343: Hiring Your First Virtual Assistant: When, Where, and How to Do it Right

0:00:07 Here’s an oldie but a goodie from the archives from the Side Hustle Show Greatest Hits Collection.
0:00:10 This is your first virtual assistant.
0:00:18 How to bring on the right help so you can work on your business instead of in it.
0:00:19 What’s up?
0:00:20 What’s up, Nick?
0:00:21 Hello.
0:00:22 We’re here.
0:00:24 Welcome to the Side Hustle Show because no matter how productive you are, there’s still
0:00:25 a limit.
0:00:30 There’s a limit to your capacity, to your hours, and to your expertise.
0:00:33 And when you’re up against that ceiling, you’ve got a couple choices.
0:00:37 You can settle in like, “All right, this is my life now.”
0:00:40 Or you can ask for help in breaking through.
0:00:42 That’s what this episode is about.
0:00:46 Growing your team in such a way that you’ve got some breathing room in your schedule and
0:00:51 in your mental bandwidth to do the work that’s required of a business owner instead of the
0:00:56 work of the business doer to borrow from Shawn Marshall in episode 312.
0:01:01 Even though I’ve been hiring virtual help in my businesses since 2005, I’ve still got
0:01:02 a lot to learn.
0:01:07 And this is something that’s been on my mind this year as I think about where I want to
0:01:10 go with my current operations and who can help me get there.
0:01:15 To help me dive into this topic, I’m excited to welcome John Jonas and Nate Hirsch to the
0:01:16 show.
0:01:21 Joining them, they’ve got more than 60 virtual team members and have been practicing remote
0:01:23 management for more than a decade.
0:01:29 And it turns out they both run platforms to help you make your first virtual hire as well.
0:01:35 John heads up onlinejobs.ph, the largest remote job board and resume database for workers
0:01:42 in the Philippines, while Nate’s created freeup.com, it’s free with three E’s, a curated freelance
0:01:44 marketplace for workers all around the world.
0:01:49 I’ll tell you a little bit more about the benefits of and differences between the sites
0:01:53 as I see them having been a customer of both after the interview.
0:01:57 Stick around to hear John and Nate’s take on when it’s time to hire, how to find the
0:02:01 best talent for your budget, and some common mistakes to avoid.
0:02:05 Notes and links for this one, plus the full text summary with all the top tips from the
0:02:09 call are at sidehustlenation.com/virtual.
0:02:13 We begin this call with a trip down memory lane as I asked John and Nate to tell me about
0:02:16 their first hires and what it felt like to take that leap.
0:02:20 You’ll hear John first and I’ll be back with my top takeaways after the interview.
0:02:21 Ready?
0:02:22 Let’s do it.
0:02:30 15 years ago, I remember having this conversation with this guy who was so far ahead of me in
0:02:31 business.
0:02:33 I mean, I was working and I was fine.
0:02:36 I wasn’t making a lot of money, but I was working a lot.
0:02:39 And he says to me, “When you’re ready to start outsourcing, make sure you go to the Philippines
0:02:40 with it.”
0:02:44 And I was like, “Huh, that’s interesting and different.”
0:02:48 And he gave me some reasons why and gave me a reference to where I could hire someone.
0:02:53 And the time I debated, I went back and forth for a couple of months, actually, of like,
0:02:55 I don’t know if I can afford to hire someone.
0:02:59 He told me to hire someone full time and I didn’t know if I could or should or if they
0:03:01 could do good work or what.
0:03:04 And I ended up taking the leap because I tried a whole bunch of other stuff and it just wasn’t
0:03:05 working for me.
0:03:12 So I hired this guy full time and it was the single most liberating experience of my life
0:03:17 where all of a sudden I had this guy whose only job was to do whatever I asked him to
0:03:18 do.
0:03:22 And, you know, as a business owner, you’re doing so many things, you’re wearing so many
0:03:28 hats, and I was able to get a couple hats off of me and onto him.
0:03:33 And I had to teach him what to do, which was fine, which is one of the biggest things I’ll
0:03:38 talk about probably later, but after a couple of months of having him work for me, I realized
0:03:45 there’s two of me now, there’s two of me, because I’m now working more effectively.
0:03:51 I could focus on things that were better for the business, like making sales, and he was
0:03:56 doing the things that I was previously doing, which was such a big deal.
0:03:59 So John, what was the business you were running at the time and what were those couple hats
0:04:01 that you took off your head?
0:04:04 So I do remember the very first thing I had him do.
0:04:08 I do not like to write, and I don’t like the process that goes along with writing.
0:04:14 So I had tried previous to this, hiring people on Upwork to write articles for me, because
0:04:16 at the time, article marketing was super effective.
0:04:20 And it was just a big pain in the butt, like I hired this guy, spent all this time hiring
0:04:25 this person, he writes 50 articles, then it sends him to me, I have to check him for plagiarism.
0:04:27 Most of them were good, some of them were plagiarized.
0:04:33 And then as soon as I got them all right, I realized like, crap, he’s a writer.
0:04:34 That’s all he does.
0:04:39 And now all the responsibility falls on me to distribute these and link them and use
0:04:40 them.
0:04:44 And I was like, dude, I don’t want to do crap with these.
0:04:45 I don’t want to think about this.
0:04:46 I’m doing other things.
0:04:52 And so when I hired this guy full time, this was the first time I was ever able to take
0:04:57 a process off of my plate where I could teach him how to do the writing and how to do the
0:05:01 submitting and how to do the titles and the articles and the resource boxes and the linking
0:05:04 and how to link it to my website and to different pages of my website and how to link them to
0:05:05 each other.
0:05:12 And so it was the first time that like, this full thing got off of my plate and I never
0:05:13 had to touch it again.
0:05:14 Okay.
0:05:19 So you kind of had an SEO affiliate content type of business where it was like time consuming
0:05:24 to do that SEO writing, this article marketing type of stuff.
0:05:25 Nate, what about you?
0:05:27 What was your first hire like?
0:05:30 So I was running an Amazon business out of my college dorm room.
0:05:32 I got into Amazon at a very good time.
0:05:36 This was back in 2008 and I had a dropshipping business.
0:05:38 And with dropshipping, there’s so much that goes into it.
0:05:42 You’re responding to every email, you’re following every tracking number, you’re building relationships
0:05:43 with manufacturers.
0:05:46 This was before Amazon software too.
0:05:50 So we were repricing every product, taking down and putting products up, changing inventory,
0:05:51 all of that.
0:05:55 So there was a lot of manual work and I’m making money for the first time in my life.
0:05:57 And I’m doing everything myself.
0:06:00 And so I meet with an accountant to pay taxes for the first time.
0:06:04 And the first question he asked me is, when are you going to hire your first person?
0:06:05 And I kind of shrugged him off.
0:06:06 I was like, why would I do that?
0:06:07 That’s money out of my pocket.
0:06:08 I love doing this.
0:06:10 I can do it seven days a week.
0:06:13 They’re going to steal my ideas that they’re going to hurt my business.
0:06:17 And he just laughed in my face and he said, you’re going to learn this lesson on your
0:06:18 own.
0:06:21 Sure enough, my first busy season comes around the fourth quarter.
0:06:22 I’m not prepared.
0:06:23 I don’t know what busy season is.
0:06:24 And I get destroyed.
0:06:26 I’m working 20 hours a day.
0:06:29 My social life plummets, my grades go down.
0:06:32 And I get to the other side and I’m like, oh my God, the account was right.
0:06:34 I need to start hiring people.
0:06:40 So I post a job on Facebook and this guy in my business law class, he messages me wanting
0:06:42 a job and I don’t even interview him.
0:06:43 I hire him.
0:06:46 And he ends up being this amazing hire.
0:06:48 I start him off doing bookkeeping work.
0:06:52 So at the end of every month, we had all these transactions on our credit card and we would
0:06:54 have to input them into QuickBooks.
0:06:56 And I used to do that every single month.
0:06:59 And I remember teaching him how to do it and having him do it.
0:07:03 And then that month comes by, we did it on the first of the month or 30th of the month,
0:07:04 whatever it was.
0:07:06 And I just didn’t have to do it anymore.
0:07:10 And it was kind of like that revelation, like I can focus on high level stuff, that kind
0:07:13 of addiction that delegating has.
