Transitioning from Task-Based Support to Strategic Partnership and Chief of Staff Readiness

Leslie Ouno (00:00) part of the Atlas community has changed my approach to the role in very many ways cause there's been immense support for the assistants that I hadn't experienced before. I am pretty confident that if the role of let's say chief of staff comes up I'm able to not only help my clients run his day but I'm also able to help, like, the rest of the team, you know, join the dots and do the interdepartmental communication and operations. Thanks to Atlas. Hello there, my name is Leslie Ouno, and I am a virtual executive assistant based in Nairobi, Kenya. I currently support a client who just transitioned into starting his own business from the employment side into running his own business. And it's been a great journey of us helping each other out and just brainstorming, and coming with the best strategies for running his business. So it's been an interesting journey cause I like how we have a very honest relationship and we always give each other great feedback. we each get to share the hurdles we are experiencing and how we can go through these hurdles. And it actually gives us a clear picture of where we're headed. So before Atlas, I was at an agency, and that's actually where I began my VA/EA journey. And I was able to learn quite a bit. But also as you grow, you kind of feel like you've hit a ceiling cap when it comes to, you know, what you want to do and what you want to focus on. what made me join Atlas was the fact that this agency is very planned, focused, let's say when you sign up, you are able to focus on one client. I am in the marketing side and when I was in the previous company, I was staffed with quite a lot of people. so, like, even getting into your zone of genius or just trying to focus on one thing was really hard. But at Atlas, they were able to... review my experience, and also through the trainings and everything we were able to establish what my strengths are, what my weaknesses are. and how I ended up being staffed was just through a mutual understanding of my client liking me and my work, and me liking the client as well. So that was very important for me because it's not blindly just being assigned to someone but it's more of the synergy - of the type of synergy you have with a person. So that's something I love about it, about the agency. So I had this situation last week where we were kind of hitting a cap cause how LinkedIn works is if you do too many invites at the same time, your account gets flagged as an aggressive account. So one thing I learned, where Atlas came through for me... when we were doing the training, they had this new way of TRAINING as compared to the previous one, because I have a former colleague who did the previous training, And when we compared notes, like, my training was very hands on. we were able to, like, meet my different cohort mates and you know, we were able to like understand each other's strengths. So I knew who, like, does what. So when I experienced this challenge, one of my training mates was actually good marketing and did lead generation, So I was able to just go back to the our connect team which is our communication platform, so it was easier for me to just ask in the group chat and ask them directly if they could recommend something and they did and it's been really helpful the moment I realized I'm not just an executive assistant, but a partner to my clients was a time when I was experiencing, like, these hurdles, it was moving from just, you know, doing a task like, hey, there's a problem, can you fix it? But he redirects the question to me, you know. because even if I mentioned like, "Hey, so we've hit a cap on the lead generation," then he's gonna ask me questions like, "okay, so... what are we gonna do about it?" So I have to think and give him options. It's not just a matter of doing one task, but it's a matter of looking at the long game. Because even if someone was to come after me, I would have the expertise to let them know If you wanna do lead generation, you will need a premium account. If you want to do it this way, you have to make sure that you're not hitting a particular number of and all that type of stuff. And I think that's what really helps me out and understand that I'm more of a strategic partner as well. Because I have to think, if someone was in my shoes right now, how would they go about this? If I have given them this SOP, would it be easier for them or would there be some hurdles? If you're considering Atlas as a place to join to build your career, I'd already tell you, like, you're already in the right direction by considering Atlas. There's a lot of EAs around obviously but having the courage to be adaptable being willing to learn and also being very proactive is what's gonna get you ahead of a lot of people. So if you're considering joining Atlas, you have to be someone who is very proactive with yourself and knows where you want to head in the future.