Over the last ten years I've had a paid assistant off and on. I have tried to have the philosophy that the assistant will help with
income streams enough to cover the assistant pay. And then I will be able to do more stuff.
The challenging part is when an assistant moves on, i need to train a new assistant. It takes about six months and I have become rather adverse to the training.
A little over a year ago came the idea of having three assistants. All three would earn their beans, so the group would accomplish three times more stuff. And if one moved on, the other two could train the replacement.
I posted this:
https://permies.com/t/171193/paul-virtual-assistant-VA
There are currently six paid assistants. They are doing far better than their first month. And the kickstarters we did in 2022 helped me to afford them while they were still trying to earn their beans. And they did 98% of the work for the "homestead bundle" earlier this year - so this month could turn out to be the first month that they truly earned their beans as a mostly solo act!
I've been kinda hard on them, but I think they are growing from the abuse. :)
I guess I am writing this to say that I feel pretty excited about this. This could turn into a pretty exciting
project. Maybe in a couple of months we could add two more. Imagine: people getting actually paid to advocate
permaculture stuff.
I guess my big question to you, dear reader: have you noticed? I know we are focusing a bit more selling stuff - to pay for these peeps. But I think it hasn't been too obnoxious. Has it been the right level of obnoxious? All good? We did two kickstarters last year and are looking at doing two again this year - a good amount? A side effect of this is that we might be cranking out more content. You like?
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