Ryan Cassin

How an Executive Assistant Improves an Entrepreneur’s Quality of Life

In business, working hard does not equate to working smart. Growing your business does not require sacrificing your freedom. On the contrary, an entrepreneur or executive who is savvy about managing their time can experience exponential growth AND freedom simultaneously. How? By hiring an elite Executive Assistant who improves your life by helping accomplish your business and personal goals!

Here is how our highly-skilled, Superpowers Assistants improve the quality of an entrepreneur’s life by helping with:

Focusing on their business
Ensuring entrepreneurs have quality time with family and friends
Delegating and juggling important tasks
Keeping entrepreneurs healthy
Managing and mitigating crises

Allowing for Focus on Important Tasks

Focusing on essential duties can be challenging when entrepreneurs are juggling multiple things. Hiring an Executive Assistant can alleviate the pressure. An Executive Assistant can masterfully handle coordinating and organizing schedules, maintaining an entrepreneur’s inbox, overseeing projects and tasks, and communicating with an entrepreneur’s team.

But more than getting the job done, a Superpower’s Executive Assistant personally invests themselves in an Entrepreneur’s success.

Aligned with their vision and goals, a Superpower’s Executive Assistant advocates for their entrepreneur, protecting their time enabling them to focus on essential aspects of their business and life.

Protecting Quality Time With Family and Friends

We’re all-too-familiar with this scene: a busy executive is bombarded with constant work-related notifications while attempting to spend quality time with family and friends. And heaven forbid they try to leave behind their phone even while on vacation.

Having an Executive Assistant to handle those situations allows entrepreneurs and executives more time to focus on personal relationships. At Superpowers, our Executive Assistants are skilled in handling emergencies and creating a less stressful work environment. We allow entrepreneurs time to bond with family and friends.

Delegating and Juggling Important Tasks

Too often, entrepreneurs and executives start their day with urgent, unforeseen tasks that pop up, pushing other vital duties to the back burner. As a result, many entrepreneurs will lie awake at night, stressing over what they must do.

Entrepreneurs who attempt to manage every aspect of their business take significant amounts of time away from tasks that require their specific expertise and Unique Ability.

A Superpowers Executive Assistant helps entrepreneurs juggle and delegate items on their to-do lists. Additionally, they help source other highly-skilled persons to help accomplish more, leaving the entrepreneur worry-free when they get home from work.

Keeping Entrepreneurs Healthy

Entrepreneurs’ well-being is just as important as maintaining their business. But unfortunately, when stressed, many tend to lose focus on taking care of themselves and, instead, prioritize the business’s health.

With a Superpowers Executive Assistant, entrepreneurs will have more freedom to recharge and do activities they enjoy. Entrepreneurs are people too! Like anyone else, they need to take vacations, go to the gym, meditate, and spend time with loved ones.

Entrepreneurs and executives need a life outside of their day-to-day business activities, and a Superpowers Executive Assistant can ensure that life is possible.

Managing and Mitigating Crises

Dealing with a crisis alone can be difficult. However, a Superpowers Executive Assistant can help through bad days, act as a partner in dealing with those days, and take the pressure off an entrepreneur’s shoulders by calmly taking the initiative in managing the crisis.

What Superpowers Assistants Understand

For entrepreneurs, their time is their most valuable possession. Entrepreneurs deserve to give themselves the life they desire. Their hard work, persistence, and diligence will always create opportunities to make money and recoup their investment, but time lost cannot be recovered. An Executive Assistant improves your life.

A Superpowers Executive Assistant is more than a Virtual Assistant. They can help improve the quality of an Entrepreneur’s life and ensure they experience the levels of freedom and growth they deserve.

Contact Superpowers today to learn more about our highly-skilled Executive Assistants

5 Tips for Entrepreneur and Assistant Communication

At Superpowers, we work with dozens of entrepreneurs and assistants daily, guiding them along the path of becoming a seamless unit. We work to discover how they operate and communicate with each other. When it comes to working well together, communication is the key. Here are the top five tips we give to strengthen entrepreneur and assistant communication.

Determine and Set Clear Expectations

The first and most crucial step is to understand the entrepreneur’s expectations. The goal of an assistant is to help their entrepreneur experience new levels of freedom and growth. Thus, it is important to clearly understand their ideal future.

