Delegate to Scale: Virtual Assistant Success

In this eye-opening episode, Jim James speaks with Blendi Muriqi, founder of Delegate.co, about how virtual assistants from the Philippines can transform entrepreneurial growth. Blendi reveals how his company matches businesses with top 1% talent, delivering 60-70% payroll savings while handling recruitment, HR, and continuity challenges. He shares insights on building a distinctive brand through bold colour choices and founder-centric marketing. The conversation explores why the Philippines offers exceptional value through English fluency, scalability, and skill competency—even for senior positions. Blendi candidly discusses lessons learned from ineffective ad spending and recommends focusing on organic growth and referral programmes instead.

Timestamps:

• 00:45 Introduction to Delegate.co's virtual assistant solutions
• 03:05 Why the Philippines offers exceptional value
• 05:32 Differentiating through niche specialisation
• 16:52 Strategic branding decisions
• 23:25 Using referral programmes effectively
• 25:06 Learning from advertising mistakes

#VirtualAssistant #BusinessScaling #OutsourcingStrategy

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Transcript

Jim James (00:01)
So many companies, so many entrepreneurs can't afford to hire the people they need and the solution can be a virtual assistant. But the problem is it takes a lot of time and it can be very much hit and miss. So you're going to want to listen to my guest today because Blendi Muriqi has built a business called Delegate.co where they remove all of the hassle and the stress and the risk by pairing you with one of the top 1%

of employees that you could possibly have. And they even do the hiring and the employment for you. So you get the best of both worlds. You get continuity, search and cost savings. Blendi is joining me from New York. Blendi, welcome to the show.

Blendi Muriqi (00:45)
Jim, thank you for having me.

Jim James (00:48)
It's my pleasure because we're going to deal with something that really is a common problem, pretty much a universal problem for entrepreneurs, which is we can't afford their payroll, the headcount as we're growing, but we do need help. Or as entrepreneurs, we're trying to do all the work and we can't grow the business. So tell us about Delegate.co and how do you solve that problem, which is as we're growing a business, we basically have more tasks

than time, but we have less budget than need.

Blendi Muriqi (01:21)
Definitely. So Delegate is probably right now one of the leading virtual assistant staffing companies. We focus on the American market predominantly.

When I first started this company, I was a business owner just starting up. I did not have the money to spend on talent here where I lived in New York. And a lot of people kept coming to me telling me, if you go overseas, the cost of labor is a lot less. Outsourcing is the way to go.

And so what we started doing was actually, I physically would go to the Philippines and I would start sourcing different talent positions. Why? Because I couldn't afford it here in New York. At the moment with Delegate, we're focusing on providing people best in talent

across different verticals, whether it's marketing, whether it's customer service, whether it's bookkeeping. If you're starting a business, you can't do everything yourself. I realized that for myself early on and overseas hiring has been a game changer for me.

Jim James (02:50)
Blendi, you talk about overseas

hiring. Why the Philippines versus say India or even Mexico, which is closer to home, but maybe those also offer a similar cost saving.

Blendi Muriqi (03:05)
Yeah, I would say value for the price point is a big thing. There are obviously there are other countries that have less wages in terms of hourly wages. But when you're looking at the Philippines, you're looking at English fluency and you're looking at competency across different

types of departments. So when it comes to customer service, the Philippines has traditionally had a huge business process outsourcing industry. And a lot of the largest companies around the world, they source all of their talent from the Philippines. It's also very scalable. It's a huge country with a huge population. And

just the Filipino culture in general, it's very pleasant working with folks from the Philippines. The last thing is infrastructure, and this kind of speaks to growing your company and growing your staff. Especially when you're working with large companies, medium companies, you need to be able to scale quickly. And what the Philippines has offered is

the ability for us to find a large swath of people and match them in a very quick time.

