Hi, my name is Yaro, and I’m one of the co-founders of InboxDone. In this article, I’m going to walk you through our hand over process.
The hand over is what you experience as a new InboxDone client. It helps you understand what you’re going to go through, how much time we need from you, and what we do (and why we do it). There are several steps that help us reach the point where we can essentially “clone” you and take over a lot of your email, and possibly scheduling, calendar management, and other tasks you choose to delegate to us now or in the near future.
If any questions come up as you read this, save them and bring them to your discovery call. The discovery call is step one in becoming a client. It’s your chance to ask questions, and it’s also our opportunity to learn more about you, your business or occupation, and the tasks you want to hand over to our assistants.
Once you sign up as a client, the hand over process begins. Here’s what to expect.
1) Step One: Sign Up and Start the Process
The hand over is triggered once you sign up as a client.
You’ll enter your credit card details in our checkout and make your first payment. All new clients start on our Standard plan, and you can see pricing on our website.
That Standard plan payment covers everything we do during the hand over, which happens in two phases:
- The matching phase
- The hand over phase, where you work with your two assistants and hand tasks over to them over a 30-day (or longer) period
It’s important to know that your second payment doesn’t happen immediately. The second payment comes after you’ve completed the matching and hand over experience, which can take up to eight weeks. That means it may be up to two months before you’re charged again. Before that second payment happens, we will have a conversation with you to decide what the best plan is going forward, based on what we’ve learned during hand over.
2) The Onboarding Call: Showing Us Your Inbox
After signing up, you’ll book an onboarding call with our onboarding manager.
The main purpose of this call is for you to show us inside your inbox via screen share. You can also share any software or tools you use, and anything unique about your situation that you need to pass on to us. We’ll ask additional questions to learn more about you.
This onboarding call kicks off the matching process inside our company. Once you’ve done this call, you can essentially sit back and relax while we find the best two assistants from our team to match you with. We don’t need your time during the matching process.
3) The Matching Phase: How We Choose Your Two Assistants
Matching typically takes two to four weeks, so you won’t meet your assistants right away. We will update you as the process progresses, and once your assistants are matched, we’ll schedule an introduction call.
When we match you with assistants, we consider several factors, including:
Time zone and check-in times
By default, we do two check-ins per day.
What does that mean? Your assistants will check in twice per day, clear your inbox, handle associated tasks, communicate anything you need to know, and possibly schedule meetings or add information to meetings. They then log off, and later in the day they do another check-in.
For most clients, the two check-ins happen once in the morning and once in the afternoon. In effect, you’re getting close to inbox zero twice per day. A third check-in is possible, but we recommend starting with two, experiencing it, and then adjusting if needed.
Tools, experience, and fit
We also look at simple things such as:
- Whether assistants have used the software you use
- Whether they have interest or experience in your industry
- Other intangible criteria that suggest a good fit
Two-way matching
We also make sure the assistants are excited to work with you. We aim for long-term relationships, and this is a personal working relationship. Someone answering your emails is going to learn a lot about you and your business, and they need to be committed to that role.
To help with this, assistants will learn about you, and they may listen to your discovery call and onboarding call. They may also review your business or website to understand what you do before they begin working with you.
4) Why We Assign Two Assistants Per Client
You may have seen on our website that we assign two assistants per client, which is unusual.
We do this for redundancy.
If you’ve ever hired a virtual assistant through a freelancer platform or another agency, you may have experienced a frustrating pattern: you spend time hiring someone, then training them, and then they disappear and you’re back to square one.
With InboxDone, both assistants go through the entire hand over process to learn the role. If one assistant takes time off, the other can fill in. If we ever need to replace one assistant due to retirement or career change, the assistant staying on can continue working and help onboard the replacement assistant.
The goal is to provide backup and minimize disruption. Nothing is perfect, but we’ve found this two-assistant system works very well.
5) The Introduction Call: Setting Expectations and Communication
Once matching is complete, we schedule an introduction call.
On that call, you meet your two assistants and get to know them. They’ll ask:
How you want to communicate
For example:
- Slack
- Microsoft Teams
- Text message
- Phone call
What you want to be communicated about
Every client is different.
You might want a daily recap or a summary pushed to Slack. You might want only emergency messages and no regular updates. You might want curated information passed to you weekly, like newsletters or certain categories of email.
