Good, Fast, Cheap with Jess Lindgren

Jeremy · 0:00

In-person meeting planning can be a lot to manage. That's where TROOP Planner comes in. TROOP Planner is built to make life easier for busy assistants like you. Whether you're organizing an executive offsite, department meeting, or team retreat, TROOP keeps it simple, fast, and organized. From choosing the perfect location to managing budgets, coordinating travel, and tracking attendee details, TROOP brings everything together in one easy-to-use platform, so you can save time and focus on what matters most. TROOP has an exclusive offer for leader assistant listeners through Administrative Professionals Day, so don't miss out. Visit leaderassistant.com/troop to learn more. Hey friends, it's Jeremy Burrows, host of The Leader Assistant Podcast. Thanks for tuning in. Today, I'm actually excited to put the spotlight on my friend Jess Lindgren's podcast called Ask an Assistant. Jess takes questions from you all and then answers them on the Ask an Assistant Show, so be sure to go to askanassistant.com to check out more episodes and submit your questions for Jess. I hope you enjoy this spotlight episode of the Ask an Assistant Show, and we'll talk to you soon.

Speaker 2 · 1:21

The Leader Assistant Podcast exists to encourage and challenge assistants to become confident, game-changing leader assistants.

Jeremy · 1:36

Hey, friends, my best-selling book, The Leader Assistant, has a companion study and discussion guide to go along with it. It's called The Leader Assistant Workbook. Now, you can buy the Kindle ebook version of The Leader Assistant Workbook on Amazon, or you can go to leaderassistantbook.com and get a printable PDF version of the workbook. This version has all the space and margin in between the questions that you can write your own answers and take notes with. So it's a great way to print it out and keep track of your discussion and study guide notes. Again, go to leaderassistantbook.com and click on Workbook to check out The Leader Assistant Workbook.

