How can I get influencers, business owners, CEOs, very successful humans to talk to me? I don’t have any clout in this space.”

I can’t tell them about my nightclubs in Manila that ran. They don’t care. I couldn’t tell them about our beach resort and I threw big parties. It doesn’t matter in this world here. I was like, “How can I do that?” I was meditating on it and it downloaded and clicked all at the same time as things do in meditation. Podcasting is where I get all of my information, where I learn a lot of my stuff. Be the host of one of those things and then you’ll have an excuse to then reach out to people and talk to them and bring them on, because you’ll be providing a platform. This all came to me.

I was like, “What’s it going to be about?” I was like, “I’m in a massive growth move now. I should talk about growth and personal development.” I was like, “The Growth Podcast.” It all happened to me in about five minutes on the plane in a meditative state. If I did not take that moment to breathe, if I would have been watching Modern Family on the damn headset of the TV, or whatever the hell people were doing, which I never do on planes. If I would have been watching a movie there, my brain would have been consumed. There’s no way I would have thought of that because I would’ve been there.

I took a moment to breathe. It came to me and I did it. I executed the moment I landed. I got a mentor. I built the whole thing and I launched. That was the catalyst for any success that I’ve had online now, and in the future, because I’ve networked, done 100 episodes or so recorded. I met tons of cool people. I’ve got contracts. I got things going on and it all came from that moment of clarity.

One, I love that story. Two, I’m not surprised at all that it would happen during a meditative state. It doesn’t surprise me because when else would it click like that? Something else you’ve touched upon, have you read Outwitting the Devil By Napoleon Hill?

I love it.

A big takeaway for me was that most people drift through life. Two percent of people think through everything instead of drifting. When you said, instead of watching a movie, you were meditating, that was the example for me. You could have been drifting absentmindedly through that plane, instead it changed your life. That’s incredible.

That’s a good analogy. I had my journal out, I was writing down my thoughts and things, and I put it all down. I closed my eyes again, put it down some more, and then I put back on my audiobook or whatever I was listening to and went about my day. When I landed, I got to my wife’s family home in Russia. We were there for a little while. I opened that up and I was like, “I was going to start a podcast. I totally forgot about that.” “Does this happen to you? Do you get all sorts of crazy ideas on planes and you’re writing like a madman?”

I was going to ask you the same thing, because that’s exactly what happens to me. Claustrophobia runs in my family and then I never had it on planes until I hit 30. It was a stressful time in my life. All of a sudden, it all came back. I try to get in a different state of mind on a plane anyway. Get myself into meditation or dive into work. Sometimes I’ll watch the movies on a super long flight, but I have a lot of ideas and they come to me quickly and I write very quickly on a plane.

Most people just drift through life instead of thinking about where they want to be in life.

I tell my wife that all the time. We travel a lot. We love traveling and flying around and doing cool shit, life’s fun. We love having fun lives. We’re always flying somewhere doing something fun. Trains are the same. I was on a train from Austria, Germany down here to Rome. We were in Croatia for a month hanging out. We did the loop.

Looking out the windows and I’m ripping out ideas. I wonder what that is. Is it because your mind is it’s inspired by what’s going on around you outside you realize you’re going over the planet and you’re moving quickly and it’s like you have inspiration download, and you’re also free to think because you’re not consumed with work or people around you?

It’s a combination of changing your environment, which changes your energy and being unplugged and having intentional thought time. My cofounder and I of Get Staffed Up, we talk about this. We had a retreat. We were in a very small room and we’re like, “It’s not that much more expensive for bigger room.” We need to learn this lesson, so we went to the bigger room.

We had some breakthroughs that day that I don’t think we would have ever had in the other room, because it wasn’t comfortable enough to walk around and think and have the right space for the energy. We refer to that lesson a lot. That’s what it is. It’s about changing your mental state. If you go to your couch and you turn on TV in the background, it’s not the same. You’re Canadian, your wife’s Russian, you have lived in Asia and Europe. This is a worldly crew you got going on there.

I met my wife several years ago in Switzerland. We were in grad school. We went to the corporate space in the hospitality world, because our MBA is in Hospitality. We went over to Asia. We were working for corporate hotels, high-end, five-star stuff, climbing the corporate ladder and hating every second of it. We moved from corporate to consulting. That’s when we moved to Southeast Asia.

