Thankfully, his BELAY VA Melissa was more than ready to help him solve his problem – and he was more than ready to hand them over.
“He very happily and freely and quickly was like, ‘Here you go. What do you need access to? How do we do this?’” Melissa adds. “[It] was great because then I could just dive right in. It was really nice.
“I had been trying to [prepare] if he were resistant to this – what I could say to get him to be more comfortable. And I didn’t need to do any of that.”
“I really needed help,” he shares. “So I wanted to start Melissa with relatively low-risk, easy-to-delegate things like my schedule.
“So we had some conversations – a bunch of conversations – talking about what we want to do together. How we want to be together. How we want to kind of flush [tension and conflict] out.
“I wanted somebody who looks at the world differently than I do. I wanted someone who brings more structure to their thinking and can solve problems in a more structured way because I don’t do that very well. I’m really kind of innovative and imaginative and generative.”
There was one thing, however, that took Kevin more time to hand over: his emails.
“I wasn’t really willing right off the bat to let Melissa write emails to my clients,” he shares. “[But] over time, she would start drafting an email for me and put it into my drafts folder. I’d go look at it, maybe tweak it a little bit, sort of make it have my voice and then send it.
“And now she catches stuff and handles it – it’s resolved before I even find it. It’s really, really cool. Thank God I don’t have to do it. Stuff just gets done. It’s really amazing.”
And for Melissa, their differences complement each other and are what have fortified their working partnership.
“We checked in each week about how everything was going and – I will be honest – sometimes that would be very uncomfortable,” she laughs. “Because I don’t always get very touchy-feely but it was really good [because] we’re not changing or growing if we’re always to stay uncomfortable.”
And when Kevin’s in the weeds and a client forgets that their meeting has been rescheduled – and is none too pleased – Kevin knows he can count on Melissa to put out the fires in his absence.
“[Something] happened – and I didn’t even have to worry about it,” he shares. “She just handled it. I just trust her to have the judgment to know which things she should watch.
“She is another set of eyes and ears for me so that I can focus on serving my clients.”