Daniel Ramsey
CEO and Co-Founder of MyOutDesk.com
The CEO Mindset
Episode Summary
What is the CEO mindset? Listen to my interview with Daniel Ramsey, CEO of MyOutDesk.com, to learn the answer and why everyone in the organization—not just the CEO, needs the CEO mindset!
Check out the “60-Second Preview” of this episode!
Bio
He is the founder & CEO of MyOutDesk, the largest and highest-rated Virtual Assistant company in the marketplace with over 500 5-star reviews and over 13 years of experience, serving more than 6000 clients across industries. Daniel is a long-time licensed real estate broker, mortgage broker, and general contractor who has sold thousands of homes and made millions in commissions. He built real estate’s #1 staffing company. Back in 2008, he was inspired by his time-management struggles to find a better way to help agents leverage their time & energy and created MyOutDesk to provide a trusted, reliable solution to the office administration, marketing & prospecting tasks that every business owner has – but most lack the time to focus on. In 13 years with MyOutDesk, Daniel has helped thousands of clients scale their businesses and grow profitability.
Website
https://www.myoutdesk.com/
LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/company/my-outdesk/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dramseyinc/
Twitter
https://twitter.com/myoutdesk
Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/MyOutDesk.LLC/
Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/myoutdesk/
Leadership Quote
“If you don’t have an assistant, then you are one.”
Get Your Copy of Daniel’s Book!
https://www.myoutdesk.com/scale/
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Full Episode Transcripts and Detailed Guest Information
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Transcript
The key to sustainable leadership lies in the ability to thrive during uncertainty, ambiguity, and change. Grand Heron International brings you the Coaching Assistance Program, giving your employees on-demand coaching to manage through a challenging situation and arrive at a solution. Visit GrandHeronInternational.Ca/Podcast to learn more.
This podcast is part of the C Suite Radio Network, turning the volume up on business.
Welcome to the Keep Leading!® Podcast, the podcast dedicated to promoting leadership development and sharing leadership insights. Here’s your host, The Leadership Excelerator®, Eddie Turner.
Eddie Turner:
Hello, everyone! Welcome to
Keep Leading!® Podcast, the podcast dedicated to leadership development and insights. I’m your host Eddie Turner, The Leadership Excelerator®. I work with leaders to accelerate performance and drive impact through the power of executive and leadership coaching, facilitation, and professional speaking.
In my line of work, I get a chance to interact with a lot of people in the C-suite, that is those that have titles that start with C – CEO, CFO, COO, etc. There are about 30 of those C-x titles these days. There used to only be three. Today, I want to focus on the CEO specifically. I want to focus on the CEO mindset, what is it and how can you and I benefit from having that mindset even if we’re not a CEO. So, who better to have that discussion with than someone who is a CEO?
I’ve invited an amazing man. I’ve invited the Founder and CEO of MyOutDesk. I’ve invited Daniel Ramsey. Daniel started this amazing organization and it is the largest and highest rated virtual assistant company in the marketplace. And he has more than 13 years of experience serving more than 6,000 clients across industries.
So, welcome, Daniel Ramsey, to the Keep Leading!® Podcast.
Daniel Ramsey:
Hey, Eddie. Thank you so much for having me.
Eddie Turner:
Man, I tell you, you’re sounding smooth over there and I love that microphone you’re using.
Daniel Ramsey:
Yeah, it’s a big one, man. I like it too. It picks up all the noise that’s right in front of it but not all the cars and kids and dogs barking in the background.
Eddie Turner:
I love it. Excellent. You sound like a podcaster rather than the CEO.
Daniel Ramsey:
Well, today’s world, I think, you have to be both and I think you know that. And the reality is the world has shifted. We’re 100% a digital company. We’re 100% a virtual company now. I think in this day and age, you almost have to make that transition.
Eddie Turner:
Yeah, some haven’t been able to do that though, Daniel. So, tell me a little bit more about you and your organization and what you do.