We went to the Philippines to a place called Boracay, which is the crown jewel of the Philippines. It’s like the Phuket of Thailand in the Philippines. It’s like a party. We went there and then we did our thing for a while, consulting all over the place, and some great stuff, invested a lot and then did a lot of things.

The president’s an absolute lunatic and he’s so damn corrupt with China. It’s insane. He sold his soul. China came in and they took over the island. They bought all the real estate and all that stuff. They closed the economy for a whole year. No planes or boats are allowed on the island. What happens, our business goes to zero. We lose everything that we’d worked for. I lost my mind. I broke down. I was crying and drinking tequila shots at 7:00 AM, because I was like, “We’ve been doing this for so long and we had our shit together. It was going very well. Now, it’s completely gone.” I had no control over that, which bothers me.

They always say, “You always have control.” In this moment, the only control I had was the fact that I chose to move there. He closed the economy. It broke me, but then I had to go on this deep inner work and journey to figure out the next move. Again, it was the stillness. The whole island was empty. I would run in the morning with my dog and it would be us on this super beautiful 7-kilometer long white sand beach, but it’s typically full of hundreds of thousands of tourists, completely empty. I remember I was like the happiest, most grateful human ever at that moment because I’ve been doing tons of inner work because I had to stop the other sabotaging work.

I had to snap out of it, so I did. I started reading, meditating, journaling, and thinking about the future. I got super grateful for life in general, but I was completely broken and screwed financially, but mentally and spiritually, I was on this super upswing. One of my mentors said to me, looking back on this, he was like, “The moment where you had nothing in the bank, no prospects, nothing going on, you were totally screwed, but you felt grateful for everything you had and you felt awesome. That was the moment where your life changed.” I was like, “You’re right. That was the moment.” That’s the rock bottom moment a lot of people haven’t felt, but the ones who have to understand it. If you can leverage that into something positive, I feel like you have a lot of value to give.

The watershed moments are sometimes the best thing that ever happened to people. A lot of people are unfortunate never to have that moment. Comfort makes you lazy. Employers, we know that you pay people enough to keep them around. Your superstars, you pay them a lot more, because that’s the way it works. You can’t always pay everyone $1 million for a job that brings the business $50,000. Economically, it doesn’t work that way. A lot of people again are comfortable. They never bottom out and so they continue to live in a state of drifting through life. It’s probably the best thing that ever happened to you.

I say it all the time. I know it is, 100%. If we would have continued on the way it was, it was very comfortable. I’m sure you are familiar with the lifestyle you can accomplish in Southeast Asia or even South America, these types of places on expat foreign business money. You can live like a king. When one of my friends from Canada would come visit, they’d come to our house. We rented the bottom part of a big ass beach house. It was my best friend’s house. He rented us the bottom suite. It was this two-story, beautiful beach house. It was shaped like two different pyramids. It was on ten acres of spa land. It was amazing. It’s like a paradise.

There were gardeners. We had yayas, which are maids. They cook the breakfast, make the beds, do everything around the house, and they’re always there doing everything for you, so that you can enjoy your life. People know how to enjoy themselves, the people who have money. When my friends from Canada would come over and visit, they’d fly in and I’d have them picked up by our driver.

They would come through and the guard at the gate of the house would carry their bag and then they’d come into the house and there’d be our maid there waiting with bacon and eggs for them, and case of beer in the fridge cold. They would crack the beer for them, and give it to them, put their clothes away for them and shit.

They would be like, “There’s the laundry bag. Tell me what you want for lunch and dinner. Here’s the menu of food.” My friends were like, “What the fuck is this? Is this a hotel?” I’m like, “This is how most of us live here.” They didn’t get it. Looking back on it now, we were so comfortable and spoiled and it’s all good. There’s nothing wrong with that, but for me, I needed that jolt of uncertainty to kick in. If it would’ve remained the way it was, I for sure wouldn’t have gone into this world. I wouldn’t be doing podcasts. I wouldn’t be doing what I do online now, which is a totally different realm. There would be no growth there for me.

