805 Jenna Spencer: Delegation Mastery

We were blessed to grow rather quickly the first seven or eight years as a business. Everything was crazy. Everybody was doing everything So where) I went wrong was like delegating too much to too many people at one time. So taking on several employees and then kind of dishing everything out all at one time, because what we don’t realize is there are hundreds, maybe even thousands of pieces of data on what we’re going to delegate to someone else in our brain. And so when we go to delegate it, we don’t realize how much is in our brain until that person comes back and asks us a 100 questions about that thing.

And then it’s very overwhelming, So really just slowing down to understand that you slow down to go faster, because the more that you take your time and delegate several of the smaller things that can take more work off of your plate but aren’t as important or one really big thing that takes up a lot of time, that is very important, thinking  with the end in mind on what’s going to give me the biggest return of my money, my time, my energy, my capacity by delegating this one or few things that then will help me then be able to do more.

Many entrepreneurs and business owners burn out in overwhelm because they don’t delegate effectively to their team – and beyond the burnout, it also slows down their business growth.  Jenna Spencer says she learned the hard way how to master delegation in her fast-growing executive assistant matching company, and now also helps business executives get good at delegating.

MELINDA

Hi, I’m Melinda Wittstock and welcome to Wings of Inspired Business, where we share the inspiring entrepreneurial journeys, epiphanies, and practical advice from successful female founders … so you have everything you need at your fingertips to build the business and life of your dreams. I’m a 5-time serial entrepreneur and the CEO and founder of Podopolo, the interactive app revolutionizing podcast discovery and discussion and making podcasting profitable for creators. I’d like to invite you to take a minute, download Podopolo from either app store, listen to the rest of this episode there, and join the conversation with your questions, perspectives, experiences, and advice … Because together we’re stronger, and we all soar higher when we fly together.

Today we meet an inspiring entrepreneur who has built a fast-growing executive assistant match platform and many tools to help entrepreneurs and executives get better at delegating.

Jenna Spencer is the Founder of AssistPro™, on a mission to free up time and create growth for busy leaders. Since founding AssistPro in 2014, Jenna has worked with hundreds of clients, helping them find the Right-Fit Assistant™ and teaching them how to delegate and develop their assistants into leaders, as well. Under her direction and leadership, AssistPro has grown more than 50% each year since its founding – and has led to her creation and launch of an extension of the company devoted to helping entrepreneurs and small business owners on the path to Delegation Mastery.

It can be hard to ask for what you want, let alone receive it. It’s a theme we talk about often on this podcast, because to successfully grow a business, we must grow into inspiring leaders able to effectively communicate the results we want. Because no one can do it all themselves, we have to get great at delegating to the teams we’ve built.

Today with AssistPro founder Jenna Spencer we get into all the do’s and don’ts of delegation.

So let’s put on our wings with the inspiring Jenna Spencer and be sure to download the podcast app Podopolo so we can keep the conversation going after the episode.

Melinda Wittstock:

Jenna, welcome to Wings.

Jenna Spencer:

Hi, Melinda. Thank you so much for having me.

Melinda Wittstock:

I want to talk about delegation. Why is it so hard for so many entrepreneurs and CEOs to delegate?

Jenna Spencer:

Yes, so this was a question that I found myself asking myself and my clients for the many years that I’ve been in business. And entrepreneurs and leaders, we understand the value of delegation, we understand the correlation between delegation and really great leadership. But then why do we do that? And what I have found is there is a correlation, or there is I don’t want to say this, a loss of the feeling of control when we go to delegate, because what we are delegating are things that we are responsible for as the leaders.

And so when we go to delegate something off of our plate to give that responsibility to someone else for things that we are still ultimately responsible for, there is a lot of hesitation, a lot of challenge that comes with that because we’re literally giving things off of our plate that we still need to be responsible for at the end of the day. And so it takes an immense amount of trust and a lot of letting go of the vine to make that happen successfully. And so there’s a big challenge with the difference between the understanding and the actual doing and letting go.