This can all be adjusted over time.
What counts as an emergency
Your assistants also need to understand what an emergency situation looks like for you, and how you want to be notified.
For example:
- A major client contract is at risk
- A major contract is about to be signed
- A family situation that you need to know about urgently
These situations may not be common, but it’s important to define them in advance.
6) The Learning Phase: Understanding You and Your Inbox
After the introduction call, your assistants move into learning mode.
They will review and study any resources you already have, such as:
- Your website
- Sales materials
- Products you sell
- Email newsletters or sequences
But the best learning happens inside your inbox, especially your sent folder. Your assistants will look at how you write emails, your tone, your style, who you communicate with, and the common situations you face. This helps them learn what it takes to answer emails for you.
Building a knowledge base
While learning, assistants also set up what we call a knowledge base.
They’ll first understand how you currently manage email. For example:
Folders and labels
- Reminders
- Redirects
- Templates
- SOPs (standard operating procedures)
Some people have complex setups and lots of folders. Some have nothing. We learn what you have, and often we bring in a system of our own to make things more efficient. This may include reducing or reorganizing folders, creating redirects, setting up reminders, and creating templates.
Templates help us answer common questions quickly, but we’re not robots. We don’t copy and paste generic answers. We dynamically adjust each message, but templates speed up the process.
SOPs (standard operating procedures)
We also create SOPs when needed.
An SOP is a document that explains how to complete a process that goes beyond answering an email. For example, if a new customer signs up, there may be multiple tasks triggered:
- Sending a welcome pack
- Updating a CRM
- Updating a task or project management tool
- Informing a team member to schedule an onboarding call
- Informing accounting to issue an invoice or receipt
For processes like this, we create a guide, often with screenshots, documenting the steps.
We do this so we can consistently perform the process and train new assistants if needed. You also get to keep these documents. Even if you stop working with InboxDone, any systems we set up and any SOPs we create are yours.
If you ever want a new SOP created later, you can ask your assistants and they will do it.
Taking over your tools
During this learning phase, assistants will also adopt any software you use for the tasks you want to hand over, such as:
- Task management tools
- CRMs (for example HubSpot or Salesforce)
- Tools like ClickUp, Monday, or Asana
- Industry-specific tools
Some clients have unique needs, including compliance requirements, and we can integrate with those. You can hand over access gradually, at the pace you’re comfortable with, and I’ll talk more about privacy and security later in this article.
7) The Drafting Phase: The Most Important Step
Once we’ve made it through the learning phase (which may take one to two weeks), we reach the most important step: the drafting phase.
This is where we do need your time and attention. It might be:
- 30 minutes per day, or
- 45 minutes every second day
In the drafting phase, your assistants begin writing replies to your emails, but they save them as drafts. You review the drafts, give feedback, and make any changes needed. You then send the email.
This continues until you reach the point where you feel comfortable saying:
“The drafts are great. I don’t need to review them anymore. You can send replies without me looking at them.”
You can do this in phases. For example, you may let us take over simple and common emails sooner, while continuing to draft more complex emails for longer.
Over time, we get better. The longer you work with us, the more situations we face in your inbox, the better we understand context and the better our replies become.
There will always be a small percentage of emails that require your input. Every client is different. It might be 2%, 5%, 8%. Sometimes we need to ask you for confirmation. For example, if someone says they met you at a conference and you promised to send them a copy of your book, we have to check with you before replying.
Our goal is to take over as much as we can as quickly as possible, but we’re happy to move at your pace. You can always check your sent folder to see how your assistants are replying.
I was actually the first client for InboxDone, and I remember feeling comfortable handing over many emails quickly, but there were always a few I wanted to check. I was having assistants write sales follow-ups and lead nurturing emails, and I was concerned about losing customers if those messages weren’t handled well.
Over time, my assistants became better at answering those emails than I was, because I was often rushed and didn’t have time to write deep, thoughtful answers. Since answering emails was their main task, they were able to be more thorough.
That wraps up the drafting phase, and it typically completes the first 30 days of the hand over process. However, every client is different, and sometimes it takes longer depending on how complex your business and inbox are.
8) What Happens After Hand Over: Pricing Plan Going Forward
Once we complete hand over, we will know how much time it takes to do the work we’re doing for you, including answering emails and completing related tasks. That helps us decide which pricing plan is the best fit from the second payment onward.
