Here's an oldie but a goodie from the archives from the Side Hustle Show Greatest It's Collection. This is your first virtual assistant. Had to bring on the right help so you can work on your business instead of eating it. What's up, what's up Nick? Loper here, welcome to the Side Hustle Show because no matter how productive you are, there's still a limit. There's a limit to your capacity, to your hours, and to your expertise. And when you're up against that ceiling, you've got a couple choices.
You can settle in like, alright, this is my life now. Or you can ask for help in breaking through. That's what this episode is about. Growing your team in such a way that you've got some breathing room in your schedule and in your mental bandwidth to do the work that's required of a business owner instead of the work of the business doer to borrow from Sean Marshall in episode 312. Even though I've been hiring virtual help in my businesses since 2005, I've still got a lot to learn.
And this is something that's been on my mind this year as I think about where I want to go with my current operations and who can help me get there. To help me dive into this topic, I'm excited to welcome John, Jonas, and Nate Hirsch to the show. Between them, they've got more than 60 virtual team members and have been practicing remote management for more than a decade. And it turns out they both run platforms to help you make your first virtual hire as well.
John heads up onlinejobs.ph, the largest remote job board and resume database for workers in the Philippines. While Nate's created freeup.coms, free with three E's, a curated freelance marketplace for workers all around the world. I'll tell you a little bit more about the benefits of and differences between the sites as I see them having been a customer of both after the interview.
Stick around to hear it, John and Nate's take on when it's time to hire, had to find the best talent for your budget, and some common mistakes to avoid. Notes and links for this one plus the full text summary with all the top tips from the call are at side hustle nation.com slash virtual. We begin this call with a trip down memory lane as I asked John and Nate to tell me about their first hires and what it felt like to take that leap.
You'll hear John first and I'll be back with my top takeaways after the interview. Ready? Let's do it. 15 years ago, I remember having this conversation with this guy who was so far ahead of me in business. I was working and I wasn't making a lot of money, but I was working a lot. He says to me, when you start out, make sure you go to the Philippines with it. I was like, huh, that's interesting and different. He gave me some reasons why and gave me a reference to where I could hire someone.
The time I debated, I went back and forth for a couple of months actually. I don't know if I can afford to hire someone. I didn't know if I could or should or if they could do good work or what. I ended up taking the leap because I tried a whole bunch of other stuff and it just wasn't working for me. I hired this guy full time and it was the single most liberating experience of my life where all of a sudden I had this guy whose only job was to do whatever I asked him to do.
As a business owner, you're doing so many things, you're working so many hats and I was able to get a couple hats off of me and onto him. I had to teach him what to do, which was fine, which is one of the biggest things I'll talk about probably later.
After a couple months of having him work for me, I realized there's two of me now, there's two of me because I'm now working more effectively. I could focus on things that were better for the business like making sales and he was doing the things that I was previously doing, which was such a big deal.
What was the business you were running at the time and what were those couple hats that you took off your head? I do remember the very first thing I had him do. I do not like to write and I don't like the process that goes along with writing. I had tried previous to this hiring people on Upwork to write articles for me because at the time, article marketing was super effective.
It was just a big pain in the butt like I hired this guy, spent all this time hiring this person, he writes 50 articles and sends them to me, I have to check him for plagiarism. Most of them were good, some of them were plagiarized. As soon as I got him all right, I realized crap, he's a writer, that's all he does. Now all the responsibility falls on me to distribute these and link them and use them.
I was like, I don't want to do crap with these. I don't want to think about this. I'm doing other things. When I hired this guy full time, this was the first time I was ever able to take a process off of my plate where I could teach him how to do the writing and how to do the submitting and how to do the titles and the articles and the resource boxes and the linking and how to link them to my website and to different pages of my website and how to link them to each other.
So it was the first time that like this full thing got off of my plate and I never had to touch it again. Okay, so you kind of had an SEO affiliate content type of business, whereas like time consuming to do that, SEO writing this article marketing type of stuff. Nate, what about you? What was your first hire like?
So I was running an Amazon business out of my college dorm room. I got into Amazon at a very good time. This was back in 2008 and I had a drop shipping business and with drop shipping. There's so much that goes into it. You're responding to every email, you're following every tracking number, you're building relationships with manufacturers. This was before Amazon software too. So we were reprising every product, taking down and putting products up, changing inventory, all of that.
So there was a lot of manual work and I'm making money for the first time in my life. I'm doing everything myself. And so I'm you with an accountant to pay taxes for the first time and the first question he asked me is, what are you going to hire your first person? And I kind of shrugged him off. I was like, why would I do that? That's money out of my pocket. I love doing this. I can do it seven days a week.
They're going to steal my ideas. They're going to hurt my business. And he just laughed in my face. And he said, you're going to learn this lesson on your own. Sure enough, my first business, he's in comes around the fourth quarter. I'm not prepared. I don't know what business season is. And I get destroyed. I'm working 20 hours a day. My social life plummet. My grades go down. And I get to the other side. And I'm like, oh my God, the account was right. I need to start hiring people.
So I post a job on Facebook and this guy in my business law class, but he messes me wanting a job. And I don't even interview him. I hire him. And he ends up being this amazing hire. He's I start him off doing bookkeeping work. So at the end of every month, we had all these transactions on our credit card.
And we would have to input them into quick books. And I used to do that every single month. And I remember teaching about to do it and having him do it. And then that month comes by. We did on the first month or 30th of the month, whatever it was. And I just didn't have to do it anymore. And it was kind of like that revelation. Like I can focus on high level stuff. That kind of addiction that that delegating has. If you fast forward ahead to my first time hiring a Filipino VA.