Melinda Wittstock:

100%. And when you combine that too with what I always refer to as the perfectionist gene that so many women have in particular. There should be an AA for perfectionism.

Jenna Spencer:

Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:

It makes it all the harder, right? Because say you’ve mastered something yourself in the early stages of your company, and now you’re a roadblock to the growth of that company if you’re trying to do it all yourself. So you have to delegate. But if you’re a perfectionist, there’s all this fear that the person you’re delegating to will not be as good as you are at doing that.

Jenna Spencer:

Absolutely. There’s such a challenge with that because, and there’s lots of symptoms that come out in that. Right. If we micromanage, if we try to delegate, but it never works or we never have the right person. So there’s lots of different ways that that also manifest in actually trying to delegate those things. And that’s where that perfectionism really comes out of, oh, well, this is how I want it done. And so there also is that element of being a really great delegator, is also understanding that how someone successfully does the same thing that I would do. It doesn’t mean they’re going to do it in exactly the same manner that I would, but sometimes we have a hard time of letting go because we think that our way is the best way.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. Do we get too attached to the how instead of the what or the why?

Jenna Spencer:

Absolutely.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right. Because someone else would have a totally different approach and they may get the same results just in a different way. So you have to be kind of open-minded about that.

Jenna Spencer:

Yeah. And that’s where delegation really does become a skill because it becomes about really leading that person through, well, what is my end result? What is my expectation? What are the things that I want to have brought to me if there is an issue or a problem? But then really releasing and letting them use their unique gifts and abilities to actually execute on those things that we’re giving over to them.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, and then of course, there’s the 80, 20 rule, 80% as good as you is actually better than you trying to do everything yourself. I’ve seen so many particularly female run businesses get stuck and unable to grow because literally the founder, the CEO is burning out trying to do everything, and it becomes a law of diminishing returns. I mean, there’s just no way you can keep up and then no one’s useful to anyone when you’re burnt out. So you got to kind of make this transition. What do you advise particularly women business owners, women entrepreneurs, of how to walk through this and kind of develop this delegation muscle?

Jenna Spencer:

Yes, yes. So there’s really three things. The first is you have to delegate to the right person for you. So what that means is if you are scaling your company, if you’re growing, you need to have the right people in the right departments. Or if you’re making your first hire, it has to be that right person for you because you have to be able to communicate with them, understand each other, speak the same language to even establish the trust needed to really hand off and to have that building block. It is about having those people that you can synergize with and you feel like, oh, we’re speaking the same language. This is going to work. So there’s that trust element.

The next is to start small. So I see so many clients that say, oh, okay, I’m going to delegate. This is going to be so wonderful. I’m just going to hand off all of these things. But then what happens is we delegate too much too fast. There’s too many open loops, open circles, too much going on, and then we crash and burn, and then it actually creates the opposite effect. Then we have even more hesitation to delegate in the future.

So I recommend for my clients, just start with where you’re at. If you know you need to delegate your email, but you’re terrified to delegate your email, just give someone access to it and let them watch and see how you’re communicating. So take baby steps, but also never delegate more than three things at any given time. And think about the level of the thing that you’re delegating. If you’re delegating a massive project, that should just be that one main focus. Or if you want to start with a couple of very small tasks, letting someone else schedule a lunch date for you on the calendar or a meeting, then maybe two or three of those. But really just starting where you are to get some of that muscle memory built up so you can say, oh, this actually went well. I feel like I could do a little bit more. And then,

Melinda Wittstock:

Right. That’s important too, just developing trust and developing trust with different individuals on your team as well.

Jenna Spencer:

Yes, absolutely. And then just that third thing I was going to mention on there. I know you asked me for the first thing, but,

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I know [inaudible 00:06:45].