Daniel Ramsey:
Yeah, I got started in this world because I was an entrepreneur and built a very successful real estate development company. We would buy properties, rehab them, fix them, and sell them. And then at some point, you start buying duplexes and then fourplexes and then you start buying land and you develop them. And I was building this business of land development and I found myself getting married, you and I talked about that, we’re both in that world of family, and found myself married. And on my honeymoon in Guatemala, working on my honeymoon. We were at a Francis Ford Coppola resort and it’s overlooking this amazing lake in the jungles, there’s monkeys, we’re in a bungalow. So, literally, we are living in the trees in the rainforest for seven days. And I found myself one night working at 1 in the morning. The bartender took my phone and started making fun of me in Spanish – “Dumb white guy. What’s wrong with him? Beautiful bride back in his room. Doesn’t he know money is not the only important thing in the world?” And he snapped a photo of me and that moment changed my entire career. I knew that I had to change how my businesses ran. I knew I had to change how I led. I knew that if I wanted to build a business that I own versus the business owning me, I had to change my entire focus. And that really started me on the path of hiring a lot of people and eventually I hired my first virtual assistant and grew that. And now we’ve served, like you said in the intro, more than 6,000 customers over 13 years, helping them find leverage in their own business.
Eddie Turner:
Isn’t that something? Number one, the fact that you were working on your honeymoon in Guatemala. Number two, how that became the genesis of an amazing business career.
Daniel Ramsey:
Yeah. You know what’s funny is I always wanted to be an entrepreneur and I always wanted to own my own. Business I was that one kid in the back of the bus selling candy bars. And I just got hooked early on sales and leadership and really building business. The problem is you go to, and I went to business school, you go to business school and they teach you about Marketing, they teach you about Sales, they teach you about Operations but they don’t actually teach you how to be a leader, they don’t teach you how to build a business. They teach you these concepts that once strung together actually makes sense and once you have some experience kind of makes sense but when you’re brand-new in business, you’re really kind of struggling to survive, struggling to figure out where you are in the world. That was certainly me in my first 10, 15 years of being a business owner.
Eddie Turner:
That’s so true, Daniel. I happen to be on staff as a leadership coach and executive coach at a couple of higher education institutions in the MBA programs and that is one of the things I’m seeing that really makes a difference because they don’t necessarily get that training in the classroom. So, it’s when they uniquely have a program tailored to themselves with the help of a leadership or executive coach that people can make that shift.
So, congratulations on being able to have this epiphany on your honeymoon and, by the way, having a wonderful wife who allowed you to live to tell the story.
Daniel Ramsey:
She laughs every time she hears it because she’s like “I was sleeping. I didn’t know what was happening.” I’m really lucky to have a wife who’s supportive. When you make this transition from an entrepreneur to a CEO and from a small business to a large business, that transition can be very painful. I have a lot of friends that have gone through really rough times in their lives making that transition because it’s like going to business school, getting your doctorate and also learning Latin all at once, making that transition from a small business to a large. So, yeah, I’m very fortunate in my wife choice.
Eddie Turner:
Excellent. So, tell us what is the CEO Mindset.
Daniel Ramsey:
Here’s how this happened and this is kind of a unique but very timely story. COVID hit, everybody knows that the world shifted and it shifted very fast. In our situation, we’re in California, in early March, we knew that literally our governor was going to shut down our entire business. What I was concerned about was how was that going to affect our clients’, our customers’ business, what would they be doing. We’d made the shift to a fully virtual company but we were really, really, really concerned that many of our clients hadn’t and they didn’t know what they needed to do and they didn’t know how to create digital content, get it out there in the world. So, the CEO Mindset is simply adding value to your and then … I literally put dot-dot-dot there because sometimes as a CEO, you’re adding value to your customers, sometimes you’re adding value to your vendors, sometimes you’re adding value literally to your employees who report to you, sometimes you’re adding value to your leadership team but the reality is once you’ve decided that you’re going to take that title as a CEO, everything shifts. You’re in service of others. And in our world, that means adding value to your people. And so, this is what we did during the COVID pandemic is figure out exactly who needed our support, what did they need absolutely right now and then we worked like hell to make sure that we were able to provide or add that value.
