When you forget what it’s like to not know something, we call that the curse of knowledge.

In training your VA (or any admin really), I find that UNLEARNING the curse of knowledge is essential.

What we learn ends up feeling intuitive knowledge because you’ve internalized it and then communicate from that view instead of actually teaching.

My entire Systems 2 is about working with showing agents and VAs and even still, there’s stuff that I regularly have to train my VA on.

For example — I am AWFUL at including all of the proper disclosures and addendums when executing a contract so I needed to make sure she would go behind me to make sure we don’t forget them.

Here’s how I handled that:

Pre-drafted each of the addendums in Dotloop and saved them in an “addendums” folder

Created this checklist so that she knew which ones to include

Since we’ve brought TC in house, included that in the system with contingencies so that the intake form triggers to ask me the questions about the situations we’d need an addendum for (ie. Is this a 55+ community? Was it built before 1978? What kind of loan?) — so based on the answers, it adds a task to confirm each of those addendums is there.

Was this tedious to setup? Yup.

But now I know that we have 3 different contingencies in place to make sure the ball is never dropped and that I don’t have to go behind her going behind me to make sure the correct addendums are in place.

… anddd, if let’s say she switches roles or leaves the company, the next person can pick up where she left off so there’s no need to worry about re-training.

Yes, that means you have to slow down…. But once you do it once, you never have to go back and do it again.

You have to pull back to slingshot ahead.

These are called micro efficiencies that ensure things are done effectively AND efficiently.

Working with VAs is a godsend but in most cases, they are amazing at executing a well-built system but not necessarily building it.

Building systems like this allows me to move fast without being sloppy.