Jenna Spencer:

My brain thinks in threes, but as far as the process, so I hear so many people say, well, what’s the perfect process to delegate? So the perfect process, there obviously are different styles. Right. We all have leadership styles, we all have communication styles, but the best way that’s going to work for you to delegate is the best way that’s going to work for you. So there are lots of different processes out there. Talk to someone you know that is really great at delegating and think about if I’m going to delegate, how would I want it to work? Or how would I feel most comfortable? So pick a process and follow it, but also don’t overthink it or continually change it, meaning looking for a different process just to feel like you’re going to be able to do it better if you have a different process. It’s more about the trust, who you’re delegating to, and taking small steps to build the muscle memory.

Melinda Wittstock:

And I like what you said about delegating too quickly because you delegate a lot of things to a lot of people, and suddenly you have a different problem because you’re trying to keep track of where things are and you don’t really know. And then, yeah, you can get out over your skis, I guess a bit with that, especially in businesses that are, yeah, especially in businesses that are growing very fast where say technology businesses or whatnot, where you were one, you were three, you were 10, and suddenly now you’re like 50.

Jenna Spencer:

Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:

That’s a big transition for a founder to walk through, because what you’re doing in any of those stages is changing. So you’re just constantly growing and it’s like every day learning more and more and more and more. So how do you tackle it in that kind of context?

Jenna Spencer:

So speaking just from personal experience with that, we were blessed to grow rather quickly the first seven or eight years as a business. And so learning from my own mistakes through that really is where that came from. Obviously I have clients that have been through similar situations, but in my experience it was like, oh, well, it was a startup. Everything was crazy. Everybody was doing everything, but I was doing marketing and business development and sales calls and all these other things. So where I went wrong was like delegating too much to too many people at one time. So taking on several employees and then kind of dishing everything out all at one time, because what we don’t realize is there are hundreds, maybe even thousands of pieces of data on what we’re going to delegate to someone else in our brain. And so when we go to delegate it, we don’t realize how much is in our brain until that person comes back and asks us a 100 questions about that thing.

And then it’s very overwhelming, and then it’s like, oh, wait, I didn’t realize this. I didn’t, oh yeah, this is right. And oh yeah, this is important. So really just slowing down to understand that you slow down to go faster, because the more that you take your time and delegate either a lot, several of the smaller things that can take more work off of your plate but aren’t as important or one really big thing that takes up a lot of time, that is very important, thinking kind of with the end in mind on what’s going to give me the biggest return of my money, my time, my energy, my capacity by delegating this one or few things that then will help me then be able to do more. So really it just goes back to going slower to go faster mentality.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. And that can be hard because entrepreneurs are kind of hardwired to go as fast as possible, right?

Jenna Spencer:

Yes. Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:

And so that’s slowing down. I mean, the other aspect that it occurs to me too is something that you’ve mastered yourself, if you’re at a level of mastery with it, it’s so intuitive that sometimes it can be hard to explain, and especially if you don’t have all the SOPs done yet, and it’s not all documented and this kind of thing. So is the first person that any business should hire some sort of operational person like an EA that’s just documenting everything?

Jenna Spencer:

So that’s a great question. So if you are a founder and things are moving very quickly, obviously then sometimes an EA is a great first hire because they can be a direct extension of you to help you move faster. If they’re completing things for you and you’re working in tandem with this person, how much more would you be able to get done at your full capacity level if you’re not having to rearrange five meetings because one meeting needed to happen today and now there’s seven things that have to be rearranged because of that. So sometimes it is the right move to hire someone to document SOPs and things like that. But what I find is a lot of times it’s better to get that relief to get that head space for ourselves as the entrepreneur and then document. So what happens is if we are overextended and we’re not delegating, we’re burning the candle at both ends, we’re out of energy. We’re not able to think at the high enough level that we need to be the best that our company needs us to be at.

And so by delegating to someone like an assistant, you immediately get your time back. Right. You’re just exchanging time, you’re getting hours back, but then you’re also getting something way more valuable, which is your capacity and your capacity to think about strategy, to think about the execution of the strategy, to think high level for your company, but then also you’re going to get your energy back and you’re going to be more energized and your capacity is going to also increase because of that. So it all depends kind of where your company is, and if you’re getting ready to make a bunch of hires, then you may need to document all these SOPs that people can then implement. But if you’re just underwater and you just need to catch up, hire somebody really great to be an assistant, a great extension of you so that you can get back up and start getting these things done and get ahead of the ball again.

