Creative EA Delegation, the Corporation of You, and Personal Leverage with Robert Hayes and Chris Ho of Athena
Want to know how I get more than 24 hours in a day?
Two words: Executive Assistant (or EA).
My guests are Athena CEO Robert Hayes and Chris Ho, Chief Client Officer. Athena provides top-caliber full-time EAs. Joining Athena was one of the highest-leverage things I’ve ever done.
We talk about:
When you are ready for an EA.
Insane leverage gained from advanced delegation.
Win-win relationships between clients and EAs.
Here’s what I learned from the episode:
The trade-off of delegation: less precision, but way more leverage.
Robert looks at hiring an EA as investing in the corporation of you.
Chris and his wife both have their own EAs.
Robert has 5 EAs!!
Delegating takes an investment of time. But if done propertly, you can hand off tasks forever.
Great EAs hold clients accountable to personal and professional goals.
Chris spends much more time in his flow-state of working now that his EA manages his inbox.
Clients often feel guilty giving critical feedback, Athena helps them work through this.
A Chief Client Officer is “a steward of a portfolio of annuities.” Grow expected value by providing excellent client experience.
Great client service is giving people medicine for their pain and candy for their soul.
An interviewing tactic: if you understand someone’s passions, you understand what they are capable of.
Jonathan Swanson started Athena to save jobs for former employees. Then was surprised to find an incredible new market in personal EAs.
Many clients struggle to accept help. Learning to delegate is hard.
Every country has extremely talented people, but in some countries talent is underused.
Robert is passionate about changing lives by bringing jobs to people with undiscovered talent.
Athena focuses on communication and expectations between clients and EAs. There is a learning phase, and behavior changes are required for advanced delegation.
Athena helps the best and the brightest people use their time better and accomplish more.
If you’re interested in joining Athena:
Click here: AthenaGo.Com and complete the survey to sign up.
There’s often a waitlist to get matched with EAs, so plan ahead and sign up now, today – no commitment required. You’ll even learn something by doing the application.
Be sure to list Eric Jorgenson as your referrer. I will earn a referral, but I’ll never accept referrals from a product I don’t believe in.
Once more, AthenaGo.Com and sign up.
Learn more about Robert Hayes and Chris Ho:
Additional episodes if you enjoyed:
Drug Cartels, Vanguard, And Goldman Sachs with Codie Sanchez
Andrew Wilkinson: De-risking Leverage, Investing vs. Operating, and the Best Part About Business
Episode Transcript:
Chris Ho: There are certain people in the world that are going to do a crazy amount, that are going to be insanely productive and are going to do a crazy amount of good and are going to march us forward and be insanely productive no matter what they do. And if that is our client base, and our sole mission as a company is to take the people that are doing the most in the world already and give them leverage to help them do more, and sometimes up to like 10, 20, 30 times more than they thought that they could do because we teach them how to delegate appropriately, we teach them how to let everything else fall away from them, and we can do that while producing the best executive assistants in the world and giving people exactly like what Robert said from economically disenfranchised places in the world and connecting them to these people and letting them be the right-hand person and changing their family's lives and their entire trajectory in life, that is like- that's the whole reason I joined. That's the whole- it's unbelievably exciting to me. And it's you have this opportunity to do this incredible good on both sides. And that's where I want- That's what I want us to become.
Eric Jorgenson: Hello again, my friends, and welcome. I'm Eric Jorgenson, and I'm living proof that anyone can start a podcast. This show explores technology, investing, entrepreneurship, and personal growth that will help you and the rest of humanity create a brighter more abundant future. This podcast is one of the few projects I work on. To read my book, blog, newsletter, or invest alongside us in early-stage tech companies, please visit ejorgenson.com. One of the biggest leaps of leverage in my entire life came when I started working with an EA, an executive assistant, that I hired through Athena. Today, I'm talking with two of the leaders at Athena, the company I personally use and love. This episode is all about executive assistants, personal leverage, the personal corporation, and advanced delegation systems. We explore the people and the playbooks behind Athena, a company completely dedicated to providing top caliber executive assistants. Today, all those assistants are from the Philippines, though they expect to expand to other structurally disadvantaged countries in the future. Today, the guests are Robert Hayes, Athena's CEO, and Chris Ho, the Chief Client Officer. Robert has an excellent track record working in the Philippines, growing several companies there, living there for many years, most notably TaskUs grew to like north of 25,000 employees, a really incredible success story there. He joined Athena at the very early stages with a goal of repeating that performance and growing to 10,000 plus jobs in the decade ahead. Chris previously was the co-founder of Able Tribe, a Canadian software startup for financial education at the point of payroll, which is a very interesting idea. Able Tribe was acquired by Humi in 2017, where Chris served as the VP of Client Experience. We talk a little bit about that job and the path and the techniques that he uses to do that job incredibly effectively. He was also, fun fact, on the Terra Mystica World Championship team in 2021. If you are a board gamer, you will know that that is an exciting thing. In this episode, we focus mostly on entirely creative ways that EAs can add value to their client's lives, these playbooks for advanced delegations, some of the stories that they've seen at Athena, some things that Robert and Chris do personally, which are just, I find so exciting. If you're interested in learning more about Athena, please open your browser, type in athenago.com, and sign up. There's often a waitlist to get matched with EAs, so plan ahead, sign up right now today. There's no commitment required, and you will learn something about delegation just by going through that quick application. Once more, athenago.com. It's the first link in the show notes. Be sure to list me, Eric Jorgenson, as your refer. I will earn a referral from that. It does not cost you any more, but I will never ever take referrals from a product or a company that I don't believe in. I've managed to spend a few days on the beaches of the Philippines with these guys and with the rest of the executives and EAs at Athena. I was blown away by what they're doing. I'm very excited to be a small part and an evangelist and a contributor to that. And I'm excited to share a bit of that experience and what I learned there here with you today. Please enjoy this conversation arriving at your ears in three, two, one.
I'm very excited to have both of you guys here. This is going to be an incredibly fun podcast, and it's necessary to have both of you because your Canadian sensibilities will not allow you to brag on yourselves. So, I'm just going to turn you on each other to bring out the best in each other. Is that fair? Okay. We’ve got Robert Hayes, the CEO of Athena. Welcome.
Robert Hayes: Thank you. Appreciate it, Eric. Super excited to be here.
Eric Jorgenson: We’ve got Chris Ho over here, who's the Chief Client Officer of Athena.
Chris Ho: Hi, Eric, thanks so much for having us.
Eric Jorgenson: Okay, now we're all identified, we're ready to go. I want to do quick like backgrounds of you guys because I think you both have really interesting stories. And maybe Chris, since you're like the instigator here, do you mind going first and telling us like how you ended up as Chief Client Officer of Athena and maybe what a Chief Client Officer does?
Chris Ho: Yeah, for sure. So just a little bit about my background. I started my career in consulting and pretty quickly after that pivoted into starting my own company. And the first company that I started was with a gentleman named Julian Roger, and we started a small Canadian payroll startup. And the idea of it, or a huge part of the mission of that company, was to build a payroll system that was going to help people and help Canadians save. And we thought that doing financial literacy at the point of payroll was going to be the only way that you could actually achieve that because you could get people's money before they got it and help them make better decisions. And so, we dove into that and worked on that for a bunch of years and had some big wins and some big losses along the way, but eventually ended up accepting an acquisition offer from a company called Humi. Humi was out of Y Combinator. It is a Canadian HR and payroll software company, very similar to like Gusto or Zenefits or Rippling, but much smaller on the Canadian stage. And so joined that company and worked there for many years, and I was absolutely loving it. And Jonathan, who's our founder of Athena here, Jonathan and Robert, wore me down over the course of many months last year and sold me on this incredible vision, which I'll let Robert kind of go into the vision and mission of Athena because he'll tell it better than I will, but they sold me on coming and helping them change the world over here at Athena. So, I jumped over, been an incredible ride over the past eight months or so. And then you asked me what does a Chief Client Officer do, and I think that's an awesome question because it's not necessarily a new role, but it's becoming more and more prevalent for companies, especially companies that- well, primarily companies that have recurring revenue business, they're trying to become more and more client centric because their entire business model or their entire revenue model is based on clients staying happy and continuing to do business with them. So, to break it down and make it extremely clear, there's two sides to what a Chief Client Officer does or what a Head of Client would do at a company. There's the hard side and the soft side. On the hard side, really what you are, you're a steward of a portfolio of annuities because every recurring revenue business has annuities and that's how their business runs, that's how they operate. An annuity for those that don't know is literally just any amount of money that recurs. It's supposed to be on an annual basis; for us, it's on a monthly basis. And there's a lot of financial instruments that are annuities, just like at a company, your revenue model could be recurring revenue on a monthly or an annual basis. But the hard side responsibility and the only responsibility of a Chief Client Officer is to make sure that the expected value of those annuities is growing rather than shrinking. And so, that's like the hard, hard side of it. Every month, every single month for us, our annuities or our recurring revenue has a chance of recurring or expanding or contracting or stopping entirely. And so, what we do is we run programs and create a client service environment or a client experience that help those recurring revenue or those recurring revenue amounts expand or continue as opposed to contract or stop. And building a world-class client program is all about building those systems and processes that expand and increase the expected value of that client portfolio. Now the soft side of it is that it's an entirely people centric role, and you have to be like desperately passionate about providing a really good client experience and making people happy and making people feel like they are something different than what they would be without your service. And one of the coolest analogies that I heard, that I've seen, and I will have to find out who said this because it wasn't my own idea, and I just don't remember what the source is. But someone once told me-someone once told me that great client service is giving people medicine for their pain and candy for their soul. And so, you're trying to give people medicine that tastes like candy so they feel good and smile all while you're actually solving their problems, because a lot of companies either do one or the other. They can solve your problems, and it sucks to work with them, just like our telco, our telecom services. They're actually like an amazing service if you think about it, but everyone hates them. Because there's no candy side to it. And then of course, I'm sure you've run into a lot of especially startup companies where they're really nice and they're like trying their hardest, but it just, you can't work with them because there's no medicine there. They're not solving any pain. So, that's the role that I run here at the Athena.
Eric Jorgenson: I like that structure a lot. And I'm interested to dig into that in the context of Athena once we kind of set that stage too. But Robert, let's do your kind of background story. What was your road into Athena?
Robert Hayes: I started up in probably the most unsexy industry in the whole world, which is call centers and outsourcing. And so, a few years ago, I won't date myself, when it was fashionable to do so, Americans used to outsource to Canada a lot. And then that's when I first got tied up into the outsourcing industry. Ended up as a young man in a company and learning that space and going, hey, this job is pretty cool. You get to learn leadership at a very young age. So, I had my first team of 25 people working for me at the age of 22. And it gave me just a tremendous opportunity to kind of like not only get deep experience with leadership, but kind of grow that as time went on. Years later, I ended up in the Philippines. My company sent me out there to actually build a location in the Philippines. And that was in 2008. And that was my first introduction to kind of offshoring in the sense of heading overseas. And so, I spent quite a few years there, about five years at that company, really learning how to set up and establish buildings, how to work with local government units, how to deal with tax treaties and all sorts of fun stuff. And as a young man, it was kind of get smashed with a sack of hammers to some degree. I learned everything from different cultures to different leadership skills as I did it. When you do that, what I found was I got really disgruntled with kind of typical leadership and typical business in the outsourcing space. So, I got frustrated with kind of very old kind of 1980s leadership tactics that were constantly being used, especially overseas, cutting costs quarter to quarter, that type of thing.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. I was going to say, what does that imply? Is that kind of like rank and yank, like very top-down sort of-?