This was I was in Florida and a friend of mine told me about upwork. He actually told me about this VA. He was using who referred her friend. Her name's Chiqui Ann. She still works with me today. And I remember getting her on emails and doing customer service because with dropshipping, there's so many emails. What's my tracking number? This arrived damaged. And I just remember training her up and getting her to do emails.
And I'll always remember the first day that I woke up and I didn't have to check my email anymore. That was incredible. And I learned a ton of out just hiring people in the Philippines in general. I remember after her, I just had a bunch of people quit on me. This kind of goes to what John was saying about just learning what it's like working with people in the Philippines. They didn't really like how direct I was and how I was right to the point.
And I really didn't have an emotional side. It was business is what you do. And that hurt me a lot of ways when I was hiring VA's for the first time outside of Chiqui Ann who for whatever reason was very loyal and put up with a lot of my nonsense. She saw the diamond underneath. Okay. Now this is interesting. So it sounds like this is kind of probably around the same timeframe kind of this 2008 2009 timeframe, which was around the time that I made my first VA hire as well.
And I actually went through a third party company because I either wasn't familiar with Eland set the time or Odesk at that time or just wasn't comfortable making a direct hire. So found this company out of Karachi Pakistan, which was at that time the largest city in the world. I never heard of 20 million people and hired this guy, Wasio to run paper click ad campaigns for me on Google AdWords.
And it was fascinated like he'd work the night shift in Karachi and we'd be on Gmail chat like all day, you know, I'm learning so much about his culture and he would joke like I know more about women choose than anybody in Karachi. And it was just a fascinating experience.
It was this kind of first taste of like Nate, you said kind of this delegation and like, oh, how empowering that can be in John, you called it this liberating experience like I could go to the gym at 10 in the morning and work was still getting done.
And that was a big like ball moment for me like I didn't have to be behind the keyboard at all the time. For me, a couple things triggered that and I had to kind of the same fears of like they're going to steal my ideas are not going to do it as well as me like all this can I afford this. And for me, it was when is the time to bring on help it was this kind of question of are you working on your business or you're working in your business and I was very much working in the business at that time.
On top of that, you kind of come to this realization like I have a process for this and even though it's all in my head right now like I could teach somebody else how to do this. If somebody else kind of looked over my shoulder, they could figure this out like it's not rocket science, but I'm curious what was you know, you're working 20 hours a day. So that was probably a red flag to bring on help, but John, like what kind of prompted you to say like, okay, this is something that I need to do.
Here's what really prompted me when I was in college, I had a conversation with my roommate. And we were talking about what we wanted to do when we when we grew up right and I said I wanted to run my own business and he laughed at me and he was like, because he was in the middle he was an undergrad to go to medical school, which he's a doctor today.
And he was like, don't you know that small business owners work like so much more than everyone else and I was like well, I think I can do it differently. And when I did the optimism of a college student, of course, yeah, of course, right when I say something like that, I'm pretty sad on like figuring something out because who wants to be a hypocrite who wants to be that guy who, oh yeah, you were going to be so awesome and whatever.
So what I tell most people today for like when do you know is when when's the time to hire someone because for me at the time he was like, dude, I don't want to do this. I don't want to do this thing that I'm doing. I hate this. So I had to try and find help. What I'll tell most people is if there is something that you're doing that you could potentially teach someone else doesn't matter how much work it takes you to teach someone else.
It's time to hire someone else. It's time to hire someone else to do it because if it takes you a month to teach them how to do it after that you'll never have to do that thing again. If you've hired correctly, you'll never have to do it again. And that is the only way that I know of that you can buy time.
Yeah, it's kind of this saw sharpening moment where you have to take again, you're already pressed for time, you're already busy and say, well, now I'm going to take time away from doing that thing to train somebody else to do it in the hopes of never having to do it again. Like it's going to take me this time up front. It's this investment in your future. The only way to buy time. Anything to add on that? Like for when is it time to hire?
There's really two schools of thoughts. I mean, the first one is exactly what John said when it's all these things that are just piling up that are taking on your time and the only way to get your time back is to pass those tasks off to someone else. And how do you get five hours in your week back, 10 hours in your week back, whatever it is, the flip side of it is, I think the average entrepreneur is only good at one to three things.
They're core competency. Maybe you're good at sales or you're good at content or whatever it is. And as you get farther and farther away from your core competency, sure, you could take a six month course to become a Facebook ad guru, but you can't do that with every single part of your business.
But at some point you have to hire people who are better at doing things than you are. And it could even be the small stuff. I mean, take the bookkeeping, for example, I wasn't necessarily great at just transferring information and making sure everything accurate and double checking it.
I mean, that was very tedious for me. That's probably not my core strength. So I take someone else and I put them in it. And not only are they doing the job, but they're doing it better than I could have done it originally. So I think that was a big eye opener for me as well when I would give someone a task and maybe not right away, but eventually they would do something even better than I could.
And that's very liberating. It makes you want to delegate. It almost makes you want to be a lazy entrepreneur, so to speak, really just Tony in on what are you the best at? What helps you scale your business and finding ways to delegate everything else?
And what I've kind of gone through in the past is a time tracking exercise or time audit exercise say, where is my time going today? And what opportunities are there for delegation inside of that? And on the opposite side, like what is not showing up in that time tracking exercise? Like what should you be doing? What would you be working on it if you only have more hours? Something else to think about?