Melinda Wittstock:

So a lot of people when it comes to hiring, I think we can make the mistake of thinking that it’s an expense rather than an investment and hire too late. And so when I talk to a lot of women about this in terms of their business growth, it’s like, what kind of return are you getting as a result of hiring this person? Which presupposes you need to know what result you want them to drive, and you can’t assume that they know it.

Jenna Spencer:

Yes. Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:

I think a lot of entrepreneurs just think, oh yeah, it’s obvious to me. It should be obvious to you and don’t actually say what the result is, or even hire the person with the result in mind. There’s a lot of, I want to hire this person to do this,

Jenna Spencer:

Right.

Melinda Wittstock:

Not to return that. So in the context of AssistPro and everything you’re doing there in terms of matching the right, how does that kind of manifest? What comes up there in your own learnings and how you advise your clients?

Jenna Spencer:

Yeah, so just talking with my clients and mentors and people over the years, we’ve kind of come up with, on average there is a three to five X return on getting some great support. So whether that is someone desperately needed in your department that you are actively doing that work or in an assistant, but that all sounds great, but how do you actually know what that return could be for you? And so an exercise is something very practical that I do with my clients is just have them go through an exercise of what is it that you can produce? What is that dollar amount that you can produce for your business, either monthly, weekly, quarterly, or through different sales, through different deals? What is it that dollar amount that you could produce if you could have a certain amount of work off of your plate, what is the missed opportunity?

Because that’s typically when we know we need to delegate, right? Because we’re missing opportunities, we’re missing money, we’re missing those opportunities to make money. So actually calculate that out. Just what is that dollar amount that you know you could bring into your business through your role if you weren’t doing all of these other things? And then actually calculate how much time it would take for someone else to do that at their rate, calculate it by your rate, and then just look at the difference. And that dollar amount is really going to show you how much more you’re going to be making and what that return is going to be on that specific person for you.

Melinda Wittstock:

This is such important advice because if you’re thinking of your value, say as a founder or a CEO that goes out and lands some big kind of strategic deal or brings in investment or whatever, what’s your hourly rate for doing that? I mean, it’s certainly not like what you’d pay someone to fix a link on your website.

Jenna Spencer:

Exactly. Yes. And so a lot of times that’s where clients will say, but I just don’t know if I’m ready to spend this money every month on this person. And all they’re thinking about is the amount of money they’re getting ready to spend. And so by doing this exercise, it actually sees, wow, I could bring in an extra of five grand a month, 10 grand a month, I’m missing $50,000 worth of business every month because of all these things that I’m doing. So it’s just a really great tool for actually seeing the numbers on paper to help with that perspective shift.

Melinda Wittstock:

So how did you come to found AssistPro? What made you interested in this whole area?

Jenna Spencer:

Yeah, so this is just a very random story I tell people. So it wasn’t that I loved the executive assistant industry or that I always wanted to do something like this. I was actually a mom and I was about to have my third child, and one day I was driving to work, I was in corporate banking, I was driving to work, and I said, I’m dropping my children off at 7:00 AM every morning, and I am haul and tail to get back there by 5:30 PM. We rush home, I make dinner, I tuck them into bed, we wake up and we do it all over again. And I said, all of a sudden I was like, this is not the life that I want. This is just not what I want. I’ve always wanted to just have freedom of my own time. That ultimately is what I always wanted.

So this was pre COVID, pre everybody working virtually, all of this. And so I started searching anywhere and everywhere from work from home opportunities, and back then it was a lot of insurance and retail, or not cold calling, but direct sales and things like that, which are all wonderful. But I started seeing some remote positions for executive assistant positions. And so I started applying in metro areas and just saying, Hey, I could fly in once a month to meet with you. Would you let me do this job from home? So anyway, long story short, through a Craigslist ad, these two business coaches hired me to be their executive assistant. And it just so happened that they were inside of kind of a coaching methodology that was up and coming. So EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System, I’m not sure if you’re familiar with that or not. And so there’s a book called Traction by Gino Wickman.

