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Startup Corner: Jaime Jay, Bottleneck Virtual Assistants LLC

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Minimally viable product …
We offer a six-step hiring formula that helps business leaders understand what the hiring process entails. We want to help our clients, who decide to outsource certain tasks, prepare for hiring a virtual assistant using what we refer to as remote-hiring best practices.

Problem solving …
According to a SmallBizTrends.com article, one of the biggest challenges businesses face is hiring wrong. The average cost to hire in the U.S. is $4,129. What is even harder to believe is that firing someone can cost an organization up to nine months of salary. We help small-business owners make sure they are slow to hire and quick to fire in order to alleviate the high costs associated with scaling the workforce.

Seed money …
Bootstrapping.

Hurdles overcome …
Identifying a target market. We’ve worked tirelessly building company profiles so that we could clearly articulate who we want to talk to and what we want to say. It’s not enough to discover the ideal demographics, but we also had to identify the psychographics for our ideal target market. We also needed to make sure that we niched down in certain industries, and once we identified that industry, we niched down again into a smaller, more focused segment.

Next phase …
Launch a new product in the medical private practice niche with a virtual assistant certification system we are calling M.A.P., a medical assistant professional. We will also be looking forward to the second quarter as we launch our D.A.P., dental assistant professional certification system. We are really big into systems and processes.

Biggest mistake …
Starting off too general without identifying a more exclusive industry.

Best advice received ...
Revenue is vanity and profit is sanity – Mike Michalowicz.

Worst advice received ...
Build it, and they will come.

Greatest need …
To connect with partners in various niches that want to increase their position within a specific vertical that needs a proven system and infrastructure, so they can hit the ground running.

Food for thought …
Be mindful of generating too much debt in the beginning. Operate lean and mean, and don’t forget to pay yourself first.

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