Jim James (04:37)
And I know that a lot of people work with people from the Philippines because there's an amazing work culture and service culture. I I've been working with a VA myself and I used to live in Singapore for 12 years. And even then, in the 1990s and 2000s, people were outsourcing to the Philippines precisely because of the work culture and the high levels of education. Blendi, so you've been building this business, but as we know,

outsourcing is not new, it's competitive, I think, as well. How have you been differentiating Delegate from other people, including the Upworks of this world that are sort of offering freelance services or the virtual staff finder websites? How are you differentiating Delegate and how are you getting noticed?

Blendi Muriqi (05:32)
Definitely. Well, I'd like to start by saying that for any business owner, there's always market opportunity in different niches. So for us, we started in a specific niche. The virtual assistant agency model, it's not crazy difficult. It's not rocket science. It's not like something that Elon Musk does,

where he's building spaceships. But for us, the way we've differentiated ourselves is saying we're going to have a really solid recruitment team that actually follows through on hiring the top 1% of talent

in a specific market for a specific niche. So for us, we started in the real estate space. And specifically within the real estate space, we started in short-term rentals because we realized that there was a really untapped demand within that market that we could take advantage of.

That differentiated us from other agencies because we focused in on people that had certain skill sets. They had skill sets in hospitality. They knew how to use the software stacks for these types of companies. And that's where we started really growing our company. A majority of our clients today are in the short-term rental space.

But that also allowed us then to look at other niches and other industries which we're now pursuing.

Jim James (07:16)
Okay, so you niche down first in property and it's interesting there you talked about competence and software. So if someone is looking to hire a virtual assistant, they can either do it themselves directly or with Delegate, they hire you to basically hire on their behalf, right? And do the qualification of software skills and so on that right?

Blendi Muriqi (07:39)
Yeah, that's correct. And it's especially useful for growing companies, Jim, because when you're just starting out, you're a startup, maybe you're just one person, maybe you're two or three people, you do not have the bandwidth to deal with hiring, with recruiting, and you're having to do it on a consistent basis, which is a good problem to have.

And then you're having to deal with payroll, you're having to deal with benefits, you're having to deal with business continuity, making sure that that person decides to leave after a year, that you're not in a tough position to fill that role. That's where, you know, our agency comes in.

we're able to actually fill that position and keep it filled and take care of all the HR headaches.

Jim James (08:44)
Let us talk just brass tax. What sort of savings are we looking at then, Blendi, for a company? there's a few areas you've mentioned like payroll, for example, national insurance maybe in the UK, in Singapore, CPF, or in America, I guess you have an equivalent sort of payment, payroll. What sort of savings can a company expect? And also,

what's the term structured like? So, you if you hire somebody, you either have a full-time or part-time, maybe flexible, maybe hybrid, but you you're kind of locked in to that relationship. Let's just talk about the commercial side and benefits then of working with you.

Blendi Muriqi (09:27)
Well, I will say that it depends on the locale. You know, Baton Rouge is going to be a different wage than New York City. So the savings are relative. But just generally speaking, you're looking at 60 to 70 percent savings in in payroll when compared to a lot of American locales,

and as well as, you know, Western European.

Jim James (10:01)
Well, that's amazing.

So you could in effect hire two people for the price of one.

Blendi Muriqi (10:06)
100%. I'll give you like a little perspective and this also applies not just to, I don't say low level, you know, I say, you know, tasks, this applies to low level tasks and responsibilities with the company, but also high level positions. When you're marketing, when you're hiring a marketing director, for example.

In New York City, that marketing director would cost you entry level, 150,000. Imagine getting that same quality of talent for a fraction of the cost to say 30,000 or 40,000. Which one would you go with? You'd obviously go with the one that is much cheaper, that provides the same, if not more value.

Jim James (11:02)
Well, let's just look at that for a second because are you saying that competencies in the Philippines would match those of someone in America then in terms of, for example, a marketing director might have strategic insight, might have worldwide experience. I mean, if you're really saying that you can match all kind of like for like, then that's one heck of a proposition, isn't it?

Blendi Muriqi (11:30)
Yeah, Now it's not universal. If you ask me, I need like an investment banking hire here in the United States, you know, it's going to be particularly difficult to find that overseas with certain competencies. But what I've found is there are management positions

within marketing, within operations that you can find just as good of a talent pool overseas as in the United States. A lot of folks, whether they're in the Philippines or other countries, Eastern Europe, they have experience working with Western companies. They've worked with European companies before.