And so at the time, there were maybe 50 coaches that were running the system with companies, I think they have almost 600 now. And they said, Jenna, my colleagues are asking for assistance and they’re wanting a Jenna. And so they needed assistance that really understood this process to help them, to help these coaches. And so it just so happened that even though I was in corporate banking, I also had this just weird myriad of background. I had had a lot of people management in the restaurant business and managing, and I did some culture stuff for a retail bank in my area. And so I was standing in my kitchen one night with my husband and I’m like, you know what? I need to do this because I have women friends reaching out to me in the business world that are saying, like, what are you doing?

I want to work from home. This just looks so amazing. And so in that moment, we decided to start the company, and those men are still amazing mentors to me today. And they literally helped start the company because they started referring all of their friends to me. And I was like, wait, what are you doing? I’ve got to get up and running. And so it’s just been this amazing journey so far, and it’s really given me what I’ve wanted, which is control of my time and really having that time freedom. But I also have helped hundreds of women just get what they want out of their lives, which is just to have more time and flexibility.

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s really important because when we launch businesses, sometimes they can kind of almost happen to us through a circumstance, or it can be just very much your life’s work.

Melinda Wittstock:

And so of all the clients you work for, how many of them are sort of accidental entrepreneurs in that sense? And how many of them are like, no, this is it, this is what I want to do?

Jenna Spencer:

Yeah. So I would say majority of our clients, because we started supporting the business coaches, majority of them were entrepreneurs, and a lot of them, I met them when they were transitioning into the coaching realm of things. And so a lot of them said, I started implementing this system into my business, and then I realized I really wanted to help others achieve what I was able to achieve in my business. So it really came from a heart of service. So a lot of them, and now I’m kind of doing this one example, but now I realize kind of the common theme is majority of the clients that I know, they all became entrepreneurs because they wanted to meet a need that they saw where they could help someone else.

And that was really my main reason as well, was to help all of these moms. But it’s just been really cool to work with hundreds of clients and just to hear all of their unique stories, everything from family businesses to starting multiple companies once they’re in their main company and seeing different ideas and different ways that they can help other people. And it’s been really rewarding and really cool just to work with so many different types of entrepreneurs.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yes. And so Jenna, what’s so interesting about your business is that it is growing so fast, 50% year-on-year.

Jenna Spencer:

Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:

Did you plan for it to be that way, were you surprised by the growth? How are you getting that kind of growth?

Jenna Spencer:

Yeah. So totally surprised by the growth because I’m like, wait, are you sure? And then we made the Inc. 5000 list. I’m like, oh my gosh, are you sure? I’ve never really been a numbers person, but I have always been just relentless about really provide amazing dynamic service through great people and that the business will come and the business will happen. So that has been just what I have always followed, but I got really serious about the whole delegation piece. And so starting as an executive assistant, those two coaches, the two entrepreneurs, they delegated to me at a level that I never even knew that existed. And I had so much responsibility in their personal and professional lives, really managing things and owning things that I have a unique perspective on delegation, because it literally changed my life. And I got to see how powerful that was for me.

I mean, it really lit me up with self-confidence because they trusted me. I felt empowered. I was growing my skillsets. I was doing all these amazing things for them, and they trusted me to do that. And so my self-confidence and my capabilities, my abilities just grew so much, so fast working for them that I knew if I could replicate that, that it would in turn clients would be super happy, but assistance would just light up and their lives would be changed. So when I started the business, I just 100% committed to being uncomfortable with delegation because it was hard switching over and then being the one to delegate. So I hired people a lot smarter than me and people that kind of were hard to afford in the beginning. Quite honestly, those two hires were really the toughest to make, my operations director and then a couple of other people that I hired.

