When Faustina, Integrator of AssistPro™ for the past 4 years, found herself
treading water with multiple roles in a start-up, from marketing director to operations director to finance manager,
the Founder and Visionary reached out to her with a life-saver.
As many Integrators tend to do, Faustina said, “nope, we’re fine, I can
handle it”, but Jenna, Founder of AssistPro said during a quarterly meeting, “you don’t really have a choice, you
need an assistant and the company needs to do that for you”.
That’s when Faustina went through the matching process and met Sherra Davis,
her Right-Fit Assistant™.
Letting Go of the Vine
What happened next was a process of discovering together how Faustina could
delegate and “let go of the vine”. There is no overnight miracle when it comes to hiring an Executive Assistant, it
will be a learning process no matter what. They started by delegating the typical tasks for most Integrators: email
and calendar. They developed a system pretty quickly, which started with Sherra taking to-dos from emails and adding
them to Trello or dropping the emails into Slack and communicating with Faustina about what she did with them. After
a year or so of this process, which seemed to be going great, Faustina felt like she was still grinding and not
getting out ahead of little tasks to be able to work on bigger rocks. The relationship was keeping her head above
water but had so much more potential.
Consulting the Visionary
“I had offloaded four full-time positions and I still felt very underwater”
so she discussed this dilemma with Jenna, her Visionary who quickly detected and revealed the issue, asking Faustina
“what’s the point of Sherra handling the emails if she is still communicating with you in Trello and Slack on them?”
This was the light bulb moment that moved us forward.
“I realized I hadn’t actually truly delegated these tasks because I still had
visibility into it and we quickly changed that”.
If Sherra was archiving emails that aren’t important then they also weren’t
important enough to be in Slack or Trello for Faustina to review. That single switch virtually removed Faustina from
her inbox altogether, “I can’t tell you the last email I responded to.”
The Pain Points of an Integrator and Finding Relief
These are common pain points for many Integrators, who like Faustina, are
detail-oriented and like to control situations and the flow of work. Changing how you receive information, as
Faustina did, can truly level up your Executive Assistant experience.
Another time-saver that helped Faustina as an Integrator was having Sherra
review the lengthy Loom explainers and other videos that could run upwards of 20 minutes. Instead, Sherra reviews
these Loom videos and provides a summary.
“Now Sherra is watching the videos and telling me the 3 most important things
from the video and taking something that was 5-10 minutes and turning it into 2 minutes. That type of elevation is
what I feel works best for Integrators and Visionaries because we are so detail-oriented, giving us the main points
moves us forward faster. ”
The Value/ROI of Hiring an Executive Assistant
According to Faustina, the number of projects and initiatives that they were
able to accomplish after matching her with an Executive Assistant shows the ROI:
“Our company has grown 50% year over year the past 4 years even during the
Pandemic and we recently just added 4 new team members. It’s not all directly attributed to me but an Executive
Assistant has allowed me to guide the company from a higher level at a faster pace.”
Bringing Sherra on board allowed me to delegate the finance manager role
because I had the space to train and onboard someone, which was 20-30 hours worth of work per week, and is now a
full-time position. I was also able to delegate the marketing and operations director roles to two more full-time
positions. With 4 full-time roles off Faustina’s plate, she is still working full-time, so you can imagine how the
right Executive Assistant and delegation process becomes instrumental and snowballs with a growing company.
Are you interested in finding your dream assistant? Get started with
AssistPro’s proprietary matching process to find the Right-Fit Assistant who will play an important role in
the growth of your business.
Put these tips and more from Faustina and Sherra’s story into action and start your journey to more freedom of time
and more growth through Delegation Mastery™.