Here are some common expectations that are vital to discuss with an assistant:

Important dates and times
Project timelines
Daily tasks
VIP clients
Specific duties/tasks that are crucial to the business

Be Aware and Understand Your Entrepreneur’s Vision

Learning what drives and cultivates the company’s growth can help an assistant better understand an entrepreneur’s mindset. Entrepreneurs often struggle with delegating tasks. They fear others lack the skills to do the job as well as they can. Understanding an entrepreneur’s vision, how they think, and their desired outcome is important because it gives them confidence that a task will be handled well.

An assistant who is highly aware of their entrepreneur’s vision and passion can excel with assisting in:

Fine-tuning each project with their entrepreneur’s vision in mind
Setting realistic goals for the future and steps on how to reach that goal
Ensuring the entrepreneur’s thought process and passion is correctly portrayed across all platforms in the business

Connect Daily

At Superpowers, many assistants state that a pre-scheduled daily meeting with their entrepreneur builds clear and open lines of communication. Starting the day with a quick, efficient chat ensures both parties are on the same page and ready for the day. This habit can help foster trust, as well as:

Allowing both to clearly see what the day entails
Updating one another on any unexpected events or updates
Establishing a safe place and time to communicate with each other
Providing an update on daily progress

Use Simple, Straightforward Language

Because both entrepreneurs and assistants lead busy lives, concise and helpful conversations are important. Simple language creates clarity and helps boost productivity. Simple language is clear and honest; it helps to remove any miscommunications.

Stay Focused and Determined

Although this tip seems like a no-brainer, it’s critical to stay sharp. When team members are conversing, both parties must actively listen. It is important to remove distractions and avoid being on “autopilot.” Thus, focusing and tuning into conversations is essential for preventing miscommunication.

How Superpowers Can Help

At Superpowers, our goal is to help successful entrepreneurs find new levels of freedom and growth. Our Superpowers Assistants start with the training, skills, and coaching necessary to immediately begin making a difference in entrepreneurs’ lives. Book a Discovery Call today to learn more about the Superpowers process.

Entrepreneur Mental Health Statistics

Entrepreneur mental health is a serious concern. Being an entrepreneur requires long hours, hard work, and sacrifice. Entrepreneurs can quickly get burned out and mentally exhausted.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Health as an entrepreneur is attainable. A proactive, assertive assistant can bring an entrepreneur’s life out of the rut and back to a healthy, good place.

Being an Entrepreneur: By the Numbers

83.1% of US business owners started their companies.
66% of jobs in the US were created by Entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneurs make up 3% of the US population.

Being an Entrepreneur: By the Hours

How often do Entrepreneurs work?

This is a question every entrepreneur gets asked at least once. However, all entrepreneurs’ working hours are different, varying with the company’s size, number of employees, and nature of the business. Some entrepreneurs may work as little as 20 hours, while others work 80-90 hours a week.

Based on a New York Enterprise Report survey, small business owners work twice as much as regular employees, with 33% working more than 50 hours per week and 25% working more than 60 hours a week.

The majority of entrepreneurs work a crazy number of hours, leading to burnout at work. They will sacrifice — often unintentionally — health, family, and personal time in pursuit of their ambitions.

Being an Entrepreneur: By the Vacations

Do Entrepreneurs take a vacation?

The short answer would be: Yes! 57% of small business owners are taking or planning to take vacations this year. However, that vacation time is not the traditional two weeks like a regular employee.

The reality is when entrepreneurs take a vacation; they are not enjoying a complete, task-free break. According to an OnDeck article, 67% of small business owners will check in to work at least once a day.

Entrepreneurs face the unfortunate reality that they are solely responsible for their companies and often feel they cannot fully recharge.

Being an Entrepreneur: By Their Mental Health

Most entrepreneurs are affected by mental health issues due to the amount of stress they experience daily. From decision-making to managing teams and customers, financial pressures and keeping the business operating can be overwhelming and mentally exhausting for any entrepreneur.