But I knew that if I made that investment and I let them do what they did best, which were things I was trying to do, and I wasn’t doing so great at, that it would be a major benefit for the business. And it totally worked that way. It was very hard. It was very emotionally like, oh my gosh, am I really going to do this? This is really freaking me out. And so I had to learn to lead them with the vision, but let them do the execution on what they knew how to do a lot better than I did.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, 100%. So what have been some of the biggest hurdles you’ve had to overcome? You mentioned earlier in the interview that you learned a lot through your own mistakes, which is always the way with entrepreneurship. So what are some of the things?

Jenna Spencer:

Yeah, so one of the biggest things, and not to get into how the industry works, but essentially we realized that we had a billing problem. And this was actually right before or right around the time I hired my operations director. And we realized that the way our billing structure worked, the system was not working correctly, and we actually owed our clients a pretty large number. It was a five figure number. And back then that was a huge amount of money for us. And so just realizing that, oh my gosh, done something wrong, and how are we going to fix this? And I can’t fix this tomorrow. And what are we going to do about it? And who do I need to tell and how do we need to have these conversations? And so just diving straight off that cliff of like this business is going to end tomorrow.

I’ve made this huge mistake. I’ve led my team wrong. I just don’t know how to do this. And my father-in-law, I called him up and he’s been one of my most amazing mentors. He met with me that same day, and he said, Jenna it was 10 miles in, it’s going to be 10 miles out. You just need to get a plan together, get a communication strategy, and execute the plan and the strategy. And if you have a couple of people that that it’s not working for, then have those conversations one off. And once I had my 24 hours with the food that I wanted, the TV that I wanted crying in bed, then I executed, or we came up with the plan and I gathered my team members and we executed the plan, and we got out of that six months earlier than we thought we would.

And so that was one of the biggest lessons that I learned in a couple of different ways. Just understanding I needed the right people on the team, but also the systems and the platforms that we were using really had to update at a faster pace or move at a faster pace than what I had thought, because I didn’t expect for business to move that fast. And so one thing that we didn’t catch, just have this massive big impact financially.

Melinda Wittstock:

That can be a scary time, actually. A lot of people think that the hardest time is when you don’t have the money you need to grow. But equally hard, maybe even harder is when you’re growing so fast and [inaudible 00:27:48] systems and you can have all kinds of cash flow pro, you can have all sorts of things go wrong at that stage. It’s kind of hard,

Jenna Spencer:

No. Absolutely. And then the other thing is just it’s a little funny, but just a mindset that I had quite honestly. So I thought, oh, well, once we hit a million dollars, everything’s going to be great, a million in revenue because I’ll have everything figured out. So then I was on this call with these two gentlemen, and I was looking for a networking group, right, because we should always be in a room where people are a lot smarter than us to help us grow. And I’m a firm believer in that. And so they said, Jenna, what’s your vision for AssistPro? And I said, 10 million in revenue annually. That’s what I want. I want a $10 million company. And they both just got real quiet. We were on a Zoom call, this was right in the middle, like right at the beginning of COVID, I think. And they said, really?

I said, well, yeah, why not? And they said, well, $10 million companies come with $10 million problems. And I was like, oh, well, I mean, do they really, do they really know? No, surely that’s not true. Right. Because I was in my own mind of, well, we’ve passed a million, we’re good to go. This is just going to be great. And then you hit. So then when you have never had a company this size before, you always have to go through it for the first time. So then I’m like, oh, there’s $2 million problems. Oh, there’s $3 million. Oh, there’s $5 million problems. And so now I look back and I just laugh on that because I’m like, man, those guys probably just had a good chuckle after that phone call. And I have just really learned that what,

Melinda Wittstock:

So what were some of the specific things at this phase? What’s the difference between a one million and a two million, a five million, a $10 million problem?

