Are you ready for an open discussion with the best of the best and the best of what's next? Welcome to the Tony DUrso Show. Join in on a great conversation today with some of the world's great influencers as they showcase great advice and techniques that made them the game changers they are today. Now here's Tony DUrso.

Tony:

Welcome, I'm your host Tony DUrso. I interview some of the most successful people in the world, and I thank you for joining us. This show is dedicated to helping you turn your vision into reality, and here's a successful entrepreneur who provides insights and guidance you can use to move along your vision path. You can also listen to my shows at Tony D-U-R-S-O.com, or go to your favorite podcast platform such as Apple podcasts and search for Tony D-U-R-S-O. Harry’s® razors. I've been using them for years and we're giving you a trial set free. I love their products. Get a five-blade razor, lathering shave gel with aloe and a travel blade cover. Get it all at harrys.com/D-U-R-S-O and Grammarly® helps you up level your writing for your blogs, social media, books, company literature, and so on. I recommend it. Get 20% off Grammarly® Premium. That's grammarly.com/D-U-R-S-O. More details just ahead, so please stay tuned. Today's show is about building remote businesses with Michael Greenberg. Let's see what we can learn today. At the end of this interview, I'm going to do a summary recap of what we went over, so stay tuned for that. Michael Greenberg is the founder of Gentlemen of Technology LLC. GOT is a B2B venture creation and growth consulting firm. GOT specializes in B2B SaaS and Service businesses, as well as personal advisory services for serial entrepreneurs. That means all of you. All right, here we go. Hi, Michael. Welcome to the Tony DUrso Show.

Michael:

Thanks, Tony. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me on today.

Tony:

I am honored that you're on with us. I'm really looking forward to learning from you on how can we grow a really good remote team, as well as any tidbits or knowledge or advice you have on authority, marketing podcasts and all that good stuff. There's a great number of people in our audience that these are very key words to us, very near and dear, and we want to learn from you. And before you go into that, Michael, let's follow your journey to success. How did it all start for you? What's your backstory?

Michael:

Yeah, so I grew up in a family with multiple generations of entrepreneurs on both my mom's and my dad's side, and so I kind of always knew I wanted to work for myself, even though I was also told that it was the worst decision and I should absolutely not do it. So, like all great entrepreneurs, I decided not to follow that advice and I actually dropped out of college after my sophomore year, went to a coding boot camp, did the whole startup thing, and then went back to school, finished my degree and took everything I learned. I consulted while I was in school. I worked at a startup for about two years, raised a little over a million with them and took all of that and that turned into Call for Content, which is my podcasting agency that specializes in podcasting and authority marketing, as you touched on. And then I was building a remote team for Call for Content, and that team ended up centralizing in South Africa, which turned into my current main focus, South Africa talent, which is all about remote. I kind of come from that very much digital tech startup land and crossed over into consulting for small business, and then started solving my own problems.

Tony:

Michael, you've gone into business on items that I've dabbled in here and there over the years. Never became really successful at much of it until I put it all together when I started podcasting myself. I'm very impressed on how successful you are at what you do and how you've put this all together. I want to ask you, how did you come about that vision for your current success? How did that unfold that brought you to where you are now?

Michael:

I really try only to start B2B service businesses these days. That was one of the first decisions I made after working with startups because B2B services have high margins and high deal values, so it's much easier for me to get a business off the ground. And that led me to consulting. And while I was consulting, I got the opportunity to see inside a number of agencies, as well as a business focused podcasting network. Through that work, I started to see a lot of similarities between these different sorts of professional services, and at that time decided that I would only start a new business if I could use a large number of the existing resources from my current business to help build it out. And so Call for Content came out of I was consulting in my clients really needed this content, needed the ability to position themselves so they could go attract sales. And that's what I needed for myself. And I started South Africa talent because I needed a bigger hiring pipeline and more availability than I could currently get for myself just as Call for Content.

Tony:

That's very clever Michael, on how you leverage the resources of one business to catapult into another successful business and so on and so forth. Very clever. We're going to delve more into that. And last here on our vision path main questions is purpose. What's your purpose? What's the riding purpose for you doing what you do?