Some of these folks have worked for Fortune 500 companies. I, 100%, I think that the competency is there. It's just about digging and finding those people and offering them, you know, a compensation package that is, you know, very enticing for them.

Jim James (12:48)
Yeah, okay. That's interesting. Certainly my experience when I lived in Singapore was that a lot of companies would hire people in the Philippines and a lot of Filipinos, Filipinas would come down to Singapore to work in, as say, in the banks and the software businesses as well. And I think it's just changing the perception, is it, that people in Southeast Asia would only do entry-level and menial jobs from what you're saying, Blendi.

we're looking at some quite senior level skills. Blendi, you're saving the entrepreneur time and money and also commitment, right? Because they hire you, a delegate to manage those people and they have a contractual agreement, which is a commercial one with you rather than an employee relationship, which certainly in the UK company to company structure is quite different to company to human resource. You have much more liability when it comes to a person

than to a company, which is fair. How have you been building the brand? You talked about niche and niching down, but that's a strategy. But what about actually getting the word out, Blendi, you're on this podcast with me, Blendi, for this, but what's been the strategy over the last four to five years since starting the business?

Blendi Muriqi (14:07)
I think it started with, you know, it starts with a name recognition. I paid a crap ton of money for a domain, that's for sure.

Jim James (14:21)
right. Right. This is Delegate.co,

because that's a premium domain.

Blendi Muriqi (14:26)
Yeah. So delegation, the whole idea is we want to help people delegate. So that's the first thing I would say is like, you know, name branding, you know, it starts with what, um, what people read. The second thing is really putting yourself out there as a founder. And I mean,

incorporating your humanity into your marketing. And people, I've realized this from just following the playbook of other successful startups and brands. The reason they have a following is not because of their company. The reason they have a following is because of them. It's because of the people within the company. It's because of the founder.

So from very early on, I wanted to focus in on putting myself out there as the founder and sharing my story. I was in the same position a lot of our clients and probably your viewers have where they were doing everything themselves. They were overwhelmed and they didn't have the bandwidth financially to hire massive teams.

It helped me to be able to hire overseas and now I'm just doing it for other people. Sharing that story right there resonates with people. And if that resonates with people, people are much more likely to want to work with us.

Jim James (16:01)
Right.

Okay, Blendi, on your website, which I notice is a particular color as well, and you at home, if you're listening, Blendi behind him has a nice picture. It looks like maybe sort of Moroccan or Middle Eastern, someone playing an instrument. And it's the same yellow ochre color on the painting behind you, Blendi, as on your website. I'm just wondering,

Blendi Muriqi (16:35)
Thank you.

Jim James (16:37)
Yeah, I'm just wondering, do you want to talk to us? I know I spring this on you a little bit, but talk about branding. Did you have some specific plan here when it comes to the branding, the colors and the fonts?

Blendi Muriqi (16:52)
Yes. So we wanted something that obviously it pops. Listen, we're not, it's not the sexiest business in the world, right? You're doing staffing. So we wanted to make it a little bit sexier, a little bit more engaging. And I've always,

when you're walking down the street and you see an orange sign, it stops you in your tracks, right? So we want something that's synonymous with that. And so we decided with an orange theme. The other thing I'll point out is I would go to a lot of conferences and everybody would have the same blue colored fonts, very,

I would say like, not, I wouldn't say not engaging, but they would choose colors, a color palette that wasn't risky. And we want it to be risky. So we chose this.

Jim James (18:03)
Yeah,

good. And I raise that specifically because I've just created a course on branding, versatile branding. And in there, I raise, you know, the topics of color and what that means and having a primary and secondary color and also a font. Because we see a lot of, at the moment, Bebas, you know, and you've chosen in your logo to have, you know, a word mark. And then you've got an arrow above it, above the D.