Jenna Spencer:

Yeah. So the zero to one million is all those initial things you put in place kind of get you by. But then for us, it was process and it was systems from one million to two million. It was like, then that was the financial thing. It was like, oh, well, the systems we were using are not going to handle where we’re at now. So for us, it was processes and systems from one to two million, really from two to five million is people. So it’s departments, it’s getting people in the right seats. One of the biggest things that we learned is just because you hire people to go into the right seats, if you’re going from one person in that department to four people in that department, it’ll take a good year to get all those people trained, get them into their seats, really understanding. But then what if you do that in four departments? Well, now there’s cross departmental communication that could be challenging and all kinds of things,

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh my God, I’m living through that. I totally understand what you’re saying.

Jenna Spencer:

Yeah. So that’s been my, like that for us and my business, those have been the two biggest things. And now we’re bumping up against the process thing again, and we basically bought bigger pants. Right. So we bought bigger software that we could grow into, but then it’s like, oh, well, what’s going to be the thing for the next five years and where we’re going if the growth trajectory continues? And so yeah, it’s been a fun journey. Lots of learning.

Melinda Wittstock:

It really is. And I think it’s almost like having children. If we knew what we were going to be going through, [inaudible 00:31:04] we do it. It’s sort of the same thing.

Jenna Spencer:

Amen.

Melinda Wittstock:

All entrepreneurs, I know myself included, are kind of, how hard could this be? To build the plane as we fly. But it’s constant learning. It’s constant,

Jenna Spencer:

It is.

Melinda Wittstock:

Challenge. And you have to be, like you mentioned mindset, you got to be kind of comfortable with that, like the uncertainty, the testing yourself, making mistakes because you’re going to make them. There’s just no way around that. I mean, there are things you can do to ameliorate it, like you mentioned, making sure you have good mentors, be in a networking group, surround yourself with people that have done it before, listen to great podcasts, read books, all that stuff. But even then, there’s always going to be some sort of new situation or something you can’t control or whatever.

Jenna Spencer:

That’s very true. I’ve found so much comfort just in the last couple of years. I’ve had a ton of growth in the last few years, but it’s really just that the acceptance and the understanding of, let me see if I can say this the right way, of you learn way more from, well, you don’t learn as much from an experience, or how do you say it? So you learn from the experience because you’ve gone through the experience.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right.

Jenna Spencer:

So for me, it was like, well, can’t someone just tell me how to jump the learning curve? Can’t you just tell me? Just tell me what I need to do and then I can avoid that pain. I can avoid that lesson. But then I’m like, so then I started actually learning and listening to other people. And so why is it that we’re in those rooms? Because those people have been there, done that, but they have the experience. And so it’s the experience that makes us better leaders and better entrepreneurs. But we have to go through the experience. It’s just like raising a kid. I told my daughter, I’m like, well, I’ve never raised a 15-year old before, so we’re kind of figuring this out together. But when my son comes along, I’ll know a little bit more. But so it’s just going through the experiences can be a beautiful thing because that’s how you learn, that’s how you grow, and that’s how you just become a better leader and entrepreneur. So it’s understanding the beauty of the journey, I guess is what I’m trying to say with all of those words.

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s true. It is a journey, not a destination. It requires some compassion for yourself as well, which I think we could be really hard on ourselves.

Jenna Spencer:

Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:

And so being a little bit more forgiving, perhaps. I say this because I’m saying it to myself as well, I need that,

Jenna Spencer:

Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:

Reminder. And so what’s next for you? What’s the next big step for your business? Where are you going?

Jenna Spencer:

Yeah, so we are looking into some technology. So matching is our big thing and really what I love to do. And so how can we make that more of an actual technology platform? So very, very excited for that. But then also leaning into diversifying the business a little bit. So not just providing the outsource services, but actually providing training and providing community and ongoing professional development for assistance. And so we hear a lot from assistance that, and with a lot of the clients that we support who are consultants and business coaches of, I see my client having this great community and all of these wonderful things, but I want more professional development. I want to learn more about this. I want to be surrounded by other amazing assistants. So we are very excited for several new things that we’re going to be rolling out in the coming couple of years, so.

Melinda Wittstock:

Amazing. Well, thank you so much, Jenna, for putting on your wings and flying with us today.

Jenna Spencer:

Thank you so much for having me. I thoroughly enjoyed this. Thank you.