0:07:19 If you fast forward ahead to my first time hiring a Filipino VA, this was, I was in Florida
0:07:21 and a friend of mine told me about Upwork.
0:07:26 He actually told me about this VA he was using who referred her friend, her name is Chiqui
0:07:27 Ann.
0:07:28 She still works with me today.
0:07:32 And I remember getting her on emails and doing customer service because with dropshipping,
0:07:34 there’s so many emails.
0:07:35 What’s my tracking number?
0:07:36 This arrived damaged.
0:07:40 And I just remember training her up and getting her to do emails.
0:07:44 And I’ll always remember the first day that I woke up and I didn’t have to check my email
0:07:45 anymore.
0:07:46 That was incredible.
0:07:50 And I learned a ton about just hiring people in the Philippines in general.
0:07:53 I remember after her, I just had a bunch of people quit on me.
0:07:57 This kind of goes to what John was saying about just learning what it’s like working
0:07:58 with people in the Philippines.
0:08:02 They didn’t really like how direct I was and how I was right to the point.
0:08:04 And I really didn’t have an emotional side.
0:08:05 It was business.
0:08:06 This is what you do.
0:08:10 And that hurt me a lot of ways when I was hiring VAs for the first time outside of Chiqui
0:08:15 Ann, who for whatever reason was very loyal and put up with a lot of my nonsense.
0:08:17 She saw the diamond underneath.
0:08:18 Okay.
0:08:19 Now, this is interesting.
0:08:23 So it sounds like this is kind of probably around the same time frame, kind of this 2008-2009
0:08:28 time frame, which was around the time that I made my first VA hire as well.
0:08:35 And I actually went through a third party company because I either wasn’t familiar with Elance
0:08:40 at that time or Odesk at that time or just wasn’t comfortable making a direct hire.
0:08:45 So I found this company out of Karachi, Pakistan, which was at that time the largest city in
0:08:46 the world.
0:08:47 I never heard of.
0:08:48 20 million people.
0:08:55 And hired this guy, Waseo, to run pay-per-click ad campaigns for me on Google AdWords.
0:08:56 And it was fascinating.
0:09:02 Like, he’d work the night shift in Karachi and we’d be on Gmail chat all day and I’m
0:09:04 learning so much about his culture.
0:09:08 And he would joke like, “I know more about women’s shoes than anybody in Karachi.”
0:09:10 And it was just a fascinating experience.
0:09:15 But it was this kind of first taste of like, Nate, you said kind of this delegation and
0:09:17 like, “Oh, how empowering that can be.”
0:09:19 And John, you called it this liberating experience.
0:09:25 Like, I could go to the gym at 10 in the morning and work was still getting done.
0:09:27 And that was a big, light bulb moment for me.
0:09:30 Like, I didn’t have to be behind the keyboard at all the time.
0:09:32 For me, a couple of things triggered that.
0:09:35 And I had kind of the same fears of like, they’re going to steal my ideas, they’re not going
0:09:37 to do it as well as me.
0:09:38 Like, “Can I afford this?”
0:09:42 For me, it was, “When is the time to bring on help?”
0:09:46 It was this kind of question of, “Are you working on your business or are you working
0:09:47 in your business?”
0:09:50 And I was very much working in the business at that time.
0:09:55 On top of that, you kind of come to this realization, like, “I have a process for this.”
0:09:58 And even though it’s all in my head right now, like, I could teach somebody else how
0:09:59 to do this.
0:10:02 So if somebody else kind of looked over my shoulder, they could figure this out.
0:10:03 Like, it’s not rocket science.
0:10:08 But I’m curious, what was, you know, you’re working 20 hours a day.
0:10:10 So that was probably a red flag to bring on help.
0:10:14 But John, like, what kind of prompted you to say, like, “Okay, this is something that
0:10:15 I need to do?”
0:10:17 Here’s what really prompted me.
0:10:20 When I was in college, I had a conversation with my roommate.
0:10:23 And we were talking about what we wanted to do when we grew up, right?
0:10:25 And I said, “I wanted to run my own business.”
0:10:26 He laughed at me.
0:10:30 He was like, because he was an undergrad to go to medical school, which he’s a doctor
0:10:31 today.
0:10:37 And he was like, “Don’t you know that small business owners work like so much more than
0:10:38 everyone else?”
0:10:40 And I was like, “Well, I think I can do it differently.”
0:10:43 With all the optimism of a college student, of course.
0:10:45 Yeah, of course, right?
0:10:49 When I say something like that, I’m pretty sad I’m like figuring something out.
0:10:50 Because who wants to be a hypocrite?
0:10:55 Who wants to be that guy who, “Oh, yeah, you were going to be so awesome,” and whatever.
0:11:02 So what I tell most people today for when do you know is when’s the time to hire someone?
0:11:06 Because for me, at the time, it was like, “Dude, I don’t want to do this.
0:11:08 I don’t want to do this thing that I’m doing.
0:11:10 I hate this.”
0:11:11 So I had to try and find help.
0:11:17 What I’ll tell most people is if there is something that you’re doing that you could potentially
0:11:22 teach someone else, doesn’t matter how much work it takes you to teach someone else, it’s
0:11:24 time to hire someone else.
0:11:25 It’s time to hire someone else to do it.
0:11:30 Because if it takes you a month to teach them how to do it, after that, you’ll never have
0:11:31 to do that thing again.
0:11:34 If you’ve hired correctly, you’ll never have to do it again.
0:11:38 And that is the only way that I know of that you can buy time.
0:11:44 Yeah, it’s kind of this saw-sharpening moment where you have to take, again, you’re already
0:11:47 pressed for time, you’re already busy and say, “Well, now I’m going to take time away
0:11:52 from doing that thing to train somebody else to do it in the hopes of never having to do
0:11:53 it again.”
0:11:55 It’s going to take me this time up front.
0:11:57 It’s this investment in your future.
0:11:59 They’re the only way to buy time.
0:12:00 Anything to add on that?
0:12:02 For when is it time to hire?
0:12:03 There’s really two schools of thoughts.
0:12:07 The first one is exactly what John said, when it’s all these things that are just piling
0:12:11 up that are taking on your time, and the only way to get your time back is to pass those
0:12:13 tasks off to someone else.
0:12:17 How do you get five hours in your week back, 10 hours in your week back, whatever it is?
0:12:22 The flip side of it is I think the average entrepreneur is only good at one to three things.
0:12:26 Their core competency, maybe you’re good at sales or you’re good at content or whatever
0:12:27 it is.
0:12:31 As you get farther and farther away from your core competency, sure, you could take a six
0:12:36 month course to become a Facebook ad guru, but you can’t do that with every single part
0:12:37 of your business.
0:12:41 At some point, you have to hire people who are better at doing things than you are.
0:12:43 It could even be the small stuff.
0:12:45 Take the bookkeeping, for example.
0:12:49 I wasn’t necessarily great at just transferring information and making sure everything’s accurate
0:12:51 and double checking it.
0:12:53 That was very tedious for me.
0:12:55 That’s probably not my core strength.
0:12:59 I take someone else and I put them in it, and not only are they doing the job, but they’re
0:13:02 doing it better than I could have done it originally.
0:13:06 I think that was a big eye opener for me as well when I would give someone a task and
0:13:10 maybe not right away, but eventually they would do something even better than I could.
0:13:11 That’s very liberating.
0:13:13 It makes you want to delegate.
0:13:18 It almost makes you want to be a lazy entrepreneur, so to speak, really just toning in on what
0:13:22 are you the best at, what helps you scale your business, and finding ways to delegate
0:13:23 everything out.
0:13:30 What I’ve gone through in the past is a time tracking exercise or a time audit exercise
0:13:33 say, “Where is my time going today?”
0:13:37 What opportunities are there for delegation inside of that?
0:13:43 On the opposite side, what is not showing up in that time tracking exercise?
0:13:44 What should you be doing?
0:13:47 What would you be working on if you only have more hours?
0:13:53 What else to think about when you’re making that first move, so, John, you took the leap
0:13:55 and said, “Okay, I’m going to hire a full-time person.
0:13:56 As did I.”
0:14:00 It was like, “Okay, am I going to be able to keep this person busy?
0:14:03 Is this going to be, are they going to pay for themselves, and then some like, am I going
0:14:04 to see an ROI on this?”