Robert Hayes: Yeah, well, you see it, performance management practices is probably the easiest, but there's obviously many, many different things. But you have three chances and you're gone, oh, wait a minute, our quarterly EBITDA dropped by 2%, we're riffing 150 people tomorrow, that type of thing. And then every single time you turn around, just cutting costs on things that just have a ripple effect to the employee population and to the way that the business operates. And so, I was stunned kind of at the end of that journey because my program, so I would have, at the end of it, I had about 5,000 people working for me, and what I found was I was the most profitable by far. Yet, I was the person who also spent a lot, didn't engage in a lot of those practices. And I just became I guess a little disgruntled with the fact that I didn't think that those organizations had it in them to change. And so that's when I started looking for a company that would embody that spirit, would be willing to have that change, would take a risk. And that's when I stumbled across TaskUs where I decided to take a little bit of a wild jump at the time. Now it looks like a very good decision, but back then it was a new company. They were starting out. The founders were two really good guys, and I just believed them and knew that they cared and that they wanted to make a difference. And so, I was able to take my skill in the industry, the leadership experience I had over those years, and to jump into TaskUs and had a very, very positive run with them, trying to change the way we treat people, change the way we do performance management, build really nice offices. And we saw a lot of attraction from a lot of great technical companies. A lot of very popular tech companies joined with TaskUs over the years after that. And it got to a size and scale where I felt like it wasn't quite for me anymore. I still dearly love the company, still really loved the founders. I think they're still doing great things. But you just reached that point where you think I'd be better off taking risks or in something a little bit of a smaller scale. And so, I decided to take a break. I told my wife at the time, should I retire? What should I do? And of course, I get introduced to Jonathan through a friend, and me and him started talking about this little company that he accidentally started called Athena. And it was accidentally started for probably the most admirable reason, which sold me on the company in the first place, which was because he wanted to save people's jobs. And so, there was a layoff that took place at another company, and that layoff effected these folks because they were going from, believe it or not, from a remote work environment back into the office, this was pre COVID, and he wanted to save their jobs. And so, I just always had an affinity for that type of leadership. And so that's why me and him really hit it off and decided to start this thing called Athena and really get it going. And so, I'm sure we'll dive into more of what Athena is doing today, what we stand for and what our mission is, but that's kind of the journey that got me here.
Eric Jorgenson: I like it. And we encounter our first battle with humility because you did not mention the scale that TaskUs reached, which was pretty incredible. I think you said somewhere in the order of 30,000 employees.
Robert Hayes: When I left, I had about 20,000 people in my organization. I think now there're probably 40,000. So, I think their earnings call was just the other day. I didn't look too much in detail, but yeah, they're a very large and successful company and continuing to be even more successful. But yeah, when I decided to move on, I had about 20,000 people in the organization. I was the Chief Operating Officer. So, I had operations, data science, project management, facilities, all within my purview.
Eric Jorgenson: The clients in that context are mostly larger organizations. So not a consumer brand, but a ton of employees, I think pretty well known within the Philippines for just being such a large employer, too.
Robert Hayes: Yeah, really strong Glassdoor ratings, some of the best in the industry. We pioneered a lot of different employee benefits, which now seem commonplace, but at the time were unheard of. So, a lot of those companies, like a lot of our competitors, like I said, I've been to a lot of call centers in my life, and you would see really old, dusty, unclean kind of shops. And we pioneered just daycares in the facility, retirement plans, we pioneered just all kinds of different benefits for like LGBTQ support, for common law partners with HMO, which especially overseas, a lot of these practices were not normal. And so, we launched a lot of those things over the years to just really build that bond and show that we're taking care of people. And that it's very possible to be very successful and make a lot of money at the same time.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. I mean, with the long run orientation, they're damn near the same thing, but a lot of people don't think that way. Robert, what was it about Chris that made you so persistent in your recruiting efforts? He feels like he was still kind of swooned and pursued. I'm not sure what the right verb is there, but I know it was an extended thing. And it's clear to me that Chris is wonderful, but I'm curious maybe what was the profile or what was the role or why you were so determined to work together?
Robert Hayes: Yeah, interviews are a really tricky thing, and there's a magic question or a magic answer or some sort of magic thing that you can do to do interviews better than anybody else. I've thought about it long and hard and tried to give advice many times. And I think there's just two things that it comes down to. It comes down to passions and insecurities. And if you understand passions, then you can better understand insecurities of people. And everybody has. Everybody has both of them, but if you can't understand the passions and insecurities, you're getting a false representation of who the person is, which is a liability when it comes to the hiring process. And so, I would just say probably the thing that stood out to Chris the most was that just like a deep, clear passion and just excitement for what he wants to get done. And so, when you do that, when you find out what that passion is, then you go, oh, okay, I understand who this person is. I know that the passion is going to be there. I know what they want to accomplish with their life, where they want to go. And when you pour into these things, oftentimes you can see the depth of somebody's passion. I use this as example quite often where I say to people like if you get an interview and somebody is a huge Pokémon card collector, it’s actually very relevant to the process because you can understand the depth to which the passion for Pokémon cards goes. And if they start pulling out spreadsheets of Pokémon card collections and like they've got them graded and they understand the code, you know what I mean? Like that's a really positive thing because then you understand a lot more about that person, what they're capable of, and what gets them excited for life. And so, I think, coming back to Chris, all that stood out. He pulled out some spreadsheets, I won't say what they're about, but he certainly showed a lot of passion through the process. And I think it just got us excited that a couple of passionate people together could just accomplish really, really great things.
Eric Jorgenson: I see that. Chris and I have spent a few hours just like excitedly yelling to each other about big problems and technologies to solve in the world. And I don't know, I really like the model of kind of interviewing for intensity. Like it doesn't matter what the interest is, but if you are capable of intense interest and passion about a thing, then you'll probably be good at whatever it is we aim you at if you care about what we aim you at. And I know- I don't know if I can say what the spreadsheets were about, like only you have seen the spreadsheets, but I know that I had a similar experience of being like, hey, do you play board games? And Chris was like, yeah, I really like board games. And I was like, oh, which ones do you play? He’s like, oh, I play a couple of these. And then like nine questions later, we find out that he's like a world champion in like multiple world or work replacement games or something like that. I was like, oh depth of intensity and interest. Which now he's on like Chris Sacca was saying like, of course, Travis Kalanick who's going to make Uber work, he's really good at Wii bowling or whatever it was. It was just like a real story that he told which maybe fits the model. Chris, in one of our numerous conversations, I feel like before I had med- you like pitched me on Robert before I got to meet Robert. And you were like, this dude is an operator. And just like underlined verbally operator a few times. And what is it that kind of- what distinguishes him from other people that you've worked with that makes him more effective or more high-impact or more exciting to kind of build a company like this with over a long run?
Chris Ho: I think it's the combination of Robert being an operator and a leader that is so impressive because I think people will sometimes have one without the other. I think it's people can imagine their own archetypes of what a leader would look like versus an operator, and being able to meld those together is just so rare, I think, because you need to be able to zoom in and zoom out appropriately. I actually find that the hardest thing to do in my own career, like this on my own leap that I take, managing a bigger latitude. When you manage a wider scope, you have to zoom out because you need to have a good understanding of what's going on around you, and then you also have to zoom in and be micro sometimes to make sure that you don't let some of the smaller things slip through the cracks. And I've just never seen anyone in my entire life be better at that than Robert. And I think that a lot of that comes with, A, I mean, just like the horsepower, but B, running a 20,000-person org and kind of getting the pattern recognition in of what is important to look at versus not. And it's funny because Robert and I are both strong-willed in different ways and we don't always agree. And I will say this to his credit is like if I was to- if there was some like magical scoreboard that every time in your life you got into a disagreement with someone, you had a scoreboard, I feel like I win against almost everyone I know. And I say that not humbly for a moment because I feel like I'm usually right about stuff. And I'm just like losing by a million miles to Robert. It feels like every time we get into a disagreement about something, he ends up being like very right. And it's really, really cool because then there's this huge amount of trust that gets built up around that too, because you see like the deep, deep experience around what we should be focused on. And then just being relentless on keeping everyone focused and keeping everyone down the right path while making people feel like it's important and while making people feel like they have something to do with it, which I think is a huge part of it.
Robert Hayes: Here's the thing though, Eric, I don't even know we're in disagreements. That’s how good of a CCO he is. Like, I didn't even know there was a disagreement. He's got this scoreboard going and it's invisible to me.
Eric Jorgenson: He's got a spreadsheet of it. That's that client service instinct, you didn't even know you were in trouble. Chris, I've had that feeling where I'm just like, whether it's an hour later or a year later, just being like, oh, thank God, he's the CEO or she's the CEO. Like they have such better context for that decision that I felt like I had high conviction on, but you just have the reps or the perspective, and Robert, you’ve been in this industry for your whole career in a high intensity way, so it really kind of pays off I think instinctually or not to see something like this grow.
Robert Hayes: Yeah. It's just, there really is an art, I think, to leadership. And I think watching a lot of things. Like sometimes I think Chris gets the most done when I start to tell him stories of stuff that we've dealt with before. It's always funny to hear him like, hey, I've got a crazy one for you. And I'm like that's not crazy. It's just leadership. And people are I just think very diverse. And so, there's so many examples that you get to see and so many mistakes that you get to make. And I mean, that's why I say I was very fortunate to be in the industry I was in, because although it was very unsexy, not a lot of people wanted to be in it, it was kind of frowned upon, it just gave me tremendous leadership experience at a very young age, which allowed me to kind of advance down that path very, very quickly. So, you name what the specific employee issue is, I have seen it probably a couple of times. And so, it seems like gut instinct, but it's almost like more just pattern recognition.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, it seems like that was a huge asset to the stunning speed of Athena for the last year or so. Has it been about a year since you joined, Robert?
Robert Hayes: Yeah, just over a year.
Eric Jorgenson: So, will you take us through kind of your first year and where Athena was at when you joined and kind of catch us up through today?
Robert Hayes: So yeah, about a year ago, me and Jonathan sat down and said like, well, what do we want this thing to be? Where do we want to go? And scale and scope was something that he was very interested in. And I mean, that's kind of my forte. So, we sat down and we kind of built out a model. So, we first sat down and agreed, and I've worked with a lot of founders over the years. The second thing we had to do was sit down and talk about rules of engagement, how we're going to work together, where ownership lays within the business, who gets input on what because oftentimes when you're working with founders and you're building a business, a lot of confrontation can pop up. So, you need kind of that foundation of trust and that relationship kind of set clearly at the beginning. I've done a lot of that over my life, and I much prefer to have the rules of engagement there so that we both understand the expectations of each other. And so, yeah, built the map, built the rules of engagement, and then it's time to get going.
Eric Jorgenson: Before we do that, I feel like it's possible that I skipped a step since we obviously know what Athena is, but maybe like to the uninitiated, how would you describe Athena, and what was sort of the pitch, I guess, that brought you into the company to even like sort of entertain talking with Jonathan and getting excited about it in the first place?