Eddie Turner:
Now, that is a very interesting definition. And when I think about a CEO and your definition of adding value to your dot-dot-dot, often times the only group of people that come to mind or the first would be your shareholders, adding value to your shareholders. So, I like your positioning that it can be your people, it can be a lot of other people against the dot-dot-dot, the ellipses. I like that.
Daniel Ramsey:
Well, we don’t exclude the shareholders. We’re always, always cognizant of who is our boss, right? I mean, ultimately, you’re reporting to a board and that board is reporting and ultimately responsible to shareholders but they’re typically not the ones who are writing the checks, they’re not the ones who are exchanging dollars. The reality is people, and this is something that we spent a lot of time or I personally spent a lot of time teaching my organization, people exchange dollars for value. And so, absolutely, as a CEO, you’ve got people pulling at you in multiple directions you can go in but when you’re very hyper-focused on who’s paying the bill, meaning who’s paying the salaries, who’s adding value to the business, that makes it a very clear directive of where you’re going to put your attention and focus in that moment.
Eddie Turner:
Yeah, I was making the point not that you ignore the shareholders but that you’ve actually expanded the lens of which you look at who you’re going to add the value to.
Daniel Ramsey:
Look, the most important people are the people who are in service to your customers and service to your vendors. And another weird space, and this is something about our culture, one of our core values is to have a servant’s heart, just to look for people to serve and in the end, when you’re serving the right people for the right reason, then things always typically work out. And if that focus is put in the right direction and you’re adding value to others and there’s a fair exchange of value, typically, companies are giving something of value and customers are exchanging dollars in revenue, then all is going to work out in the end.
Eddie Turner:
Yes. And that raises the question do I have to be a CEO to have a CEO mindset.
Daniel Ramsey:
I love that. There’s a lot of leadership that comes from every corner of the organization. One of my favorite stories is we went through a period a couple years ago where our accounting just was not keeping pace with our customers’ billing. There were some late payers out there. And so, I offered a challenge to our accounting people. I said “Hey, look, you actually have to interact with our customers. If they’re having challenges paying their bills, we need to know why, we need to know if it’s a reasonable reason and we need to interact with them.” And so, I challenged our accounting team which is a small team, there’s only like seven or eight of us in that team, and I challenged them to actually get on the phone within 24 hours of a missed bill. And 24 hours of a missed bill for a company is hyper aggressive. And they’re all experienced, they come from other companies where they were in the Bookkeeping or Accounting department or the Finance department. And so, where typical timeframes for billing is Net-30, Net-60, Net-90, sometimes people will pay over long term. So, I challenged our staff to go after those bills the moment they became late like within 24 hours, have a conversation. And I didn’t know what would happen. Of course, over time, the numbers got better because what you focus on actually improves; what you measure, it really improves; and what’s reported up, really, really improves, right? This is part of leadership but wildly enough, I got feedback from one of our just standard accountants n the team, her name was Jamie and we’re doing kind of our company circle where we’re sitting down and getting feedback and giving feedback and it was at a company event and she got on the mic and she said “A year ago when Daniel asked me to call our customers within 24 hours, my heart almost jumped out of my body. I was nervous and scared. I’d never interacted with the customers before. They’d sent emails and you know done the standard stuff but never within 24 hours” but here’s what she said which was wild – “It’s been really good for me to understand the pulse of our customers. Some of the conversations I’ve been able to have with our customers have been massively valuable for me personally as I develop here and I’ve learned a lot about our business” because guess what, she’s in there having conversations with our customers. So, yeah, the wildness is sometimes you’re adding value as a CEO to different areas of your organization and asking them to do stuff in service of the business that they would not normally do. And so, that’s just one small story of where our core value of a servant’s heart and really looking for ways to improve has really impacted the business.
Eddie Turner:
That’s a great story. And really nice to hear how even at the CEO level, part of that mindset is having a servant’s heart. And that is something that we’re seeing surface in 21st century leadership that wasn’t necessarily part of the leadership models of the past. So, very nice.
