Eleven thousand unread emails.
Two EA hires had already failed. The third cleared 11,000 unread emails, then turned into four.
Mike Hauptman is founder and CEO of Ad Lib Media Group, a fast-growing media company on the East Coast. He moves fast - a full calendar, a growing team, and the kind of personal and professional life that requires constant coordination to keep from colliding.
By the time he found FreedUp, he'd already tried making an EA relationship work twice before. The third time, something finally clicked.
What was landing on his desk that shouldn't have been.
When Rose joined in March 2025, Mike's personal inbox had over 11,000 unread emails. Bills weren't being paid. Medical insurance claims were sitting open. His schedule was running on back-and-forth emails with clients - the kind that eat an hour to produce a 30-minute meeting.
The bigger issue was history. Mike's previous VA would take a task, go quiet, and simply stop working on it - never following up, never flagging a blocker, never closing the loop. Mike would have to chase her down to find out nothing had been done. It had happened enough times that he was skeptical the model could work at all.
What was different this time was the structure behind the hire. FreedUp wasn't just placing someone - they were vetting, training, and staying involved. The delegation meeting gave Rose a real foundation to start from. And the ongoing check-ins meant that if something wasn't working, it would surface early rather than fester.
Rose came in ready to work. From day one, Mike was sending her tasks - often with no context at all, just a request and an expectation. Rose figured it out. When she didn't know something, she asked. When she didn't know who to ask, she used Claude to learn and moved forward. Within about a month, she had real ownership of his world.
“He's very open,” Rose said. “So I feel open to ask questions. It was pretty quick.”
Sixteen months in, the transformation is hard to overstate.
- The inbox is clean.Rose cleared all 11,000 emails, organized everything into folders, and now monitors both his personal and work accounts daily. Bills get paid. Spam gets cleared. The things that need Mike's attention reach him; the rest doesn't.
- Scheduling is fully off his plate.All the back-and-forth with clients - finding times, coordinating calendars, following up - goes through Rose. She handles it so well that she now does it for the whole team, including interview scheduling as Ad Lib opens new positions.
- His personal life has margin.Mike can take his time at the gym. If his kids are sick in the middle of the day, he can step away knowing Rose is watching his inbox and will flag anything urgent. On his wife's birthday, he took the full day off. Rose handled everything.
- The work no one wants to do gets done.Insurance claims, medical invoices, business licensing, equipment orders for new hires, onboarding logistics. She once took an online course to complete Mike's boating license process on his behalf. “You never know what's going to come,” she said. “And I do it all.”
- One assistant became four.Rose was the first. Now Sophia, Stefan and Jeff have joined the Ad Lib setup - with Rose helping manage Sophia. As she put it: “If he was not happy with it, he would not get all of those EAs for one company.”
She got a distributed company across an international border.
Ad Lib is a distributed team - most of the staff had never met in person. Rose coordinated flights, hotels, the conference venue, food and sightseeing for the whole group into Canada, nearly missing the trip herself due to a visa issue she resolved at the last minute.
Everything went perfectly. “Everybody was happy,” she said. “So I was super happy as well.”
“He's always: thank you, you're the best, you're a lifesaver. I almost cry when I say it - he's the best boss I've ever had.”
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