Robert Hayes: Yeah. I mentioned the common values first because that's always very important for me. Both of us have been kind of through big growth stories of successful companies. So, I think first off, getting common values, it's actually kind of difficult. And so, why he started the company, I think that spoke to his values. We got our families together, so my wife and kids, his wife and kids, and we just say is this something that can stand the test of time? So, we built a relationship that way, spent a little bit of time together, and then, kind of sat down and talked about shared visions, and that kind of primed us. Now, the shared vision itself specifically was Jonathan had set up a shop with Thumbtack, which is what ultimately became kind of this fledgling Athena group. And there was about 80 people that he had kind of in this company that he had saved their jobs. And so, when he spoke to me, he goes, Robert, there's this absolutely massively untapped market, which is people who desperately want work. And then there's this large group of people who are out there who desperately need work. They need advanced delegation techniques. There's so much possibility. There's so much market here that's completely untapped. All my friends love it. All the employees really love it. Like if we could put some sort of structure to this, this could be something extremely special. And so, Jonathan's very excited about a lot of the advanced delegation practices that he had come up with or that some of his peers had come up with. And he was basically networking through those groups, going, wow, look at all of this that is possible if we can just get this machine built properly. And then, my excitement to pair with it really comes from the fact that when I was a young executive, I started with an EA, and I thought I was- there's no way I need an EA because my workhorse level, like I was one of those guys that would work 20 hour days, six days a week, I would burn the candle at both ends. And there was a big presentation to a large fortune 500 company, and I got some help from somebody. It wasn't my EA; it was somebody else's idea. And they did an absolutely fantastic job, and they basically turned this presentation around for me in no time. And I remember at that moment going, damn, how stubborn am I? And I think a lot of executives go through that where they think that if you're young and you're just really going after a successful life and you're trying to build it, you think you can always do it best and delegation basically just results in failure. And so, when me and Jonathan first started talking about those kind of advanced, excited stuff, my mind as an operator went back to that time for me when I first dove into delegation. And I thought, wow, even if the advanced delegation techniques are not quite there yet, there is certainly a huge market of guys or girls or whoever in the same position where I was, where I was stubborn, where I was not willing to accept help. Wouldn't it be great if we could be that company that could help folks? And so, that was kind of the primary. And then on the backend, I just think I've been so fortunate that continuing to give jobs to people throughout my career is probably one of the things I'm the absolute proudest of, and not only jobs to people, but jobs to people who really, really desperately need it. And there's a moment in my life that always stands out for me because I lived in the Philippines for 10 years, and this is my two companies ago. I used to drive, and I used to work graveyard shifts for the first six years that I was there. And I would drive down the street at 7:00 PM going to work. And I remember, I had a young child at the time, two years old, and I would drive to work, and there would be this one child on the side of the street with just an adult t-shirt on basically going from car to car begging. And it's a terrible, terrible thing to like see that kind of poverty on a day-to-day basis. I mean, it breaks your heart that that's the way the world truly is. But especially when you've got your own kid at home to compare. But what I would say is folks over there desperately need the help. When they get the jobs, they can pay to get out of that poverty. And I just saw the difference that our companies, even the companies that weren't the best, were making over there by giving jobs. And so part of my passion to continue to keep putting in the hours, to keep working, really does stem from the fact that I think if there's companies that behave well and that go to those places and see it as a tremendous opportunity to set the tone and take care of people at the same time as delivering excellent service to the clients, I just think it's an extremely positive thing to accomplish. And it's a moment of- it's a very big motivating factor I think for me overall to continue.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I like that a lot. And that feels similarly, and it makes it difficult to empathize sometimes with the people who seem to think there's some inherent moral problem with employing someone outside your native country. Like that seems like illogical and somewhat insane to me. And I kind of try to empathize with that view sometimes, but it's- especially in this context, when you think about how much of an impact you can have by bringing some of the well-developed practices and perks, and I feel like sometimes arbitrage has a negative connotation. It's like very positive arbitrage. Like you can have a significant impact as an average person by contributing in the Philippines and hiring someone there or in a place like it.
Robert Hayes: Yeah. It's not just the Philippines. I mean, I think the Philippines is- There are certain things about the Philippines that make it a great place to be. I mean, there's a lot of other logistical components that I think make the Philippines great. But I just think going to economically disenfranchised locations, I mean, that's one of the most beautiful things about technology these days. I mean, now we can reach out and get the best of the best of people from any region. And so, it's really interesting. I think if you have the top 10% of people in the US are just amazingly talented, high IQ, just passionate, all this. In my opinion, the same exists in every single country. But when you come to a country like the US, it's extremely competitive to get that level of talent. And so whatever arena you enter into, some of that talent is sitting there with no job in some of those markets. And so, it just makes so much sense that if you want that top tier talent, why not go to somewhere where that talent is sitting there not doing anything. And so, I don't think, from my experience in the different countries and when I was with TaskUs, we worked with India and Greece and Ireland and Mexico and all over. And I kind of see the same thing, that there can be cultural nuances that can make some things difficult, but for the most part, there are extremely skilled people waiting for the opportunity, and the Philippines is a great place, but there's lots of other places that are equally excellent.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, absolutely. So, Chris, maybe, what was it for you that drew you in? Was it Jonathan and you had a similar alignment? Was it knowing that Robert was going to kind of head this thing up? At what point in the past year or so in Robert's reign did you join?
Chris Ho: So, I joined in September. I think my start date was September 6th. And I mean, I think throughout the interview process and throughout the process of these two guys coming to bring me into the fold, I was really, really excited about a couple of different things. The first is that I think you have to- to work at a company like Athena, and we touched on it, we're connecting people around the world, which I think is really, really powerful. And I think some of the things that you have to believe is that you have to believe that, like Robert said, people all around the world are more or less equal, that there aren't certain parts of the world that are inherently better or smarter than other places in the world. I think you have to also believe that worldwide talent is going to continue to get harder to find rather than easier. And I think there's actually like- when someone just says it like that, it's easy to nod and agree, but there's a whole contingent of people that would think that talent is going to get easier to find because there's going to be unemployment from AI and machine learning and all that kind of stuff. And so, I'm firmly in the camp that talent and good talent is going to continually get more and more competitive. And then I think that the other thing that you have to believe is that, like I said, we're connecting the world and people are- no one place is better than the others. You have to believe that people around the world can actually work together. And you use the term arbitrage, and I don't want to explore that too deeply necessarily, but what I do want to talk a little bit about is the fact that you- I think there are some people that have this notion that when you work with someone across the world, you're taking advantage of them in some way, shape, or form.
Eric Jorgenson: There seem to be some people now who just equate the word hirer with the word exploit, which just is not- those words are not the same word.
Chris Ho: And I'm fully with you. And I think that what Robert and Jonathan’s vision and what they were describing to me, it was so beautiful to me. And I don't say that lightly, or I'm not trying to make it like dramatized or anything like that. It was a big decision for me to come and join up. And it was truly beautiful to me that what they described to me was we're going to connect these incredible people across the world. We're going to connect some of the best and brightest in the Philippines and perhaps other nations as well, with some of the best and brightest principals or executives, people that are like making legitimate change all around the world, we're going to connect them together. We're going to give people a good sense of how small the world can be, and we're going to teach these people, both the clients and the EAs, how to use their time better and how to do more together. Like do more together. Like it's actually so crazy if you just think about it like that. But you can get everyone together in such a way that it's really, really beautiful because you're changing two lives at once, and it can be very transformative. So, it's just so exciting for me.
Eric Jorgenson: The closer I have gotten to it and the bigger my sort of sample size has gotten, and I know my experience with Athena has been great. I know my EA is wonderful and very grateful for the opportunity and is like learning and excited. But seeing and meeting hundreds of other EAs and seeing that broadly has like given me, similar to your describing, like a deep sense of the beauty of the win-win that you guys are facilitating here, which I think is incredibly cool. And there’s so- maybe I hope that's what we can kind of get into now, like maybe in the context of the exciting past year you guys have had. But everything that goes into creating a great experience on both sides, for your clients and for EAs, it's a lot more than- I feel like the simplified look is like, oh, it's a staffing company. Like you make a match, and there is just so, so, so much more that goes into both sides of this and all the kind of magic in the middle that I'm sure and I know you've seen firsthand all of the work that you guys have put into that.
Robert Hayes: There's a lot. And I think it's important to start with when you first say just hiring somebody, that's a difficult process on its own. But certainly, that is fairly common. There's also the method, which I think is an interesting thing. Even having a one-to-one relationship or assigning a person to another person or making that match, that's not something that I think the industry necessarily agrees on. So, one of the things the industry I think agrees on is you take a task, you send it somewhere, it gets done, it comes back. That's kind of the fundamental agreement of the industry today. And one thing that Athena I think has decided is that the relationship and the expectations matter a lot. If you don't have that relationship built, if those expectations haven't been set over time, if that communication, that tone is not set correctly, that a lot can be missed. And so, I think one of the first things we've done is we said, no, this is the way to do it. And so, we've made that kind of clear, that it's going to be rocky. There's going to be some mismatches up early. There's going to be a learning phase, as I'm sure you had with your EA, Eric. But it's fundamental to go through that behavior change because otherwise you can't get to this kind of elite level of delegation where you have teams and practices and expectations being continually met. And so, I think first off, of all the other organizations we've seen, that's not very common that they're that firm on that. And it's not very common that this is a personal and professional relationship. This isn't just rudimentary tasks or calendar management, that it's a collection of different things with a quest to kind of like amplify yourself over a longer period of time. That's the premise of the start for Athena. So, I don't know if I articulated that great. Chris is probably better with the words, but I do think that that's an important part to call out because I don't see a lot of people, especially who are overseas, working that way. I've seen onshore folks, companies, doing some of that but very, very few offshore. More often than not, they either charge per hour or per task and the relationship doesn't stay consistent for a long period of time.
Eric Jorgenson: That's one of the interesting hard stances as a brand and a service that I feel like Athena took, which is like we are full-time, long-term matches only and actually kind of dug in on that. At first, I was kind of like, ah, I don't think I need a full-time person. Like I could probably get away with 10 hours a week. And it was such a- you are so correct to hold that line because as soon as I got matched and got in there, it totally changed my thinking from how little help can I get away with to how do I maximally use this incredible new resource that I have, what else can I do or give them or delegate that really like totally changed the frame for me. And I think, I'm sure it is a simpler and better business to run, but it is also a much stronger service from my point of view as a client because of that decision.
Chris Ho: It's funny because it's such a hard line in the sand to draw. A lot of people- It's funny, it's even, our client base, as you might be able to tell, because it's still an expensive service, the relatively wealthy people, potentially that are further along in their careers, there's also a lot of founders in the technology space, and yet still, there's a lot of tentative- There's still a real tentative nature around getting an executive assistant. There's a lot of people that are bashful about it. There are a lot of people that wonder maybe I don't- maybe it's not necessarily do I deserve this, but like I don't necessarily need this because I can do some of this stuff myself. And it's interesting, you see all these different types of profiles of clients that are really, really tentative, just like you yourself were, Eric. And one of the things that I like to tease some of our clients about, because they say they don't have enough stuff to do, I'm just like, that's just- it just can't be true, either that or like I don't know what kind of startup you're running, but it's definitely not like the one I was running if you don't have enough stuff to give to your- I call them junior varsity. I've called it to a couple of them to their faces too.
Eric Jorgenson: It’s like a mental block where I'm so busy, oh, I don't have enough work to give a EA or I don't know how I would use this new resource, which that is a mental block that people need to get pushed over.
Chris Ho: It's a big mental block. And it is funny when I do, I say that's junior varsity, buddy. It's good to challenge those guys because they- it's interesting actually, because they'll take a moment and they'll say I guess you're right, I do have tons of stuff to do. And there's actually also with clients, while we're talking about the psychology of their different profiles, we do find that women have a much harder time thinking that they deserve an executive assistant, which is also really, really interesting. A lot of them think I don't really need it, or I can do that myself. And there's a different type of coaching that goes in around that when you're- because a lot of what we're doing in onboarding is we're priming people for a behavior change. And I think we have so- we've come so far, but we have so far to come in onboarding and getting people ready for this relationship, because a relationship with your executive assistant is the most personal professional relationship you'll ever have. I think if you were to interview a bunch of like old dudes or really seasoned executives, we'll call them, instead of old dudes, we'll say seasoned executives, that have these long-term relationships with their executive assistants, a lot of them, their closest relationships from a personal level will be with their spouses, whether it's their wife or their husband, and with their executive assistants. And a lot of what you do, or a lot of what your executive assistant takes from you as well, is a lot of the daily administration of your life. And a lot of the daily administration of your life is the daily rhythm of your life. If you ask a lot of people, how do you start your day, they get up, they have a shower, they have a coffee, maybe they exercise, they sit down and they check their email. But if you have a really strong executive assistant, you're not checking your email anymore. You might not necessarily be booking- You lose a lot of agency in booking your calendar and you lose a lot of agency in how you respond to certain things and what you see. And it's so interesting to prime people for that change because it is very disconcerting for a lot of people. I see Robert smirking so I’ll-
Robert Hayes: Well, it just occurred to me, Chris, do you remember a few years ago, Steve Jobs and these guys were all like wearing the same clothes every day because they wanted to make less decisions every single day. So, it got to that point where it's like the same outfit, that is an acceptable practice. But an EA is still such a big barrier. Like it's really interesting that was a more acceptable change to literally wear the same thing every day on repeat then to actually get help from somebody. But I think it does come back to if you don't think that the person receiving the task actually wants it, then you automatically hesitate to deliver it in the first place. Like you seem like that asshole boss or something from a TV show. But when you start to realize that their life gets so much better, they gain experience, they're learning new things, it's changing the way they think about the world, it's helping their economic circumstance, I mean, I think there's just a superpower there because it's a two-way thing. And I'll say just over my career, I've had a chance to work with a lot of people where they do amazing work, and then the economic benefits that come from some of these relationships, I mean, Chris, you have probably the most stories there, but those always really shine to me. When they get tipped in crypto or they do such an amazing job to help with an investment that they get a piece. I mean, we have so many of those really cool stories that I think fly in the face of that kind of initial hesitation, which makes it, I think for me and you especially, so surreal to imagine people still hesitating to take that first jump.
Eric Jorgenson: Give us some stories, Chris.
Chris Ho: Yeah. I mean, I'll give you some specifics, I suppose. I think that I have seen, and I remember, I've been here for about eight months, so still getting my feet wet to a large extent, and I have seen some of our executive assistants’ lives entirely change, the lives for themselves and for their families entirely change because they've had the opportunity to essentially become the right-hand person, the right-hand person to some of the most up and coming, essentially leaders of the world. I mean, maybe that's a little bit of a dramatization, but it's not really. Our client base is quite affluent. Our client base is quite powerful. And there are people that are building the next unicorns. We have plenty of clients that are at these unicorns. We have plenty of clients that are essentially building the technology of tomorrow or running industries that affect our everyday lives. And our executive assistants, they get to be that person's right-hand person. And really, I mean, literally in the eight months that I've been here, I've seen on multiple occasions lives being completely changed from an economic standpoint because of something that the client has provided to that executive assistant, whether it be direct compensation or equity or some opportunity to come lead a team. And it has been- it's honestly like every time I hear about it, it makes me want to work harder here.
Robert Hayes: Yeah, it's almost like- it feels like every month now where a client is asking for their EA to be flown to another country, Mexico or the US, or go to a board meeting here or join the team get together in this place, or that EA starts to get involved with some of the advanced executive level hiring. It's pretty amazing stuff. But I'll say the one that kind of surprised me the most, one of the EAs, I meet with them every week, and she was telling me that one of her primary responsibilities, believe it or not, is to maintain a family Slack room where she helps the family stay bonded over distances by like getting them to ask about their day or booking next dinners. She'll do things like there's family questions of the day that everybody has to answer. So, the EA is actually like a center point in that family to kind of keep them bonded. And actually, feels like they are part of the family because they're such a central component. And it's just things that you wouldn't- you are so surprised that those type of relationships are in place. And then it makes you reflect on your own family relationships and go, wait a minute, if I'm growing away from my mom or dad because they live on the other coast or something like that, would a practice like that kind of help us stay tighter and more bonded as a family? And that's why going back to the junior varsity comment, when you hear that, like, oh, I don't have enough to delegate or you hear things like I just do the Amazon myself, you start to go like, okay, but what opportunity is being left on the table, either opportunity to expand your output, to be able to do more, to achieve more, to hit your goals faster, or the ability to achieve the same and relax way more, have way more time to yourself, spend more time on the beach. And different people have different ambitions, but those are probably the two most common. Which is I want to achieve the same but hang out and relax and enjoy my life. Or I want to superpower myself and 10X my output, so I've got three jobs and I've hit my bucket list before the age of 45.
Eric Jorgenson: This is why this is the right podcast because that is literally an entire commercial for thinking in leverage without using the word. But Athena has like leverage in your tagline, or at least you used to, like the homepage was like giving leverage to the world, or like- what is either your personal or kind of the organization's take on that? I mean, do you talk about that openly? Do you think about it intentionally?
Robert Hayes: Yeah, we've thrown this back and forth, and we're a startup company, and the nomenclature is always so tough. We're trying to embody this feeling that we're trying to achieve. And so right now, we're really focused on basically time. Like time is the one resource that is not scalable. Time is the resource that you have a very finite supply of, and that every moment of every day that you spend, that's a decision that you are making that you cannot take back and that you can't exchange. And so, for us, if you spend even 15 minutes a day for your entire life on just purchasing Amazon products, that's a pretty bad decision when it comes to your overall-
Eric Jorgenson: Your hourly rate.
Robert Hayes: Exactly. But here's the interesting part that I think a lot of people need to think about, and I think Chris really hits on this well, is if it takes you two hours to delegate that task, but it's gone forever, then you've got to start measuring that. But what usually happens is people do it for an hour, the EA fails, or the process fails for some reason, and I'll just do it. So, they spend the hour and then they go right back to doing the 15 minutes immediately after, instead of finishing that two hour investment to get it trained properly and communicated properly and delegated forever. And so, it's that first two hour component when it comes to leverage that I think is probably the biggest challenge that our business faces, but that really any executive faces.
Chris Ho: I think Robert hit on it. There's actually kind of three points I just want to hit on to give you that piece- that piece on leverage that you're looking for the pod. I mean, one of the coolest things for me, so I've been working with Sam for eight months.
Eric Jorgenson: Is Sam your EA?
Chris Ho: Sam is my EA. She's wonderful. And one of the really cool things that she has been great at and that I love is that it's really since for the last seven months or so, so about one month in, what I did is I essentially put together a list of all the important people in my life, gave her access to my Facebook and Instagram, and kind of went through and just categorized the people that I might want to send gifts to for certain events and all that kind of stuff. And it is so cool because it's gotten to the point where there's like essentially some like things that- there's like a baby book that I really like to send to people that are just having a kid or something for weddings or something for birthdays. And you kind of go and classify who's acceptable to give what. It is so cool because now people think that I'm more thoughtful than I am. Honestly. It's like I got this note from a buddy the other day being like, oh my God, this book is so cool, like I really appreciate it, like me and, his name's Kevin, me and Yana love it, thank you so much. And funny enough, and this is going to sound terrible, but I actually didn't know that he had had a kid, but I had sent him a gift. And now I have this superpower, which is crazy. And I texted him and I was like, oh my God, this is amazing, and we caught up and all that kind of stuff. But so, Sam is taking care of that and making- that is like- that's the definition of leverage. Like I am potentially being- and some people might say that's cheating.
Eric Jorgenson: You are doing things you didn’t even know you were doing.
Chris Ho: Correct. Which is really, really- like that's part of the SOP. The other part that I wanted to circle back on, because Robert's family story really resonated with me, because one of the coolest stories that I heard was from a client who we won't talk about what the client's name is, but he came to me, and this was back actually back when I had pretty much first started because I was running his kickoff call and his discovery call. And I was kicking him off with an executive assistant, and one of the things that he had said in his goals was I want to spend more time with my wife and my two daughters. I'm putting all my time and energy into this startup. It's going great, but I do feel really guilty that I'm not spending enough time with them. And I feel like a lot of regret that I'm missing some of their stuff. And so, they were like perfect. The EA said okay, I'm going to make sure some of this stuff gets booked in. And really actually what ended up happening is we come back about a month later, and I wasn't in this particular call, but he messaged me, and he said I just got called out by my EA. My EA told me I was being a dick. And I said what? And so, he tells me the story, and he goes, yeah, he over the course of the first month, I had got a- she had booked a bunch of stuff for me with my wife and kids, and I had canceled some of the things. And I had to- literally, it was like the prototypical story. Like he had missed the soccer game, literally of like his two daughters, they were on the same team, and they're playing at soccer thing, and he said he was going to go, and he didn't. And his EA called them out. And I love that story so much. And his EA said stop being a dick and pay attention to your family, like get your priorities in order. And one of the things that you have to remember is that the executive assistant and client relationship is super, super tough for the EA because there's a huge socioeconomic difference, there's a huge seniority difference. There's like big gaps in terms of the level of sophistication that the client may have versus what the EA may have. Because an EA, no matter how wonderful they are and no matter how well we source and train and all that kind of stuff, they're still junior resources, which is part of the battle and part of why onboarding can be really challenging. Because you're taking this junior resource and you're putting them into a different world and they're trying to emulate the person and they're trying to be responsible for them and be this bastion of hope essentially.
Eric Jorgenson: Trying to represent them in a culture that they don't totally understand. That's a really hard challenge.
Chris Ho: A hundred percent. And so, when I heard that this EA was holding him accountable to his actions, I was like blown away, and I was so happy because one of the things, and now like we're getting- again, I'm getting into my eighth month with Sam here, Sam holds me accountable to stuff and like scolds me for doing stuff that I'm not supposed to do or holds me accountable to. And when you have an accountability partner that knows and understands your context and when your EA can be your accountability partner, that is extremely powerful and something that we're trying to drive towards as well. So having someone hold you accountable to your own progress, both personally and professionally, that's a superpower in and of itself.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I have that relationship with Ivan even in very subtle ways. I mean, he just says, hey, you said you wanted to write a blog post every week, do you have a blog post ready this week? And it's like the politest reminder that I'm not living up to my past self’s expectations ever. And I'm like, oh, all right, all right, here I go, here I go. Thank you. Thank you for the reminder. But yeah. I feel like we could do- I can spend hours digging through your guys' brain and experience for this. And I kind of want to because I feel like that will just be an entire amazing podcast unto itself. I have an inexhaustible appetite for out of the box tasks and just like great stories of delegation, like whether it's really impressive or really small, or like this accountability story's amazing. This family group chat is amazing. Like some of these advanced delegation like tactics, I guess, that you guys talk about. And I mean, to me, one of the most compelling things about Athena is the community of EAs and the playbooks that get generated and the techniques and everything that they are either learning independently and then sharing or that you are like training them even before we get matched, like tools and playbooks and techniques. All of that is so exciting. And every like kind of little case study that I hear is like just more brain candy for me.
Robert Hayes: Yeah. Well, I'll kick it off and I'll throw it over to Chris for the learning [inaudible 58:44] a little bit more in the weeds than me. But for a recruiting process, we look for the factors that best match what we expect our executives to expect. So, we're trying to understand our demographic, which is why we're pretty tight. So, we already mentioned right off the bat that we are looking at our executives and going, hey, this is the type of people that we're going to be working with, early-stage tech founders, like early-stage executives, people who are founding new companies. Like that's really who we focus on, and we try and understand the challenges and the needs of those people in particular. And so, it goes all the way back to the recruitment process. So, we're doing social media screens, we're doing playbook tests. So, we take mock examples that we've pulled from many executives that say, hey, these are the types of things you're going to be doing. We've put them through that screening process with high, high rigor, very, very early in the process. All kinds of financial background checks. We basically run the entire gamut of checks in the Philippines that are available to us. And then we use a very, very discerning process to get that eliminated. So, our credibility in the Philippines has grown exponentially. We're attracting about 3000 applications per week right now.
Eric Jorgenson: That is insane. For how many openings?
