Mikel Tube (Owner of Wooden Diving Board, Belgium), a seasoned government consultant, had long harbored dream of creating wooden diving boards. However, his demanding schedule left him with little time—certainly not the eight hours a day required to pursue this passion.

After reading Tim Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweek, Mikel discovered the concept of virtual assistants and saw a solution to his time crunch. He signed up with GetFriday, aiming to delegate tasks and reclaim his Fridays, allowing him to focus on his new venture and achieve a better work-life balance. Though, the work life balance did not happen due to his love for work, it did help him achieve better productivity and efficiency.

Video Transcript:

Sunder (GetFriday): When and how did you get started with GetFriday? What was the trigger point to get started?

Mikel: “How did I get started with Get Friday and this will be a classic. Timothy Ferris! Yeah. But it was not immediately Get Friday. In fact, I had an idea. I was working as a consultant for the government. I had an idea and I made wooden diving boards and I said, okay, let’s try to make something from this.”

“And since I was working at the Flemish government at that moment, I didn’t have like eight hours a day to spend on the new project. I read the book from Timothy Ferris, which must be a classic for you because everybody references to Timothy Ferris. And then I got this organization in my mind, like saying, “I need to go online, I need to have a website, I need to have some administration and all this.”

“I heard about virtual assistants and then I checked, not only you, I checked others. I don’t know the other names again, but you have some competition. And finally, I ended with you. So you had a good plan. I think at that moment it was something like an eight hours plan, a week and all this. And yeah, we had a match. So 2013, trying to solve my problem of not having the time and trying to get my Friday, but that didn’t work and I didn’t get my Friday though.” 

Sunder (GetFriday): But I guess we helped you on a lot more other things. This usually happens. It’s always about, we think it’s always about having a good work-life balance, but eventually it turns out that we help people do much more, but for the work-life balance. 

Mikel:Yeah, indeed. We become more efficient, but the workloads because we love it. I think the people that you work with are people that love to work. And so, yeah, we don’t count our days.