Michael:

I personally believe that entrepreneurship is a moral good because it creates economic value, and that employment going beyond that just step of creating additional value in the economy, but going out and employing people in it, that that's one of the greatest things you can do. And so when I add those up, the ultimate purpose that I strive towards is to educate others to become more successful entrepreneurs themselves so that they can employ more people.

Tony:

We're learning how to build remote businesses with Michael Greenberg, and you can find him at www.callforcontent.com. That's C-A-L-L-F-O-R-C-O-N-T-E-N-T.com. Michael, did I get that right?

Michael:

You did indeed and thank you for the plug.

Tony:

My pleasure, my pleasure. This is good stuff. And you know, there's a lot of entrepreneurs, small business owners, some people on their career. We have corporate execs in the audience as well. We want to learn, and it's not just one thing that helps us be successful. It's learning a lot of things and learning from people such as yourself. So I'm very happy to plug it because my whole focus here where I'm at in my life is to help my audience. And if I can help them grow their business a little bit more and share some resources, which we are going to ask for from you at the very end of the show, I'm only too happy to do that. And now with no further ado, Michael, let's get into your vision path and talk about remote teams. Now this is interesting because some of us, a lot of us, I do, we use VAs - virtual assistants. I've used so many, but you have remote teams and you know what? Let's kind of mix this up a little bit. First of all, what's the difference between a virtual assistant and a remote team?

Michael:

To put it nicely, a virtual assistant is somebody you've put in a box.

Tony:

I've done that a lot and I don't get all the results I want.

Michael:

No. I started with a remote startup, and so I started with remote teams and hiring developers. And then I read The 4-Hour Workweek after I had quit startup land and I learned about virtual assistants and I was like this sounds exactly like the guys I was hiring before. We're calling them all assistants now instead. And I think really the way I like to differentiate and the way we differentiate when we title people within the business is a virtual assistant is somebody who is completing a repetitive task for us that we cannot automate because it requires some simple level of human cognition that AI have not been able to replicate yet.

Tony:

And everyone else is a remote team member? Well, obviously when you say remote team immediately by definition means more than one person so you have several people working. Sounds like it could be more expensive.

Michael:

It could be. And I think that's one of the big things is virtual assistant generally means developing country. Whereas remote team, my team members are split between three countries. We've got a couple people in the US and then we've got a couple people in Ukraine for development and design, and then the rest of the team is in South Africa. South Africa has far and away the lowest rate of all of those locations, which is why the majority of the team is located there. That's about 80% of our team.

Tony:

Interesting. And you may have mentioned this in your history of how it all started for you. How long now have you been using remote teams?

Michael:

So for my entire career, which is not that long yet, but it's just over seven years now.

Tony:

That's a long time to have a success record with remote teams. It's very interesting.

Michael:

Oh, I wouldn't call it all success, but I've certainly learned a lot when it wasn't.

Tony:

The fact that you've learned something, Michael means success because we sometimes have to fail to succeed and we sometimes run into an obstacle or some sort of a great difficulty that we are able to then hurdle and become successful. So there are good lessons, there are bad lessons, but they're always good lessons.

Michael:

I like that mindset.

Tony:

Thank you.

Michael:

I like it a lot.

Tony:

Thank you. And well, let's get more into the remote teams because I'm really interested for myself as well as for my audience. Let's talk about what kind of challenges are there when you use a remote team and let's kind of dig more into this.

Michael:

So I think the biggest one is you can't see other people working in an office with you and what that means, especially if you're new to working remotely, working online, it means that you have to get it out of your head that somebody isn't working if you can't see them. That's just a mental barrier. But the challenges that come into play with that, one of the big ones is actually making sure people are working, and there's a whole variety of software that has been developed to track peoples' time effectively for remote team management.

Tony:

This is the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Just ahead the chat continues about building remote businesses with Michael Greenberg, but first it's time for us to take a short break. See you back here in just a moment.

Tony:

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Tony:

All right. We're back on the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Let's see what we can learn today. Today's show is about building remote businesses with Michael Greenberg. At the end of this interview, I'll give you a summary of what I got out of this, and I'll share some pointers with you. Stay tuned for that. Michael launched Call for Content, which is a full-service podcasting agency for content marketing, audience growth, and monetization strategies. All right, and now back to the chat with Michael.

Michael:

We use an app called Time Doctor that has way more features than we use, but it acts as our time tracking, so time tracking is more important for a remote team because it is difficult to see what people are doing otherwise. Most companies have to use time tracking because they simply are not set up to move to an entirely performance-based or results oriented workplace.

Tony:

That's really interesting. I don't mean to make a bad plug on any company, so I'm not going to mention their name, but there is a resource out there that the people that you hire from this resource, they all have this sort of a system that you mentioned. And when I order something, I'll get these beautiful screenshots showing how much time they spent on my project. But if I go to another company, which I'm not going to mention just yet, and I just buy ... I want this done. Here's the price. I wind up spending less money and getting my product instead of I'm just paying for people's time. Do you run into that kind of factor using this, because these people work on an hourly basis?

Michael:

We do both depending on the type of person we're hiring. Generally, the pathway that we work with somebody is they start on either project based or hourly work, and then they move to some sort of guaranteed minimum number of hours or pieces with a contract, and then we move them onto full time salary. Occasionally we'll just jump somebody and hire them directly for full time, but most of the time we like to stick our foot in the water, try it out, see how they work, make sure they work well with the team and then bring them all the way in, and so the pricing structures we use are heavily dependent on the types of work. For writers, we do both piece rate and hourly, but for example, for our audio editors, we only do hourly now. We stopped doing piece rate.

Tony:

Interesting, and I can see that some jobs could be very long and require hourly. And I am going to mention one of them, which is Fiverr®. I've used them for years. I have spent so many thousands with them, it's incalculable, but I get complete jobs done most of the time. You know, exactly what I want exactly the way I want, whatever it is. So I know that I'm paying X amount of dollars for X product, but I know everything can't be done that way. Just perhaps it works really, really well for me.

Michael:

I know million-dollar plus agencies that are built off one or two smart guys and a whole lot of Fiverr. That works particularly well with media buying companies, like Facebook ads and that sort of thing. If they've got one good copywriter and somebody who can just manage the ads, then they can take on millions of dollars in business and outsource the design and all the other little pieces to something like Fiverr for a very low cost.

Tony:

Very interesting. And we talked about the challenges and now we're kind of getting into the advantages. So let's hear all the great things that come about as a result of using a remote team.

Michael:

So I think the real number one advantage is value. I get the best team when I hire my team intending to hire my team for the best people wherever they are at ideally the lowest price, and what that ends up looking like for me is a system I like to call the 50/10, which is we're looking to hire one expert around the $50 an hour mark, and then we would like to have them manage multiple lower to mid-skill people from developing countries where labor is much lower cost, below $10 an hour rate. For example, we might hire one 15-year US experienced copy and blog writer and pay them $50 or $60 an hour, but then I'll hire four writers in South Africa and each one of them might be $7 or $8 an hour and so I'll hire all of them full time. I'll hire the experienced US-based writer for maybe 10 hours a week, and then they'll manage and mentor that whole batch of new hires at much lower cost, and ideally, I end up with several fully trained, exceedingly good values in about three months.

Tony:

That is very interesting, Michael, and you've already mentioned that the preponderance of your team is in South Africa, got some people in the Ukraine, in the US. What I like about what you're doing is that in South Africa, English is their main language. It's the first language whereas in Fiverr - and it's no offense, because I have a lot of people - they are in other countries - Romania, India, Pakistan, and so forth. English is not their first language. And sometimes you have to go through this trial and error because they're not understanding the words coming out of your mouth because it translates differently. But when English is the first language, I find it's just so much easier to get stuff done.

Michael:

It really is. And that's one of the main reasons I focused on South Africa, is that we could get the level of English and I can get people that I can put on the phone without an issue. Those two things have made a big difference, especially as chat and having people go back and forth on email become more and more important. I need to make sure that they understand the context and idioms that may come up in conversation. And South Africa, I found that having that British colonial past has made a big difference when they're conversing with the US.