Robert Hayes: Well, we just have the one post. We do about 50 or so matches that we are trying to maintain. We're actually trying to keep it low. Believe it or not, our growth is too crazy. But yeah, 50 is the target that we had set, even though we've exceeded that quite a bit. And yeah, we get about 3000 per week. So, we go through that whole list of folks. There's a big automated, upfront process. And then we convert it into a manual process towards the end where we do in-person, or sorry, over video call, but with a person to make sure everything matches. And then once we even get to that process, then on top of that, we allow the executive to choose the person as well based on a video presentation of that person. So, we coach and guide them, hey, this is the job, this is the way it works, this is the way it looks. Talk about yourself, talk about your feel, who you are, how you work with your community, what your life situation is. And then we put those videos in front of the folks at the front of the waitlist to say, hey, here are the folks that we've screened. We've already gone through 3000 applications or so to get to this person. We think that they're an absolutely great match. What do you feel? And then the client at that point makes the decision. Now there's a bonded start. I chose them, there's that match that gets made. There's a commitment and trust that can get built. And so that process then shuttles off, and then we have onboarding and all sorts of other processes that Chris can illuminate on. But right before we get to that process, like that matching process, Chris dives in on like a ton of different training modules, which I'm sure he can highlight at least one or two.
Eric Jorgenson: And it's interesting to hear that because my perspective from the client side is that like my hand was held for maybe a month, at least a couple of weeks on the way towards that, that's kind of like, hey, in order to effectively work with your EA, here's what your expectations need to be, here are the tools that you need to have in place, here are the mindset shifts that maybe you need to think about, here's how much time it's going to take in the first weeks to onboard. Like I had never worked with an EA before when I joined Athena. And I was like there's a high chance that I just suck at this for a meaningful period of time. And I don't know how to get better at it without spending way more time. Like I need a coach. And that was the experience for me. It was like a scaled version of like, hey, we're going to coach you through and just kind of like fail-proof this new adventure for you as like a client coming in, while you're kind of like upskilling and filtering on the EA side.
Robert Hayes: That's where we want to specialize too. Because Chris was talking about it the other day when we were diving in a bit, that folks who have had EAs before successfully are really not the best demographic for us. Like that's not necessarily what we're trying to go after. What we're trying to go after is really those executives who are starting, they could have failed a number of times before. We find great success in those situations because they try the cheaper services or the per piece services, and it doesn't work out. A lot of folks like that. Yeah. And then, we can guide from there. So that's kind of the niche that we target. That's where we think we offer the most value. And that's what we want to continue to focus on as time progresses.
Eric Jorgenson: Chris, do you want to talk about some of the kind of last mile like tools and playbook training that they go through?
Chris Ho: And Robert actually brought up a good point to frame this. Our competitors, for the most part, or the other people in market where Robert said you send a task across the world and it comes back complete, I think a huge portion of different companies that are trying to solve this problem, they're trying to do as much as possible to take the human element out of it as much as possible. They're trying to Mechanical Turk everything. And they are trying to maybe pool a bunch of tasks together from a whole bunch of different people and then get them done on a very transactional basis. And so, for us to differentiate and for us to live the mission, essentially, that we're trying to achieve, which is provide incredible career opportunity on one side, provide incredible leverage on the other side, and put those two things together, we focus a lot more on actually our perspective on the way that certain things should be done. And so all of our training modules start with a perspective. And so, I'll conceptualize that with an example. And one of those examples is what is our perspective on calendar management? Calendar management, we have a certain perspective on how executives or how someone that's really busy should manage their time. And a lot of it is around how does an executive’s energy levels wane, like there's a sine wave of your energy levels throughout the day. And so, our perspective based on calendar management is understanding with your principal – your principal is the client on the executive side. The executive assistant, we ask them, make sure you understand with your principal the energy levels of your client. Like, are they an early morning person? Are they a late-night person? Are they someone that thrives with asynchronicity? Do they need to be synchronous? I, as an example, am trying to do things a little bit more asynchronous just to play around with it. Whereas like Jonathan loves like leaving me voice notes and leaving me Loom videos and all this kind of stuff. And I'm really trying to get to a good sense of it and really trying to figure out a way to integrate that a little bit more into my life. There's some people or some executives, for instance, that love having an opportunity to compose themselves before a meeting. So, it's like don't book your principal in back-to-back meetings if they like to have a moment to catch their breath and like they hate being late for things and make sure that they've got their energy level still up. Whereas other people love being back-to-back. And they're like it’s such a waste of time to like be in a meeting and then 15 minutes, and then in another meeting and then 15 minutes, then in another meeting, because they feel like there is this huge switching cost that they don't want to be in. They want to have a chunk of meetings all back-to-back so that they don't have that context switching cost. And on that note, like context switching is extremely painful. Context switching is extremely painful for everyone. And so, in there, in our perspective, it's like try to organize your client's calendar in a way where they're doing as little context switching as possible. Now, what does that mean? Because that's a foreign term to a lot of people. It's make sure that like things are grouped so that there's less context switching. Make sure that if you have a meeting with someone that is directly relevant to someone else on your team, for instance, that comes- and so what we're essentially trying to do is we're trying to get our executive assistants trained up in a way that the thought process behind actual calendar management comes from an actual perspective or a point of view, as opposed to just this is how you use Google calendar, make sure that- and so, that's like the basis of a lot of our playbooks is that we have a white paper, and a white paper just means a perspective piece essentially, so we write our Athena perspective on how something should be done. And then there's two components to it, an instructional module that goes into our learning management system, and EAs go through essentially like an academy, we call it the Athena academy, and watch those videos and learn and do quizzes and all that kind of stuff to figure out did I understand, did I actually like capture this material? And then we have playbooks, and the playbooks are very much in their fledgling state, and we're experimenting actually in beta with a lot of people around how to actually customize these playbooks to make them like instead of just Athena's version of the playbook, it's Eric's version of the playbook. And one of the really exciting things around this is this concept of everyone in the world should have a user manual for themselves. And so, that's like really what we're building right now. And it's very fledgling, and if there are other Athena- I'm sure I'm going to die for this because Athena clients are going to be like I heard you on Eric's podcast, and I want to know about my user manual. We are building it, and it's going to be epic, and it's going to be incredible. And it's this concept of, yeah, everyone has a user guide and other people can learn how to work with you. And it sounds like a little bit egocentric, but you can be the center of your own universe and you can teach people how to work with you and how to work around you and how to help you live the life that you want to live. And that's your prerogative. And so, that's what the client playbooks are becoming. And it's very exciting.
Eric Jorgenson: I mean, I sat in on some of those training sessions when I was over there, and seriously, it looks like probably the training that you went through when you were new at Deloitte. It's like here's how you pull in data, analyze, like construct an actual- Here's how you communicate a proposed decision with data at the back. Like it's an amazing education, like upskilling all these EAs and showing them in context how to make decisions on behalf of their client or at least propose them is incredible. Can you tell us what some of the playbooks are? Because I feel like that is exciting. When I hear- we talked a fair bit about like how each of you use your assistants. So, what systems you've come up with, and then we kind of like share these playbooks and it's like, oh, Chris has this like recipe kitchen, grocery thing figured out; I want to have that figured out, like show me how you solved it. Like, let me have that playbook.
Chris Ho: Yeah. So, I'll give you the structure, and the structure is kind of a life map type of structure that we're going through right now. And if you think about your life in different pillars of your life, I think almost everyone would agree with you that health is one of the pillars of your life. And you can break down health into exercise, diet, and sleep. And so, we're building out playbooks around, for instance, diet is one. It's hey, your principal or your client wants to cook more at home. That's a really common one that we get. Why do you want to cook more at home? Well, because there's so many amazing reasons to cook more at home. You can eat healthier, you can spend more time with your significant other or with your family, and it's another tool in your arsenal of living a beautiful life, honestly, if you can nourish yourself and nourish your loved ones. And so of course, it's a common request. But one of the hard things about cooking for yourself if you're running a fledgling company, or let's be honest, if you're a high-powered executive of some sort that has an executive assistant, you're probably really busy. And so, you probably often order out or eat out substantially more than you would otherwise want to. And so, one of the things that an executive assistant can help you with, and this is one of the instructional modules that we're going through and we're teaching our executive assistants about, is how do you take as much of the cognitive load of cooking at home away from your principal? The cognitive load, a lot of that cognitive load is you have to decide what you're going to eat. You have to decide on what that recipe is. You have to make sure that those ingredients are fresh and at your house. And you have to make sure that you have the time and are with the right people and have the right amount of stuff. And there's a whole bunch of cognitive load that goes into planning, that again, I talked about earlier, that daily administration of your life or that weekly administration of your life, that falls into it as cooking that meal. And so, one of the instructional modules that we're building out, and it's getting more and more advanced because it's so contextual, is this idea of right now, we're getting to a pretty- Melissa is my wonderful wife. Shout out to Mel. She and I are getting to this awesome place with our executive assistants where Mel will kind of decide on a couple of things and will say, hey, we're going to cook four times this week, here are the four things we're going to cook, send them off to Tazan who is her executive assistant, and then everything that we need and the right amounts of what we need arrives at our doorstep. Now, the first couple of times we tried this, obviously it was super painful because some of the stuff- like it was not the right brands or not the right amount of stuff or-
Eric Jorgenson: Bottles of red wine vinegar.
Chris Ho: Well, this is the thing. Like again, there's cultural differences. There's contextual differences. So, literally the first couple times we tried this, it didn't work out very well, but we just stuck at it and stuck at it and stuck at it, and now, it's freaking amazing. It's actually amazing.
Eric Jorgenson: It's like that second hour that Robert talked about. Like, if your expectations are set that this is only going to take 15 minutes to delegate, it's a world of hurt. You'll never get it done.
Robert Hayes: It's funny you say that too Chris, because my wife has a big case of baby wipes in the garage because we were doing the same thing with like diapers and a lot of the repetitive tasks. So, one day we just got this huge case of baby wipes, so we're set for life. But that's a small price to pay for not having to ever think about that ever again.
Eric Jorgenson: You truly have to make different trade-offs. Like I find myself doing- I'm like, oh, this was so wasteful. And then I'm like we got an extra head of lettuce. What is that $3? We'll give it to our neighbor. Like this was absolutely within the acceptable margin of error of it's not like this was a failed experiment by any means.
Robert Hayes: You can't be afraid to fail. You gotta own it.
Eric Jorgenson: What are the single like most exciting or biggest moments of relief or whatever, like of single things that you guys have used your EAs for? I know for me, there's definitely bigger projects that Ivan has done, but anytime I can have him call customer service on my behalf, there is no greater joy in my life then- I hate phone trees more than anything else in the world. And Ivan, before he worked with me, he worked in an AT&T call center. He was like a call trainer. And so, knowing that I'm sending like a trained assassin into the call center ecosystem, that he knows how to work the system, and can like get that stuff done for me is just, it gives me such elation. Is there anything else that like you guys do that makes you that happy?
Robert Hayes: Yeah. I mean, I'll use two examples. One that seems small, but I think it really does matter in the grand scheme of things, it's stuff that you don't ask for that you don't expect that happens and surprises you. So, once you have this EA relationship built, there's that tough period, then you get a bond built, then the things that you asked for are getting done. But then after you've had this EA relationship for a long period of time, then stuff starts to happen that you didn't even ask for that you love. So, a good point was when I was over in the Philippines, I was traveling through the Philippines for work, and then I was going back to Thailand to meet my family. And I had a stopover at the hotel, and I had like maybe four or five hours. Booked a massage for me, happened, didn't even think about it. Just proactive. Yeah, you had long travel, you were on a long flight, it would've been great to relax. And it was just that kind of like somebody doing that for you, just it makes a world of difference when you're in those kinds of spots after a long day of travel. The other one saved my other company. So, I have a construction company that I founded with a friend of mine here on the island. And what we found out was we found out that there was the government has to post for projects. And so, there's a lot of these websites particularly for the provincial government here in Canada. And so, we would basically bid and all this. And so, our EA just started bidding on pretty much every project possible that we could find using a set criteria that we had kind of built out. And when you can have that kind of like machine going, which here in Canada, it would be so difficult to have that kind of a machine built. But when you've got remote support, you have that machine built, you can put lots of these bids in using data that's readily available and you can just keep going. We've had like quarter million dollar contract wins just because of that process. And so, from a cashflow perspective for the business, even if sometimes the profitability might be off by a little bit, you just keep rolling. You keep moving into more and more projects, building credibility. And so, it's things like that that I never would've expected that really turned into an absolutely huge win, just because you start to open yourself up to the possibilities of these other techniques as well.