So you've plainly put a lot of thought into this. It hasn't just been a Canva design. So that's why I wanted to call it out, Blendi.

Blendi Muriqi (18:39)
Jim, you guess, did I do this or did I delegate this to someone else?

Jim James (18:49)
You know what? Because I see the yellow, the ochre color orange on the painting behind you, I'm going to opt for you doing it.

Blendi Muriqi (18:59)
So, and this is a valuable kind of lesson to followers. When you're delegating, you know, you start with the high level strategy and view your outlook on something and then the initiative you leave to your team. So, you know, I can take some credit, you know, for the big picture colors design.

But when it came to the actual nitty gritty production of this, it was all my team, all of whom are based in the Philippines.

Jim James (19:35)
yeah.

Yeah, no, absolutely. I can see. But I think the idea for the colors, for example, that the idea to take a risk has to come from you. Right. And then, Blendi, you also have a podcast, which I want to just talk about because obviously I'm a big fan of podcasts. I'm normally a fan of entrepreneurs becoming guests,

which leaves them enough time to focus on their business, but also to meet new communities and get onto new audiences. Why have you started a podcast and what's been the impact?

Blendi Muriqi (20:04)
Thanks for watching.

I started the podcast because I wanted a way to network with other people and have discussions with like-minded entrepreneurs. The way I look at the podcast is it's an introduction to someone's business. It's a discussion.

It's very informal and I do not have any sort of goals with it other than A, find nuggets of wisdom within the conversations that we want to keep, that we want to share.

And also view it as a way to promote similar to you, your podcast to promote other people's companies and brands. think good faith is the number one currency in the world. And when you're able to provide other people value, that value is returned tenfold to you, whether it's through business

connections and so on.

Jim James (21:29)
So to be clear, on your show, Sip and Scale it's called, are you hosting your clients? Because I can see you've got two people on each show.

Blendi Muriqi (21:41)
Yeah, sometimes there are our clients. Sometimes there are people that are adjacent in whatever industry that we're in. A lot of times it is startup founders that we've just been able to connect with and say like, Hey, really interesting what you're doing with X company. We'd love to have you on the podcast to talk about how you got it to where it is today.

Jim James (22:11)
Okay, great. So the podcast is something that is taking a lot of your time, Blendi, or are you finding that quite easy to do? Have you outsourced the production on that as well?

Blendi Muriqi (22:24)
Production's completely outsourced in terms of scheduling. All of that is outsourced. On my end, I have to develop an agenda, obviously, for the podcast. And I have a really great marketing assistant that helps me facilitate that. But it's not,

It's not a crazy amount of work on my end. If anything, it's just, it's like any other meeting. It's like going to a lunch and having a coffee with someone, right? That's hence why we call it the Sip and Scale podcast.

Jim James (23:10)
Right, okay, Blendi, that's nice, a nice relaxed approach to creating the content that helps. And then you also have a referral program. What role is that playing in terms of growing your brand?

Blendi Muriqi (23:25)
You know, we recently started the referral program because we realized that when people have a great experience with Delegate, we want them to be rewarded for it and rewarded for bringing us more business in. So essentially the way we've done it is when we have a new client come in, they have an onboarding fee that they pay.

If they refer us to someone else, we'll waive that onboarding fee. And then any other companies, any other clients that they bring on, they receive a one-time referral fee, which will be either given in straight cash or as a credit.

Jim James (24:19)
That's great. So you're incentivizing people to help fill your funnel, which is often not done actually. And yet as you're demonstrating, it's self-funding, isn't it? People bring a new client, they get a cut of the new fees, which is great. So, Blendi, it sounds as though you are building this brand incrementally, knowing in a very clear

Blendi Muriqi (24:36)
Yeah.

Jim James (24:48)
sense of direction. Have there been any things that you've done, again, not to embarrass you, but as a lesson for us that have not gone quite as planned, let's call them a learning experience that you could share with us?

Blendi Muriqi (25:06)
I mean, so be careful with how you spend your money. And that goes for business, it goes for your personal life. You know, we were talking, we were just talking about the referral program. Why are referral programs great? Because it's a relatively low cost way to acquire new clients.