0:14:08 Do you guys have any frameworks or recommendations for figuring out how many hours you might need
0:14:11 outside of perhaps that time tracking exercise?
0:14:15 Well, I spent five hours last week on this, so I can hire somebody five hours a week to
0:14:16 do it for me.
0:14:18 Yeah, I do.
0:14:21 It doesn’t matter, and I’ll tell you why.
0:14:26 My brother, one time, is running this business, and he’s overwhelmed, whatever, and he hires
0:14:27 this full-time person.
0:14:30 He says he didn’t have enough work to keep him busy full-time, then he comes back to
0:14:34 me three weeks later and was like, “Dude, I need to hire someone else.”
0:14:37 He was like, “Until you have someone else working for you, you don’t realize how much
0:14:41 there is to do or how much can get done.”
0:14:46 For me, there was a huge … I’ll just point out what you said that my first hire was full-time
0:14:48 and your first hire was full-time.
0:14:53 There is something different in hiring full-time, and this took me years to recognize.
0:14:58 Most entrepreneurs are working in their business, and you’re a grunt worker, which I was a grunt
0:14:59 worker at the time.
0:15:04 I was tweaking WordPress, and I was writing content, and I was doing Facebook, whatever.
0:15:08 It wasn’t until I hired someone else, and I hired them full-time, and that’s a big, big
0:15:09 deal.
0:15:14 I hired them an hourly, and you don’t care if they’re busy or not.
0:15:17 If you give them a task to do, they do the task, great.
0:15:21 If they’re done and you don’t have something else for them to do, you don’t care, which
0:15:25 allows you to continue doing whatever junk you’re doing.
0:15:31 If you hire someone full-time, if they’re not busy, that’s on you now.
0:15:35 That’s what fell on to me was like, “Oh, he finished this task.
0:15:36 Oh, I gave him this task.
0:15:37 I thought it would take him 30 hours.
0:15:39 It took him six.”
0:15:43 Now, I immediately faced with this thing of like, “Oh, crap.
0:15:50 I have to come up with something for him to do,” which right there is the shift between
0:15:52 working in your business and working on your business.
0:15:55 That’s the shift between being a grunt worker and being the CEO.
0:16:01 It forces you into taking a different role in your business so that now you have to work
0:16:03 on it rather than work in it.
0:16:07 For me, when you ask how do you figure out how much time to take, you don’t.
0:16:09 You hire someone full-time.
0:16:10 You can hire someone part-time.
0:16:12 That’s fine, but pay them a set salary.
0:16:18 What you’ll find is, you’re forced into becoming a better business owner.
0:16:20 Hourly doesn’t force you to do that.
0:16:23 More with John and Nate in just a moment, including how much you might expect to pay
0:16:28 for qualified help, and remember, these are $20, $19, so adjust those up a little bit,
0:16:35 and role-based outsourcing versus task-based outsourcing right after this.
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0:18:44 Yeah, that’s interesting.
0:18:50 That shift from grunt worker to CEO and having somebody on the clock for you to say, “Okay,
0:18:54 I need to come up with something productive for this person to do,” kind of flips a switch
0:18:55 in your head.
0:18:58 You can’t innate anything on that because it’s like when we’re getting to budget in
0:19:02 a moment, but it’s like, “Could I really keep somebody busy full-time?”
0:19:05 It’s just a side hustle for me, even if I’m just working a few hours a week.
0:19:08 Would it justify bringing somebody else on for 40?
0:19:09 I can’t disagree with any of that.
0:19:12 I’ve hired plenty of people full-time, and it’s that same mentality.
0:19:14 I tend to do hourly.
0:19:19 This is my personal preference, and we have plenty of clients who do fixed price or salary
0:19:20 or whatever, too.
0:19:22 For me, I kind of like to experiment, too.
0:19:27 I just hired someone for lead generation, and I’m hiring them for 20 hours a week, but
0:19:28 I set that expectation up front.
0:19:31 Your mind for 20 hours a week, and same thing.
0:19:35 If they only have five hours of work to do, it’s on me to make sure that they get those
0:19:36 extra hours.
0:19:41 I would say most of my VA’s are full-time, although we do have certain things that are
0:19:42 part-time.
0:19:46 I’ve had people that have started part-time, and I’ve eventually increased them to full-time
0:19:47 as well.
0:19:50 Same type of mentality, slightly different approach.
0:19:54 I do agree that if you get someone where you’re like, “All right, I’m just going to use you
0:19:58 five hours a week,” it can just put you into something where you’re just constantly trying
0:19:59 to find work for them.
0:20:02 You’re not really taking everything off your plate.
0:20:07 I’ve seen people that have gone that part-time VA route, but they’re still doing every other
0:20:11 day-to-day operation in their business when so much more can be outsourced.
0:20:16 Then it also just becomes a budgeting thing, figuring out how much money did I actually
0:20:17 make last month?
0:20:20 What am I actually willing to invest into my business?
0:20:24 Maybe you want to be super aggressive, and it’s 40% to 60% of your profits are going
0:20:26 towards expansion and hiring.
0:20:28 Maybe it’s more conservative, and it’s 10% to 30%.
0:20:33 You can pick a number and go up and down 10% or 5% each month depending on what you want
0:20:38 to do and how your business is doing, but that’s the approach that I’ve taken.
0:20:39 Okay, that’s interesting.
0:20:41 I’ve never really thought about it that way.
0:20:48 I’m going to proactively invest 25% of the profits back into growth, back into the business.
0:20:51 I was like, “Hey, I made $10,000 last month.
0:20:52 Great.”
0:20:54 You don’t really think about it, or at least I haven’t really thought about it in that
0:20:58 way, so that is an interesting way to frame it.
0:21:01 Let’s talk about that budget for a moment.
0:21:07 Obviously, there’s some geo-arbitrage advantages of hiring in the Philippines.
0:21:10 That’s the specialty of onlinejobs.ph.
0:21:14 What kind of budget were you looking at, John, for that first full-time hire?
0:21:17 When I first hired, there was no place like onlinejobs.ph.
0:21:20 There was no marketplace you could go to to find people.
0:21:26 I went through an agency and I paid them $750 a month, and they paid the worker $250 a month.
0:21:27 It was great.
0:21:29 $250 was for a full-time salary.
0:21:30 Full-time salary, yeah.
0:21:35 That’s 15 years ago, so that’s not enough today.
0:21:39 I will say that I just hired someone to do some admin stuff for us, and I was ready to
0:21:46 pay her $500 a month, and she said, “I want to make $350 a month,” which I think is too
0:21:50 low, so we paid her $400 a month for full-time work.
0:21:51 Is that a decent living?
0:21:54 That seems absurdly low by Western standards.
0:21:57 It is absurdly low by Western standards.
0:22:00 I have 25 people now that work for me.
0:22:01 She’s definitely the lowest paid person.
0:22:07 The rest of them make between $450 and $1,500 a month.
0:22:13 Usually in the Philippines, people live with their parents, or they live with their spouse
0:22:15 and their both spouses work.
0:22:19 One of the great things about what both Nate and I do is we let people can raise their
0:22:24 own kids rather than having their parents raise their kids or a nanny raise their kids.
0:22:26 The wage isn’t the whole thing here.
0:22:31 It’s also a lifestyle thing for them where they get to see their family, where otherwise
0:22:36 they’re not, because the standard work week in the Philippines is six, 10-hour days.
0:22:41 I think that’s changing some, but still six, 10-hour days.
0:22:46 Usually people are working five, eight-hour days for us, and they’re often working from
0:22:47 home.
0:22:48 Yeah.
0:22:49 They’re able to do it from home.
0:22:54 They don’t necessarily have to pull a night shift at some BPO call center type of place.
0:22:55 Right.
0:22:57 So the $400 a month is a low end.
0:22:58 It’s low.
0:23:02 So usually that person is going to be living with someone else who’s also working.
0:23:03 Okay.
0:23:07 But in the $502,000 range, not unreasonable today.
0:23:08 Right.
0:23:09 Yeah, for sure.
0:23:11 It’s just about anything in that range.
0:23:17 Nate, are you saying the same thing or free up focuses on these more hourly workers rather
0:23:18 than full-time hires though, right?
0:23:19 No.
0:23:24 I mean, you can do fixed prices on our platform too, and they set their own rates.