Below are statistics on how mental health differs between entrepreneurs and non-entrepreneurs:

72% of entrepreneurs are directly or indirectly affected by mental health issues compared to just 48% of non-entrepreneurs. (NIMH)
49% of entrepreneurs deal with mental health issues, while only 32% of their counterparts experience them. (NIMH)
45% of entrepreneurs report being stressed compared to 42% of “other workers.” (Gallup Wellbeing Index)
Entrepreneurs are more likely to have “worried a lot” — 34% vs. 30%. (Gallup Wellbeing Index)

In addition, entrepreneurs were found to be more likely to experience the following in comparison to the general population:

Depression: 30%compared to 15% and 16.6% (APA)
ADHD: 29%compared to 5% and 4.4% (NIMH)
Addiction: 12%compared to 4% and 8.4% (SAMHSA)
Bipolar diagnosis: 11%compared to 1% and 4.4% (NIMH)

Suicide is another factor that affects entrepreneurs. It’s not something talked about enough among entrepreneurs, but it happens too often. Success doesn’t protect them as most would think it does. When we talk about the most common causes of death for entrepreneurs, number one is heart failure, and number two is suicide.

The numbers–and stories we hear from entrepreneurs–communicate a crucial truth: They are burned out and overextended, and it costs their mental and physical health. Entrepreneurs are responsible for most jobs created in the US, and they pay for it dearly.

How Can An Assistant Help?

- An assistant can have an entrepreneur’s back! When entrepreneurs are stressed out, an Executive Assistant can find ways to lighten their load or solve the crisis.
- No such thing as “small jobs.” It might feel like assistants are just handling an email or scheduling a haircut, but these “small jobs” take away from an entrepreneur’s mental load and create trust.
- Assistants, be a safe space for entrepreneurs to vent. If an entrepreneur is having a bad day, check out this article: Cure For Entrepreneurs Who Are Having A Bad Day! It is an excellent resource assistants have utilized to assist entrepreneurs.
- We encourage entrepreneurs to take a recharge day. Sometimes an entrepreneur won’t want to take a vacation. It’s hard to trust their team can function while they’re away. An excellent assistant builds trust so entrepreneurs can go and mentally recharge.
- An assistant can and should create freedom and growth. When entrepreneurs have the space to think creatively and grow their business, they are at their best. This is the space where they do what they love, aren’t bogged down, and don’t feel stressed.
Being an entrepreneur is often viewed as a glamorous lifestyle, but many fail to recognize the long hours and mental toll it can take. Our goal is to help successful entrepreneurs achieve new levels of freedom and growth. We strive to increase entrepreneur health. All Superpowers assistants are skilled to ensure you never feel burnt out or stressed. Book a Discovery Call today to find your Executive Assistant!

Does Multitasking Actually Help You Get Ahead?

Does multitasking help? In our daily work, we handle numerous demands simultaneously, rarely focusing on a single task at a time. Multitasking is an often discussed, seldom solved plague of the modern information worker. The latest research indicates that the costs of constant task switching far outweigh the benefits.

Problems with Multitasking

A recent Stanford University study found people who multitask are putting their mental health at risk. The study shows that multitaskers struggle to ignore distractions and focus on essential details. They have a more difficult time remembering meetings and interactions than their single-task counterparts. According to this study, heavy multitaskers do not “pay attention, control their memory, or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time.” These struggles lead to increased anxiety and stress levels.

It’s clear: multitasking can harm our work performance. But there’s a more profound risk associated with deteriorating mental health in the workplace. A decline in job satisfaction is most strongly associated with mental health problems, leading to struggles with retention and turnover. Gallup Workplace research indicates “the cost of replacing an individual employee can range from one-half to two times the employee’s annual salary — and that’s a conservative estimate.” The downsides of multitasking affect a business’s bottom line in unexpected ways.

When focusing on too many projects, things can slip through the cracks, especially when it comes to complex projects requiring a high level of detail. Our work is impeded by irrelevant and excess information; when you multitask, your productivity decreases, your stress levels increase, and you feel burned out. Not only does productivity suffer, but the mental health of the multitasker takes a nosedive.

Multitasking might seem like the perfect solution to effectively growing a business, but in reality, it could be detrimental to both the entrepreneur and their company. Being able to focus is the most critical skill for building mental efficiency and strength.

Does multitasking help? Not really…

Effective Alternative Strategies

Here are three ways to be more productive without resorting to multitasking:

Delegate tasks appropriately. Don’t try to take on every single task in one day. If you have someone in the right seat to take on the more tedious tasks, you’ll be able to work in your Unique Ability and focus on a single task at a time.
Time block your day. Create an hour-by-hour calendar so that you can separate individual tasks. You are less stressed and more productive when you understand your daily schedule.
Don’t be afraid to give yourself breaks between tasks. When we immediately jump from task to task, we are easily distracted due to work overload. Taking at least a 5-10 minutes break is essential.