Chris Ho: Yeah, and I think one of the things that I didn't expect, because this is not tactical, this is literally just- this is just peace of mind, I suppose. But before I had my executive assistant, sometimes it's scary to sit down and do work for- if you get into like a really amazing flow and you get into that flow state and like it's so amazing because you feel so productive and you're like, fuck, I put in a good day's work and like I'm going to sleep like a baby. And you can actually sit there and work for like 10 hours in a row. And for me sometimes, like if I get into a real flow state, you can go for like 16 hours in a row. And it's like kind of weird and not everyone will do that. But I'm sure everyone has experienced that flow state before. And especially if you're a high performer, you've probably experienced that flow state before. Having an executive assistant has given me way more of that flow state, not because of anything she's actually done or how strong she is necessarily, but because I know that someone's watching my email and I know that someone’s got my back on emergencies, so I don't feel like I need to go and check and interrupt that flow state. And so that is like a huge under- we don't even really talk about that with anyone, and maybe we should. Actually, maybe that's my fault. Maybe I should be telling more people about that because it's actually this incredible feeling that someone has your back, that someone's watching out for things that might come in, that they can take care of because almost nothing is like you need to be reachable at all times. And maybe you can put on your emergency ringer or whatever it may be, but it's really, to me, just a special part of having an executive assistant or having someone that you can trust watching out for you, is getting into those flow states.
Eric Jorgenson: When you talk to somebody who is a prospective client, how does someone know when they need an EA, when they're like ready for that in their career or what the like- how to kind of look at the opportunity cost of- because I think the cost of this is lower than people think or would imagine. I mean, certainly it's not the equivalent of effort or cost of doing this in the US where you're like, oh, I have to take on like a $50,000 a year expense, plus I have to figure out the overhead and how to manage payroll and like, wait, do I owe this person benefits? Like all of the overhead around that. So, what is kind of the tipping point of this is a no-brainer if these either life circumstances or professional circumstances or hourly rates, however you want to kind of classify it. Not financial advice.
Chris Ho: No, it's not financial advice at all, but I will have a- I'll have an answer that is going to maybe sound a little bit snarky, but it's really like what I actually believe. And that is once you reach a level of comfort with yourself around how you want things done and how you're going to do things, you are ready for an executive assistant. If you can economically- if it economically makes sense in terms of outsourcing some part of your own responsibilities, the place where we see the people not have success is if they can't articulate what they want or they can't articulate how they feel about things. And that's why we see the people that are most ready to have an executive assistant are system thinkers of some sort. They have a system, or they have an SOP, a standard operating procedure for how they believe that things are going to get done. There are two other things that are essential. One is that the person needs to have an understanding of their locus of control. And when I say locus of control, what I mean is like how comfortable people are giving up a little bit of agency. And then also how comfortable are people with something that is not 100% the way that they themselves would do it. And so, it's kind of like a perfectionist score of some sort, because we do see some clients come in and dramatically fail with us. I'm not going to pretend that we're perfect. We see some clients come in and dramatically fail with us because they either can't give up the agency that they need to to effectively work with an executive assistant, or they're not comfortable with any type of quality drop-off in something that gets done. And the way that I'll describe that is that imagine it was me and you, Eric, imagine I was your executive assistant, imagine I was your Chief of Staff and I was the Chief of Staff- even if you're telling me, and we share a lot of context. We're both entrepreneurial, relatively young men in the context of everything. We share a ton of context. I probably know how you like certain things. We're not like super close friends or anything like that, but I probably have a really good sense of how you like things and what you would want done. And even if you tell me to do something, I'm not going to do it 100% the way that you would want to do it, I'm not going to understand 100% of your full intention. And you're going to have less agency than if you do it yourself. And now take that with an executive assistant, and again, there's a socioeconomic divide. There's an international divide. There's oftentimes sometimes a gender divide as well.
Eric Jorgenson: Cultural, contextual.
Chris Ho: Yeah, correct. And so, when a person is ready to have an executive assistant, they have to be at a certain level of comfort with themselves. They have to have a certain level of sophistication in the way that they're thinking. And they have to be able to understand at least where they're going to struggle giving up some control, giving up some agency, because the trade-off, the implicit trade-off that you make with delegation is you might not get 100% of exactly what you meant across, and you might not get 100% control of what you're doing, but you get every second of the time back.
Eric Jorgenson: And if you have- I remember kind of doing the napkin math of like here's what I kind of think my time is worth professionally, here's what kind of think my leisure time is worth personally. And it's something we talk about in the course all the time. And then I kind of did the math on like even if I'm only- even if Athena hours are half as effective, this is a 10X like ROI instantly. And I'm sure it's going to be better than that, but like the margin of error of getting a positive outcome of this, if you are in the- like I've seen somebody else drop a rule of like, which is a nice clean rule, and I don't know if it's quite true. I think there's more lifestyle to it than that. But if you make more than a hundred thousand dollars a year, you should have an EA. Or like if you have more than two kids, you should have and EA, or like if both husband and spouse work, you should have an EA. I'm sure it's not quite as easy to cut and dry like that.
Robert Hayes: From my perspective, this is how I think about it, maybe this is wrong, but this is the way I thought about it from when I first did it to as I continue to do it. Are you ready to found the corporation of you? Are you entrepreneurial enough to found the corporation of you? And do you believe in yourself enough that you know that your output is going to gain? And so, delegation is an interesting word because it usually has a negative connotation. People think of like these shows with the secretaries and the old school style. But really what you're doing is you're hiring an employee into the corporation of you. And so, I see so much opportunity for consulting work, so much opportunity to get on boards, so much opportunity to share what your true expertise is about, that you waste time on buying Amazon, doing calendars, like doing very ineffectual work. Like if you were looking at yourself as a corporation, as a business, that would be a terrible decision to diversify into a completely different stream that makes no sense and that you don't have the skill in. So, I always- I would ask the question to the client, are you ready to invest in the corporation of you? Is that a bet you're willing to make? Is that an investment that's going to have an ROI? And if you can answer that question, then I think the interesting thing that comes next is the same people who if they are willing to make that investment, they need to understand that this is an employee that they're bringing on. And that means they need to be humble, listen to them, coach them, develop them, do all the things that a good boss would do with an employee as well. And then tremendous benefits are going to come from it. You look at these entrepreneurs that are founding huge companies with 50,000 employees, nobody questions that those companies need to have a ton of employees in order to gain leverage. But for some reason, when it becomes a personal thing, all of a sudden, the context of the conversation changes a lot. So, I think if you frame it that way, I think it starts to mean like, hey, wait a minute, I just need to treat me like I'm a company.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. And I love the way that's articulated because you start to feel- when you feel constrained, when you feel like there's more of you to give than you can afford to, but you can't afford to let anything fall off the plate, but you don't know what resources to kind of reach for. Like that classic kind of trap of like I only think of leverage in one way, I haven't considered this- hiring an EA was one of the two biggest jumps in the personal leverage that I felt in my whole life. And that sort of- it was one of the things that just clicked into like, oh my God, and unlocked this whole new level of compounding, like re-investing the gains from that step back into more projects and more effectiveness and more impact. So yeah, I think that's very well-articulated.
Robert Hayes: Well, and when you see some of these people who are accomplishing the most in the world, I mean, pick your person who's got the most leverage in this whole planet, I don't think anybody would argue the fact that they have a massive family office behind them. It's not talked about, but they do. And every once in a while, a story comes out. But a lot of those folks are under such like extreme NDAs, that it's clear that the amount of leverage that they get because of those huge family offices they have behind them is exponential. So, it just, it feels to me like if leverage is the goal, if output is the goal, then having the teamwork behind you to achieve those goals is an absolute necessity. And fighting it is fighting your goals.
Eric Jorgenson: It's something you should be running towards, not shying away from. As you described that, I'm picturing like a scene of succession where there's like the main characters, and then there's just a bunch of people around them with like clipboards that you don't even know their names. It was just like a staple of that. But even, every book you've ever read, like there's one big name on the front. And when you flip to the back, you see 50 names that contributed to that person's life and this book in particular, and there's a lot of leverage, and nobody wants to shine a spotlight on how they're accomplishing what they are. But this is I think one of the open secrets to it.
Robert Hayes: Yeah. They ask the question all the time, like how do you do all these different things? And the answer is never, oh, I have 50 people behind me that do a lot of those things.
Eric Jorgenson: And to that point, I hope, Robert, it's fair to say, like you have more than one EA?
Robert Hayes: Oh, yes. Yeah, yeah. I have a team for sure.
Eric Jorgenson: What does a team look like? How does it work?
Robert Hayes: I have my original EA, and she's been working with me for about seven years now. So, she's been with me for a long time. And then, I have kind of two for time zone coverage that sit underneath her. And so, they're kind of like my hands-on folks that kind of follow me 24/7. We divide some tasks based on expertise or skills. So, there's certain parts of my life that go to one or the other, if it's not a time zone sensitive issue. But we have that team basically focused on like following as I spit out tasks from the construction company, Athena, or investments or whatever the case may be. And then the construction company has a number of folks that are inside of it. So, there's like a master person for the construction company who spend some time with me, but more time with the other founder being kind of the main liaison for that company. And then, yeah, we do regular cadences of meetings and different communication methods to kind of go back and forth and communicate on things. So, we do use the Athena app. That's kind of a primary tool for me to delegate. So, if I'm on the fly, I’ll record something into the app. The app goes to my Chief of Staff, and then she can delegate the task in Asana to different folks. I mean, they have access to do it as well, but that's her primary job responsibility. And then if I wanted to communicate with them, I generally do that through Signal in a group chat.
Eric Jorgenson: So, it's literally a small business or two.
Robert Hayes: Yeah, yeah. And it's funny because it makes money. So, I mean, it's ridiculous, but I told the story about the winning the bids for the construction company. But yeah, setting up consulting, like getting on the boards of certain companies, advisory roles, like all these things are possible because a lot of the other stuff that I would before spend a lot of time on, I don't have to do that. And so, I'm much more open to opportunities because I'm not wasting and I don't feel so busy that I'm not going to entertain them. So, it's just a refocus of where I'm actually good versus where I'm not. And then on the back end of it, I think it's really important what you guys were saying before about the weaknesses. The weaknesses that you have, those are probably the areas where you can benefit the most. And I'll give an example because I think it helps in the context of these. Like, if you're the type of person who is like, oh, I'll get to the dentist eventually, like I'll get there, I’ll get there. But you just kind of keep putting it off, and then, it turns into a disaster. If you have an assistant who's good at that stuff and knows that that's a priority for you, all that stuff happens and you don't have to worry about it. And so, what's the benefit of like not putting that stuff off?
Eric Jorgenson: Having teeth.
Robert Hayes: Yeah, it's funny, but it's so true. And I don't know what it is for every person. I'm sure every person has a thing. I tease Chris about his haircuts.
Eric Jorgenson: Oh, he gets daily haircuts. That looks like it was shaved this morning. That's fresh.
Robert Hayes: Yeah. But he was doing it himself, so I was teasing him about it. But you get the point. It's like these things that otherwise you wouldn't think about oftentimes frustrate you that you just dismiss it within a few seconds. When that just gets offloaded, like Chris said, it gives you the peace of mind, but also it protects you against things long term that could hurt you as well.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. And Chris, do you want to give us your version of that? I know you and your wife both have your own EAs, which kind of help you both at work and at home.