Jess · 2:32

Hi, everybody, welcome to another episode of Ask an Assistant, the podcast for executive assistants and the people that love us. I'm your host, Jess Lindgren. Let's get to work. Right up at the top, I would love to acknowledge the fact that it is Administrative Professionals Week this week. Give last week's episode, episode 16, a listen if you haven't already. I lay out some of my thoughts there on the week and the day and ways that folks in corporate America might consider celebrating the Administrative Professionals in their lives. Thing two, there is not a question this week. I rather am sharing some of my thoughts on an experience that I had and would love to hear your thoughts. So right up at the top, askanassistant.com. Please feel free to reach out and let me know what you think about this week and any week's episode. This week, we are talking about a situation that I encountered with a friend who was running an event. And they asked me for some help in advance. I was happy to do it, run a couple errands here in town, order a few things via my Amazon account. They don't have a Prime account and I am slowly but surely trying to wean myself off of the reliance on Jeff Bezos and his monstrosity that is amazon.com. But in the meantime, since I still have an account, I am very happy to help order things in advance. No problem there. But then the day before the event, they called me up in a panic and they said, Jess, I really need like a dozen flash drives. And so I said, okay, well, you've got a few options, most of which will involve you physically going to a store to pick them up. And they said, you know, can I just can I peek around your Amazon account? I don't want you spending the time doing the research, to which I said, sure, go ahead. And they tried to find an option that would allow them to pick up same day at an Amazon locker, which I haven't done since I lived in San Diego. So it's been almost three years since I've done that. I don't even know where the local Amazon locker is where I live now. I don't know what the order minimums are. You kind of have to get lucky and find a product that suits your needs. In this case, they wanted thumb drives that were like two to four gigs. And when they looked at any local stores, they were only finding options for buying individually and things that were like 16 plus gigs, which is way more than they needed. But it just brings me around to one of my favorite things that I love to keep in mind, which is the triangle, if you will, of good, cheap, and fast. So in this instance, good would have meant a, let's say, 10-pack of two to four gig thumb drives that fit within the budget that could be picked up on the same day. If you're familiar with this, I don't even, is there like an official, I don't know, we're just gonna call it the good, cheap, fast triangle for the purposes of this conversation that we're having here today. But basically, three things, like I said, good, cheap, and fast, and generally speaking, you can only pick two. If you want something to be good and cheap, so in this instance, we want a 10-pack of thumb drives that fit within the budget, it's not gonna be fast. It's gonna be really difficult to make that happen before tomorrow's event. If you want something to be fast and good, you want something that you can pick up today, that's going to be a 10-pack of 2 to 4 gig thumb drives, it's not gonna be cheap. It's gonna cost you way more than if you had planned even 48 hours in advance. If you want something cheap and fast, it's not gonna be good. If you're looking for something that's gonna fit within your budget that you can pick up today, you might not even be able to find 2 to 4 gig thumb drives. You might be scraping through someone's supply closet of promotional materials and get branded thumb drives that are 256 megs or something like that, like not even one full gigabyte. So I totally understand it. And I've been there myself when it comes to a last minute request from an executive, something that you ordered weeks ago. You just forgot to check it off your list and it didn't show up. And now it's go time and you really have to have it. I've been there. I can totally sympathize. But in this instance, I was dealing with a friend who works at a non-profit. So budget is really kind of the top consideration. And feeding into even the cheap of it all, you're going to spend your time, which is the one finite resource that all of us have. There is no, it is not a renewable resource. It is not something that you can get more of. You can't go to the store and buy more time. You're going to spend all that time trying to find something that fits within the budget. So definitely, I really encourage folks to just kind of wing it if something like that comes up. For me personally, though, too, the calculus of what constitutes cheap really changes. If someone is able to get me fast and good, I don't worry so much about the cheap. My feelings, my personal feelings on what constitutes cheap or affordable really changes. Because if you can get me something that's fast and good, if you can get me same day and it's the 10-pack of 2-gigabyte drives that I wanted, I might have two or three times the budget that I originally had to save myself the time and effort of needing to do a ton of research or go to 15 different Best Buy stores to try and track them down. So that's just me personally. Something that you may have heard me say a time or two on this show is a lack of planning on anyone else's part does not constitute an emergency on my part. Again, I totally do my best to sympathize, empathize, offer what resources, solutions, thoughts that I have and then move on with my day. Then on top of that, if this is an event that's going to happen again in the future, add it to your list. Talk about it in your debrief. Hey, if we had planned even a couple of days in advance, we could have used the Amazon account, we could have ordered this, we could have gotten exactly what we wanted. Is this something that we're going to need for a future event? If we bought a 10-pack, whether it was in-person or something that we ordered online, did we use all 10? Do we have a handful that we can use for the next event? Did we only use five and now we only need five for the next event so that one pack of 10 can spread across two events? There's just a lot of calculus that goes into it on the backend of that good, fast, cheap triangle. And the more that you can get out ahead of it, the better. But again, I know last-minute things happen to all of us and we just hit the ground running and do our best. So no real question this week. More of an experience and some of my thoughts. I would love to know from you what your thoughts are on the good, fast, cheap. If there are things that maybe it's more of a rectangle or a quadrangle. It's got more than just the three good, fast, cheap. You know, what are your thoughts there? I would love to hear from you. And happy Administrative Professionals Week for sure. Happy Administrative Professionals Day tomorrow, if that's something that you celebrate. And until next week, take care.

Jeremy · 10:37

You're listening to The Leader Assistant Podcast.

Speaker 2 · 10:50

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Jeremy · 11:04

Hey, friends, my best-selling book, The Leader Assistant, has a companion study and discussion guide to go along with it. It's called The Leader Assistant Workbook. Now, you can buy the Kindle ebook version of The Leader Assistant Workbook on Amazon, or you can go to leaderassistantbook.com and get a printable PDF version of the workbook. This version has all the space and margin in between the questions that you can write your own answers and take notes with, so it's a great way to print it out and keep track of your discussion and study guide notes. Again, go to leaderassistantbook.com and click on Workbook to check out The Leader Assistant Workbook.