I’m talking to Daniel Ramsey. He’s the founder and CEO of MyOutDesk and we’re talking about the CEO Mindset. We’ll have more with Daniel Ramsey right after this.
This podcast is sponsored by Eddie Turner LLC. Organizations who need to accelerate the development of their leaders call Eddie Turner, The Leadership Excelerator®. Eddie works with leaders to accelerate performance and drive impact. Call Eddie Turner to help your leaders one on one as their coach or to inspire them as a group through the power of facilitation or a keynote address. Visit EddieTurnerLLC.com to learn more.
This is Valda Ford. I am the Chief Executive Officer of ValdaFord.com and you are listening to the Keep Leading!® Podcast with Eddie Turner.
Eddie Turner:
All right, everyone. We’re back. I’m talking about the CEO Mindset and I’m talking about it with Daniel Ramsey, the Founder and CEO of MyOutDesk.
Daniel, before the break, we were talking about adding value to your dot-dot-dot. And in that ellipses, you talked about how that can be the shareholders, that can be our people, it can be anyone who we need to add value to and having a servant’s heart. Do you have some other practical examples of how that’s being done by you and your organization today?
Daniel Ramsey:
Thanks, Eddie, for that question. Here’s the reality. When the pandemic hit, most states shut down everything. In New York, wildly enough, one of our customers called us and told us “Hey, we are not allowed to make prospecting calls to our customers anymore. We literally are not allowed to call customers.” So, in March and in April, we had to come up with a strategy and that strategy was What do I say during a pandemic? As a sales person, what do I say?” And we gave that strategy out to all of our customers across the country that were suffering from the shutdown. And really, ultimately, we said “Hey, just be human. Here’s the world. You’re going to be human. You’re going to call them and see if you need any help. We’re going to call them and see if they need anything delivered. We’re going to call them and see if they have enough food, if they have enough toilet paper.” Wildly enough, we had customers delivering toilet paper when you couldn’t get any.
Eddie Turner:
Isn’t that something?
Daniel Ramsey:
And that’s the idea, right?
Eddie Turner:
Talk about a servant’s heart, huh!
Daniel Ramsey:
Right. Well, here’s the point. Most businesses were paralyzed in inaction. They were doing nothing because they didn’t know what to do. And there’s nothing wrong with that. And if you found yourself in that space, that’s okay. I think if you start thinking about being a CEO and what the CEO Mindset is, how can I serve in this moment. And so, we start off by just saying “Hey, what do you say to customers?” So, that was step one.
Step two – we started realizing that a lot of our people needed support going digital, meaning they didn’t have the tools, they didn’t have the technology that they needed, they didn’t know how to work from home remotely, they might not have had a mic or the right camera or the right equipment to do remote work, forget the whole concept of selling remotely. So, we spent a lot of time helping people figure out how to go remote and how to sell remotely via Zoom or some other meeting format. And then when PPP was around, we literally, I’m telling you, Eddie, I think, I was the first person to do live webinars out there explaining how to use the PPP money.
Eddie Turner:
And for those of our audience members who may not know what those acronyms stand for, can you explain?
Daniel Ramsey:
Oh yeah, for sure. The PPP was the government program during the pandemic that businesses could get loans from. So, if you owned a business or you ran a business and you were being affected by the pandemic, the government put out two different loan programs. The challenge is they put out the programs without any guidance. So, business owners who were having massive disruption in their business and CEOs and everybody who was in a leadership role, we had the information, we just didn’t know how to use it. And so, myself, we had our attorney, we had our CPA, and we had multiple stakeholders at our company MyOutDesk literally put over a thousand people through webinar series so that they could figure out how to get their piece of the government loans. And back then, everybody was concerned that their bank wasn’t going to take it, that the government wasn’t going to approve it. Everybody was just nervous. And so, we did the best we could and helped explain all the different programs, how they could take advantage of them, what the situations were, everything to do with a government program which is convoluted complex. And by the way, they kept dripping out information late and then it was wrong and they changed it. And so, literally, we took several thousand of our customers, literally, our direct customers through a How to Get the Government Loan webinar series. And then we interacted on a one-on-one basis with each of them to help them complete their applications. By the way, we make no money doing this, Eddie, and our job is not financial advisors. There were no loan fees paid to us but that’s the point of the CEO Mindset is really how can I serve and what value could we add. I happen to have those connections that allowed those webinars to move forward. And because we were able to educate and really kind of walk our people through the step-by-step process, a lot of people didn’t have that deep anxiety, a lot of our customers didn’t have that deep anxiety that the whole nation was feeling and still even to this day, we all have our moments.
