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Outsourcing can save so much of your time and effort, which is why we have brought in John Jonas to share with us the wonders of outsourcing. What should you outsource and what shouldn’t you outsource? We’re going to talk about that in today’s episode, so tune in!
Welcome back. We’ve got John Jonas here for another episode. Of course, we’re talking about outsourcing. But in this one, we’re going to talk about what things you can outsource and what not to outsource. -Great. – Okay. To start off, let’s start with what can we outsource? What types of things do you have your team? -Okay, sweet. So, on my team I have multiple programmers. So, any sort of custom programming work online for a system or an app. You have… Have someone else do that. I have designers and different kinds of designers. Like graphic design or web designer. I have people that do those things. I have web people. People who take integrate like design and code and put it into a website. I have admin people. People who do whatever I ask them to do. Just supporting me. Or we have back-end admin. People who like look at all of our data and try and find problems or good things or whatever. We have customer support people. I have an HR person. I know people that have people in the Philippines doing data entry or making phone calls or telemarketing or doing I know, like people with real estate virtual assistants. Or I have a guy that does video editing and photo editing. I have, I know, you have you have a bunch of that too. Basically, any process that can be done on a computer and where it’s going to be delivered somehow online can be outsourced. -Yeah. So, just some similar examples. I’ve also got several video editors, graphic design. You know, I’ve got a got a web team that I actually then trained to do video editing because we don’t do websites anymore. But I’ve got somebody that does my bookkeeping and does kind of team management. I’ve got another person that I actually… Just gave a promotion and gave him additional responsibility because he’s really, really capable. He’s my systems creator. Which is… Which is cool for me because I’ll come up with some ideas and I’ll say, “Okay, here’s kind of us. We need to create a system for this. Here’s some ideas.” And that’ll let him run with it. And he’ll create the systems and then really, it just a little tweak here and there so that’s really helpful. -That’s… That’s sweet. -You know, design, anything. Like you said, anything that can be done on a computer. Another question I have on this because I know you’d provide a lot of coaching or resources for other people. What are some other unique things that you’ve seen people use for hiring people in the Philippines? -So, one time I saw a guy who he had a full-time job and he had learned about this. And I think he just had an opportunity that he knew about. He wouldn’t took a part-time job and hired someone in the Philippines to do all the work. That was interesting. I have seen people do a lot of lead generation with their… With the Filipinos. Where they’ll take like, “Hey, go collect this data from all these different places and put it together and then craft an email or a phone call or whatever and call that person and just kind of pre qualify them for me.” And then I’ll take it from there. So, they have them do like, you know, a lot of lead generation for… That ends up with them or that ends up with another team or something like that. But it’s just a it’s a good way to prequalify someone. -Alright. Now, let’s switch gears and talk about what not to outsource. In the way that we do. What are some things that you’ve learned or that you knew right off the bat not to do? -So, the first thing is like your marketing message. You should be the CEO of your business. You know your customers, you know your product. The marketing message is for you to create. Don’t go give that to someone else and say, “Hey, here’s my product what do we tell people?” -Yeah, tell me what our mission statement is. -Yeah, right. -That’s you. That’s your job as a CEO. With that, my team does a lot of marketing for us. They do a lot of writing, they do a lot of pushing content out and social media. Posting and stuff like that. But it’s based around the marketing message that I have created. So, that’s one thing. Sales copy is a… Is kind of a hard thing to outsource in the Philippines. You can outsource it, gets expensive usually. And the same thing with like a marketing message, you can outsource that. It’s usually to an agency and then that’s where it gets really, really expensive, right? -So, as I first started building a team and you know, building a clientele, there were some things that I had hesitations to outsource. -Yeah. -And there are some things that I haven’t outsourced successfully that we’ll start with that. So, I’ve tried several times to hire telemarketers. And I haven’t had any success with it. I’ve had people that are dedicated. It wasn’t a matter of their skillset. When I look back, I didn’t have a system that I could do successfully myself. -Yeah. -And so, that was a big part of it. You mentioned… You mentioned, you know, writing sales copier things like that. There’s a lot of cell psychology and even somebody that speaks English in an amazing way or in writes great. But there’s just an additional level that includes that cell psychology. And so, it’s a difficult. -It’s… That’s really hard. I mean I’ve tried that multiple… I had some success with it. It’s really hard to outsource sales copy. -And I think going back to what we talked about in a previous episode. But to hire somebody to do something that you or I… Like that I don’t know how to do and I’m hiring them to do it, that’s pretty hard because like I have a hard time supervising. One example is I launched a web design company. That was successful. But then I had somebody come to me that needed custom programming. I don’t know how to program it. Mine was just… We were using Joomla in WordPress and designing it. You know, in Photoshop or creating it visually. But I had a client come to me saying, “Hey, I need some custom programming.” I’m like, “Oh, I can do this. I’ll just hire some programmers.” I had a team of 4 programmers. They actually did a good job but it was so hard for me to know how to gauge time and how to price the projects. And I didn’t want to let my employees down, I didn’t want to let my clients down. So what I ended up doing is aying, “You know what? I’m the middle guy here and I kind of brokered an arrangement.” And I basically said, “Hey, if you pay me a finder’s fee, you can just take over my employees.” But get this, the price that I was paying my employees, I negotiate their payment over here to be double. -Wow. So i thought really good about… “Sorry, I hired you. This isn’t going to work.” But hopefully it paid off. -You know and I see I see people successfully do the the programming thing like building a custom website where you don’t know how to program and you still manage to do it. -That’s your background. I know you’re programer. -Yeah. But for me, I graduated in computer science so I get it. But I see other people succeeding at it. -Okay. -But it’s hard. I see a lot of people not succeeding at it because you… Like you’re saying, you don’t have a gauge of time, you don’t have a… I had a friend that said, “Hey, I just want to clone this website. That should be really easy, right? Like a week.” I was like, “Yeah, I don’t think so. It’s not going to… It’s going to take months. At least months.” You know? And then he gets into it and and he wants this and this and this. It ended up takin like 9 months. He thought it was a week. You know, that’s hard. -Okay. So, the moral of the story conversation that we’re having here that I really want to emphasize. Because I encourage a lot of people to outsource, I absolutely love it. And with a few exceptions, you can outsource just about everything. But I understand that it’s going to take time for training and it’s going to take some time to kind of master and create the systems. But the time that you put into it compared to the time that it frees up, so worth it. -Oh, yeah. -So, worth it. -Yeah. And and the most savings is a big deal. And when you combine that cost with the time, it’s you know, it’s pretty low risk. -Yeah. We haven’t mentioned the cost of hiring so many of the Philippines. But to be able to hire somebody full-time and just make a nice round number. 500 bucks a month. -Yeah. -That’s… That’s a great blessing. -Yeah. -So, if you haven’t checked out the website yet, go to virtualassistanttotool.com. I’ll link it below. And what that is it’s a resource where you can… It’s basically like a directory. -Job board. -John created this this website. You can… You can you know, drill down and search for the exact type of skill sets you’re looking for. And your ideal employee to outsource for the Philippines. If you’re watching this on YouTube, make sure you subscribe and on LinkedIn, you can actually do some social things. You can share this. So I’ll tag you, I’ll tag you on LinkedIn here. But share it with other people who might find this video helpful as well. We’ll see in the next episode.