Most clients stay on the Standard plan because it tends to be the right amount of hours. But:
- If we’re not doing much work for you, we can move you to a lower plan.
- If you want to delegate more, you can stay on Standard or increase your usage.
- If you have a very busy inbox or complex tasks, we may need to upgrade you to a higher plan, or you may choose to reduce what we handle to stay within Standard.
We have no long-term contracts. Plans are month-to-month, and you can upgrade or downgrade anytime, as long as you give us notice.
If you have a quiet period, we can downgrade. If you have a busy period, like a launch or starting a new company, we can expand your plan. We can even add a third assistant if needed.
If you want to expand service to a co-founder or leadership team, we can go through a new hand over process, assign additional assistants, and gradually expand support across your company.
9) Privacy, Access, and Security
A few important points about privacy and how we access your tools.
Email access
You might use Gmail or Outlook, or email apps like Superhuman or Front. We can integrate with those.
For Gmail, we may use the delegate function, which allows you to grant access without sharing your password. More commonly, we access email using password-sharing tools like:
- LastPass
- 1Password
- Bitwarden
These allow you to share access without assistants seeing your password, though they may log in as you to access the account.
However, we are not pretending to be you. Your assistants are part of your team. They have names, email aliases, and signatures. Replies come from the assistant’s name and signature, such as “Jane, your executive assistant” or whatever title you want to give them.
There are some situations where we can write emails directly on your behalf, but that carries risk because the recipient believes it’s you. We prefer not to do that unless absolutely necessary.
In some cases, we can create a separate inbox (for example, a receptionist inbox) where we handle most email, while you maintain a private inbox for a small set of key messages.
Access to other tools
For other tools, we may use password sharing, or you may create user accounts for assistants in tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams. They operate as team members inside your company’s tools.
NDAs and confidentiality
For other tools, we may use password sharing, or you may create user accounts Some clients require an NDA. There is an NDA built into our terms of service when you sign up. You’re welcome to review it. If you need something specific for your situation, we can have our team sign a more specific NDA.
We may also use tools like DocSend to control who can view attachments. All team members use a VPN, and we typically work inside cloud-based interfaces. We are not downloading your data to our machines. We are accessing Gmail, Slack, CRMs, and other tools through cloud interfaces.
Some clients, such as academic clients, require specific IT protocols. Others require unique privacy setups where information is segregated. For example, with medical clients, there may be medical information that only the client can see while we handle everything else.
Every client is different, and we are happy to work through these situations with you.
10) Our Hiring and Training Process
Lastly, a quick overview of how we hire and train our assistants.
InboxDone is almost seven years old at the time I’m recording this video, and we’ve spent a lot of that time developing and evolving our hiring and training process. We are a hiring and training company. We are always looking for great talent, testing, vetting, interviewing, and training assistants before they work with clients.
We have a 10-step process that includes interviews, background checks, and testing. Some of the testing is focused specifically on answering dynamic email situations that aren’t simple, to see how applicants handle them. This helps us assess:
- Problem solving
- Independent thinking
- Written communication
- Written English ability
There is also an internal training course that assistants complete before working with clients. It’s a 10-hour program created by my co-founder, and it teaches how to do the role well and how to communicate well with clients.
Communication is key. Being open, setting expectations, and giving feedback leads to the best outcomes.
We also make a deliberate choice not to hire low-cost overseas labor. Most of our team are Canadian or American born, raised, and educated, and we prioritize high-level written native English ability for handling email. We do have some team members living overseas as expats, and we may have team members in other time zones to support international clients, but everyone has gone through our hiring and training process.
Final Notes
That’s the hand over process.
You now know about our matching process, which takes two to four weeks, and the hand over itself, where you spend the first month working with your two assistants. You also understand how we access your tools, how we protect privacy and confidential information, and what our hiring and training process looks like.
Most of what I’ve described happens without you. The main time we need from you is during the drafting phase, and for occasional situations where we need your input because we can’t confirm something just from what we see in your inbox.
Over time, we get better and more independent, and you get more comfortable with us. As that happens, you may decide to hand over more tasks.
If you haven’t booked a discovery call yet, head to our website and book one. My name is Yaro, and I’ll talk to you very soon.
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