Tony:

And now you're managing a huge number of teams and you're providing services for different clients. It sounds a little complicated. I presume you have some strategies in place and you have some methods in place on how to properly implement and manage this.

Michael:

Yeah. Number one, I am huge on standard operating procedures, SOPs, and we document everything throughout the company. So every meeting is recorded and transcribed and searchable. Every time we do something once, the first time we do it, we record video so that the second time we can make a good instructional video on how to do it. And I try to create a culture that encourages people to automate and to follow these systems of checklists, these standard operating procedures, so that when we bring on two or three more people, we know if they follow this process, we're going to get this result out the other end. And that goes all the way back to the very beginning. When we first test somebody and think about hiring them, we test them to make sure that they can do the sort of work that we're asking, but we also test to make sure they can learn, because a lot of the people we work with might not have done everything we're going to ask them to do before. There aren't that many people who have worked with podcasting agencies, for example.

Tony:

And with that, how do you know who's right for you to hire? You know, is there a long process with trial and error? How do you manage to get a good team?

Michael:

So I prefer green hires, which is uncommon I've found, but because I'm using this system where I have the more experienced mentor, and then I have the less experienced new hires, it gives me a lot more room in terms of wage so I'm less concerned, and I can give a little more time to training them at the beginning. The other piece of the puzzle is I use personality assessments, and then I also have what we call our list builder pool, which is anyone who wants to just work for us part time or wants to try to start working for us in the future. They can sign up for the list builder pool, and we'll give them really specific briefs on I need 50 contacts of this kind, and then they've got four days to build that list and when they turned it in, they get paid. And so that piece rate work lets us see who really wants to be working for us because they're building more lists, and it lets us see how reliable they are. And so then if we see somebody works well there, we'll give them a personality test and see what kind of jobs they've done in the past to figure out, okay, they might be good in one of these roles. We have three training and hiring tracks within the company. You're either going to become a writer with us. You're going to be on our digital track or you're going to become an analyst. And by setting those tracks, it means everyone follows pretty much the same system for the first year to 18 months. And so that gives us a lot more ability to weed people out earlier in the process, since we're able to see what does and does not work.

Tony:

Michael, I think one of the secrets to your success is that you are extremely methodical and organized completely. And you're so structured. I see that as being very successful.

Tony:

This is the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Just ahead the chat continues about building remote businesses with Michael Greenberg, but first it's time for us to take a short break. See you back here in just a moment.

Tony:

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Tony:

All right. We're back on the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Let's see what we can learn today. Today's show is about building remote businesses with Michael Greenberg. At the end of this interview, I'll give you a summary of what I got out of this, and I'll share some pointers with you. Stay tuned for that. All right, and now back to the chat with Michael.

Tony:

How long do your team members stay with you?

Michael:

The good ones or the bad ones?

Tony:

Obviously the bad ones don't stay long, I presume, but I think that you've made it so easy in a way and structured, just do these things every day and you get paid. It seems like you would be able to keep most of your team members.

Michael:

Generally, if somebody is going to drop, they're going to drop in the first 60 days. I don't think we've had anybody who makes it past that mark who doesn't stick around for at least a year, or who is planning to, and that's been really good. We also use a lot of KPI dashboards, Key Performance Indicators so anyone who's full time with the company has a dashboard and it will turn red and it will turn yellow if you are not performing at the desired level. So that lets everyone really know where they stand and lets them say okay, I'm going to get everything up to green. If everything's green and it stays green, then I'm able to take more on my plate or ask for more or get that raise that I want because there's a very clear path to do so.

Tony:

Do you see a shift happening with this from the virtual assistant to the team?

Michael:

Not yet. I think at this point, virtual assistant is still largely the term used in the US to refer to these sorts of jobs. And I mean, we market our services as virtual assistant in many areas because of that culture or that terminology. But I think as more and more companies become remote and more and more entrepreneurs hire virtual assistants and then have them for years at a time, that turns into the situation where they realize I don't need any of my people in one place. So at that point, when you have that mindset shift, that's when you become a remote team, I think.