Eddie Turner:
So, you used it to help out business owners who wanted to secure the Paycheck Protection Plan and you sorted things out for them and didn’t do it at a cost but you did it because using the CEO Mindset, you wanted to employ a servant’s heart.
Daniel Ramsey:
Well, here’s the thing. I knew that this wasn’t a time for my team. And we have a large Sales team, a large Marketing team but this was not a time for our team to go out there and try to sell our services. We provide virtual assistants to small and medium-sized businesses. We’ve served some of the largest billion-dollar companies down to the brand-new entrepreneur who just started yesterday. And in March, nobody was saying “Daniel, I need help.” Everybody was saying “Daniel, I’m not sure if I’m going to have a business next month.” So, this wasn’t the time for us to push on sales, it wasn’t the time for us to go after and break into new markets but it was the time to help our customers and our potential customers and the people inside of our network survive during this crazy time. In fact, our whole series during that time was Survive and Thrive. And so, in the Thrive section we talked about how to make the digital transition, how to do digital marketing, what does it look like to start a blog, to redo your website, to start looking at online sources of business versus there’s no events, there’s no conferences. So, we were helping people put on live virtual events and we have been over the last couple of months because that’s what’s needed in the industry right now.
Eddie Turner:
Okay. Well, you did that and now things have changed. If a person has decided they want to start their own business, you mentioned you’ve handled billion-dollar organizations and new entrepreneurs, so if a person wants to start their own business right now, they’re not that billion-dollar organization, explain the reason, the value of securing a virtual assistant.
Daniel Ramsey:
Yeah, I love it. Here’s the reality. If you introduce me to any leader anywhere in the world, with the right amount of time, they could accomplish anything. And that’s the reality that we all have, right?” It’s a “we can do it” society. And leadership, that is just true day in and day out. And so, in our world, we literally help customers in four different ways. We help them buy back their time in their admin work, in their marketing work, in their prospecting work and their project coordination or customer service work. So, for instance, many of our clients will come to us and say “You know, I’m working 12 hours a week” or “12 hours a day, 7 days a week. Daniel, I’m working on my vacations and honeymoons.” I’m like “I know that. I know that world.” And they just need some more time in their world. And so, we help them organize and hire virtual assistants to help free some of their day or week or month up so they can go hit those sales numbers or they can go hit those operational kinds of milestones within their business. And really, we’re a leverage company. Think of us as a remote global staffing company and we can help you in those four areas.
Eddie Turner:
So, by freeing up the CEO’s time, they can free up their mind and therefore be more productive in their business.
Daniel Ramsey:
Oh, my goodness! One of my favorite stories is we help the CEO of a Midas franchise chain. Literally, they have 13 locations. They’re in contract right now for two more. They own multiple real estate large developments and they own these franchises and they do really, really well. And the CEO, when we first started talking, we just started talking “Well, what do you need?” and at first, he just thought “Well, I need somebody to help us save money at all of our stores.” We went through a process and it turns out that wasn’t really that important. Then they needed help with systems and it turns out his brother is a tech genius and his brother was like “No, I kind of got that.” Well, what we landed on, what he really needed was more time back. And so, we hired him a personal assistant. That personal assistant has removed him from … they have a Slack channel where all of his office managers and his property managers could get a hold of him. They pulled him out of that. Now, his virtual assistant handles all of his schedules, all of his email, all of his communication with different offices and just streamlined his entire day. The other day, his name is Brian, Brian sends me a picture of a barn door. I’m like “What is this, Brian?” And he sends me this picture and he’s like “For six months, my barn door had sat on the ground because I didn’t have time to order a new one. I gave the dimensions and what I needed to my virtual assistant and within two hours she had a new barn door purchased for my property.” And so, these are the little things that we help leaders and CEOs do is realize only focus on the stuff that only you can do and the rest you can delegate down.