When you're making that first move, so John, you took the leap and said, OK, I'm going to hire a full time person. As did I, you know, it's kind of like, OK, am I going to be able to keep this person busy? Like is this going to be? Are they going to pay for themselves? And then some like am I going to see an ROI on this?
If you guys have any frameworks and recommendations for figuring out how many hours you might need outside of perhaps that time tracking exercise? Well, I spent five hours last week on this so I can fire somebody five hours a week to do it for me. Yeah, I do. It doesn't matter. And I'll tell you why my brother one time's running this business and he's overwhelmed whatever and he hires this full time person. He says he didn't have enough work to keep him busy full time.
Then he comes back to me three weeks later. I was like, dude, I need to hire someone else. He was like, until you have someone else working for you, you don't realize how much there is to do or how much that how much can get done. So for me, there was a huge and I'll just point out what you said that like my first hire was full time and your first hire was full time.
There is something different in hiring full time. This took me years to recognize most entrepreneurs are working in their business, right? And you're a grunt worker, which I was a grunt worker at the time. I was tweaking WordPress and I was writing content and I was doing Facebook, whatever. It wasn't until I hired someone else. And I hired them full time and that's a big, big deal. So you hire someone hourly and you don't care if they're busy or not.
So if you give them a task to do, they do the task great. If they're done and they're not and you don't have something else for them to do, you don't care. Which allows you to continue doing than whatever junk you're doing. If you hire someone full time, if they're not busy, that's on you now. And that's what fell on to me was like, oh, he finished this task. Oh, I gave him this task. I thought I would take him 30 hours. It took him six.
So now I was immediately faced with this thing of like, oh crap, I have to come up with something for him to do. Which right there is the shift between working in your business and working on your business. That's the shift between being a grunt worker and being the CEO. It forces you into taking a different role in your business so that now you have to work on it rather than work in.
So for me, when you ask, how do you figure out how much time to take, you don't. You hire someone full time. You can hire someone part time. That's fine. But pay them a set salary. And what you'll find is you're forced into becoming a better business owner. Hourly doesn't force you to do that.
More with John and Nate in just a moment, including how much you might expect to pay for qualified help. And remember, these are $2019. So adjust those board a little bit and roll based outsourcing versus task based outsourcing right after this. That's the sound of another sale on your online Shopify store. But did you know Shopify powers in person selling to it's true. Shopify is the sound of selling everywhere online in store on social media and beyond.
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Just go to indeed.com slash side hustle show right now and support our show by saying you heard about indeed on this podcast indeed.com slash side hustle show terms and conditions apply need to hire you need indeed. Yeah, that's interesting that shift from grunt worker to CEO and like having somebody on the clock for you to say like OK, I need to come up with something productive for this person to do kind of flips the switch in your head.
When we're getting to budget in a moment, but it's like, could I really keep somebody busy full time like I'm just a side hustle for me, even if I'm working a few hours a week, would it justify bringing somebody else for 40.
I can't disagree with any of that. I've hired plenty of people full time and it's that same mentality. I tend to do hourly. This is my personal preference. And we have plenty of clients who do fixed price or salary or whatever to for me. I kind of like to experiment to like I just hired someone for lead generation and I'm hiring them for 20 hours a week.
But I set that expectation of front your mind for 20 hours a week and and same thing if they only have five hours of work to do. It's on me to make sure that they get those extra hours. So I was a most of my VAs are full time, although I would do have certain things that are part time and have had people that have started part time and I've eventually increased them to full time as well.
So same type of mentality, slightly different approach. I do agree that if you if you get someone where you're like, all right, you're, you're, I'm just going to use you five hours a week.
It can just put you into something where you're just constantly trying to find work for them. You're not really taking everything off your plate. I've seen people that have gone that that part time VA route, but they're still doing every other day to day operation in their business when so much more can be outsourced.
And then also just becomes a budgeting thing figuring out how much money did I actually make last month. What am I actually willing to invest into my business maybe you want to be super aggressive and it's 40 to 60% of your profits are going towards expansion and hiring maybe it's more conservative and it's 10 to 30% and you can pick a number and go up and down 10% or 5% each month depending on what you want to do and and how your business is doing but.
That's kind of the approach that I've taken. Okay, that's interesting. I've never really thought about it that way like okay, I'm going to proactively invest 25% of the profits back into growth back into the business. It's always like hey, I made 10 grand last month. Great. You know, it's like I do you don't really think about it or at least I haven't really thought about it in that way. So that is an interesting way to wait a frame.
Let's talk about that budget for a moment. So obviously there's some geo arbitrage advantages of hiring in the Philippines. That's the specialty of online jobs stop pH. What kind of budget were you looking at John for that first full time hire. When I first hired there was no place like online jobs up pH right there was no market place you could go to to find people so I went to an agency and I paid them $750 a month and they paid the worker $250 a month.
And it was great 250 was for full time full time. Yeah, that's 15 years ago. So that's that's not enough today. But I will say that I just hired someone to do some admin stuff for us and I was ready to pay her $500 a month. And she said I want to make $350 a month which I think is too low. So we paid her $400 a month for full time work. Is that a decent living like that seems absurdly low by Western standards.
It is absurdly low by Western standards. I have 25 people now that work for me. She's definitely the lowest paid person. The rest of them make between $450 and $1,500 a month. Usually in the Philippines people live with their parents or they live with their spouse and their both spouses work. One of the great things about what both Nate and I do is we let people can raise their own kids rather than having their parents raise their kids or a nanny raised their kids.