Tony:

I got you and we're going to talk about authority marketing podcasting, and a couple of others topics here. But the last point on my mind on remote teams is any advice for businesses if they're looking for a VA, they need VA, they're working with VA. What kind of advice would you give them to consider looking at a remote team?

Michael:

So big thing - don't make your first hire, if your business has everyone currently located in the same place, don't make that first remote hire be anything really important or vital unless the person you're hiring has many years of remote work under their belt. I think that, and the other big thing is start with a virtual assistant and start with a virtual assistant from an agency. So that way one you're not hiring somebody directly who you're then going to fire in 45 days because they're not doing the work, and two, if you hire a good agency, they will provide a lot of the management and training to make sure that that person provides value to you quickly because that's what the business of a virtual assistant agency is. So if you're dipping your toe in the water for the first time, find an agency that trains for the specific thing that you want, get them for 10 or 20 hours to start each week and then work your way up to full time. And once you've got all the way worked up and you really have somebody you're relying on, who's not with you at that point, you can start making full time hires.

Tony:

All right, let's get into authority marketing here, and thank you for that, by the way. Michael, what can you do for us? What can you do for our businesses to make us more well-known so that our product and services can be better received by our audience, by our consumers?

Michael:

I like to do two things. One, I like to create content that positions somebody as that authority in a very specific niche. And when I say very specific, I mean, if we can get it down to a list of a thousand people that are this niche, that's even better. The smaller, the tighter, the more narrow, the better. And the other part of that is once we've got this content that makes you the expert and authority in these very specific topics, then we can use that content to generate leads and generate publicity opportunities to get in front of that exact audience, because if we get targeted enough, we can actually build those very specific lists.

Tony:

There are number of coaches, consultants, advisors in the audience. So this is a way that they could become more well known in that niche, that field that they are in that then would help bring about more people that you would promote them or could promote them to.

Michael:

That is correct. That's really the first thing we developed at Call for Content. I put out the system for myself as a consultant because people were asking me as too young to be doing this guy. Why should I trust you? Why do you know what you're doing? And the easy way to solve their problem was to create a bit of content about... I created a little presentation about why I was an expert in this thing and about my thoughts around how to do it well at the time I was consulting in startup growth. So growing the business and fundraising. Then I went around and I found out where the kinds of clients I was looking for hung out, which were really just at private events and dinners for angel investors. And so I went and I met those different angel investor groups and they invited me to pitch at them and that's how I got my clients. And then I realized hey, you can do this with podcasts online just as easily. So now we largely do our authority marketing with podcasts, and we look to create some sort of larger book or other course or something really meaty out of a podcast series in about a six month time frame and use that to launch the PR campaign, and get all those very targeted placements for our clients who for this system to work really have to be in B2B services.

Tony:

That's very interesting. And I've gone through a lot of your material already on podcasting, authority marketing, building businesses. Very interesting stuff, Michael. I'd like to delve in a little bit on podcasts. We do have other podcasters in the audience. Of course, I am a podcaster, you're a podcaster. Talk to us, how can you help us podcast better?

Michael:

So everything I just said about authority marketing applies to podcasting too. In fact, I think even more so the podcasts that we see really succeed are normally really, really niche podcasts, or maybe the person hosting it is a little weird in some way, and they have that nice polarizing element. It makes it harder I think for podcasts to grow huge. We won't take on a client if they say I want to be the next Joe Rogan, or I want to have a million plus downloads an episode. Unless you come to us with half a million, we're not going to be able to get you there. But if you come to us with nothing and you say I want 200 downloads every episode because I've only spoken in front of 50 people in my life so if I have 200 listening to me, that's going to be amazing, then you're a perfect fit client for us because we see that you understand how to use podcasting effectively.

Tony:

Michael, you've grown as we've mentioned early on. You've created a successful business, leveraged that into another successful business, so on and so forth. What are you looking to accomplish in the next few years?