Eddie Turner:
Yeah. And I suspect that if you experience what I experience in my work as a virtual facilitator and an in-person facilitator, there were some events that people said “Oh, this could never be done online, has to be face to face.” Well, COVID taught folks that all of that was not true. And that was something I had been beating the drama on for years and I had successfully helped organizations move things virtual. Well, I suspect that many of the clients who were saying “Nope, I only can have an assistant who’s there, who I see all the time,” I suspect that COVID has perhaps changed your viewpoint and probably helped your business.
Daniel Ramsey:
Yeah, we’ve gone through some incredible growth numbers over the last couple of months. We’re 55% above last year’s numbers in COVID. And being a virtual company, meaning a fully remote virtual company, we’ve really helped our customers also figure out how to be a fully remote virtual company and find leverage in ways they just never could have imagined. And I think, like you’ve discovered, many people, having gone through COVID, now accept this as the new reality. Companies like Facebook and multiple other companies are just not coming back to the office. And I think we’re all, as a country, going to be better off for that.
Eddie Turner:
Indeed. Wow! I have really enjoyed talking to you, Daniel, and learning more about your viewpoint on the CEO Mindset and I love hearing how your work with virtual assistants and empowering CEOs to take back more of their time and work with distributed teams across the globe is making such a difference.
What’s the overarching message you’d like to leave our listeners with?
Daniel Ramsey:
Well, you nailed it, Eddie. It’s time. Here’s the thing. Everything in the world is easier when you have more time. More time, it’s the only resource that you can’t sell, you can’t buy more of, you have a finite amount and it, at some point, gets exhausted. And so, we consistently are helping CEOs, and I’m not talking about … The other day I sat down with a CEO who literally has 5,000 employees 300 million dollars in revenue and literally, I walked him through our process and helped him discover his next best three steps. And literally, we did that in a 45-minute consult where we went through “Who’s on your team? What are the big challenges? What roadblocks are standing in your way?” and literally, we did that all in 45 minutes and I helped him discover his steps for 2021. And I would just invite your audience to do the same thing. Jump on our website MyOutDesk.com, come check us out. We’d love to serve and help you find some leverage and buy back some of your time.
Eddie Turner:
Outstanding. We’re going to put your information in the show notes so that folks can reach out to connect with you and your organization across all the social media channels.
Thank you for being a guest on the Keep Leading!® Podcast and helping us learn more about the CEO Mindset so that we can keep leading.
Daniel Ramsey:
Thank you, Eddie, for having me.
Eddie Turner:
And thank you for listening. That concludes this episode, everyone. I’m Eddie Turner, The Leadership Excelerator®, reminding you that leadership is not about our title or our position. Leadership is an activity. Leadership is action. It’s not the case of once a leader, always a leader. It’s not a garment we put on and take off. We must be a leader at our core and allow it to emanate in all we do. So, whatever you’re doing, always keep leading.
Thank you for listening to your host Eddie Turner on the Keep Leading!® Podcast. Please remember to subscribe to the Keep Leading!® Podcast on iTunes or wherever you listen. For more information about Eddie Turner’s work, please visit EddieTurnerLLC.com.
Thank you for listening to C Suite Radio, turning the volume up on business.
The Keep Leading!® podcast is for people passionate about leadership. It is dedicated to leadership development and insights. Join your host Eddie Turner, The Leadership Excelerator® as he speaks with accomplished leaders and people of influence across the globe as they share their journey to leadership excellence. Listen as they share leadership strategies, techniques and insights. For more information visit eddieturnerllc.com or follow Eddie Turner on Twitter and Instagram at @eddieturnerjr. Like Eddie Turner LLC on Facebook. Connect with Eddie Turner on LinkedIn.