And so the wage isn't the whole thing here. It's also a lifestyle thing for them where they get to see their family. Where otherwise they're not because the standard work week in the Philippines is six 10 hour days. And I think that's changing some but still six 10 hour days. Usually people are working five eight hour days for us. And they're all working home. Yeah, they're able to do it from home. They don't necessarily have to pull a night shift at some BPO call center type of place.
Right. So the $400 a month is a low end. It's low. So usually that that person is going to be living with someone else who's also working. Okay. But in the $502,000 range, not unreasonable today. Yeah, for sure. You can find just about anything in that range. Nate, are you saying the same thing free up kind of focuses on these more hourly workers rather than full time higher.
So right. No, I mean, you can do fixed prices on our platform too. And they set their own rates. My team VAs. I got about 40 of them are in that five to $7 an hour for the most part. But then I've got people that are team leaders that have been with me longer that make 15 plus an hour. And we do that intentionally. But we have people on our platform that'll hire a VA for the $500 a month or 800, whatever it is. Our biggest thing is we just don't want turnover.
And that's not to say that people are definitely going to quit if you don't pay them enough. But for us, if a client comes to us and we introduce them to a freelancer, we want the freelancer to only take a rate that they're going to be happy with long term. And we've just found that, yeah, if someone accepts the 400, whatever it is, if they're not 100% happy with it, it's not that hard to beat or match or have another client come in and swoop them.
And the last thing we want to do is have that happen to our client base. So we like to say that that we're five and up. But if the freelancer is good going below, whether it's $4 or $3 or is good with a fixed monthly rate, they're more than happy to, they're more than welcome to take that rate as long as they're good with the full time. And that rate's not going to be an issue going forward.
To bring up that point to illustrate, like this doesn't have to be a budget breaking move in your business. Like you can get somebody competent and qualified really affordably. And that was one thing that was really eye opening to me 10 or 12 years ago as we were just kind of getting started down this path.
And I should add to there's a thriving industry of work from home, professional assistance and contractors and freelancers in the United States in Europe, like where salaries, the $35, $50 an hour up. So that's if your budget allows and you need somebody closer to home, you can absolutely go down that path too.
One thing, and this is from Chris Ducker, his advice was to hire for the role and not necessarily the task, whereas a lot of my hires have been for the task, like I need you to run this ad words campaign. I need you to run this live chat customer support. What do you guys think about that? Quote or that bit of advice to say, okay, you're going to be the customer support manager. And in that role, one of your tasks is going to be to manage this customer support.
But you have free reign over that kind of division or content area of the business. Yeah, so I mostly agree with it. I mean, with my customer service reps is it's the same thing where we're hiring with them for the role. They're responsible for a lot of different things. It's not like you can only do email support and only understand email support.
If you don't understand what's going on in our software or certain questions or are able to do live support, you're not going to succeed in that role. Now, we also have other more standard, just do this task positions. We have a lead generation process that we use for partnerships and to get on podcasts. And I've been doing the same thing for five plus years. We have this process down. We hire someone and the only thing they do is that task.
And it's much less of a role. It doesn't really build into someone. We actually have had someone who's knocked that role out of the park and we've moved them over to a different role. And they've really taken that over. But for the most part of that role is you do it. So I would say 75% of the stuff that I personally hire for is more of that.
This is your role. Grow into the role rock become a rock star of that role. But there's other situations that that might not be necessary, especially as a young starter or maybe a starter that just has their systems really down pat where it's almost that McDonald's style. You're standing here, you're doing this and that's what you're responsible for. And someone else is responsible for step B and someone else is responsible for step C.
So I have two situations. One of them is correct and one of them is not. So the situation where you hire for the role or you hire for the task is technical positions. So anything Webmaster programmer designer something that requires some technical knowledge hire them for their skills in that thing almost everything else though, even like a high end content writer would fall into that technical thing.
Almost everything else I say hire for their English because if someone speaks good English, that means usually it means they think well. That means they'll learn well. You can teach them things well. They can do other things well. And English is one of the things the second thing that I say hire for is hire for their dedication to details their attention to details and then second their reliability like do they show up every single day.
So if they're paying attention to details and they're reliable like you can teach this person anything you want and their English is less important. Those are my criteria for like role based versus whatever because I've found that usually if I find someone and they're good, it doesn't matter what they know individually. They're going to work on different things just like Nate said, like you're going to transition into something else because business is change.
And I want someone who's smart and who he's tensioned the details and who shows up every day. And I can teach you this task and then we can learn another task when business changes. Okay, well let's dive into that because I think this is an important next step is kind of. Okay, now that I've kind of itemized out what I could probably use some help with and I've gotten some ideas on what that might take.
How do you test for reliability before you before you hire somebody and see if they actually show up every day or how do you test for attention to detail before you could look at their resume for typos and stuff like that. But what goes into your job descriptions for a new hire or like how are you doing that screening or hiring process John.
So for me, it's not a matter of job description. It's a matter of what do I do after I communicate with them. I'll just tell you my process and lots of people have different processes and there's not a right way, but this is my way. So once I've communicated with someone, I start interviewing them. I will ask them one, two, four questions across five, eight, 15 emails during the recruiting process.
In there, I get to see all kinds of stuff. So I would say my recruiting, my recruiting success is probably 80% where like 80% of the time I'm finding someone I'm picking a good person. So when I'm doing this, I'll ask the four questions. Here's the example. Can you answer three of those questions? What are the chances you only do three of the four tasks I ask you to do later? Right?