Michael:

Big number one goal on my mind right now is building South Africa talent into first-off a million plus a year business, and second into a business that employs over 100 people. I honestly don't know which one of those is going to come first because labor costs are very low in South Africa. So that's my goal for growth there. But outside of that, I personally am hoping to get my first book published that's not just an eBook, but is an actual print copy, and I am hoping to start some sort of school or mastermind, something like that to really take everything that I've been working on around entrepreneurship and around figuring out how to design and build and manage these businesses over time so I can start spreading it to other people.

Tony:

Are there any personal habits that contribute to your vision success?

Michael:

Yes. I like to cook a lot. I think that makes a big difference because I cook my own food. It takes time out of my day, a considerable amount, but that also helps break myself from my work throughout the day, and it helps give me distinct pause points. I've also just learned a huge amount about patience and about making things that last and about how to prepare to do something. The whole philosophy of Mise en place that comes out of professional kitchens is invaluable to entrepreneurship. I know there's a guy who's written a book about that now, though I can't remember the name of it off the top of my head. And so I think cooking has really played a huge part of my success, and I'd say bread baking has taught me more about patience than just about anything else I've done.

Tony:

This is the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Just ahead the chat continues about building remote businesses with Michael Greenberg, but first it's time for us to take a short break. See you back here in just a moment. As folks adapt to this changing world, we're all going to be buying more stuff online than ever before. I am, and if you're an eCommerce seller, are you ready to meet the demands of our new delivery culture? Be ready guys with ShipStation®. Why ShipStation®? Well, when you're selling online, getting a lot of orders out fast can be tough. How do you keep track of who gets what, which shipping carrier should you use, are you getting the best rates and so on? That's why you need ShipStation. It's the fastest, easiest, and most affordable way to manage and ship your orders. Just a few clicks and you'll be managing your orders, printing out labels and getting your product to happy customers like me. ShipStation® makes it easy. ShipStation® helps online sellers of any size, get orders out quickly, save money on shipping costs and keep customers happy. I know I said that before; just checking that you're listening. Now no matter what you're selling - Amazon Etsy, your own website - ShipStation® brings all your orders into one simple interface, guys. It's really cool. It makes them really easy to manage from any device, even your cell phone. ShipStation® works with all the major carriers, including USPS, FedEx, UPS, even Amazon fulfillment so you can compare and choose the best shipping solution for you and your customer. They even offer big discounts on shipping costs. Now any business can access the same postage discounts that are usually reserved for large Fortune 500 companies. You'll always know you're getting the best deal and that's good, right? No wonder ShipStation® is the number one choice of online sellers. You'll ship more in less time with the best rates available. Hey guys, and right now the Tony DUrso Show listeners can try ShipStation® free for 60 days when you use offer code T-O-N-Y. Make sure your business is ready to meet the demands of delivery culture. Get started at ShipStation today. Click on the microphone at the top of the homepage and type in T-O-N-Y. That's ShipStation, then enter offer code T-O-N-Y. That's Tony. ShipStation - make ship happen. All right, guys. Check it up and tell me how much you love it. You're listening to the Tony DUrso Show with special VIP guests. Now back to Tony and his guest.

Tony:

All right. We're back on the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Let's see what we can learn today. Today's show is about building remote businesses with Michael Greenberg. At the end of this interview, I'll give you a summary of what I got out of this, and I'll share some pointers with you. Stay tuned for that. Michael has expanded his businesses further into podcasting and B2B services with new acquisitions and partnerships. All right. And now back to the chat with Michael. I'm astounded by that, not about the bread, not about the cooking. The patience, and I think you've hit the nail on the head and you really understand a great piece or part of being successful as you do have to have patience, and I like the fact that you've got your ritual down that breaks that concentration, cause you know, some of us entrepreneurs - I'm not raising my hand, I'm just joking - we work so long, we worked so long that by the end of the day, we can get a little mentally drained if we don't take that break or have a routine that breaks that attention. So I think that is extremely important to your vision success. Very good point on that.

Michael:

I'm really lazy so I take a lot of breaks. I will regularly take a two- or three-hour siesta if I can at midday so I can cook myself a hot lunch and then eat it and take a nap.

Tony:

Very good. And we've mentioned a couple of resources here, but are there any great resources that you want to make sure that our success squad audience takes away with?

