#87 - Train Your VTM (Virtual Transcript Manager) With Me!

📍 Hey. Okay, so I was planning to release the episode with Whitney and Kamryn, the one that we recorded in Los Angeles at the Biltmore Hotel where we talk about the Veritex acquisition and what made them make that decision, why it was the right move for them and clarify a lot of the misconceptions that we've been hearing about in our field.

Turns out that whenever I record video podcasts, it messes up my workflow, so I'm just gonna keep it, keep it rolling with the audio. All right, so. Uh, I'm hoping that next week will be the release date for the Whitney and Kamryn episode. I'm so sorry Whitney and Kamryn you guys are amazing and that's probably why I keep delaying this 'cause I'm like trying to make it so perfect and wanting to do the whole entire video. But I just really want the video to be as high quality as the audio. I mean the audio itself is not the best, but like the content, the content, the actual words we're speaking the topic that we're talking about. that's what I'm talking about when I say the value of the audio. I meant the value of the content that we're talking about. It's so, so good. So you guys don't wanna miss it. Definitely make sure you're subscribed so that you can get updated when you see when that episode is released.

But for today, I just wanna come and give an update about something really special. I'm really excited about this. If you've been listening for a while, you know about something called the VTM. I talk about it all the time. It stands for Virtual Transcript Manager, and it is a role that I created within my business in 2018 when I was freelancing.

I think I was, yeah, I was living in Albany at that time. Well, actually I was technically living in Troy, working in Albany and Troy in that area, the capital of New York. And if you've heard me say this a few times, everybody wants to know about this, so I just have to keep explaining about it.

I hosted interviews. No. Okay, let me backtrack. Yes, I did host interviews, but that is not the first thing that I did. Uh, what led to me hosting interviews. Okay, so I was freelancing and there was one specific client that I had where it would be, uh, kind of like calendar calls. If any of you guys have worked in court, you know what I'm talking about. For those of you who have never worked in court, it's basically like a list of cases that are kind of like the generic script that, you know, we hear all the time that the judge has to go through, like the routine calls, that it's nothing big, it's nothing out of the ordinary.

It's just like the routine calls and they're very, they're typically pretty short because it's just. Routine things that have to get done. It's not like diving deep into anything. It's really just, okay, the, the date has come. Let's get this over with like back to back to back cases. And that's how it is in court.

Some, sometimes, you know, if it's not a trial or a contested hearing, contested just means witnesses are brought forth and people are testifying about what they observed and yeah, so these calendar calls, they don't have any of that good stuff. So this is me as a baby reporter, just taking everything that I could get and getting as much experience as I could.

And I kind of like worked my way up to covering the biggest, and I guess maybe I was the only one that was, that was willing. No, I mean, of course there were others that were doing it too, but you know, I. I ended up taking on major workloads with the board of parole, and those jobs were really like a marathon.

Those days, it would be like three days of back to back to back to back to back hearings, to the point where the lunch break was pretty much non-existent and we started at 8:00 AM and finished way past 5:00 PM I mean, sometimes they went until 9:00 PM. Tuesdays I had a hard stop because of a commitment that I am dedicated to, and I put that first above all else no matter what happens.

That is my priority. I have a hard stop every Tuesday at 6:00 PM and if they weren't okay with that, then I would just say, okay, well, let me know so I can get another reporter to cover. So usually they would end up just making sure they finished by that time. But that was non-negotiable for me.

I would have gotten up and walked out if they went past my hard stop. 'cause I, and I would tell them in it, you can't just, you know, you can't just do that without giving them a very clear heads up. I would give them, I would make sure that they understood, like multiple times, confirm that they know that we have a hard stop at six.

I need to know. And even like an hour beforehand, if it felt like maybe we were gonna continue past six, I would just remind them like, I just wanna remind you guys. Uh, not you guys, but you commissioners. I wanna remind you that I have a hard stop at six. Please let me know now or forever hold your peace because I still have a chance to get coverage.

If you wanna go past six, it's no problem. I just have to get coverage. But like 99.9% of the time, they would always accommodate my request. They would rarely ask for me to call someone else. They would just continue into Wednesday and Thursday and sometimes even Friday.