So there's a good attention to detail thing. If I email you and it takes you three days to respond during the recruiting process, what are the chances it's going to take you three days to respond after I hired you? I recently had one of my people refer me to his brother who I know is super, super talented.
And I started interviewing him and it took him three weeks to respond to me. And I was like, sorry, dude, I'm done. No, because if you do that during recruiting, chances are really, really high after I hire you're going to keep doing that. So I'm seeing reliability, I'm seeing your communication. I get to see your handling of English. How do you handle English or English slang or you know, it's reasonable to fake your profile.
I have your friend help you write your profile. It's not reasonable to do that twice a day for five days in emails. What type of questions are you asking in these emails? I will ask everything like, where do you live? Who do you live with? How many kids do you have? Are you married? How much do you want to make? What's your past experience? Tell me a situation where you've had something hard and how did you solve it?
Why are you the right person for this job? Show me examples of your work. Write a paragraph telling me that why you're different than other people. I don't want to hear because I'm dedicated and I work hard. I don't want to hear that. Give me something unique. All kinds of random crap. Attach a picture of a pink Cadillac to the next email. Just to see if they're paying attention. In that scenario, and I know a lot of employers do this, there's three potential responses.
One is they ignore it, which is why I ask it because they're ignoring a task of asking to do that didn't make sense to them and that's crappy. Two is they attach a picture of pink Cadillac great three is they question you and are like you asked for this why that's silly thing. Why are you asking for this that's awesome like when I see that I'm like okay sweet you're willing to question me question my authority you know this is going really well.
And so through this process you're going to narrowing down the candidates based on who's answering these questions well who's you know asking questions back to you and seeing who kind of stands out and this is all before jumping on like a Skype call or a video chat. No, it's not I don't do it. So this is Philippine specific the reason I don't do it what I have found is that Filipinos are scared they're shy and that's what they call they call themselves shy.
And really what it is in my experiences they are worried about disappointing you like they're a very pleasing culture and so if they're going to disappoint you or make or they're going to feel embarrassed they'd rather not do the thing at all. And so getting on a call with you is one of those things where they know that they're going to understand you because they're they watch American TV and they're fine understanding English.
It's there where you're not going to understand them so I've had like two different situations of this where two of my employees they are working for me were they were both super hesitant to get on a call with me. One of them I could barely understand him and we never had communication issue but we got on the phone I it was impossible.
And so there was a program of the best program I've ever met so it didn't really matter right the other one her English was perfect completely flawless and she didn't want to get on call with me because she was so worried so my point with the not I don't do sky calls because what you'll find is and maybe Nate has a different process but you'll have 10 recruits you'll ask them to do a sky call six of them will schedule it with you two of them will show up where of those 10 you potentially had 10 good recruits and the systems for a voice position.
So there how they speaking which doesn't really matter and you just lost eight of them. Who potentially could have been really great and now you're down to a pool of two because you require skype.
John really happy you said that because I think a lot of people have told me I'm crazy because I won't do any kind of voice calls any kind of phone call sky calls biker calls whatever with any of my international staff really ever I keep everything on skype message for a lot of different reasons but I mean one of what you just said most people just don't want to do it and if it's not a voice position it doesn't really matter.
I not only do I care about the speed of responses to emails I care about speed to responses to skype messages and that doesn't mean that they need to be available 24 seven but if I'm doing an interview with them and we're both there we both show up and I'm shooting the messages and it's taking five minutes for a message to come in here and an extra minute and a half here instead of quick responses along with the high level English skills that we both value that's a huge red flag for me as well.
It's really surprising to hear that okay we'll just hire somebody over this written communication but sounds like you got a lot of our communication are meetings and everything is all is all written via skype it also just gives them a good way to go back and read things everything is in writing if you need to go back and say hey this is what we talked about I don't know if you ever tried to get like six Filipinos on a zoom call or something someone always has an internet issue things drop out things get miss her to it never goes as planned.
So this is interesting and this is not applied to your first hire but once you have a team they'll start doing things so my team insisted or came to me and asked me can we set up a slack chat so we can chat with each other like sure great I don't really participate in it all my communication is asynchronous I do it through email or I do it I mean we use base camp so almost all of it's through base camp for project management so all the communication is I write a message they write back when they're available and sometimes around at the same time and I'll find that we're doing it really quickly together.
But for most of what we do and every business is different where I don't require instant communication other businesses will and yes I chat great we don't do it and so like the phone call is completely unnecessary more with me and john in just a moment including common hiring mistakes and went to let a low performer go right after this what mistakes do you see people making on your platforms for hiring maybe Nate you can go first.
Yeah I think the biggest thing is just setting the expectations right from the beginning I mean if you're I mean it starts off with just what the communication channel is someone might have five different clients and they each have one person like slack or base camp another person like Skype the other person only likes email and if you don't take the time to set that expectation up front a lot of times you'll run into issues I had a client this week where the freelancer came to me and they're like I don't know what to do with this client they I've been messing them over and over and it turns out the client was waiting for me to do this.
I was waiting for a slack message and the freelancer had no idea that that's how they were supposed to communicate even though he got a slack invite like three weeks ago so I mean setting those expectations is definitely key what I like to do when I hire people is almost scare them a little bit scares probably not the right word but I like to set the expectations very high this is how we communicate this is who you go to for this this is what constitutes success failure I'll tell them anything that I didn't like from let's say that I got rid of a customer service rep all I'll explain why why did I do that.