I’m with you there. It’s funny you bring up Southeast Asia and the Philippines. Our very first people from Get Staffed Up are from the Philippines. You had asked me why people would consider this model. Culturally speaking, I’m not trying to paint a broad brush and say that everybody is all the same, but the English is not as good in that part of the world as it is in Central America, South America, and Mexico. I had people in the Philippines say this to me, but they’re trained to do their job, and that’s it. They’re very good at taking orders, but they’re not going to be your creative assistant. They’re not going to take a lot of initiative and come up with answers.

They’re going to be, “Yes, I’m going to do this for you and do a good job at only exactly what you tell me to do.” Those experiences all led us to 98% of our people now come out of the Latin American world. The time zone obviously is different, but there’s still such a tremendous amount of savings. You can take advantage of economic arbitrage. Pay somebody where they live very good for what they need for their lives, but it’s still going to save you 60% to 70% of what you would pay someone here in the US.

When you hire someone in the US, most people don’t realize if I’m paying someone $100, it’s costing me anywhere from $135 to $145. You got to do multiple of 1.35 to 1.45, because you’re going to add in the overhead, the taxes, the insurances, all the perks, the benefits, everything. We at Get Staffed Up hire the people. They work us, and we essentially lease them out to our clients full-time.

The difference between us is we’re mostly in Latin America, we don’t do this part-time. I call it Tetris. Most staffing companies that have virtual model or offshore models, they got a building in the Philippines. They pack it like sardines. Everybody has a desk this big with their headset and they do 10 hours a week for Tom, 20 hours a week for Sally. The people on the business are constantly trying to fill hours. That’s not our model. Our model is full-time only. We’re going to find you, somebody who’s friendly, smart, educated, speaks good English, writes good English just happens to live in a different part of the world. We’re going to put them through a very rigorous process.

This quarter, for example, we’ll have 5,000 people apply to work for us. Only 1% will make it. We’re going to grow by 50-ish people this quarter. We have 1% placement. We’re finding the best of the best. They sign a contract with us. They are our employees. We take on all of the complicated rules that we have to follow for hiring in their country, then we lease them to you for a flat fee per month. You’re paying us as a contractor flat fee. You’re getting 40 hours a week from somebody who’s your team member, because there is no split loyalty. They’re working just for you. They answer to you. They’re a part of your team culture, but we’re taking a lot of the headaches away for you.

That’s good because that is one of the big problems is this Tetris model, it is trying to fill hours. It’s true. On your journey, through everything you’ve been through and building your business and setting up your company and successfully growing it, did you have a personal transformation that happened that you didn’t expect?

The realization that in order to grow, you have to delegate everything basically. We have a trademark phrase me and my cofounder called, “Delegate your way to freedom.” I’m working on a book called Massive Delegation. The 80/20 rule, you got to analyze everything you’re doing and get rid of 80% of it and spend the 20% on the very high value things or the things that bring you the most pleasure that you liked doing the most. Later, you got to do it again. Maybe a year, maybe half a year. The 20% you kept, you got to keep repeating that in order to grow.

For me, I didn’t realize that my ego was holding me back. My fear of failure wasn’t because like, “I’m going to be so hard on myself. I’m going to fail.” I’ve been a pretty high achiever. The problem with going to law school is it’s like, “This person is doing something with their lives and they’re passing tests and they’re smart.” A lot of people that go to law school, where you get the horrible lawyers from, it’s a big ego crash and things that don’t need to happen. I was afraid to fail because of what I thought people would say about me.

In order to grow, you have to delegate everything.

Once I learned that was holding me back and I wasn’t any better than anyone else, I was making everything about me, unintentionally thinking that I wasn’t making things about me. In fact, you can either be super egocentric or such an introvert that it’s also narcissism because you think if you go out in public, everyone’s looking at you, “That person’s shy.” They may have as big of an ego, it just comes out in a completely opposite way.

Reading the empowerment books, the Napoleon Hills, Eckhart Tolles of the world. I don’t know if it’s like one moment, but it’s a lot of growth for me and my mindset where I don’t have to do everything myself. If I do try to do everything myself, it means like, “I’m the best at it.” No, you’re not. There are other people better than you. You got to be big enough to admit that and then bring on the team who’s better than you.

In the law firm, we’ve got a leadership team that’s incredible, our managing partner is a bad-ass. He’s so good. In Get Staffed Up, we eat our own medicine. A hundred of percent of our team is offshore. We’re at sixteen employees ourselves now. We’re trying to find people that are so much better than us at something very narrow that they could be good at.

