Why an executive assistant should be one of your first hires as a founder
As an early-stage founder, you’re expected to stay on top of everything and personally drive most business areas. You’re juggling tasks, meeting with customers, refining the product vision, fundraising—you’re a jack-of-all-trades, a master of one or two, or potentially even none. 😅 (If you’re a generalist like me, that is. Come to think of it, is being a great generalist a trade in itself? But I digress…)
You don’t have the budget to hire people for each role just yet, so extending your executive capacity is crucial. Heck, I’m probably guilty as charged myself. Even as a scale-up executive leading a team of over a thousand people, I delayed hiring an executive assistant until much later, after continued pressure from my partner. This was a mistake. 🤦♂️ What made me change my mind was the realization that “if you don’t have an EA, you are the EA.” Without one, you’re doing everything yourself, including tasks you should be outsourcing.
I went from not believing in the value of an EA to writing a 20-page manual on how to work with one. 📚 Now, I’m transforming this knowledge into stand-alone GPTs that are empowering and improving the capabilities of my executive assistants, helping them automate routine tasks and make more informed decisions.
If you’re new to this path and don’t know where to start, there are a few companies where you can hire EAs that are pre-trained, including Athena, Wing, and Magic. 🚀
Healthcare Tech Enthusiast | Passion for Patient Healthcare Access | Epic and Cerner Adventurer | Data and System Analyst | Revenue Cycle Professional
3wI've seen the same roles posted for the last several months, and interviewed for one, where after the interview the recruiter wouldn't answer any emails, provided no feedback or anything for close to a month then randomly got a declination email, without so much as a response to any of my follow up emails. I was so excited at the possibility of bringing my amazing analyst skills to Abarca, but my experiences with the recruiter I was working with has really made me reconsider applying for any more roles at Abarca.