So it was just like a lot back to back. In those weeks that I covered those. It was just so, the burnout just was like 3X, I mean, it just, it was ridiculous because every little transcript was about 15, 20 pages. Every single transcript requires data entry. You know, adding the, the includes and the format, all the formatting and everything.

As many of you have heard from my coaching calls with Joshua Edwards, my real time coach, you might have kind of picked up on the fact that organizing my own work and automating things, that is one of my biggest passions. I love productivity. I love streamlining and automating, and just making it as seamless as possible. And since it's not my particular strength to do a lot of data entry and a lot of, you know, of course there's are some tools built into Case Cat that maybe I wasn't using correctly, or that maybe I just didn't, I just forgot how to use or something. I don't know. But either way it was just a lot of, a lot of work. I would start the day i n my CaseCAT file, and I would.

And then I would just press like PRAF/PRAF/PRAF. That's P-R-A-F / P-R-A-F. You know, I would just press that a few times to put some space in between the first transcript and the second transcript, and I would just continue to write every single case in the same file. Whereas other court reporters would probably, well, actually, I don't know.

I did, I personally did try. To do individual files, but I quickly realized that I, it was impossible to keep up. Impossible. I'm telling you, I don't think anyone could keep up with that unless, unless you're, you are AI or you are a robot and you don't need any time to breathe and to take it like to. I don't know, to check your email, make sure your family's okay.

Like, like if you don't need any, any time to yourself, not even one second, then maybe you can do that. But to be inputting every single, like, to be breaking the transcript up or to be creating so many different files and putting the data into every single one, or putting the, you know, all that into every, like, it, it just was really hard for me to do.

And I couldn't keep up with that, at some point I was just like, forget it,

I'm just gonna keep it all in one file so I can breathe a little bit. So yeah, that's how we're gonna do this, where that's how we're gonna roll. But then the work on the back end, you know, the next week or two when I'm putting everything together and actually carrying out the tasks of finalizing the transcripts.

It was just so much, so much work, and I just, I needed to find someone that could handle it for me. I needed to find someone that was better at it than I was. So that's why I created the job description, and I thought about this for such a long time. I mean, I had this burnout problem for for a couple years. And I always wanted to do something about it. I always wanted to build my business and hire someone and hire help and get, get a team going. And you know, I had scopists, I had proofreaders, but that was not enough. I needed someone who could take care of all the admin, breaking up the transcripts, adding the appearance page, the captions and everything.

Scoping, proofreading, you know, managing the entire flow from rough draft to submission. I really did not want to be so bogged down with all of that because I wanted my focus, my time, my energy to be spent on getting better at my skill, increasing my real time, uh, building relationships, spending quality time with my family.

Going to church, reading the Bible, joining study groups like doing good deeds, volunteering, having peace of mind. I, I just really wanted to spend my time more meaningfully than just being buried in admin work and glued to a screen. It was very unhealthy. I would, I would even be. I would wake up at 6:00 AM start scoping immediately.

I would go to different coffee shops, like the ones that would open at the crack of dawn, sometimes even 5:00 AM and I would just start my day so early and have like four or five hours of scoping in the early morning before, before the day actually began. And then I would. Have my laptop with me at the hair salon.

I'd be working, uh, doctor's offices, waiting rooms. If I'm waiting for an appointment, my laptop would be there out and I'd be working in my car. I have a desk that. Goes on top of the wheel, and actually I'm gonna post a video about it because I think it's a really, it's like one of the top must have items from my Amazon wishlist that I wanna share with court reporter.

It's like I, I think I'm gonna make a court reporter's essential items list because this one is key. I mean, I love it. Plus my car has wifi. I have the Honda Prologue. It's a hundred percent electric car, and. It has wifi it built into it, so it's like a little office and then I have my desk and literally anytime any place I can be working in my car and I find to be, I find it so interesting 'cause I can actually be more productive when I'm working from my car for some reason.