Why why didn't work out what they were doing so that they have all the information that they need to succeed and I would much rather have someone back out right at the beginning because they say you know what I can't meet those expectations then for me or my team to invest two or three weeks into someone only to realize that they're not the right fit also into that is just personal preferences any pet peeves that you have I know for me and my team one of my pet peeves is if someone messages me hey Nate unless it's like a friendly thing but if it's a business thing
and then they wait for me to respond before they tell me what the issue is or why they contact me to begin with because there's just a lot of people and that would take forever for me to go back and forth and in order for me to get the information I need up front so one of the things I preach is get me all the information up front so that I can help make a decision or help teach you whatever it is so really setting those expectations right from the beginning that's where I think a lot of people go wrong in the hiring process where they just get further and further down the line without being on the same page to begin with.
John what about you as far as mistakes or unhappy customers of online jobs yeah so I see I see two things and both these have to do with exactly what Nate said expectations so number one is trying to hire someone who can do everything I can't tell you how many times I've gotten an email that said I need someone who can build my website and make it look really awesome and put up a Facebook fan page for me and change the graphic and then write 15 articles that are really perfect.
I'm professionally done and do my adwords marketing and create this custom programming thing like dude this person doesn't exist I'm sorry this is silly that's one thing like hiring people with expectations of like this this is a magical person there's no such thing the second big mistake that I see is expecting perfection right from the start like I hired this person and you didn't do this thing exactly how I told you to do it the first time and so you're fired so what I've seen is I'm not going to do it.
I've seen over the years often is like I provided them perfect instructions look and when I look at the instructions I'm like dude I don't even know what you want so your instructions suck but you think that your instructions are perfect and you expected them to do it perfectly and you had zero tolerance for this and you fired them that's usually the mistake like this isn't a magic bullet it doesn't solve things overnight you have to work at it you have to create a relationship with the people you're hiring it takes time.
What my personal favorite is when someone messes a VA and their only instructions are 5 me profitable products on Amazon that's it nothing else and then they'll hire the VA for 5 hours and then they'll dispute it and they'll say this person didn't find me any profitable products and I have a whole can response for it and that but you're absolutely right I mean if you're only as good as your direction to and your instructions and that perfect person does everything you don't even want to hire that person let's say best case scenario you hire a perfect person that can do all these different tasks for your business.
If that person gets sick and that person quits on you you're never finding a second one that's going to be exactly the same so I think a lot of business owners need to get out of that mentality as well.
Yeah or like build me a website like what no that's not no there's so much thinking that goes on and that's that's probably the other side of it is and this goes way back to the very beginning when is it time to hire someone don't hire someone expecting them to take over and run your business or to build your business for you.
You should know what you're doing in your business before you hire someone like you should have a reason you're hiring this person and know what they're going to do and it's the same thing for like build me a website you should know what is going into this website or at least you should be willing to think through it and work with them through the issues like hey I like this from this website here's why I wanted on my website put it here stuff like that because the build me a website doesn't work.
On the flip side of that when is it time to say like this is just not working out like this person is not communicating well they're not meeting expectations like we've been through this training three or four times and it's just like they're not getting it like we've ever had to let somebody go who just wasn't performing.
I mean I definitely have I don't think anyone has a 100% higher record it doesn't doesn't exist for me it's all about how much investment did I make into this person if I'm on week one and there's not showing up on time and they're not grasping it I'm probably pretty quick to partize now I've also had a situation where I had a bookkeeper for two years and he was an absolute rock star and all of a sudden he started making mistakes and not falling directions and I sat down and I met with him and I tried to get to the bottom of what was going on and I'm really happy I didn't find out what was going on and I'm really happy.
I didn't fire him because it turns out that he was just burnt out from busy season and he needed a week and a half off and he came back and he's been crushing it ever since so for me I kind of look at how much time I've invested I also try to focus on what I can control by higher three VAs and all three then can't follow my SOPs and are all struggling I probably need to take a look at my SOPs and how I'm communicating it and how I'm teaching it so there's different factors there.
I think we've all heard the fire fast, higher slow it's kind of the same thing it all depends on how much time and money you've invested into someone but you also don't want to get caught up hey I've invested a month into someone so I'm not going to part ways and then you end up two months in and they're still not doing what you want so it's kind of a fine line and a balancing act. And it's hard.
I'm not going to be doing sex no matter where you are so for me my when something's not going right especially in the Philippines the first question is what are you stuck on to that person because I mean I've had the exact same experience that Nate has had like I have this amazing programmer and he's been so doing good for so long and then he stopped working for like a month and I I'm the type where I just want people to work and I don't want to think about it and it takes me a while to realize something is not going on.
So I approached him and said what's going on with you I was like do what if he's not working I'm going to let him go but I said what's going on with you and it turns out he was like I'm so sorry sir I I have this major I problem where if I look at the computer for more than an hour straight I can't see I go blind like oh crap that sucks yeah like hey how can I help you work through this he was like well I need this medicine and it's hard to get and really expensive like sweet let me help you buy this medicine so you get back to work.
And he's back to work and awesome but there's there is a thing of patience there of like trying to work through issues where a lot of people just aren't willing to do it if you're not willing to do it if you're not willing to work through issues then this is hard for you. Now that seems exceptionally common where oh my wife's brother is in the hospital or there was a typhoon which I guess you could verify or the internet was out or you just you kind of get ghosted in the hospital.
