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Nate Woodbury has been outsourcing to the Philippines for years now. John Jonas, Creator of Virtual Assistant Tool, is the perfect person to be guesting in this episode, sharing with us his own experiences. Let’s listen in on how to build a strong virtual team.
Welcome back. In this episode, we’ve got John Jonas back. We’re talking about outsourcing again. And specifically how to build your virtual team. Okay. So, just before hitting the record button on this on this video, both he and I came up with the same phrase in our mind. Kind of one at a time. -Yeah. -I’ll let you introduce it. What are we talking about here? -Okay. So, let me tell you how not to do this first. -Okay. -I talked to a guy once a couple years ago who said, “Oh, man. I tried that outsourcing thing. It didn’t work.” I was like, “Oh, what happened?” “I hired like 20 guys and nothing ever happened. Nothing ever got done.” I was like… -I like your scruffy accent you gave it there. -Well… That’s… That was it. I was like, yeah duh. Right? Have you… Would you ever hire 20 guys here in the US and expect something to get done would you give him no direction? No. My advice always when someone comes to me and says, “I want to build a virtual team.” Great. Do it one at a time. Hire one person to do one thing and make that work and then go from there. -And for context, I’ve got ten full-time employees in the Philippines. you mentioned you got 24. -I have 24, yeah. -so we have good sized teams. But yeah, I started… I started with one person. And then, you know added a second editor, third. -One at a time. So, I have something else. -Yeah. – people often ask me who do I hire first? -Yeah, that’s a good point. -And so my advice is to find something that you are currently doing and get that off of your plate as a starting place for your team. Get someone that… And your first task, the reason you’re giving them something that you currently do. Something that you know how to do is to see, “Can I make this work?” Because hat’s… That’s the whole purpose of this first task. You hire this guy, now your job is to see, “Are we compatible even? Can I make this workwith this person?” Because if you can, great. Now, you can get him doing all kinds of stuff and then you can hire someone else. If you can’t work with them then you you’re wasting your time. Right? And so, that’s your first job is get one person do one thing. Now, that first thing what you’re hiring them to do is hopefully something you know how to do. And my advice what that is find something with good English. So, unless you’re hiring like a video editor or a program or a technical person, right? Design or webmaster. English won’t matter for that if it’s in the Philippines. You’ll never have a communication issue. But if it’s something to do any sort of writing or social media or admin work or customer support, find someone with good English. Because if they have good English, they can learn anything else. And you… Once you’ve taken some time off of your plate, you can spend time teaching them. -A lot of people who watch my channel are other YouTubers. And if I were to make a suggestion on the first person that another YouTuber would hire, definitely definitely, definitely. Without question, that’s an editor. -Yeah. -But so many YouTubers, that’s the last thing that they want to outsource. And they think… Well, I find the camera guy, can’t really send that off to the Philippines. So I’m going to do the filming. But the editing, there’s just it’s an art. It’s so much creative control. What if I hire somebody that that’s going to help me with product development. They’re going to help me with Facebook marketing or you know, it’s like… Yeah, those are good things. But if… Just think about the impact that it would have on your life. How many hours are you spending each state editing? And yet you turn that over to somebody else. -Well. And you can… Because I’ve done this with editing. Like I’m not an editor but I was editing my own videos and I hated it. And you can get someone else and say, “Hey, I really like this and this and this. These styles, right? And hey, watch all of my previous videos and see what I’m doing.” And then they’ll get a really good idea of your artistic style. And you can mold them, right? So, “Oh. Hey, this is great but how about this and this and this? Let’s change these things.” Great, well you only spent an hour on this video instead of 4. So, you can you can afford to go back and forth with them a few times. -Yeah, absolutely. I mean let’s just use that math. If it takes 5 hours, that you’re normally putting into editing a video. And you hire somebody else and they get 80% of the work done. And then you still got to go in and tweak it and give them some you know some fine-tuning. Okay, you’ve spent one hour, freed up that’s freed up a lot of time. Definitely where I… -And that’s totally doable. Like, get the final cut files from them, right? And finish it yourself. Fine. But that would be the first person. -Who’s next then? -Yeah and building the virtual team. Well if you’re a YouTuber, I’m going to say someone to handle… Someone social. I don’t know. Someone’s social who’s going to go comment another YouTube videos