I don't really know why, but, or from a coffee shop, just not anywhere but my own home office I think is the most, is more productive. So yeah. But. The point I'm making is that I don't, I didn't want to be glued to my laptop. I mean, it is actually good in some, in some ways, that is a really good thing that we have the option to work as much as we want.

Literally, we can work as much or as little as we want, depending on our determination, our mindset, how many connections we have, how many agencies we work for, how many clients we want to get. If we make our own business cards, like there's so many ways that we can get. There's so much work that exists out there, and so many ways we can get it, to the point where we can't handle it ourselves, and I just wanted to, rather than rejecting jobs because I'm so mentally exhausted or because I'm double booking myself by accident, rather than doing that and messing things up for everybody.

I wanted to increase my capacity to take more, to be able to work five times a week if I wanted to. So that is why I decided to put my foot down and I say, I said, this is not how I want to be operating. I do not want to be the one that is doing all the manual, like all, well, not necessarily manual, but all the admin work, all the data entry.

I don't want to be dragging myself and glued to a screen. I, it just, that's not what I want. So I want to, I am going to do it. I'm going to finally find someone, and I tried asking my scopist, I tried asking my proofreaders if they'd be interested. I didn't get really much traction, so I decided to create a job description and post it on Indeed, and you know what this is, this is the craziest part.

In order to actually take that step of doing that, I had to hire a consultant. I spent over $2,000 on a consultant to basically tell me that I should do this and say, you can do it. Just do it. Like that was the best advice I've ever gotten. And yes, it was worth the 2000 because I finally did it. I finally did what I had been putting off for years, what I had been wanting to do, but not knowing how to start.

I just needed someone to tell me, just do it. It doesn't have to be perfect. Just get it done. Just post the job thing. Just job thing. The, the job description. Just post it. Just make it like, okay, so, and back then we didn't even have AI to help us like. I, this was 2018. Well, maybe there was, but I didn't know about it, so I just was, I just did it.

I wrote out the job description. I documented my process of managing my transcripts, and I'm talking about like the project management aspect of it. We need to track all the different deadlines and all the different requirements for the different clients that we're working for. The different requests, responding to emails, uh, just overall project management for a court reporter, that is what a VTM does.

But at the time I didn't want to really call it like virtual transcript manager because I knew no one's gonna know what that means. So I think I just called it legal administrative assistant. So many court reporters have heard me talk about this and have asked me for the job description 'cause I actually have it. Or at that time I did. I think, yeah, I've sent it to a few people. I even had like a, a landing page where because, because so many people wanted it, I set up a page where people could just sign up, give me their email address, and it would just automatically send to them because everybody wanted it.

And so legal administrative assistant is what I called it. And I just outlined all the duties. I documented my personal process of managing my transcripts and I posted on Indeed, indeed had a feature where you could filter applicants out based on their ability to learn new softwares and technology.

So us court reporters being on specific softwares that many people are not familiar with, I thought it was very important to be able to filter and find the right people who can easily adapt to technology and easily pick up on things and easily learn those types of softwares. So I loved that tool and it was so accurate.

I mean, it was just so amazing because no one got a perfect score on that, except one person and that one person. Happened to be the one out of like 25 people that I interviewed, that one person that got the highest score on that test was actually such a good fit in many ways. And, and keep in mind, these people are not already scopist.

They don't know anything about court reporting, scoping, CaseCATalyst, Eclipse, anything. These people are just regular people that are applying as a legal administrative assistant. And it's, it was just amazing that I was able to find the right person and that she did so well. So I hired her, worked with her for three years.

Her name was Natalie. Is Natalie, sorry. She's not, I'm not working with her anymore because she went into cybersecurity after I started working in court and didn't, the workflow wasn't really enough to sustain. Her full-time anymore, but for three years we were going strong. Three years full-time. And then when I started working in court is when we did not work together anymore. That's when I started to really struggle because when I had the VTM, when I had Natalie working with me, I didn't have to worry about coordinating between scopists and proofreaders and asking them if they're available before sending it. Like how stressful is that when you, you can't just get your job out of sight out of mind.