In certain situations and you're like what was it something that I did like is this legit and you're halfway around the world and trying to figure out okay is this person just trying to get more money out of me why did they all of a sudden stop working it can be kind of a frustrating situation like you've ever had that happen where it's like I do not been proactive about asking him like hey what's going on with you like you might never have found out or do you get these kind of sob stories and I don't know it's hard to know.
What's the truth? Yes we all get them Nate how do you deal with it? Yeah, we definitely all get them I mean part of what we do that I think is that we do well is we almost set the expectation if you're going to get on the free up platform not working for me just offering your services in general never mind on my my internal team the communication is everything if you're not communicating with clients if the clients have to chase you of my team as a stop what they're doing to reach out to you and reach out to your emergency contact you you're going to get blocked from getting more clients from up.
And we'll make it right with the client but but that's it so we all go through personal issues I know Philippines people in the Philippines sometimes get a bad rap for for different things whether it's they have an extended family or they've got power outages or stuff like that but we really set the expectation that listen if you're supposed to work and you lose power the expectation is you
communicated up front to the client and you go somewhere where there's internet and if you can't you let us know and and having strong internet strong power is a very minimum requirement offer your services on the free up platform so we kind of set those expectations I mean if someone for my team just disappears for a week most likely they're not going to continue working with me I mean we just can't have people that are just going to completely drop off the face of the earth with absolutely no communication at the end of the day what are you going to do I mean we have to do that.
People is emergency contact information we've got if someone referred to the platform we can contact that referral but if someone disappears I'm not going to go to the Philippines and chase them down or I have this piece of paper legal agreement like none of that's going to happen there's only so much you can do and we consider ourselves as pretty reasonably reasonable people if you have a personal issue if something's going on let us know we're going to problem solve and see if there's a way to work around it but if you're not going to communicate it up front then there's not much we can do to help you.
Do you put a contract in place to say like okay here's the expected hours here's your payment terms here's you know what I do spell that out up front.
So we the terms of use of being on our platform which is different if you're talking about my internal team that no I mean we've got our so what I do that I lay out the expectations it's not a contract but I have it all in writing and I'll have them right I confirm or I agree to everything as we go down so if there's ever a question of did we agree to this or you're supposed to do this
we have this conversation that we can go back to and it's like hey you you agreed to this I mean again what am I going to do with the legal agreement with someone in the Philippines I'm never going to enforce that at the end of the day but John might have a different beard. Yeah I love it because I get this question all the time too like where's the contract like no you're not going to enforce a contract no no.
So I have a funny situation where I this client who she wasn't happy with this bookkeeping work and I knew this bookkeeper this bookkeeper has been awesome is been in the plot for a while tons of really happy clients and we paid out the bookkeeper and the client came back and she wasn't happy with the work it was like $400 or something like that so I refund the client no big deal.
The freelancer was happy he had other clients I checked in with them they were all happy but the client came back to me and he was like I don't want you to pay for this I want you to get the money from the freelancer and and pay me from the freelancer and it was like don't you have these legal agreements can't you enforce this and I try to tell her in the nicest way possible that I wasn't going to force this guy to send me $400 that I wasn't going to hire a Filipino lawyer to go after him like none of that was it was realistic in any way and John I'm sure you get it.
I'm sure you get very similar stories. Yeah and usually we're like you I mean we're trying to be nice about it but in the end we just say go away no this is up to you to work this out. Fair enough. Anything else to add on this dipping your toe into the outsourcing waters before we wrap up?
I'm a big fan of experimenting like right now I'm building kind of a biz dev team to handle partnerships and I don't have an exact SOP I probably wouldn't have done this back in the day when I was hiring people for the first time but I'm looking I know the type of person that I want and once I hire them I'm going to give it a few months and I'm going to experiment and try different things and find someone that I actually work with and collaborate with and that's kind of a more of an advanced thing I definitely wouldn't recommend it but don't get in the mentality that you can only hire someone if you have a ABCDE process.
Yeah it's strongly recommended but there's a time and place in your business to experiment with different things and I'm a big fan of low risk high reward situations if I hire someone to run my Instagram for three months what's the worst case scenario I lose a few hundred dollars and what's the best case scenario is it starts up a brand new revenue source and build the presence there and don't be afraid to experiment and try new things as long as you're in the mentality that some things work and some things don't.
Nate and I are so similar my thing with this is look you don't know this works for you until you try it like you gotta give it a try and it takes a leap like if you're working fifty hours a week plan working fifty five hours a week for a couple weeks it's just part of it but then if it works for you like the reward is time.
It doesn't work for you you're out a couple hundred bucks right it's not that big of a deal but to know if it's gonna work for you you gotta try it you have to do something you have to take a leap. I think the bigger risk aside from the time and the money you know in my case it was opening the doors to the kingdom is like okay here's the. Adwords account you can do some serious damage in there if you don't follow directions are you.
I don't know change the password lock out the credit card information something and or it's like okay bring somebody into manage my inbox it's like there's some potentially sensitive information is like there's the time and money risk but there's like the. Business and security and like personal thrust risk that can be hard to get over as well so kind of like that framing it as like an experiment like low risk high reward hires and.
We should point out that like people aren't out to screw you over vast majority people like they're looking for honest work and they want to do a good job and they want to have something that can support them in their family for. A long term but it is this leap to get over to like especially for to first time delegating to say okay now.
No somebody else is going to take over this for me free up dot com fr e e up dot com freelance hiring marketplace and online jobs that pH for hires in the Philippines and we should add to like you know not just Philippines but you hire people from all over up free up.