Chris Ho: Yeah, exactly. And just like any team, people fall into their own roles, and Sam is my EA, and Zan is Mel’s EA. And we do have these kinds of like family office meetings where we talk about what our priorities are, what's going to be important to us coming up, what the next quarter looks like. We talk a little bit about some of the things that need to get coordinated. Actually, something that has been really cool and really exciting for us is that we just tore down a house and designed it and built it up together over the course of the last year. And so, the EAs were like pretty intrinsically involved in that. We're doing some landscaping now, so there's literally- I was a little bit worried because we're recording this and I want it to be professional audio quality, but there are people in the back, hopefully I'm secluded enough, that people in the back just essentially like jack hammering the patio back there. But all that to say, yeah, we have the family office that coordinates, again, the daily administration of your life, making sure about kind of the bird's eye view of what the calendar is going to look like. When are we going to see my family this summer? When are we going to see Mel’s family that summer? What are the big things that are coming up? Like when are we traveling and when are we going to be able to see person X, Y, and Zed? And so just having a team coordinate your life when you get to a certain level of how busy you're going to be. And again, once you're living a life that's intentional enough that you understand and you can be articulate about what you want to see happen happen, that's the time when having an executive assistant just actually gives you real leverage. They're able to help coordinate the life that Mel and I are trying to build for ourselves, which is, again, that's the superpower.
Eric Jorgenson: I love that. I think we started this, we did the first half of this answer, but not the second half, but that's okay. We can pick up where Athena is today now after a year of Robert's hard work and a good portion of Chris's. And then I'd love to see a little bit of like where you see this going over the next 10 years, like what the idealized vision of Athena can be in the 2030s.
Robert Hayes: Yeah. Where we're at today, we've got around 500 partnerships now. We started a year ago when I came on board, we probably had around 70 and many of them were part-time or kind of mixed relationships. Today, it's around 500.
Eric Jorgenson: There’s not a lot of businesses that grow 10X in a year.
Robert Hayes: Yeah. It's been some crazy growth for sure. And the demand is there. I mean, so that's why we're so lucky is because the demand for these types of relationships is very much there. And whenever we do these podcasts, I have a conversation with Chris. I go, Chris, are you sure we should do this? Because there's a lot of demand to get these kinds of relationships, and they're hard to build. They take a lot of focus and a lot of really great people. Yeah, we've been on a hiring spree, bringing on really talented people like Chris and many, many others. We brought on a new Chief Marketing Officer, a new Chief Financial Officer. So really trying to formalize the company, build a lot of really strong practices. And that's what we're in right now. We're in build and invest mode. And we're where do we get to? We had talked in an original forecast that getting to an employee size of 10,000 people was the target for 2030. I guess I'm not as focused on that as I am creating really high-quality relationships. And I do want to get to a place where I continue to find new opportunities in other economically disenfranchised parts of the world, not just the Philippines. So, from an objective standpoint, if we can continue to have a high-quality relationship between the EAs and the clients, we can leverage the playbooks and our applications to kind of help make that communication flow back and forth between the two of them very, very seamless and at the end of the day, treat our people really great. I think I'd be satisfied. And from a market standpoint, it seems like we're in an opposite situation to a lot of companies where the demand for the product is very, very high, so we're being very careful about how we approach. But ultimately, if we do get to a place where we find we can supply those high-quality relationships with folks and help people while doing it, yeah, we'd like to continue to look outside of our current target demographic which is simply just early-stage founders, entrepreneurs, tech business owners. Chris, do you want to add anything to that that I missed?
Chris Ho: Yeah. Well, I just want to jump in with reiteration a little bit of part of why I joined the company. Because the vision or the long-term vision for me is that Athena, at some point in the future, can claim and can proudly claim and rightfully so claim that we provide, we source and find and create these relationships and that we produce the best executive assistants in the world. That Athena produces the best executive assistants in the world. I think there's no reason that we can't become that company. And I also think that we have this opportunity to do this incredible good because it's like controversial to say that some people are more impactful than others. And I know that the reality is I'll take that stance and just say it, that there are certain people in the world that are going to do a crazy amount, that're going to be insanely productive and are going to do a crazy amount of good and are going to march us forward and be insanely productive no matter what they do. And if that is our client base, and our sole mission as a company is to take the people that are doing the most in the world already and give them leverage to help them do more, and sometimes up to like 10, 20, 30 times more than they thought that they could do because we teach them how to delegate appropriately, we teach them how to let everything else fall away from them, and we can do that while producing the best executive assistants in the world and giving people exactly like what Robert said from economically disenfranchised places in the world and connecting them to these people and letting them be the right-hand person and changing their family's lives and their entire trajectory in life, that is like- that's the whole reason I joined. That's the whole- it's unbelievably exciting to me. And you have this opportunity to do this incredible good on both sides. And that's where I want- That's what I want us to become.
Eric Jorgenson: Oh, I love that. That is such- this company's vision and mission like strikes a chord deep within me on both sides of the vision and everybody that I've met, you guys are generous enough to invite me to like come to the Philippines and hang with you and meet all the EAs and like be kind of a part of the family for a week or so. And the hunch that I had that that was true just kind of kept becoming more obvious and more clear. Like there's no- there's magic in leverage and there's magic in elevating people and finding extreme talent, especially when they're contextually in a disadvantage and putting those things together. And I've seen just alchemy magic happen already, even at what is a relatively small scale compared to where I think we will get in the future. And I'm just really excited to see what happens as you guys keep adding zeros and adding playbooks and finding new countries, new people, new clients, and seeing where we go from here. But yeah, it is almost unbelievable that like you guys independently arrived at such a similar worldview and set of values and things to be excited about that like I did, and we just kind of met in the middle and like Spiderman pointed at each other and we're like, oh my God, this is great. I'm not alone.
Robert Hayes: You gotta put the meme up now then.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, we will end with the meme. And just from an economics perspective, what is going to happen in like 100 or 200 years? Like is the whole world going to end up getting like totally flattened out? Will these local sort of like disadvantages, like will that trend just continue over like decades and decades until the world is truly flat?
Robert Hayes: And when you say flat, you mean in the way of just equal?
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I mean like will every- will the global average pay be the same as the sort of local average pay?
Robert Hayes: Fully loaded question. It's interesting to see kind of what's happening because it feels that way. I mean, the Philippines when I first got there in 2008, it was just a very different, very, very different world than it is today. I mean, the amount of change, like entire cities have been raised there kind of in the last five years. Where I used to live basically was non-existent and five years later, and when you kind of go there, you just kind of get stunned because the skyscrapers are happening and everything's like really, really popping up. And people say that; people say the Philippines was the early 2000s, and then it's going to move downstream to Vietnam or Africa or wherever. So, to some extent, I think it's a beautiful thing because the middle-class starts to exist in these countries where it just absolutely didn't. But how far away would that happen? My God. I mean, that's probably a long ways off. And I would imagine technology's probably the great equalizer. And so, the faster that technology gains, probably the tighter we get and the more opportunities can be leveraged. So that would be- I still think we're a ways off because the more you travel to countries like those, the more gaps you see, it's illuminating. What do you think, Chris?
Chris Ho: Yeah, I think it's a really big question. I think that one of the things I said earlier on the pod was that you have to believe that everywhere in the world, there's incredible people. To be an Athena client, that's one of the things you have to believe. And I do think that over the course of 100, 200, 300 years and into the future, I'm firmly in the optimist camp. I know that being optimistic can sometimes paint you as naive, but I would rather be- I guess I would rather be naive if being a pessimist is the only way to be seen as worldly enough. I do think that things are getting better all over the world in a variety of ways. And I do think that one of the beautiful things that will start to happen over the course of the next century is that if you have enough talent and you have enough drive, you're going to be able to find your way to a beautiful life. Whereas that might not have been true over this past century, I think it will be true of the coming century. And so that I think is wonderful.
Robert Hayes: It's interesting, too, with technology because, years ago, people were saying all the jobs would go away because everything would become so easy. And it kind of seems like we've seen the complete opposite. We've seen everything become ridiculously complex, therefore there's way more jobs needed and way more people needed than ever before. I wonder if there is a tipping point at some stage where that kind of reverses. But it doesn't seem like it as of now, at least.
Eric Jorgenson: That debate is probably thousands of years old. Like, oh, we invented the plow. What are we going to do all day? I'm a deep believer that not only do pessimists not produce, but that continued technology- technology is another form of leverage that just kind of continues to make everyone's lives better and the more widely that gets distributed, and the more wildly opportunity gets distributed, and talent gets- I think leverage somewhat naturally accrues to the high-impact sort of individuals that Chris was alluding to. We all choose to work for people that we think can use our talents the best. We invest in the people who we think are going to put that money to use the best and produce the greatest thing. So, there's a very natural sort of economy of leverage going on. And the more people are connected to it and the more fluid and meritocratic that becomes across the whole globe, the trickle-down effects and the lifestyle improvements to everyone on the planet are meaningful. So, I think this is truly like a very meaningful kind of paddle in the water towards that effort, actually. Like there's not a lot of people in the frontiers of places like this with high intention, high talent, high integrity. I mean, Robert, you kind of mentioned at the beginning, like there's companies here, but not always for the right reasons and not always with the best intent and not always at the highest level of professionalism.
Chris Ho: One thing I'll jump in on that is that this is really cool, and I actually don't know if Robert knows this, but I meet with executive assistants a couple of times a week. So, I usually try to meet with two new executive assistants a week. And I can't tell you the number of times that I said how did you hear about Athena? Why did you apply? And they say, oh, I heard that it was a Robert Hayes company, so I wanted to apply. And I was like, holy shit, this guy is like- and I know, having worked with Robert for the past eight months, that he's an incredible leader, definitely the strongest leader I've ever worked with. And it's just- but to see that, like that people are applying because they know it's a Robert Hayes company, like that's a special feeling as well.
Robert Hayes: Thank you. That’s nice to hear.
Eric Jorgenson: Go for that- like Athena, a Robert Hayes joint, or Hayes EAs.
Robert Hayes: I think if you believe deep down that both people can win in any engagement, I mean, I think it just changes the whole context. So, I said it earlier about the whole 1980s like philosophy or a lot of companies quarter to quarter driving profits at the expense of everything else. I just continue to refuse to believe that it's not possible to have both parties win. And so, when you have that kind of a belief, I mean, that's what we did at TaskUs for a long time. It wasn't just me, obviously, there was a lot of us involved in that. But we were able to show on a repeated basis that you can take care of your people and still make good money and still produce excellent results. And that's what we want to continue to do. And so, yeah, the market is full of different people out there offering services, hiring, all that kind of stuff. And at many times, we've actually said to some of our clients like, hey, this is not the option for you. Like I've told Chris many times like, hey, no, that's not for us, even though it's very lucrative, it's very profitable. He's come to me with some big opportunities where I've said that's not what we do. That's not our value prop. That's not what we're going to be best at. So, we're really trying to stick to the things that we think we can do amazingly. And that is kind of exactly what we've described here today. And that's going to be our absolute focus. And they say companies are always defined by what they say no to. You can have all these fancy core values, all these fancy websites, all this kind of stuff, but where you actually decide to draw the line and that's why, with your onboarding too, Eric, like no, it's a full-time thing. There's the training you’ve got to go through. There's selection criteria that we have to go through. We're starting to screen more folks, but that's not because we want to exclude folks, it's because we want to make sure that our promise is kept, that our value proposition is kept. And oftentimes that means explaining to folks where they're going to get the most benefit and where they're not. And that's why I said a lot of folks, they go try two or three other places and it doesn't work, those make ideal clients for us because they understand the reason why. But folks who have had successful relationships in the past, it doesn't necessarily work best with us just because that's not what we specialize in.