I don’t know at what point you get a business where you’re not wearing multiple hats, but I’m not there yet. That’s why you have to keep growing. If I get 3 people and then 6 staff members, I’ll be good. I won’t be doing my own bookkeeping, but you’re still doing your own marketing and visionary. There are a lot to do in business.

Maybe you remember this story of the guy who was sitting at his desk or something, and a guy came in and they were saying something along the lines of, “You don’t know everything. Why are you getting all the money? Why are you the boss? You don’t even know how to do that over there.” He was like, “I don’t, but you see this Rolodex here. I can make a phone call and I can have an expert here and he can do that for me.” This is what we’re talking about.

You don’t have to be the smartest guy in the room on everything. You have to have the most connections and the most influence and be okay with other people. You need to bring on A players to your team. I want to make a distinction too, because what we do is not for everybody. For example, I’m guessing you may have a few virtual assistants that are maybe from the Philippines because that’s the world you know. If you have a podcast and you have a system you need to follow, and I never quite read the full The 4-Hour Workweek, but basically, you can get people for cheaper than what we charge by doing it yourself.

If you’re doing some digital things and simple tasks, then somebody from the Philippines, Indonesia, or India may be good. There’s a place for everything. I want to make that distinction. There’s never one way to do something. Certainly, there’s a cheaper mouse trap than us, even though we have incredible savings, but we hang our hat on finding the best people out there possible for positions that are answering the phones, personal assistants, executive assistants, marketing assistants, people that are going to be a valuable part of the team.

People always get that confused like, “Could I go to Upwork or Fiverr?” Those are good for project-based things. I still use those services. It’s not what we do, but it’s fascinating how many things you can get done from behind a computer. You can make your PDF designed and then plug it into a bigger marketing campaign that someone else is running for you.

It depends on the need you’re trying to fill. It sounds to me like, if you’re placing executive assistants, people that are helping high-level leaders in the company with their calendars and phone calls, this is not something for someone you pick up on Fiverr. You need a professional who is there and knows your company culture, who’s committed to the cause.

They show up every day, know the mantra of the company, know the owners, and they’re part of the team. You’re providing that. It’s been a pleasure talking to you. It’s been awesome and enlightening. I thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it. I know the readers got a lot of value. If they want to come find you and check you out, and see what you’re doing, where can they go?

The fastest way is going to GetStaffedUp.com. For your readers, Aaron, if you go to the Contact page and it says, “Where did you hear about us?” We would like to give your readers, if you type in The Growth Podcast, then we’ll give you a $250 discount on your startup fee. Our pricing is very transparent. To get started, for some buy-in, because then we go in this in-depth recruiting for you. It’s $1,750. Depending on the type of virtual assistant you need, we have three different levels.

We have a very clerical data entry. We’ve got the middle most popular level. It’s $1,850 per month flat fee, all in. That’s for your administrative assistant, executive assistant, personal assistant, legal assistant receptionist, intake person, happiness coordinator. The highest level is the marketing assistant. Go to the website, fill out the form and we’ll jump on the phone with you and mention The Growth Podcast.

Thanks for the discount. The readers love that. Thanks for hopping on. I appreciate it. Take care of yourself over there.

I enjoyed it. I’m glad to know you. It’s pretty cool. It’s good for you.

Have a good one.

Take care.

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About Brett Trembly

In the South Florida legal community, Brett is a former President of the Miami Kendall Bar Association and former Vice-Chair of the Florida Bar 11th Circuit Grievance Committee 11 “I.” He also volunteers on the Florida Bar Young Lawyers Division Mentoring Program, the Dade-County Bar Associations Rainmakers Committee, and annually volunteers for Miami-Dade County’s Ethical Governance Day. Brett has also been named a Super Lawyers Rising Star in Florida for the past three years.

Brett also maintains his leadership emphasis and is strongly committed to giving back, serving as Past-President of the Rotary Club of Miami, Past-President of a B.N.I. Chapter, Vice-President of the Rotary Foundation of Miami, Inc., as a Director of the Palmetto Bay Business Association, a member of the Pinecrest Business Association, an American Ninja Warrior alum, and Moderator for his E.O. forum.