0:23:29 My team VAs, I’ve got about 40 of them are in that $5 to $7 an hour for the most part,
0:23:33 but then I’ve got people that are team leaders that have been with me longer that make $15
0:23:37 plus an hour, and we do that intentionally, but we have people on our platform that’ll
0:23:41 hire a VA for the $500 a month or 800, whatever it is.
0:23:44 Our biggest thing is we just don’t want turnover.
0:23:48 And that’s not to say that people are definitely going to quit if you don’t pay them enough.
0:23:52 But for us, if a client comes to us and we introduce them to a freelancer, we want the
0:23:56 freelancer to only take a rate that they’re going to be happy with long term.
0:24:01 And we’ve just found that, yeah, if someone accepts the 400, whatever it is, if they’re
0:24:06 not 100% happy with it, it’s not that hard to beat or match it or have another client
0:24:07 come in and swoop them.
0:24:10 And the last thing we want to do is have that happen to our client base.
0:24:13 So we like to say that we’re fiving up.
0:24:18 But if the freelancer is good going below, whether it’s $4 or $3 or is good with a fixed
0:24:22 monthly rate, they’re more than happy to, they’re more than welcome to take that rate
0:24:26 as long as they’re good with the full time and that rate is not going to be an issue
0:24:27 going forward.
0:24:33 To bring up that point to illustrate, this doesn’t have to be a budget breaking move
0:24:34 in your business.
0:24:39 You can get somebody competent and qualified really affordably.
0:24:44 And that was one thing that was really eye opening to me 10 or 12 years ago as we were
0:24:46 just kind of getting started down this path.
0:24:53 And I should add too, there’s a thriving industry of work from home professional assistants
0:24:58 and contractors and freelancers in the United States, in Europe, like with salaries, $35,
0:24:59 $50 an hour up.
0:25:03 So that’s if your budget allows and you need somebody closer to home, you can absolutely
0:25:06 go down that path too.
0:25:11 One thing, and this is from Chris Ducker, his advice was to hire for the role and not
0:25:15 necessarily the task, whereas a lot of my hires have been for the task.
0:25:21 I need you to run this AdWords campaign, I need you to run this live chat customer support.
0:25:25 What do you guys think about that quote or that bit of advice to say, okay, you’re going
0:25:30 to be the customer support manager and in that role, one of your tasks is going to be
0:25:32 to manage this customer support.
0:25:38 But you have free reign over that kind of division or content area of the business.
0:25:40 Yeah, so I mostly agree with it.
0:25:44 I mean, with my customer service reps, it’s the same thing, we’re hiring with them for
0:25:45 the role.
0:25:46 They’re responsible for a lot of different things.
0:25:50 It’s not like you can only do email support and only understand email support.
0:25:54 If you don’t understand what’s going on in our software or certain questions or able
0:25:57 to do live support, you’re not going to succeed in that role.
0:26:01 Now, we also have other more standard, just do this task positions.
0:26:05 We have a lead generation process that we use for partnerships and to get on podcasts.
0:26:08 I’ve been doing the same thing for five plus years.
0:26:09 We have this process down.
0:26:14 We hire someone and the only thing they do is that task and it’s much less of a role.
0:26:15 It doesn’t really build into someone.
0:26:19 We actually have had someone who’s knocked that role out of the park and we’ve moved
0:26:22 them over to a different role and they’ve really taken that over, but for the most part,
0:26:24 that role is you do it.
0:26:29 I would say 75% of the stuff that I personally hire for is more of that.
0:26:33 This is your role, grow into the role, become a rock star of that role, but there’s other
0:26:38 situations that might not be necessary, especially as a young startup or maybe a startup that
0:26:43 just has their systems really down pat where it’s almost that McDonald’s style.
0:26:47 You’re standing here, you’re doing this and that’s what you’re responsible for and someone
0:26:52 else is responsible for step B and someone else is responsible for step C.
0:26:56 I have two situations, one of them is correct and one of them is not.
0:27:04 The situation where you hire for the role or you hire for the task is technical positions.
0:27:10 Anything webmaster, programmer, designer, something that requires some technical knowledge,
0:27:13 hire them for their skills in that thing.
0:27:19 Almost everything else though, even like a high end content writer would fall into that
0:27:21 technical thing.
0:27:27 Almost everything else, I say hire for their English because if someone speaks good English,
0:27:31 that means usually it means they think well.
0:27:35 That means they’ll learn well, you can teach them things well, they can do other things
0:27:37 well and English is one of the things.
0:27:44 The second thing that I say hire for is hire for their dedication to details, their attention
0:27:51 to details and then second, their reliability, like do they show up every single day?
0:27:54 So if they’re paying attention to details and they’re reliable, you can teach this person
0:27:57 anything you want and their English is less important.
0:28:03 Those are my criteria for role-based versus whatever because I’ve found that usually if
0:28:07 I find someone and they’re good, it doesn’t matter what they know individually, they’re
0:28:10 going to work on different things just like Nate said, you’re going to transition them
0:28:16 into something else because businesses change and I want someone who’s smart and who pays
0:28:20 attention to the details and who shows up every day and I can teach you this task and
0:28:23 then we can learn another task when business changes.
0:28:24 Okay.
0:28:29 Well, let’s dive into that because I think this is an important next step.
0:28:35 Now that I’ve itemized out what I could probably use some help with and I’ve gotten some ideas
0:28:42 on what that might take, how do you test for reliability before you hire somebody and see
0:28:47 if they actually show up every day or how do you test for attention to detail before,
0:28:51 yeah, I guess you could look at their resume for typos and stuff like that, but what goes
0:28:57 into your job descriptions for a new hire or like how are you doing that screening or
0:28:59 hiring process, John?
0:29:03 So for me, it’s not a matter of job description, it’s a matter of what do I do after I communicate
0:29:04 with them.
0:29:08 I’ll just tell you my process and lots of people have different processes and there’s
0:29:11 not a right way, but this is my way.
0:29:16 So once I’ve communicated with someone, I start interviewing them, I will ask them
0:29:25 one, two, four questions across five, eight, 15 emails during the recruiting process.
0:29:28 In there, I get to see all kinds of stuff.
0:29:35 So I would say my recruiting success is probably 80% where like 80% of the time I’m finding
0:29:38 someone, I’m picking a good person.
0:29:43 So when I’m doing this, I’ll ask them four questions, here’s an example, if you answer
0:29:48 three of those questions, what are the chances you only do three of the four tasks I ask
0:29:50 you to do later, right?
0:29:52 So there’s a good attention to detail thing.
0:29:56 If I email you and it takes you three days to respond during the recruiting process,
0:29:58 what are the chances it’s going to take you three days to respond after I’ve hired you?
0:30:06 I recently had one of my people refer me to his brother who I know is super, super talented
0:30:09 and I started interviewing him and it took him three weeks to respond to me and I was
0:30:11 like, sorry, dude, I’m done.
0:30:16 No, because if you do that during recruiting, chances are really, really high after I hire
0:30:18 you, you’re going to keep doing that.
0:30:23 So I’m seeing reliability, I’m seeing your communication, I get to see your handling
0:30:24 of English.
0:30:27 How do you handle English or English slang or, you know, it’s reasonable to fake your
0:30:30 profile, like have your friend help you write your profile.
0:30:34 It’s not reasonable to do that twice a day for five days in emails.
0:30:37 What type of questions are you asking in these emails?
0:30:41 I will ask everything, like where do you live?
0:30:42 Who do you live with?
0:30:43 How many kids do you have?
0:30:44 Are you married?
0:30:46 How much do you want to make?
0:30:47 What’s your past experience?
0:30:51 Tell me a situation where you’ve had something hard and how did you solve it?
0:30:53 Why are you the right person for this job?
0:30:55 Show me examples of your work.
0:30:58 Write a paragraph telling me that why you’re different than other people.
0:31:00 I don’t want to hear it because I’m dedicated and I work hard.
0:31:01 I don’t want to hear that.
0:31:03 Give me something unique.
0:31:04 All kinds of random crap.
0:31:08 Attach a picture of a pink Cadillac to the next email just to see if they’re paying attention.
0:31:13 So in that scenario, and I know a lot of employers do this, there’s three potential responses.
0:31:18 One is they ignore it, which is why I ask it because they’re ignoring a task that I
0:31:20 asked them to do that didn’t make sense to them.
0:31:21 And that’s crappy.
0:31:24 Two is they attach a picture of a pink Cadillac, great.
0:31:28 Three is they question you and are like, you asked for this, why?
0:31:31 That’s a silly thing.
0:31:32 Why are you asking for this?
0:31:33 That’s awesome.
0:31:35 When I see that, I’m like, okay, sweet.
0:31:38 You’re willing to question me, question my authority.
0:31:40 This is going really well.
0:31:45 And so through this process, you’re kind of narrowing down the candidates based on who’s
0:31:50 answering these questions well, who’s asking questions back to you and seeing who kind of
0:31:51 stands out.
0:31:55 And this is all before jumping on like a Skype call or a video chat.
0:31:57 No, it’s not.
0:31:58 I don’t do it.
0:32:02 So this is Philippine specific, the reason I don’t do it.
0:32:07 What I have found is that Filipinos are scared.
0:32:10 They’re shy and that’s what they call it.
0:32:12 They call themselves shy.
0:32:17 And really what it is in my experience is they are worried about disappointing you.
0:32:20 Like they’re a very pleasing culture.
0:32:23 And so if they’re going to disappoint you or make or they’re going to feel embarrassed,
0:32:26 they’d rather not do the thing at all.
0:32:30 And so getting on a call with you is one of those things where they know that they’re
0:32:35 going to understand you because they watch American TV and they’re fine understanding
0:32:36 English.
0:32:39 It’s they’re worried that you’re not going to understand them.
0:32:45 So I’ve had like two different situations of this where two of my employees, they were
0:32:49 already working for me, they were both super hesitant to get on a call with me.
0:32:51 One of them, I could barely understand him.
0:32:56 And we had never had a communication issue, but when we got on the phone, it was impossible.
0:32:57 He was a programmer.
0:32:58 The best programmer I’ve ever met.
0:32:59 So it didn’t really matter, right?
0:33:04 The other one, her English was perfect, completely flawless.
0:33:06 And she didn’t want to get on a call with me because she was so worried.
0:33:10 So my point with the nut, I don’t do Skype calls because what you’ll find is, and maybe
0:33:15 Nate has a different process, but you’ll have 10 recruits, you’ll ask them to do a Skype
0:33:16 call.
0:33:17 Six of them will schedule it with you.
0:33:23 Two of them will show up where of those 10, you potentially had 10 good recruits and this
0:33:26 isn’t for a voice position.
0:33:30 So how they speaking, which doesn’t really matter, and you just lost eight of them who
0:33:31 potentially could have been really great.
0:33:35 And now you’re down to a pool of two because you require a Skype interview.
0:33:41 John, I’m really happy you said that because I think a lot of people have told me I’m crazy
0:33:45 because I won’t do any kind of voice calls, any kind of phone call, Skype calls, Viber
0:33:49 calls, whatever, with any of my international staff really ever.
0:33:53 I keep everything on Skype message for a lot of different reasons.
0:33:57 But I mean, one of what you just said, most people just don’t want to do it.
0:34:00 And if it’s not a voice position, it doesn’t really matter.
0:34:05 Not only do I care about the speed of responses to emails, I care about speed to responses
0:34:07 to Skype messages.
0:34:10 And that doesn’t mean that they need to be available 24/7, but if I’m doing an interview
0:34:14 with them and we’re both there, we both show up and I’m shooting them messages and it’s
0:34:18 taking five minutes for a message to come in here and an extra minute and a half here
0:34:24 instead of quick responses along with the high level English skills that we both value,
0:34:26 that’s a huge red flag for me as well.
0:34:30 It’s really surprising to hear that, okay, we’ll just hire somebody over this written
0:34:32 communication, but sounds like you’ve got it.
0:34:33 Yeah.
0:34:37 I mean, most of our communication, our meetings and everything is all written via Skype.
0:34:42 It also just gives them a good way to go back and read things, everything’s in writing.
0:34:45 If you need to go back and say, hey, this is what we talked about, I don’t know if you
0:34:49 ever tried to get like six Filipinos on a Zoom call or something.
0:34:53 Someone always has an internet issue, things drop out, things get misheard, it never goes
0:34:55 as planned.
0:35:00 So this is interesting and this is not applied to your first hire, but once you have a team,
0:35:01 they’ll start doing things.
0:35:05 So my team insisted or came to me and asked me, can we set up a Slack chat so we can chat
0:35:06 with each other?
0:35:08 Like, sure, great.
0:35:10 I don’t really participate in it.
0:35:12 All of my communication is asynchronous.
0:35:14 I do it through email or I do it, I mean, we use Basecamp.
0:35:17 So almost all of it’s through Basecamp for project management.
0:35:21 So all of the communication is, I write a message, they write back when they’re available.
0:35:23 And sometimes we’re on at the same time and I’ll find that we’re doing it really quickly
0:35:25 together.
0:35:30 But for most of what we do, and every business is different where I don’t require instant
0:35:31 communication.
0:35:34 Other businesses will and yeah, Skype chat’s great.
0:35:35 We don’t do it.
0:35:37 And so like the phone call is completely unnecessary.
0:35:43 More with Nate and John in just a moment, including common hiring mistakes and when to let a low
0:35:45 performer go right after this.
0:35:49 What mistakes do you see people making on your platforms for hiring?
0:35:51 Maybe Nate, you can go first.
0:35:56 Yeah, I think the biggest thing is just setting the expectations right from the beginning.
0:36:00 I mean, it starts off with just what the communication channel is.
0:36:04 Someone might have five different clients and they each have one person like Slack or
0:36:08 Basecamp, another person like Skype, the other person only likes email.
0:36:12 And if you don’t take the time to set that expectation up front, a lot of times you’ll
0:36:13 run into issues.
0:36:17 I had a client this week where the freelancer came to me and they were like, “I don’t know
0:36:18 what to do with this client.
0:36:20 I’ve been messaging them over and over and over.”
0:36:24 And it turns out the client was waiting for a Slack message and the freelancer had no idea
0:36:28 that that’s how they were supposed to communicate even though he got a Slack invite like three
0:36:29 weeks ago.
0:36:32 So I mean, setting those expectations is definitely key.
0:36:36 What I like to do when I hire people is almost scare them a little bit.
0:36:40 Scare is probably not the right word, but I like to set the expectations very high.
0:36:41 This is how we communicate.
0:36:42 This is who you go to for this.
0:36:44 This is what constitutes success, failure.
0:36:48 I’ll tell them anything that I didn’t like from, let’s say that I got rid of a customer
0:36:49 service rep.
0:36:53 I’ll explain why, why it didn’t work out, what they were doing so that they have all
0:36:56 the information that they need to succeed.
0:36:59 And I would much rather have someone back out right at the beginning because they say,
0:37:00 “You know what?
0:37:04 I can’t meet those expectations,” then for me or my team to invest two or three weeks
0:37:08 into someone only to realize that they’re not the right fit.
0:37:10 Also into that is just personal preferences.
0:37:16 Any pet peeves that you have, I know for me and my team, one of my pet peeves is if someone
0:37:20 messages me, “Hey, Nate,” unless it’s like a friendly thing, but if it’s a business
0:37:24 thing, and then they wait for me to respond before they tell me what the issue is or why
0:37:28 they contacted me to begin with because there’s just a lot of people and that would take forever
0:37:32 for me to go back and forth in order for me to get the information that I need up front.
0:37:36 So one of the things I preach is get me all the information up front so that I can help
0:37:39 make a decision or help teach you whatever it is.
0:37:43 So really setting those expectations right from the beginning, that’s where I think a
0:37:47 lot of people go wrong in the hiring process where they just get further and further down
0:37:49 the line without being on the same page to begin with.
0:37:56 John, what about you as far as mistakes or unhappy customers of online jobs?
0:38:01 Yeah, so I see two things, and both of these have to do with exactly what Nate said, expectations.
0:38:05 So number one is trying to hire someone who can do everything.
0:38:09 I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten an email that said, “I need someone who can
0:38:16 build my website and make it look really awesome and put up a Facebook fan page for me and
0:38:21 change the graphic and then write 15 articles that are really professionally done and do
0:38:24 my AdWords marketing and create this custom programming thing.”
0:38:25 Like, “Dude, this person doesn’t exist.
0:38:26 I’m sorry.
0:38:27 This is silly.”
0:38:33 That’s one thing, like hiring people with expectations of like, “This is a magical person.
0:38:34 There’s no such thing.”
0:38:40 The second big mistake that I see is expecting perfection right from the start, like, “Hey,
0:38:45 I hired this person and you didn’t do this thing exactly how I told you to do it the
0:38:49 first time, and so you’re fired.”
0:38:53 So what I’ve seen over the years often is like, “I provided them perfect instructions.
0:38:54 Look.”
0:38:58 And when I look at the instructions, I’m like, “Dude, I don’t even know what you want.
0:39:03 So your instructions suck, but you think that your instructions are perfect and you expected
0:39:08 them to do it perfectly and you had zero tolerance for this and you fired them?”
0:39:11 That’s usually the mistake like, “This isn’t a magic bullet.
0:39:13 It doesn’t solve things overnight.
0:39:14 You have to work at it.
0:39:17 You have to create a relationship with the people you’re hiring.
0:39:18 It takes time.”
0:39:23 John, one of my personal favorites is when someone messes with VA and their only instructions
0:39:26 are “Find me profitable products on Amazon.”
0:39:27 That’s it.
0:39:28 Nothing else.
0:39:31 And then they’ll hire the VA for five hours and then they’ll dispute it and they’ll say,
0:39:34 “Oh, this person didn’t find me any profitable products and I have a whole canned response
0:39:35 for it and that.”
0:39:36 But you’re absolutely right.
0:39:41 I mean, you’re only as good as your directions and your instructions and that perfect person
0:39:42 that does everything.
0:39:43 You don’t even want to hire that person.
0:39:47 Let’s say, best case scenario, you hire a perfect person that can do all these different
0:39:51 tasks for your business and that person gets sick and that person quits on you.
0:39:54 You’re never finding a second one that’s going to be exactly the same.
0:39:58 So I think a lot of business owners need to get out of that mentality as well.
0:40:01 Yeah, or like, “Build me a website.”
0:40:02 Like what?
0:40:03 No.
0:40:04 That’s not…
0:40:05 No.
0:40:09 There’s so much thinking that goes on and that’s probably the other side of it is, and
0:40:10 this goes way back to the very beginning.
0:40:12 When is it time to hire someone?
0:40:16 Don’t hire someone expecting them to take over and run your business or to build your business
0:40:17 for you.
0:40:20 You should know what you’re doing in your business before you hire someone.
0:40:23 Like, you should have a reason you’re hiring this person and know what they’re going to
0:40:24 do.
0:40:26 And it’s the same thing for like, “Build me a website.”
0:40:30 You should know what is going into this website or at least you should be willing to think
0:40:33 through it and work with them through the issues.
0:40:35 Like, “Hey, I like this from this website.
0:40:36 Here’s why I want it on my website.
0:40:37 Put it here.”
0:40:42 Stuff like that because the “Build me a website” doesn’t work.
0:40:47 Well, on the flip side of that, when is it time to say like, “This is just not working
0:40:48 out.
0:40:49 Like, this person is not communicating well.
0:40:51 They’re not meeting expectations.”
0:40:55 Like, we’ve been through this training three or four times and it’s just like, they’re
0:40:56 not getting it.
0:41:00 Like, we never had to let somebody go who just wasn’t performing.
0:41:01 I mean, I definitely have.
0:41:03 I don’t think anyone has a 100% hiring record.
0:41:05 It doesn’t exist.
0:41:09 For me, it’s all about how much investment did I make into this person?
0:41:14 If I’m on week one and they’re not showing up on time and they’re not grasping it, I’m
0:41:15 probably pretty quick to partize.
0:41:20 Now, I’ve also had a situation where I had a bookkeeper for two years and he was an
0:41:25 absolute rock star and all of a sudden he started making mistakes and not following directions
0:41:28 and I sat down and I met with him and I tried to get to the bottom of what was going on
0:41:32 and I’m really happy I didn’t fire him because it turns out that he was just burnt out from
0:41:36 busy season and he needed a week and a half off and he came back and he’s been crushing
0:41:37 it ever since.
0:41:40 So, for me, I kind of look at how much time I’ve invested.
0:41:43 I also try to focus on what I can control.
0:41:48 If I hire three VAs and all three of them can’t follow my SOPs and are all struggling,
0:41:53 I probably need to take a look at my SOPs and how I’m communicating it and how I’m teaching
0:41:54 it.
0:41:55 So, there’s different factors there.
0:41:59 I think we’ve all heard the fire fast, higher, slow.
0:42:00 It’s kind of the same thing.
0:42:04 It all depends on how much time and money you’ve invested into someone but you also don’t want
0:42:08 to get caught up, “Hey, I’ve invested a month into someone so I’m not going to part ways
0:42:11 and then you end up two months in and they’re still not doing what you want.”
0:42:14 So, it’s kind of a fine line and a balancing act.
0:42:17 And it’s hard.
0:42:18 Firing sucks no matter where you are.
0:42:25 So, for me, when something’s not going right, especially in the Philippines, the first question
0:42:29 is, “What are you stuck on to that person?”
0:42:32 Because I’ve had the exact same experience that Nate has had.
0:42:38 I have this amazing programmer and he’s been so dang good for so long and then he stopped
0:42:40 working for like a month.
0:42:43 And I’m the type where I just want people to work and I don’t want to think about it
0:42:46 and it takes me a while to realize something’s not going on.
0:42:50 So, I approached him and said, “What’s going on with you?”
0:42:51 I was like, “Dude, what?
0:42:54 If he’s not working, I’m going to let him go.”
0:42:56 But I said, “What’s going on with you?”
0:42:59 And it turns out he was like, “I’m so sorry, sir.
0:43:03 I have this major eye problem where if I look at the computer for more than an hour straight,
0:43:04 I can’t see.
0:43:05 I go blind.”
0:43:06 Like, “Oh, crap.
0:43:07 That sucks.”
0:43:08 Yeah.
0:43:10 Like, “Hey, how can I help you work through this?”
0:43:13 He was like, “Well, I need this medicine and it’s hard to get and it’s really expensive.
0:43:17 Like sweet, let me help you buy this medicine so you get back to work.”
0:43:19 And he’s back to work.
0:43:20 And awesome.
0:43:24 But there is a thing of patience there of like trying to work through issues where a lot
0:43:26 of people just aren’t willing to do it.
0:43:30 If you’re not willing to do it, if you’re not willing to work through issues, then this
0:43:31 is hard for you.
0:43:39 Now, that seems exceptionally common where, “Oh, my wife’s brother is in the hospital
0:43:44 or there was a typhoon, which I guess you could verify,” or the internet was out, or
0:43:50 you just kind of get ghosted in certain situations and you’re like, “What, was it something that
0:43:51 I did?
0:43:52 Like, is this legit?”
0:43:55 And you’re halfway around the world and you’re trying to figure out, “Okay, is this person
0:43:58 just trying to get more money out of me?
0:44:00 Why did they all of a sudden stop working?
0:44:02 It can be kind of a frustrating situation.
0:44:08 Have you ever had that happen where it’s like, “Hey, I do not have been proactive about
0:44:09 asking him.
0:44:10 Like, “Hey, what’s going on with you?
0:44:12 You might never have found out.”
0:44:17 Or do you get these kind of sob stories and I don’t know, it’s hard to know what’s the
0:44:18 truth.
0:44:19 Yes, we all get them.
0:44:20 Nate, how do you deal with it?
0:44:21 Yeah.
0:44:22 We definitely all get them.
0:44:27 I mean, part of what we do that I think is that we do well is we almost set the expectation.
0:44:31 If you’re going to get on the free up platform, not working for me, just offering your services
0:44:34 in general, never mind on my internal team.
0:44:35 The communication is everything.
0:44:39 If you’re not communicating with clients, if the clients have to chase you, if my team
0:44:44 has to stop what they’re doing to reach out to you and reach out to your emergency contact,
0:44:46 you’re going to get blocked from getting more clients from us.
0:44:49 And we’ll make it right with the client, but that’s it.
0:44:50 So we all go through personal issues.
0:44:55 I know people in the Philippines sometimes get a bad rap for different things, whether
0:44:59 it’s they have an extended family or they’ve got power outages or stuff like that.
0:45:04 But we really set the expectation that, listen, if you’re supposed to work and you lose power,
0:45:08 the expectation is you communicate it up front to the client and you go somewhere where there’s
0:45:09 internet.
