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Having a great business means having great employees. Having the best employees also means high expenses. Did you know that you can hire a full time virtual assistant for just $400 for an entire month? In this episode, Nate will be sharing his experience on hiring full-time employees and how to find amazing team members.
You ever wonder what it would be like to have people work for you while you’re comfortably sleeping? We’re going to talk about today how to hire somebody specifically in the Philippines. Hey, everybody. Scott Christopher once again talking to Nate Woodberry, YouTube guru, marketing genius, guy to help all of us make more money and just do what we want to do on YouTube which I love. You’ve been doing this for some time now, how did you get involved in it and really, that we’re going to talk more specifically now about some of the resources that you avail yourself of that seems sort of out of reach to people. I need a staff of a hundred to do this or that but let’s start talking a little bit about that. Yeah, outsourcing in the Philippines, I first got the idea of outsourcing from the book the 4-hour workweek by Tim Ferriss. Okay, so I learned a lot from that book. I got a lot of great ideas that I was able to implement but as much as he talked about outsourcing, it still seemed foreign to me like maybe one day I’ll be able to hire an employee.. Literally no pun intended, he didn’t even catch it. I didn’t catch that. Outsourcing sounded foreign to me, I just think that’s very funny, he’s this unintentional Canadian. Alright, keep going. Anyway, it was foreign so it was like someone known, it was until about 18 months after being introduced to it through Tim Ferriss that a friend of mine John told me his virtual assistant tool that he’d created and show me how easy it was to actually hire people and he told me specifically why I should be hiring people in the Philippines and maybe we could talk about that but that very night, I went on to this website, this virtual assistant tool and I could search and I found somebody now hired my first person within like 36 hours. And it’s not that the person themselves, him or herself is virtual. In other words, wwhen you say virtual assistant, we’re talking about a living breathing human being, it’s just that they’re not next to you as your assistant so the term virtual is a bit of a misnomer, at least the way I’m hearing it. So here I’m hiring somebody.. It’s an outsourced assistant. Yes, the other side of the planet that we connect through that we connect electronically, through e-mail, through video or whatever. They work for me but they’re not actually physically in my present come to my workplace. Right, so that kind of gives it the virtual hook. My very first hire ended up in failure but it’s so funny and I had such a great learning experience, I caught the bug. Yeah, okay. Failure mostly on my part because I was inexperienced. It was a great success that.. So here’s the story.
So at the time, I was an employee doing telemarketing for a SEO company, a company called orange soda and I had an independent contractor position for them as well, I wrote articles. So they wrote these articles to spam the internet with, okay, they would pay me $10 to $12 per article and when I learned about outsourcing, I hired a person to write these articles for me and I paid her to did like 250 per article then I turn them into my company and get paid $10 to $12 per article so it was really cool. At first, I would proofread and kind of critique and but she got better and better and so then I just kind of let her go and we were doing, you know, 10 articles a day. So this is like a ghostwriter for you? You’re providing at least the topic, the content to some degree but maybe she’s doing some of the research, putting it together for you? The company would provide me a title, you need to write an article about this so I would just give that title to her, she would write it and I pay her two or three bucks and I get paid ten or twelve bucks. So, great idea, right? It actually was a really good idea. I was so pumped up about it and it worked for a while. Here’s the problem.. She started plagiarizing, she would take paragraphs from other content out there and mix it into one article. So she was plagiarizing? She was plagiarizing and I didn’t check. In the beginning I checked but later on.. So by the time I noticed, we were about, I went back in history and found that she had done that on the previous 50 articles, it looked for that round number 50 and I was like, oh no, if my boss finds out, they’re going to fire me and I was like, sweating about it so I went in proactively and said, I went to the CEO of the company and he thought it was hilarious, I told him the story, he thought it was hilarious but he says I’m not the decision-maker in this and you gotta go talk to your supervisor over here and it was a young kid that had you know, liked having power and he decided he was going to be mad at me about this so I wasn’t able to do that position anymore, he let me rewrite those 50 articles and because they had already paid me on them so I had to rewrite those but I fired my assistant that was plagiarizing. Now, okay, knowing what I know now I are what I would have done or should have done is like, I should have you know, I should have.. But the purpose of SEO, I actually think it was a great strategy, my mistake though was not doing quality control, making sure that it was original content and I should have kept tabs on her more and even if I did find that she was plagiarizing, I should have said, did you know that you’re not supposed to do that and remind her and just be a human about it but instead I went, you’re fired. And I was fired from my position too and that was my first that was my first experience but because it had worked for months, a few months. I just like it, this is so awesome cause I could hire someone for 400 bucks a month. So that’s where you kind of thought, this is a workable model? Yeah, guess how many people I had working for me a few months later? We’re talking three or four months later. Working for you doing what? Give me parameters here. I quit my job..