The reason we started doing that in the first place was because we spent a massive amount on paid advertising when the return on advertising dollars was extremely bad. One of the mistakes I made was looking at what the biggest competitors in the space were doing and they were just pumping

You know, 200, 300 grand a month into Google ads, Facebook ads, and they

they were definitely getting volume, but they weren't getting good quality clients. And we did something similar where we started advertising and we just, A, we weren't making a return on those advertising dollars. And B, we were getting clients that we didn't really like, we didn't want. We wanna work with people we love working with. So that's, if I had to say like that one

mistake is watch your adverse advertising spend and focus on building a brand that will bring people into your funnel organically.

Jim James (26:55)
Right, yeah, that's wonderful advice. So, Blendi, I know you are also a very considerate person. If there's a book or a podcast that you have found inspirational on your journey, what would that be?

Blendi Muriqi (27:16)
I would say, and I have it with me to show your audience, this is Dan Martel's Buy Back Your Time. It talks about how you as a business person may be stuck where you are right now because you're not taking advantage of your time in a way that's productive.

The number one way to be productive in this day and age is to have a delegation mindset. And Dan Martel goes through each step of the delegation journey. And I've gotten a lot of value out of the book. And every person that's read it has changed their perspective on how they spend their day and how they allocate time towards a certain activity.

Jim James (28:07)
Blendi, I must look at that because I do too much of the podcast myself with automation rather than delegation because that's your other path, isn't it? Is automation as a solution. So, Blendi Muriqi I'm hoping I pronounced your surname correctly a second time. Did I get it okay?

Blendi Muriqi (28:23)
Yeah.

You got it. You actually, you got it the way it's supposed to sound. Because in America, most people will say Mariki, which is fine. You you adopt the American way of saying it. But where I come from, I'm Albanian by origin. It's pronounced Morichi. So you hit it right, hit the nail right in the head.

Jim James (28:53)
Perfect.

Great. We've got a bit of of the continental, a bit of sort of Italian pronunciation, a bit of sort of Mediterranean. But if people want to find out more about you and about Delegate, where can they go?

Blendi Muriqi (29:08)
Yeah, they can visit our website, Delegate.co to interact with me, to find me, find me on LinkedIn, Blendi Muriqi right on LinkedIn. And if they want to really see more content, see me speaking to other business people, follow our podcast. It's called the Sip and Scale podcast and it's on Spotify, all of the

places where you find your podcasts.

Jim James (29:39)
Great. And Blendi, of course, I'll put your details in the show notes as well. that's Blendi, B-L-E-N-D-I. Sounds like an exotic, something you might make a Blendi to drink. that's M-U-R-I-Q-I in terms of his surname. Okay. Blendi, thank you so much for joining me from New York this morning.

Blendi Muriqi (30:00)
Jim, thanks so much. It was a pleasure speaking with you.

Jim James (30:04)
Well, the pleasure is all mine and as always, it doesn't matter how many interviews I do, I always learn something new. And I think this is the joy of being an entrepreneur. If we're curious and we're listening to other entrepreneurs, there's always an insight or an activity or a learning. I think what Blend is doing is really for me understanding that the business may not have to be

doing something particularly radical, but you can take some radical and sort of self-defining steps to making it your own by niching down, by the domain name, by the colors, his attention to detail, the podcast, this founder first strategy. You're innovating in how you're building the business. And I think that's a beautiful thing because being an entrepreneur doesn't mean you have to start a new business model,

but you can refine how an existing business model can be built in a better way. And that is a great exposition of being an entrepreneur. So, Blendi, thank you for that.

Blendi Muriqi (31:13)
Well put. Thank you.

Jim James (31:15)
And my name is Jim James. Thank you for joining me, your host on The UnNoticed Entrepreneur podcast today. If you've enjoyed it, do please share the show with a fellow unnoticed entrepreneur, especially if you know that they need to delegate someone, because we've got someone who can help them out. Until we meet again, I just encourage you to keep on communicating.