Episode 13: You Can’t Have It All At the Same Time, with Jennifer Maffei



Jennifer Maffei is the Founder & President of VEA Services, LLC. Her mission is to help Executives to get their time back.

Jennifer comes from a unique perspective. She has both owned businesses, and had been an Executive Assistant at Fortune 500 Companies – overseeing and coaching multiple Assistants.

Over the years, Jennifer saw that there was a disconnect between the Executive and Assistant relationship. There were many seminars to go to, but no one was working with both the Executive and the Assistant to find out what their actual needs and styles were and then coaching both parties to work better together. Not in a generic form, but specific to their situation.

Jennifer has changed all that.

In 2014 she founded VEA Services to work with both the Executive and their Assistants. Coaching them to work better together and Maximize the Executive and Assistant Relationship. Also working with Executives who have never used an Assistant before and then helping them to identify their specific needs and coaching them on how to manage their new Assistant correctly.

In addition, Jennifer travels the country educating Executive peer groups on the need to reclaim their time back and how to work with an Assistant to maximize their effectiveness. Moving from Vancouver, Canada to the United States in 2004, Jennifer now resides with her family in the San Francisco Bay Area.

What you’ll learn about in this episode:

  • Gaining three bonus months a year by delegating two hours of tasks a day
  • Why you shouldn’t fall into the trap of thinking you’re the best person to do everything
  • Why batching time is a fantastic strategy
  • Jennifer’s first jobs
  • How Jennifer did two years of college in nine months
  • Jennifer and her ex-husband’s decision to build their own house in their mid 20s, how they then flipped the house, and how they repeated the process over and over
  • The story of her move to the US
  • Why she decided to get back into the Executive Assistant business instead of going into real estate
  • Jennifer’s six years with Williams-Sonoma
  • How she tore — completely tore — her back and the three year recovery from that injury
  • How VEA Services was born
  • Why divorce was the most threatening thing to Jennifer’s financial security
  • Why Jennifer doesn’t want to scale too quickly yet sees a massive growth in the future
  • Why Jennifer and her husband (the love of her life — not the ex) were evicted from the home they were leasing and then bought a dream house when it was very cheap
  • Jennifer and her husband’s financial goals for the future
  • How she’s managed to maintain a healthy balance while learning at home
  • Why retirement isn’t really something Jennifer sees in her future
  • Why Jennifer’s first corporate boss was the most influential woman in her life

Ways to contact Jennifer: