Getting Started: Identifying Your Needs

I want to offer all executives and business owners the opportunity to have an exceptional assistant—their very own secret weapon who will remove from them all interruptions to their productivity, keeping them from growing their business. I know that most organizations cannot afford to pay their owner’s assistant or chief executive’s assistant the same salary as the executive assistant to Warren Buffett or Bill Gates, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get close to having that caliber of assistant. Just like certain features are borrowed from luxury car manufacturers and used on less expensive models, you can use this book as a guide to the characteristics you can borrow from the assistants who are the top of the heap—that most rarefied group that takes care of the world’s top CEOs and business owners. You just need to know what to look for and develop the instinct to recognize it when you see it, because it doesn’t come in a standard package with a label on it. If it did, it wouldn’t be a secret weapon.