Michael:

Oh, definitely. The call for content playbooks, everything I've talked about that I say I've done, or we do has been recorded as a playbook at www.callforcontent.com/playbooks, and they're right on our website. There are these massive how-to guides. They're also the first training materials we give our new employees, so they are literally what we do and we've got them for monetizing podcasts and growing podcasts and appearing on them and for authority marketing as well. I love the playbooks and I don't feel like they get used enough. The other thing is I do have open office hours because I try to be an educator, and if you go to call for content, click on one of the office hours buttons, you'll be able to book 30 free minutes with me to talk and then I'll record those. And if there's any good questions in there, I'll use them to create more content in the future.

Tony:

I love that. Once again, we learned how to build remote businesses with Michael Greenberg and you can find him at www.callforcontent.com and that 'for' is F-O-R. That's www.callforcontent.com. Michael, I've learned a lot and I've gone through your playbooks. Amazing stuff. I encourage the audience, check this stuff out. It's good. Thank you so much, Michael.

Michael:

Thank you for having me on today, Tony.

Tony:

Hey, success squad. Thanks for hanging out with me while I featured an elite entrepreneur who took his vision to reality. I hope this was as inspiring for you as it was for me to do this interview. I learned so much about building remote teams, virtual assistants, and so on and so forth. The insights are so valuable. How did you like it? Building remote businesses with Michael Greenberg. At the get go, he wanted to be an entrepreneur and wanted to work for himself, but he was told it was the worst decision and he should absolutely not do it. Have you guys heard that before? Well, there's no guessing what he did. He even dropped out of school to follow his startup dream, but he did return to college after he got it going. I do not advise dropping out of college or school, but look at what Michael did. He dropped out, got his dream going and then went back and got his degree. Very brilliant. Now everyone listening to this podcast is probably an entrepreneur and I'm sure you are and you may have heard those words before yourself. Don't do it, right? And what I think it does for a lot of you great entrepreneurs is when you hear no and don't do it and bad idea, it makes you want it even more. Isn't that right? I like his focus on B2B services as they have high margins and high deal values. Make a note of that. Do you use VAs - virtual assistants - or do you use remote teams? They sound the same, but Michael says that VAs are kind of the same, but they're in a box VAs usually are hired to do repetitive type tasks. I've hired them before to do something specific against a carefully worded document of what to do, how to do, when to do it, etcetera. Some good advice thrown in here that even if you have some hardships or downturns in your business, as long as you learn something, then it's worth it, right? And that new knowledge helps you do better and better. I like working on a task or project basis as I know that I'm spending so much and I'm getting this specific result in return regardless of the time that was spent on it. I think that's an easy way for me to get my stuff done. How about you? As mentioned, there are jobs or tasks that are lengthy and require an hourly pay. Thus, it really depends on what you need. Does anyone in the audience have better results by hiring out work done on an hourly basis? There's so much more I got out of this interview. What did you get? I'd love to know how you use this information to help you in your business or career. Okay guys, now grab hold of your vision. Decide you're either going to start something great or take it to the next level. You have to decide first. You know that. It always starts with a decision, and you can get my Vision Map to help you along to process. The free eBook is at Tony D-U-R-S-O.com. I talk about how to develop your vision, your purpose, your long-term objective, even your master plan. I talk about strategy, tactical. Great stuff, and you can pick up the audio version and the training class too. Highly recommended. I created my empire as some people call it in just a few years. That's all it took. I had the Vision Map as my guide. You can do it too. Let's help you move on your journey to success. Hey, and if you have an Apple device or access to Apple podcasts, please look up my name Tony D-U-R-S-O and subscribe to my show. A kind review there will get you tremendous appreciation back in return. Thanks everyone, and remember - just take action. Success awaits those who persevere and remain steadfast despite the odds. Sow good seeds, do good deeds and join me on the next episode of the Tony DUrso Show. We hope you've enjoyed this week's edition of the Tony DUrso Show with his key influencers. Be sure to tune in again next Friday at 5:00 PM Eastern time, 2:00 PM. Pacific time on the Voice America INFLUENCERS Channel.