Let's wrap this thing up with you guys number one tip for side hustle nation doesn't have to be outsourcing related or virtual assistant related just whatever entrepreneurial wisdom you'd like to impart and let you kick this one off so what I found over the years is the thing that separates. Successful and from those that are not is the willingness to think the willingness to think through hard things.
Because business is hard it's not just telling me what to do and I'll do it that's not how you run a business you have to be willing to think through problems and create solutions and. And that's where the hard work is the hard work isn't in oh I work 80 hours a week hard work isn't being willing to think effectively and create solutions.
Yeah completely agree with that the thing I would add kind of separate tip is just being able to prioritize it's it's such an underrated skill as an entrepreneur you got a million things you can do all these different things you can tackle you can go after every social media change.
You got to figure out what comes first will come second what comes third when a new idea comes up you have to figure out where that slides in and and the best entrepreneurs just know how to prioritize and kind of goes hand in hand with hiring you have to know what what order to hire people what order to get projects done and and a lot of times that's the difference between success and failure.
Absolutely the willingness to think through hard things I mean this is going to be hard you know what was easy everybody would be doing it right and then the prioritization skill is absolutely critical both on this hiring front and just in the broader business and life sense like hey you vote your time with your priorities say I didn't have enough time to get that done be honest with yourself you prioritize something else for better or worse.
John and Nate really appreciate you guys joining me and catch up with you soon. In the early days of John and Nate's businesses they were wearing all the hats content creation SEO sales customer support and that's how we start that's totally normal but as you grow you might find some hats fit better than others just as these guys have for example Nate mentioned the importance of prioritization and really focusing on your core confidence. Where is your time best spent.
All right my top three takeaways from this call with John Jonas and Nate her number one is to buy time John called hiring the only way he knows to buy time and I'm thinking about the various resources at our disposal time money talent energy and time is unique in that it's a non renewable resource once you spend it is gone unlike money where you can always make more so the idea is to buy.
So the idea of buying time stood out to me as something incredibly valuable to buy me what better to spend your money on as you go through the exercises of auditing your hours what time could you buy back in in most cases. I probably wouldn't make a higher until you have revenue coming in to justify it but as soon as you do that opens up this opportunity for delegation this opportunity to buy back your most precious non renewable resource let's take away number one to buy time.
Take away number two is it takes a leap John describe this mental shift this liberating experience in forcing himself to start creating systems to start trusting other people to start delegating and I liked it. Nate's point about thinking of your first hire as an experiment because you might not be the world's best boss on your first try.
I know I certainly wasn't I remember getting frustrated with wasio my first hire when it was taking him longer than I thought it should to complete these tasks the truth was I've been doing them myself almost daily for years at that point my fingers could fly across the keyboard without even thinking I knew every inch of the website interfaces we were dealing with.
When it was all new to him on top of that the processes that I internalized through practice through repetition you know took some time to get down on paper and to become similarly second nature for him but it was an important leap that little experiment that I've built up in my head to be a much bigger deal than it probably was in terms of downside risk but it was a really empowering one at the same time so that's take away number two it takes this leap think of it as an experiment.
Take away number three is it is better to over communicate since so much of our communication is non verbal and you lose a ton of that in these virtual work arrangements I think it's really important as both john and Nate described to be really upfront in your communication and setting expectation for communication some of my most aggravating virtual hiring experiences have come as a direct result of slow or unclear communication.
Especially if someone is working a different time zone from you it can slow your progress to a crawl if you could only send and receive a message or two per day I remember working with this development team in India which had almost no overlap with my working hours and it was something that wasn't an issue during onboarding because the sales team of course was working US business hours but after they close the deal the rest of the team the technical guys were not the part of this call.
Not doing a phone or Skype interview with a potential hire was really surprising to me as that's always been a part of my process but john and Nate made a good case for skipping it is it really necessary for some roles sure but for others probably not why make somebody jump through that hoop all this stuff is something you'll learn as you go but it was definitely interesting for me to hear how these guys with big virtual teams go about it.
Now as promised I wanted to give you my two cents on online jobs and free up as a client of each the advantages of online jobs as I see them are access to a wide talent pool seriously wide john's got over a quarter million resumes in his database and there are some cool filters you can use to narrow down that candidate base and like you mentioned it's a really affordable option for full time help and that's primarily what you find is people looking for full time work or at least.
20 hour a week work once you make a higher you'll pay your assistant directly and online jobs doesn't take any markup on the salary instead the platform charges a monthly membership fee to post jobs and communicate with potential hires and that fee starts at $69 a month at press time and of course you can put that on pause after you filled the role that you're looking for so great place to find ongoing support virtual employee type of roles.
Free up takes a different approach in that it's a curated freelance marketplace meaning they seem only approves the quote top 1% of freelancers to join me said the current makeup of his talent pool is about 40% from the Philippines 40% from the US and 20% from the rest of the world platform started out from dates background in e commerce as serving other Amazon e commerce sellers but they've gone much broader than that today.
I've primarily used it for shorter term project based work but you can find ongoing assistance there as well what I like about free up is the speed of execution you can post your job and the site is going to introduce you to candidates they feel are a good fit within 24 hours usually within just a few hours and you can say yes let's get started and it's off to the races. Building is done through the free up platform and the site takes a small percentage of every hour of or every project build.
Once again you'll find the full text summary of this episode with all the links mentioned and John and Nate's top tips from the call at side hustle nation dot com slash a virtual that's it for me thank you so much for tuning in until next time let's go out there and make something happen and I'll catch you in the next edition of the side hustle show hustle on.
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