0:45:11 And if you can’t, you let us know.
0:45:16 And having strong internet, strong power is a bare minimum requirement to offer your
0:45:18 services on the free up platform.
0:45:20 So we kind of set those expectations.
0:45:24 I mean, if someone from my team just disappears for a week, most likely they’re not going
0:45:26 to continue working with me.
0:45:30 I mean, we just can’t have people that are just going to completely drop off the face
0:45:32 of the earth with absolutely no communication.
0:45:35 At the end of the day, what are you going to do?
0:45:37 I mean, we have people’s emergency contact information.
0:45:41 We’ve got, if someone referred to the platform, we can contact their referral.
0:45:44 But if someone disappears, I’m not going to go to the Philippines and chase them down
0:45:49 or I have this piece of paper, a legal agreement, like none of that’s going to happen.
0:45:50 There’s only so much you can do.
0:45:53 And we consider ourselves as pretty reasonable people.
0:45:57 If you have a personal issue, if something’s going on, let us know.
0:46:01 We’re going to problem solve and see if there’s a way to work around it.
0:46:04 But if you’re not going to communicate it upfront, then there’s not much we can do to
0:46:05 help you.
0:46:09 Do you put a contract in place to say, like, okay, here’s the expected hours, here’s your
0:46:14 payment terms, here’s what I do, spell that out upfront?
0:46:18 So with the terms of use of being on our platform, which is different, if you’re talking about
0:46:23 my internal team that, no, I mean, we’ve got our, so what I do is I lay out the expectations.
0:46:28 It’s not a contract, but I have it all in writing and I’ll have them write, I confirm
0:46:31 or I agree to everything as we go down.
0:46:35 So if there’s ever a question of, did we agree to this or you’re supposed to do this,
0:46:39 we have this conversation that we can go back to and it’s like, hey, you, you agreed to
0:46:40 this.
0:46:43 I mean, again, what am I going to do with a legal agreement with someone in the Philippines?
0:46:46 Or I’m never going to enforce that at the end of the day, but John might have a different
0:46:47 idea.
0:46:48 Yes.
0:46:53 I love it because I get this question all the time too, like, where’s the contract?
0:46:55 Like, no, you’re not going to enforce a contract.
0:46:56 No.
0:46:57 Yeah.
0:47:02 So off of that, I had a funny situation where I had this client who, she wasn’t happy with
0:47:03 this bookkeeping work.
0:47:06 And I knew this bookkeeper, this bookkeeper has been awesome.
0:47:10 He’s been on the platform for a while, tons of really happy clients.
0:47:14 And we paid out the bookkeeper and the client came back and she wasn’t happy with the work.
0:47:17 It was like $400 or something like that.
0:47:18 So I refunded the client.
0:47:19 No big deal.
0:47:20 The freelancer was happy.
0:47:21 He had other clients.
0:47:22 I checked in with them.
0:47:23 They were all happy.
0:47:26 But the client came back to me and he was like, I don’t want you to pay for this.
0:47:32 I want you to get the money from the freelancer and, and pay me from the freelancer.
0:47:34 And he was like, don’t you have these legal agreements?
0:47:35 Can’t you enforce this?
0:47:40 And I tried to tell her in the nicest way possible that I wasn’t going to force this
0:47:45 guy to send me $400 that I wasn’t going to hire a Filipino lawyer to go after him.
0:47:48 Like, none of that was, was realistic in any way.
0:47:51 And John, I’m sure you get very similar stories.
0:47:52 Yeah.
0:47:55 And usually we’re like you.
0:47:59 I mean, we’re trying to be nice about it, but in the end we just say, go away.
0:48:02 No, this is up to you to work this out.
0:48:03 Fair enough.
0:48:04 Fair enough.
0:48:09 Anything else to, to add on this dipping your toe into the outsourcing waters before
0:48:10 we wrap up?
0:48:14 I’m a big fan of experimenting like right now, I’m building kind of a biz dev team to handle
0:48:17 partnerships and I don’t have an exact SOP.
0:48:20 I probably wouldn’t have done this back in the day when I was hiring people for the first
0:48:21 time.
0:48:23 But I’m looking, I know the type of person that I want.
0:48:27 And once I hire them, I’m going to give it a few months and I’m going to experiment and
0:48:31 try different things and find someone that I actually work with and collaborate with.
0:48:33 And that’s kind of a more of an advanced thing.
0:48:37 I definitely wouldn’t recommend it, but don’t get in the mentality that you can only hire
0:48:40 someone if you have a ABCDE process.
0:48:45 Yeah, it’s strongly recommended, but there’s a time and place in your business to experiment
0:48:46 with different things.
0:48:49 And I’m a big fan of low risk, high reward situations.
0:48:53 If I hire someone to run my Instagram for three months, what’s the worst case scenario?
0:48:58 I lose a few hundred dollars and what’s the best case scenario is it starts up a brand
0:49:02 new revenue source and I build a presence there and don’t be afraid to experiment and
0:49:06 try new things as long as you’re in the mentality that some things work and some things don’t.
0:49:09 Nate and I are so similar.
0:49:13 My thing with this is, look, you don’t know if this works for you until you try it.
0:49:14 You’ve got to give it a try.
0:49:15 And it takes a leap.
0:49:19 If you’re working 50 hours a week, plan on working 55 hours a week for a couple of weeks.
0:49:21 It’s just part of it.
0:49:25 But then, if it works for you, the reward is time.
0:49:29 If it doesn’t work for you, you’re out a couple hundred bucks, right?
0:49:30 It’s not that big of a deal.
0:49:33 But to know if it’s going to work for you, you’ve got to try it.
0:49:34 You have to do something.
0:49:35 You have to take a leap.
0:49:40 Yeah, I think the bigger risk, aside from the time and the money, in my case, it was
0:49:42 opening the doors to the kingdom.
0:49:45 It was like, okay, here’s the AdWords account.
0:49:49 I mean, you could do some serious damage in there if you don’t follow directions or you,
0:49:54 I don’t know, change the password or lock out the credit card information or something.
0:49:58 And or it’s like, okay, I’m going to bring somebody in to manage my inbox.
0:50:01 It’s like, there’s some potentially sensitive information.
0:50:05 So there’s like, there’s the time and money risk, but there’s like the business and security
0:50:11 and like personal trust risk that can be hard to get over as well.
0:50:16 So kind of like that, framing it as like an experiment, like low risk, high reward hires.
0:50:20 And we should point out that like, people aren’t out to screw you over.
0:50:23 Vast majority of people, like they’re looking for honest work and they want to do a good
0:50:28 job and they want to have something that can support them and their family for a long term.
0:50:34 What is this leap to get over to like, especially if it’s your first time delegating to say,
0:50:38 okay, now somebody else is going to take over this for me.
0:50:48 FreeUp.com, F-R-E-E-E Up.com, freelance hiring marketplace and online jobs.ph for hires in
0:50:49 the Philippines.
0:50:51 And we should add too, like, you know, not just Philippines, but you can hire people
0:50:53 from all over on FreeUp.
0:50:56 Let’s wrap this thing up with you guys.
0:51:00 Number one tip for side hustle nation doesn’t have to be outsourcing related or virtual
0:51:04 assistant related, just whatever entrepreneurial wisdom you’d like to impart and we’ll let
0:51:05 you all kick this one off.
0:51:10 So what I found over the years is the thing that separates successful entrepreneurs from
0:51:12 those that are not is the willingness to think.
0:51:17 The willingness to think through hard things because business is hard.
0:51:20 It’s not just tell me what to do and I’ll do it.
0:51:21 That’s not how you run a business.
0:51:25 You have to be willing to think through problems and create solutions and that’s where the
0:51:26 hard work is.
0:51:29 The hard work isn’t in, “Oh, I work 80 hours a week.”
0:51:33 The hard work is in being willing to think effectively and create solutions.
0:51:34 Yeah.
0:51:35 Completely agree with that.
0:51:38 The thing I would add kind of a separate tip is just being able to prioritize.
0:51:41 It’s such an underrated skill as an entrepreneur.
0:51:43 You’ve got a million things you can do, all these different things you can tackle.
0:51:46 You can go after every social media channel.
0:51:49 You’ve got to figure out what comes first, what comes second, what comes third.