There’s no need to wear yourself out by multitasking. Build a team around you that catalyzes your success without compromising your well-being. The role of an Executive Assistant is to create mental space for dedicated, thoughtful work — the type of work required to grow your business.

Set up a discovery call with the Superpowers team. Start your journey toward growth AND health.

Is Work From Home Here to Stay?

Working from home. The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed what was once inconceivable into a necessity to keep businesses operating.

Statistic: Change in remote work trends due to COVID-19 in the United States in 2020 | Statista

A Shift Towards Working From Home

There has been a significant shift towards both men and women working from home. The number of U.S. remote employees increased from 17% to almost half of the entire U.S. workforce during the pandemic, and new data shows that most employees prefer to stay at home. Many companies have already begun implementing new work-from-home policies.

Tech giants like Facebook and Twitter are already considering permanent work-from-home positions for employees. Amazon recently reversed course on its aggressive return-to-office plan and announced individual teams will now decide how to work. According to a study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, nearly 40% of U.S. full-time workers have occupations compatible with operating remotely once the pandemic is over. What many have deemed non-traditional in the past is quickly becoming the norm in many fields of business.

Benefits of Working From Home

A National Bureau of Economic Research study, “Why Working from Home Will Stick,” found employers are more open to work-from-home arrangements for their employees than before the pandemic. Workers are showing they can be productive working at home. Going forward, they plan for at least 30 percent of their employees to work from home at least one full day per week.

Companies also are reaping benefits from remote work. A larger talent pool, increased productivity, and reduced overhead costs are some of these benefits.

Conclusion

Simply put, working from home is here to stay.

With both employers and employees turning to remote work, entrepreneurs should strive to adapt. Making the shift towards remote work will give their businesses a competitive edge and ensure new levels of freedom and growth by having the flexibility to operate anywhere.

See how Superpowers can help you gain that competitive edge with a virtual Executive Assistant today.

Interested in joining our team of virtual Executive Assistants? Apply to be a Superpowers Assistant!

What is a Daily Bullet and How Can it Make Your Life Better?

Making that transition between working hours and personal time is particularly difficult for entrepreneurs. Before working with a Superpowers Assistant, many of our clients confess turning off their laptops at the end of the day is downright anxiety-inducing (if it happens at all!). They find themselves checking emails during family time and working late into the night. They struggle to detach their thoughts from work.

The Daily Bullet

We’ve created the “Daily Bullet” playbook. It provides a consistent structure for guiding Executive Assistants in providing their entrepreneurs a daily summary of completed tasks. This summary is a powerful tool for increasing visibility and decreasing stress.

At its core, the Daily Bullet is a concise recap of both the entrepreneur and EA’s day. But according to our Superpowers Executive Assistants, this tool does so much more.

How Does it Help?

After scanning the Daily Bullet, an entrepreneur can transition into their evening, reflecting on the accomplishments, confident there are no critical unresolved issues, and excited about the next day. It is a powerful tool for promoting the well-being of entrepreneurs.

“My entrepreneur says it helps him focus. He knows what needs to get done, and he’s not wasting time or wondering what to do next! He also loves knowing what got done. Makes him feel like things are moving along.” – Amber, Superpowers Assistant

It is designed to give all the necessary and relevant information without overwhelming entrepreneurs.

“I find that it keeps us synced up just a little better. It eliminates those ‘Did I have Kathryn do that?’ moments from his evenings.’ And truly – it helps me hold myself accountable. I like to see a LONG list of accomplishments at the end of every day.” – Kathryn, Superpowers Assistant.

A Daily Bullet gives entrepreneurs the freedom to disconnect once the workday is complete.

“It also just really ties up any loose ends from the day, so it helps to keep the communication between my entrepreneur and me up to date and organized.” – Danielle, Superpowers Assistant.

It helps foster the assistant and entrepreneur relationship by creating the space to personalize and tailor each Daily Bullet to fit each entrepreneur’s specific needs.

“My client loves the quick clicks that I include as a way to unwind.” – Alicia, Superpowers Assistant.

While the Daily Bullet is humble in its goals, the consistent confidence it imparts is invaluable.

Ready to start receiving your Daily Bullet? Book your discovery call!