or who’s going to do some marketing for you on YouTube or Facebook, right? -Okay. So if you don’t know who John Jonas is, he’s the creator or virtual assistant tool. And you’ve got to check out this website. You can… I’ll put a link in the description below. But let’s talk about for a minute the power of this tool in building a virtual team. Because I mean… I don’t even know if Craigslist is around anymore. I know it exists but do people use it anymore? How else, without the website, how are people going to build a virtual team? -So when I got started, it was really painful because I went to a company and said, “Hey, I want someone.” And they said, “Oh, here you go. here’s this person.” I was like, “Well. that’s it? What skills?” Like I didn’t get to… I didn’t get to choose anything. And then I had to pay them a 3 times markup. But it was just weird and… And so, what I wanted was to be able to… I wanted like indeed.com, what they have. -Yeah. I mean, if you’re if going to hire somebody locally, you’re going to get resumes and have lots of people apply. – Yeah. And so, that’s what I built was like indeed.com but for the Philippines. Where you can go on and search resumes and search something and narrow it down and filter and sort. And get down and then like, “Hey, here’s 17 people who are amazing. Well let’s contact them and started interviewing them and and see who’s the best.” -Okay. So a lot of… A lot of my following has experience with UpWork or Fiverr. -Yeah. -And if they if they haven’t experienced hiring people directly like this in the Philippines, specifically with with virtual assistant tool, you and I see it as night and day difference. -Yeah. -What… How do you… How would you describe that difference? -Yeah. So I did an interview yesterday with someone who… Who was like, “Oh, I just used UpWork.” It’s like, “Wow. It’s not the same thing.” -Yeah. -So number one, I’ll say the Filipinos much prefer the way that we do it.
We see people come from UpWork all the time who they… They’re making $8 an hour on UpWork and they’re happy to take a full-time job for $3 an hour. Because that stability is just prized in the Philippines. So the difference between up work and virtual assistant tool comm or hiring a virtual assistant full-time is commitment. Where in UpWork, you have no commitment. -That’s huge. – and what that means… For most people they’re like, “Oh, that’s so good. I don’t want the commitment.” For me, what I meant was I hired this person full time and if they’re not busy, that’s on me. And now, I’m paying. And I’m not paying very much but I’m still paying for them. And so if they’re not busy, I need to find something to keep them busy. And that right there was the difference between me being… Me being like this. Like the grunt worker. You know, like, “I’m busy. Oh, they’re not busy. I don’t care. I got to get this email done, right?” And stepping back and saying like, “Oh, they’re not busy. What else can i work on in my business?” Right? “What can I do? What can I create that’ll give them something to do?” That made the transition from me being in my business, to being the CEO and working on my business. So, that’s the really big difference between… Between UpWork and virtual assistant tool. -When you mention commitment, another word that comes to my mind is loyalty. And and I’ll be a vulnerable a little bit here. I’m in a pretty good place in my company right now. But it hasn’t always been this way. -Yeah. -I’ve had I’ve had some ups and downs financially. And my… I just met my team for the first time a few weeks ago. I traveled to Manila and we had a really good good time. We were… We were talking and they were… They were saying because a lot of… Most of them work for me for many years. They were going back and saying, “There’s a point where their payroll was at the longest point of 3 and a half weeks.” And they stuck with me. -Delayed. -Delayed. So, their pay day was here and I wasn’t… And I communicated but I wasn’t able to pay him for 3 and a half weeks. And they… What they told me is, “You know what? We we knew we could trust you. We knew that you would get us paid and we the company succeed. It was never a question of where they were going to leave.” And I… When I heard that from them just a few weeks ago, it just… It hit me so much like… I’ve kind of took it for granted. I mean… I wanted to be open and upfront with them about everything. And I… But it really meant a lot. It would never have that with like hiring on Fiverr or UpWork or something like that. It’s like we really have… We have a great team. We… It’s like a business family that we’ve created here. It’s really neat. -Yeah, that’s really awesome. -And now… Now, it’s good to be back in a place where I can, you know ,give them pay raises and stuff like that. So, alright. Thanks again John. We kind of gave him a resource to go to check out virtualassistanttool.com. I’ll link it below. If you’re watching this on YouTube, be sure to subscribe, comment. If you’re on LinkedIn, you can actually share. I’m going to tag John in this. So you’ll get this. I don’t know if you’re a LinkedIn.- I’m not much of a social media guy myself. But I’ll see… Someone’s going to see it on LinkedIn from my team. -We’ll see you in the next episode.