All of a sudden a world famous painter and people are painting things for you? Within a few weeks after this experience, okay, at the same time that I hired this person to do the articles for me right, I was tinkering around with website design and I advertised locally on Craigslist and found a couple clients, they were happy and so I quit my job,went full-time with that and within a few months, I had 10 full-time employees in the Philippines working for me doing website design. Well that explains how you said gosh, we’ve designed, I have designed over 500 websites. I’ve gone, where did you find time to do all that? Now that makes sense. I mean, it all makes sense but I just have one question. I know everyone’s dying to know.. So when she wrote these articles, I mean, and they were turned in, did she have the byline? I mean, or was it..? It was me, or course. That’s my assistant. No, you’re right, people go straight all the time, you know, old what’s-his-name Patterson, he does ,he hasn’t written a novel in a hundred years, it’s always someone else but he puts their name on the cover Nate. You know, I admit, I don’t even know if my name was on it. If a name would have been on it, it would have been me but it was just used for the for the company. Oh that’s fine, as long as you’re telling them which you ultimately did once she got caught plagiarizing. It’s a good story. This is the beauty of watching these videos, is you kind of get into the mind of Nate and where he’s come from and why he’s actually pretty darn good at what he does. Now although the background of using outsourcing is a bit nefarious to me, the current state of your outsourced.. That story, I hired that girl eight and a half years ago now. You’ve grown, you’ve lost a few hairs. A couple of them. You’ve gained some more. There’s a huge variety of people that this works really well for, a type of skill sets you can hire people for. I’ve had great great success with all things that are computer related so from from graphic designers, web designers, even computer programmers, I had some great, this is a.. I’ll just to tell a quick side story. So I don’t know programming, I started a web design company but I don’t know any programming but when I got into that space, I had some clients that needed some custom programming work and so I hired a couple of custom programmers and it was going well but it was hard for me to know how to bill for their hours, how to guesstimate how long it would take and I ended up selling these to employees like kind of a finder’s fee. I charged a finder’s fee and gave those employees to them but here’s the cool part so not only did I get a fee for beating a finder’s fee but I negotiated the rate that the employer was going to pay them as double is what I was paying them so I totally hooked them up. Anyway but so you can you can find people that are great at all things designed for you.. So they come to the table already educated and trained certain skill sets but you’ve got to kind of train them on your on what you want them to do for you. Does that require you going to the Philippines? I’ve never been. I want to go this year but so.. Just all virtually done, yeah, so what you first said is correct, they have the computer, they have the skill sets, a lot of them have college degrees and you have to have a system so you can’t just say let’s see I want to start a web design company, I’m going to hire a web designer, okay, you design websites and I created a very step-by-step system. In my case, I had four different steps. We do this first then we move on to this and and I had it outlined.. This is exactly what you do and and I hired them to run my system so it’s kind of like what, you know, McDonald’s, right? If you get hired, if I get hired to go flip burgers at McDonald’s, we’re not reinventing the wheel and figure out okay we’re going to how do we make burgers.. No, there’s a workflow that’s already set up, yeah. Exactly, this is how our orders are made, this is how the burgers were flipped, this is how you put on the catcher, a system was set in place and I’ve had great great success hiring people in the Philippines that are very skilled that can step into the system. Oh, that’s fantastic. So what the bulk of the work that you do is what? Because clearly, you’re resting peacefully, well on the other side of the world, they’re doing this part of the work for you. So yeah, about how the time zone works is about 5:00 p.m. here is when my team in the Philippines, you know, get up finish breakfast and start and start working for me so it’s pretty cool to know that I can work a full day and I can think of lots of different tasks or tweaks or instructions I want to give them and that by the time I start my work the next morning, they’ve already implemented. And if I may say we’re specifically referring to these videos. I mean, that’s what you’re outsourcing to the philippines for..
Right now because we do youtube production, I have lots and lots and lots of video editors that these people do rough cuts, these people do fine cuts, text effects cuts, this is my keyword research team, this is my youtube launch team. Yeah, and you’re able to do this for four or five hundred dollars a month? It’s insane and it’s.. so this is the thing that on one hand, it’s obviously a great blessing to me and and I’m tempted to think but isn’t that taking advantage of them? Well in the Philippines, as I’ve come to learn, it really is a third world country and it’s really hard for them to find a good-paying job and what I’ve learned, what they’ve been willing to do for four hundred bucks a month, they will leave their family for six months to go to another island and work a job that like works fourteen hours a day, six or seven days a week, sending their money back to their family and then when that job is done, they come home and they have to find another job and so if I can pay them the same or you know, bump it up a hundred bucks a month, pay them five hundred bucks a month and they only have to work 40 hours a week and I let them control their schedule, just you know, be a consistent eight hours a day on weekdays and you know, they get the flexibility, sometimes there’s power outages and I understand that but the the feedback that I’ve gotten from them is just a gratitude and appreciation and it’s really humbling, the gratitude that they show me for giving them this opportunity and so I’m obviously so grateful and they’re the ones editing this video so I’ll talk to you editors, I’m so grateful to you because it’s just provided a huge opportunity here. It’s allowed me to create to create this company that services that I can do and the efficiency and the prices that I can sell my services for that just wouldn’t be possible if I had to hire somebody here and had to pay them you know eight or ten times that amount a month, I just I wouldn’t have this company. So truly, symbiotic kind of work relationship. It’s very cool. So somebody wants to, I mean, what so you’re sharing secrets, how would somebody, what do they do to..? I’ll even include a link below where you find it, it’s the virtual assistant tool that I use and it’s simply a directory where there’s a couple hundred thousand people now in the Philippines that say I want to work for an American boss and they’ve expanded it now to like the UK and Australia but you’re basically saying, I need more opportunity, I can’t find a good job here, I’ve got all this talent and skill, they’ll list it out, this is what I’m good at, by the way, they all speak really good English, they speak English good. They communicate fantastic, their communication is fantastic and they’ll put their picture there, on the website, there’s actually a reliability score to know if it’s a real profile or if it’s a copy so you can really filter it down any people that know how to use Adobe Premiere, I need people that are you know really good at editing sound for podcasts or whatever you’re searching for, you can find that person right there on that virtual assistant and with today’s world, you just upload all of your files and do what a Dropbox or something? And they are right there on the other end grabbing them.. Exactly. Wow, very cool. So what is holding you back from hiring a full-time assistant? Five hundred bucks a month, what would you have them do? That’s the question. Alright, I’ll tell you, there should be nothing holding you back at this point, that is 500 bucks a month. Whatever, you’ve set it off.