You have to continue to babysit it through the entire process while also taking other jobs and managing other deadlines. Some of them being urgent and expedites and overnights and dailies. It's just. For me, maybe it's because of A DHD. Maybe it's because I'm lacking in many ways, but I believe that finding people to do the things that I'm lacking in is the best way to grow.

So I found her and it was so worth having, even though many people would consider it expensive, I don't consider it expensive. Investing in my own mental health and wellbeing, investing in my time to spend meaningfully. Investing in growth. That is what I was able to do. I was able to grow because she freed up my time.

I was able to do the things that meant something to me. So I grew in my personal life. When I started working in court and didn't have a VTM anymore, I just felt like I was kind of drowning, even though it wasn't a lot, like it wasn't back to back to back.

It wasn't tons of transcripts that were being ordered, but it was still the ones that were being ordered, it was very hard for me to keep up with, especially when there were smaller transcripts, like because those just felt like so inconvenient and so. Uh, not worth the few, maybe few dollars that you get from short transcripts like that.

It, it just, you know, 'cause every little transcript has a lot of extra work with it. So that's why we love the big transcripts, the trials, the 800 page ones, you know, those are the ones that are really worth it because it's not quite as much of the administrative headache.

So all that is to say that I wanted to give the backstory because what's coming is really exciting. I finally have another VTM and the story behind this is so, is so interesting. I'm not gonna share it now because I don't know if, I didn't ask her if she'd be comfortable with me sharing the story, so I'll just, but I did mention that I would love to document this process of training her because she knows I have a podcast and that many court reporters are interested in this. This is an industry-wide problem that many of us need help with, and I would love to document the process so I can share it with everybody. And she was actually totally open to it. So I think we're gonna be documenting the process.

Today was our first training session, we sat down together she's a college student at Manhattanville. I picked her up. We found a nice quiet place to work and I started with an 800 page trial. That's why I said 800 pages earlier. 'cause that number's fresh in my mind because that is what I'm dealing with right now is an 800 page trial that I need to complete this week. So I started with that. It had already been scoped by someone, so I was really just teaching her how to open, how to back up a file, how to restore it into CaseCAT, how to navigate inside of CaseCAT. We set up our shared workspace on OneDrive 'cause it's more secure than Google Drive and that is our way to track all the deadlines. So we have an Excel spreadsheet inside that OneDrive, she's gonna be keeping it updated with the deadlines and with the notes and the clients and who wants, or who's ordering it, how many pages there are, billing, making sure that the bills get paid and that if she's not the one scoping, she also delegates, she's the one that will coordinate with the scopist and proofreaders if needed.

She's the one that will coordinate all of that if she's not the one personally scoping it. But I have a feeling that just like Natalie, she'll probably love doing the scoping. Natalie was obsessed with doing it and she never wanted to delegate, she never wanted anyone else to do it. She always loved doing it herself.

So I have a feeling that Amina's gonna love it too. She is already doing amazing, so I'm really proud of her and I'm really excited for this because this is the first time, again, in a long time that I've had a VTM. I feel so relieved and so thankful and so grateful to God that everything was moved. The universe was moved to be able to provide the situation where I could have a trusted person to manage my transcripts and free me up to actually take more work. Because honestly, for a long time I've been rejecting work and rejecting jobs and just not, not seeking work. Because I'm at max capacity, my brain is already.

The bandwidth, the mental bandwidth that I have I hope that. Everything goes well. Now that I have a VTM, I can take more jobs. I can build up my finances and, invest in the things that I wanna invest in. 📍 I can also focus on my coaching sessions with Joshua the Court Reporter Podcast and now the WeLoveU Podcast, which is launching June 1st.

I am so excited to document this process and to share with you all. I know I talk about this a lot, but I am really excited about it and I believe that this is gonna be valuable and for everyone who signed up for my VTM program in the past it still does feel like more innovation is needed with it. So I think as I work with Amina and train her and we really document a process that can be replicated, that can be shared with everyone, now that I have the intention to do that, I think it's going to work out much better.

And just sharing and documenting the journey in real time. So stay tuned for that.