0:51:54 When a new idea comes up, you have to figure out where that slides in and the best entrepreneurs
0:51:57 just know how to prioritize and it kind of goes hand in hand with hiring.
0:52:01 You have to know what order to hire people, what order to get projects done and a lot
0:52:03 of times that’s the difference between success and failure.
0:52:04 Absolutely.
0:52:08 The willingness to think through hard things, what do you mean this is going to be hard?
0:52:10 If it was easy, everybody would be doing it, right?
0:52:17 Then the prioritization skill is absolutely critical both on this hiring front end just
0:52:18 in the broader business and life sense.
0:52:21 It’s like, “Hey, you vote your time with your priorities.”
0:52:23 Say, “I didn’t have enough time to get that done.
0:52:24 Be honest with yourself.
0:52:27 You prioritized something else for better or worse.”
0:52:34 John and Nate really appreciate you guys joining me and we’ll catch up with you soon.
0:52:40 In the early days of John and Nate’s businesses, they were wearing all the hats, content creation,
0:52:44 SEO, sales, customer support, and that’s how we start.
0:52:49 That’s totally normal, but as you grow, you might find some hats fit better than others
0:52:51 just as these guys have.
0:52:55 For example, Nate mentioned the importance of prioritization and really focusing on your
0:52:56 core competencies.
0:52:58 Like, where is your time best spent?
0:53:03 All right, my top three takeaways from this call with John, Jonas, and Nate Hirsch.
0:53:06 Number one is to buy time.
0:53:11 John called hiring the only way he knows to buy time, and they got me thinking about the
0:53:18 various resources at our disposal, time, money, talent, energy, and time is unique in that
0:53:20 it’s a non-renewable resource.
0:53:25 Once you spend it, it’s gone, unlike money where you can always make more.
0:53:29 The idea of buying time stood out to me as something incredibly valuable to buy.
0:53:31 What better to spend your money on?
0:53:37 As you go through the exercises of auditing your hours, what time could you buy back?
0:53:42 In most cases, I probably wouldn’t make a hire until you have revenue coming in to justify
0:53:48 it, but as soon as you do, that opens up this opportunity for delegation, this opportunity
0:53:52 to buy back your most precious non-renewable resource.
0:53:54 That’s takeaway number one, to buy time.
0:53:57 Takeaway number two is it takes a leap.
0:54:04 John described this mental shift, this liberating experience in forcing himself to start creating
0:54:08 systems to start trusting other people, to start delegating, and I liked Nate’s point
0:54:13 about thinking of your first hire as an experiment because you might not be the world’s best
0:54:14 boss on your first try.
0:54:16 I know I certainly wasn’t.
0:54:20 I remember getting frustrated with Waseo, my first hire, when it was taking him longer
0:54:23 than I thought it should to complete these tasks.
0:54:28 The truth was, I’d been doing them myself almost daily for years at that point.
0:54:31 My fingers could fly across the keyboard without even thinking.
0:54:37 I knew every inch of the website interfaces we were dealing with when it was all new to
0:54:38 him.
0:54:44 On top of that, the processes that I’d internalized through practice, through repetition, took
0:54:49 some time to get down on paper and to become similarly second nature for him, but it was
0:54:53 an important leap, that little experiment that I built up in my head to be a much bigger
0:54:58 deal than it probably was in terms of downside risk, but it was a really empowering one at
0:54:59 the same time.
0:55:00 That’s takeaway number two.
0:55:01 It takes this leap.
0:55:02 Think of it as an experiment.
0:55:09 Takeaway number three is it is better to over communicate since so much of our communication
0:55:14 is nonverbal, and you lose a ton of that in these virtual work arrangements.
0:55:19 I think it’s really important, as both John and Nate described, to be really upfront in
0:55:23 your communication and setting expectation for communication.
0:55:30 Some of my most aggravating virtual hiring experiences have come as a direct result of
0:55:36 slow or unclear communication, especially if someone is working a different time zone
0:55:37 from you.
0:55:42 It can slow your progress to a crawl if you can only send and receive a message or two
0:55:43 per day.
0:55:48 I remember working with this development team in India, which had almost no overlap with
0:55:53 my working hours, and it was something that wasn’t an issue during onboarding because
0:55:57 the sales team, of course, was working US business hours, but after they’d closed the
0:56:01 deal, the rest of the team, the technical guys, were not.
0:56:07 The part of this call about not doing a phone or Skype interview with a potential hire was
0:56:11 really surprising to me, as that’s always been a part of my process, but John and Nate
0:56:13 made a good case for skipping it.
0:56:16 Is it really necessary for some roles?
0:56:18 Sure, but for others, probably not.
0:56:20 Why make somebody jump through that hoop?
0:56:24 All this stuff is something you’ll learn as you go, but it was definitely interesting for
0:56:29 me to hear how these guys with big virtual teams go about it.
0:56:35 Now, as promised, I wanted to give you my two cents on online jobs and free up as a client
0:56:36 of each.
0:56:42 The advantages of online jobs, as I see them, are access to a wide talent pool, seriously
0:56:43 wide.
0:56:47 John’s got over a quarter million resumes in his database, and there are some cool filters
0:56:52 you can use to narrow down that candidate base, and like he mentioned, it’s a really
0:56:56 affordable option for full-time help, and that’s primarily what you’ll find is people
0:57:00 looking for full-time work or at least 20-hour-a-week work.
0:57:05 Once you make a hire, you’ll pay your assistant directly, and online jobs doesn’t take any
0:57:07 markup on the salary.
0:57:13 Instead, the platform charges a monthly membership fee to post jobs and to communicate with potential
0:57:18 hires, and that fee starts at $69 a month at press time, and of course, you can put
0:57:21 that on pause after you’ve filled the role that you’re looking for.
0:57:26 So great place to find ongoing support virtual employee type of roles.
0:57:31 Free up takes a different approach in that it’s a curated freelance marketplace, meaning
0:57:36 Nate’s team only approves the “top 1%” of freelancers to join.
0:57:43 Nate said the current makeup of his talent pool is about 40% from the Philippines, 40%
0:57:46 from the US, and 20% from the rest of the world.
0:57:51 I’ve started out from Nate’s background in e-commerce as serving other Amazon and e-commerce
0:57:54 sellers, but they’ve gone much broader than that today.
0:58:01 I’ve primarily used it for shorter-term project-based work, but you can find ongoing assistance there
0:58:02 as well.
0:58:05 What I like about free up is the speed of execution.
0:58:10 You can post your job, and the site is going to introduce you to candidates they feel are
0:58:15 a good fit within 24 hours, usually within just a few hours.
0:58:19 Then you can say, “Yes, let’s get started,” and it’s off to the races.
0:58:24 Building is done through the free up platform, and the site takes a small percentage of every
0:58:27 hour or of every project build.
0:58:31 Once again, you’ll find the full text summary of this episode with all the links mentioned
0:58:37 in John and Nate’s top tips from the call at sidehustlenation.com/virtual.
0:58:38 That’s it for me.
0:58:39 Thank you so much for tuning in.
0:58:42 Until next time, let’s go out there and make something happen, and I’ll catch you in the
0:58:45 next edition of The Side Hustle Show.
0:58:47 Hustle on.
0:58:50 As a side hustle show listener, I know you’re driven.
0:58:55 Otherwise, you wouldn’t be here, but I also know you can end up hustling and driving yourself
0:59:00 into exhaustion, overwhelm, and even burnout if you don’t stay anchored to why you’re
0:59:01 doing it.
0:59:05 That’s why I want to recommend another podcast that will massively support your side hustle.
0:59:08 It’s called What Drives You with host Kevin Miller.
0:59:10 Kevin’s a former pro athlete.
0:59:14 He’s a lifelong entrepreneur who started 19 different businesses.
0:59:18 He’s a father of nine kids, an author and a mountain adventurer as well.
0:59:23 He knows both the glory and the dark side of drive and has devoted his life to helping
0:59:28 people who want to drive further, faster, but also enjoy the ride every single day.
0:59:32 He brings on today’s most influential people in personal and business development to see
0:59:37 what drives them and get their guidance on the key ingredients that power our own drive.
0:59:41 If you want to fully harness your drive and find peace and fulfillment in the process,
0:59:45 go find What Drives You with Kevin Miller, wherever you listen to podcasts.