Eric Jorgenson: Just in that last sort of set of paragraphs, I heard two like very- what sounded like really strong or frequently used heuristics or like mental models or priorities for you. Like you hit both on focus and win-win sort of alignment, relationships. And I wonder are those- what is the full set of sort of the like heuristics that make you- you've done so much with Athena so quickly, you clearly have an impact, like a reputation from TaskUs. Chris, who I respect, has a very large sample size and looks up to you as a leader and operator. What are the mental tools or priorities or things that you use to guide the decisions most often that you feel like sort of attribute- you would attribute that to?
Robert Hayes: Yeah, I'd say number one is actions and words, and the segregation of the two of them have a disadvantage, a natural disadvantage, which my natural disadvantage is I'm not a very emotional, like emotionally based person. So, I struggle with kind of the being very emotional. But what it's caused me to do is to be very observational when it comes to people's behaviors and their actions and the words that they speak and trying to separate the two. So oftentimes when me and Chris are talking and some of the examples you gave, where I tell him somebody on his team is going this direction. And then he says no, or something like that, oftentimes what it has to do with is you just look at what they're doing, why they're doing it, compare that to how they're speaking. If there's a contradiction, experience has just taught me to really watch the contradictions, and then it becomes somewhat predictive of next behavior. And like I said, the experience of being able to kind of go through painful terminations, to be able to go through deep performance issues, to be able to go dealing with heavy handed relationship issues in a peer environment. Like a lot of these kind of like very controversial relationships or personality types that I've hired before that had high expectations on, a lot of those situations, they become almost predictive, but I think the superpower would be very much separating the words from the actions and understanding the gap, as opposed to just looking at the complete picture and then trying to make a judgment based off what's been presented. So, that's where it becomes predictive and that's where you get to a place where you can kind of see through the noise I think a little faster than folks who haven't had that experience yet.
Eric Jorgenson: Super interesting. Chris, do you have similar heuristics on the client or operation side?
Chris Ho: I mean, it's funny because I'll just comment on Robert for a second, because it's like one of the hardest things to follow for anyone, I think. And for any young- any anyone that's younger or just learning to lead a larger org, and I said this earlier on the pod as well, when to zoom in and zoom out. So, it's like one of the funniest things to me, and everyone will know this, when sometimes the boss tells you something that you think you should understand, but you don't necessarily understand, is Robert said don't get too into the weeds on this, but know what's important. It's like, oh, okay, I'm going to try to figure out what's important and what to actually zoom in on. And that's really hard. That's like your whole job, as you get more latitude, as you get a wider breadth of your responsibilities is figuring out what actually is important. And part of the hilarity of that is, of course, you learn that over time because you start seeing the same patterns emerge. And you start seeing, okay, this is why this is going to be important. And certain people will be, of course, better at it than others. And a lot of judgment is pattern recognition. But on the client side, it's funny enough that very similar to what Robert said and mirrors actually what Robert said on the client side, clients will lie to you all the time meaningfully or not. They don't necessarily mean to lie to you. It's okay. I forgive you. They lie to themselves in onboarding a lot about how they behave and how they're going to behave and how much control they need and how much agency they need. They lie to themselves about how much work they actually have to do. And when I say lie, I don't mean it in a derogatory sense, and I don't mean it in a negative sense. I just mean that people tell themselves stories about themselves all the time, no matter how sophisticated you get, no matter how senior you get. And part of being a good – not good – part of being a great client experience org is understanding what a client actually needs and not what they're telling you that they need. I think that is the most important thing on the client side that I try to impart on our team is picking up and doing a lot of that pattern recognition. Like once you go through and see enough clients and they come through with their different problems and their different pain points, one of the things is actually, and this is actually a very common sales technique, is finding that person's pain and talking it back to them. And you find that person's pain and you talk back to them. If you can get them to feel that pain on a sales call, you can close them. We use that in a less salesy and aggressive way. We use that same tactic in client experience where it's like no matter what the client is telling you, really try to understand what the real pain is and like what they actually need and the type of person that they are so that you can like actually help them in the ways that they're going to need help. And so, very similar. It's surprising to me that, well, it's not surprising, but a lot of it mirrors one another. You look at what the actions are and how the person is actually behaving is how you're going to help them.
Robert Hayes: An interesting thing with clients, too, that I think is worth a call-out for folks who are debating this relationship or looking for how to improve it is the clients that refuse to provide the negative feedback. Like that's the one that kind of stands out to me all the time, which is not providing feedback to the EA. So, I don't know, Chris, if you want to highlight it a little bit, but I think it's worth noting just because we see it so often, where if the EA actually misses expectations, screws something up royally, often times we'll see people not even say anything. They're like, no, everything's good. Chris, like how often does that happen? Like pretty often, right?
Chris Ho: It's definitely one of the bigger stumbling points of clients. And it's funny to me because there's this, I don't know if I'm using this, there's kind of like this cognitive dissonance of because it's an executive assistant, it's like I don't want to- either I'm tentative to get mad at them, or I don't understand necessarily how to give them feedback. Because don't get me wrong, our client base is I'll use the word sophisticated, because they are, they're leading companies, they, for the most part, have managed people or teams before. And it's really- it's this kind of like mental block of I'm not going to- and this is, I think one of the things that's really interesting as well is who do you give feedback to you? Who do you care enough to give feedback to? Only the people that you like really want to invest in. And you're willing to put yourself in a certain amount of discomfort to go ahead and give that hard feedback. But sometimes there's this mental block around I don't want to give that person feedback because- and sometimes it's because you might not believe in that person or because you don't want to invest in them or because I think a lot of it, and maybe, Robert, this is what you were alluding to, but I think a lot of it comes back to that guilt of like should I have an executive assistant in the first place, which is like this whole thing that we have to really- Yeah.
Robert Hayes: Yeah, it's a two-sided thing because they're guilty because they don't think they deserve the EA, but then they get one, but then they're guilty, they don't want to be- they don't want to give critical feedback. But I call it out just because I think that's something that very much needs to be watched. Because I mean, oftentimes, I use this example with the EAs a lot when I talk to them is if the client just gives you thumbs up all the time, says it's a good thing, but doesn't leverage you very much or you're not expanding the relationship, it's not taking on new tasks, basically what they're saying to you is like, yeah, yeah, it's okay, and they start to walk away from the relationship. Even if they're not walking away, they can move them somewhere else, but not have that difficult feedback. And as a business owner, investing in your own business, like I mentioned earlier, I just think it's so important that they provide that feedback, good or bad. It's difficult to do, but extremely important to do so. And I say to the team, I say, if you're a parent of a child, and I've got three and I love them to death, but the hardest person in the world on them is always going to be me. Because I want them to achieve great things. I want them to get to a place that they're going to be happy and successful. And I think, to some extent, the clients, we've seen that trend in them quite a bit, that that's something that needs to be watched. Don't feel guilty for having an EA in the first place and don't feel guilty if you have to give critical feedback.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Ivan was really good especially when we first started about asking for feedback, reinforcing how much he- and I'm sure that's a result of your coaching, asking how much he wanted it and how much he benefited from it. But the other thing that I think Athena is perhaps under- you maybe do not give yourself enough credit for is you're a neutral third party, and you seek feedback from us as clients continuously that you then have a path to sort of feedback and as part of a coaching package and a performance thing and like an improvement system where it's like even if it's a survey or just a third party, or like, hey, how do I deliver this difficult feedback, it's not you and an EA just like alone in an awkward relationship where you're like afraid to annoy them because they have actually a huge amount of access in your life, and it's this like very- whether it's a really positive relationship you don't want to give negative feedback or potentially like oh, my God, I'm afraid to offend them like version of that conversation. Like both are hard for totally different reasons. And Athena addresses both from my perspective, which I think is maybe an underrated benefit.
Chris Ho: Yeah. Well, I think it's one of the things that you touched on that you might not have realized you touched on, and I said this earlier in the pod too, but it's that your relationship with your EA is your most personal professional relationship you'll ever have. And so, part of the other reason that folks have a hard time criticizing their EA is it feels like it's a very personal relationship, and it feels- it's almost like when you have to give feedback to your wife or your husband, like it's, hey honey, I don't really like when you do that. It's hard. It sounds kind of silly. It sounds kind of silly, but it's a very personal professional relationship.
Eric Jorgenson: Everyone just got a little stomachache when you started that sentence.
Chris Ho: It feels shitty. And your EA is trying to emulate you and they do these sometimes deeply personal things for you, and it's such a personal relationship. And so, it can be very awkward to give feedback, hard feedback or good feedback. And it is something where, and I'll take the analogy a step further, you say neutral third party, a lot of our facilitated feedback sessions honestly mirror what I would imagine like a marriage counselor looks like in some ways. Where it's like tell me how you feel, tell me how you feel, and making sure that that is really how the relationship continues to evolve. And so that's what we really- that's part of what we try to do in some of those sessions as well.
Eric Jorgenson: Every time we talk about this topic or anything else, I am just like so grateful that there are people like you guys thinking so hard about this problem and working so hard on it. It has definitely changed my life for the better. And I have recommended Athena to many people already and certainly will continue to. I'm so excited to just kind of chip in on this journey and get a seat in the stands to kind of watch where it all goes. I love what you guys are working on. I love all of the EAs that I've met, and what a party Athena throws. Unbelievable.
Robert Hayes: You had a few drinks while you were there, did you. Eric?
Eric Jorgenson: Did you go to bed early? You did go to bed early.
Robert Hayes: Forced on you. Well, we were walking through the beach area there, it's like everybody's kind of grabbing us, trying to force drinks down your throat.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. It's tough working conditions over there with the beachfront, when the Wi-Fi reaches the beach, and the rum comes in coconuts.
Robert Hayes: It was great to see the happy group. Great to see such a group of people excited about what they're doing. It was, yeah, an absolutely great trip. And thank you so much for sharing your experience and motivating a lot of the EAs about what the relationship can achieve over time. So, thank you so much for doing that for us as well. We appreciate it. We have that problem sometimes where we do meetings like this to talk about the client side of the relationship. But it also helps us so much when we can share the client's side of the relationship with the EAs so they can get the perspective on what it's like to be a client and what it feels like to be on that side of the equation. It helps them do a better job overall. And I think helps expand our vision as we look to continue to grow many of these relationships around the world over the next few years.
Eric Jorgenson: It's an incredibly exciting vision.
Robert Hayes: Big, big things to do.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Well, thank you guys for taking a few hours out of your extremely busy and high leverage schedules to hang out with us, and I hope this has been impactful for everybody listening and it brings them a little closer to feeling like they're ready to invest in the corporation of them.
Robert Hayes: Yeah, just reach out to Chris's email directly so that-
Eric Jorgenson: Okay. We'll leave a link in the show notes. Thank you guys again so much for the life lessons and the personal lessons and the professional lessons. It's been awesome to get a couple more hours with you. I look forward to the next time.
Robert Hayes: Thank you, Eric. Appreciate it. It's been a blast.
Chris Ho: Thank you so much, Eric. Yeah, it’s been an absolute pleasure.
Eric Jorgenson: I appreciate you hanging out with us today. Thank you so much for listening. My favorite idea from the pod I think was Robert's question about whether you're ready to invest in the corporation of you. I think that's a great way to think about it, a great way to think about building your personal leverage, how you manage your career, your family, your investments, and your time. If you're feeling you're ready for an EA to be a valuable member of that company, that company of you, consider Athena. Go to athenago.com, sign up, go through that application. List me as your refer, check out the company. They publish a bunch of great stuff, and it's a wonderful crew. If you liked this episode, you will also love another episode featuring EAs with Michelle Penczak who's the CEO of Squared Away. All of their executive assistants are military spouses all around the US. It's a wonderful sort of remote job, different take on the EA space. Other episodes that are very focused on kind of the corporation of you, Codi Sanchez, who manages dozens of companies and investments. Very interesting systems in that one. And Andrew Wilkinson was one of our early episodes focused on people leverage. All of those are great places to go next if you enjoyed this episode. Thank you so much for listening. Appreciate you, have a great week, and be well.