Recently, Katrina McKay, Founder & CEO, Uplevel Solutions, was invited to do a live interview for the graduates of the StartUp Here Toronto program (an initiative of the City of Toronto). She was interviewed by Jeremy O’Krafka (pictured), Founder, MENTORnetwork.
What follows are some of the highlights from their conversation together.
Jeremy: Kindly introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your background and how you got to where you are today.
Katrina: Hi! Well, I’m the founder and CEO of Uplevel Solutions. We have two main divisions at Uplevel; one is one-on-one coaching and consulting with entrepreneurs who are looking to grow their companies. […] And then the other side is a virtual assistant and business support services; my company has quite a large team in the Philippines. All of our team members are folks that we recruited and trained ourselves, that helped us support the growth of these various companies by taking away all of that onerous admin work that all of us founders seem to be stuck with as we continue to grow our companies.
Jeremy: Can you tell us about some of your past entrepreneurial experiences that led you to [understand the necessity of outsourcing] and starting to build a virtual team to support your business?
Katrina: I actually built the team that I’ve been looking for myself and couldn’t find elsewhere!
My entrepreneurial journey started about eight years ago. I was still working a nine to nine and I’m not misspeaking – it really was a nine to nine…and I started an eCommerce company. as well as started what later became Uplevel Solutions. […]
I tried a number of different permutations to get the help that I needed to continue to grow my companies and to offload some of the tasks that I was just not getting to. At the time, that included tasks like uploading products to our Shopify store. (I was a very early Shopify adopter.) And answering customer service emails.
I also had the advantage of having helped a couple of different companies in the SMB space develop teams in various parts of the world.
[…] How we ended up in the Philippines is actually kind of a sweet story. I had hired a number of different people for like small projects and one person really stood out.
Her name’s Metchell Jackson. She’s still on my team, so she’s been working with me for now seven years, almost eight. She started doing customer service for my eCommerce company. She was my executive assistant for a while. And now she’s our team manager and sits on our management team.
[Editor’s Note: Check out the Liisbeth piece on Katrina McKay to learn a bit more about Metchell Jackson and her work at Uplevel.]
As I was working with more and more entrepreneurs […], I noticed that they also needed the same sort of team that I was developing for myself.
Initially we were offering services a more as a favour. Like it was like an add on to my coaching practice where I’d say, “Oh, sure. […] Edna has some extra capacity, you know, sure, let’s get Edna to help support your company.” And I just realized how much of a need there was from the folks that I was already serving to have really strong, amazing admins.
Jeremy: What are some of those first tasks or responsibilities that an entrepreneur probably should be thinking about outsourcing?
Katrina: Anything that’s repeatable task, basically anything where you’re sitting in front of your computer and you’re like, “why am I the one doing this?” is probably something you should start looking at delegating. An easy exercise, which is sometimes a little painful to be fair is to jot down anytime, during a day or week or month, where you’re doing something that is sucking your energy and not contributing to the bigger picture for your company in a major way. That could be answering email, that could be travel arrangements, that could be doing research for blog posts where you need statistics. It could be pretty much anything that involves any data entry or like project coordination, keeping things on schedule. That’s not necessarily the type of stuff that you want to be doing as a founder. It depends on your business, obviously. But most of us tend to be big picture thinkers were visionaries and that’s where we want most of our time to be spent.
Jeremy: What are some of the key technology based tools or platforms that you see entrepreneurs are using within their teams to really enhance the productivity?
Katrina: I’m a huge fan of Slack. […} It’s a really great way of managing internal communications which is what we use it for. Let’s see, what else? I can’t speak too much to Zapier, but I know that we have a lot of Zapier integrations as well. The reason I can’t speak to it as that, that is somebody else on my team handles all of that for me.
We also use Asana and Trello. We use both of them for different applications. Those are project management pieces of software and a Asana links very nicely with Slack through Zapier integration. […]
Jeremy: In the areas of updating CRMs, invoice and expense tracking, how do you engage with a VA to help with those areas of information management?
Katrina: […] Invoicing is something that’s so common for our Uplevel VA’s to do. So on our side, when clients come on to have us do invoicing, it’s not so onerous. We ask them if they are using Xero or Freshbooks [or whatever other system they may be using]. […] It’s one of the easiest things that you can get a VA to do.
The process that you have to figure out though is how are you going to notify your assistant when there’s an invoice to be sent out. One particularly efficient way that I’ve seen this done is to forward an email to your assistant anytime a proposal is accepted. Then, have your assistant create an invoice in draft format.
An important note… Even if you have the best VA in the world, you want to make sure that your instructions were clear. I find that even with our own team (who I feel like has some of the best training in the world!), they’ll make mistakes because I’ve left part of the process out or I forgot to mention something or I didn’t think about an outlier.
Jeremy: Do you run rehearsals on that type of stuff or how do you go through to kind of really tightened up your process?
Katrina: Drafts are always great. I don’t like to do rehearsals … I feel like everybody knows they’re make-work projects and the performance isn’t the same. I also like doing regular check-ins. When you’re a person dealing with other people, you have to remember that it’s a really great idea to just check and double check that people are understanding the instructions that you’ve sent to them. And I think that’s important in leadership no matter what level you’re at, no matter what level your folks are at who are supporting you, ask them lots of questions and also we, we have, and I think this could be helpful too.
As for CRM support… We do a lot of CRM support because if you’re anything like me, if anyone on this call is anything like me, you’re really great about having the meeting and really terrible about taking the meeting notes and putting them into some kind of system where you can access them again. If I didn’t have Daisy, who is my amazing assistant,l, all of the follow ups from meetings that I have, all of my follow-ups would happen three months too late.
A really easy super easy hack that I’ve found and a lot of our clients have started doing too…If you’re using a Google calendar, which pretty much everybody is on their phone, put your notes in your phone, address some of those notes on that calendar appointment to your assistant, have that assistant handle any of the follow ups and super easy.
WANT TO LEARN MORE ABOUT UPLEVEL?
Interested in learning more about Uplevel’s virtual assistant services? Check out our Plans & Pricing page or send an email to caralee@uplevelsolutions.com to set up a call to chat about your specific needs.
JEREMY O’KRAFKA
Jeremy is the Founder of MENTORnetwork. He helps entrepreneurs understand and access membership.
KATRINA MCKAY
Founder & CEO of Uplevel Solutions, Katrina is obsessed with helping entrepreneurs grow and creating sustainable working opportunities for folks in the Philippines. She loves nerding out about outsourcing, business building and marketing. She’s also the Business Growth Mentor for the Build Your Dream accelerator program based out of Toronto, Canada.
