Evan Carmichael explains how to build a virtual company using Upwork to hire global freelancers. He hired video editor Saad after a one-hour test, then treated him like a team member rather than a contractor, building loyalty and freeing himself to focus on content creation.
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Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael, and welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. In today's video, I'm going to answer a question from one of my readers, Van, who had a question about creating an outsourced organization. So the email that he wrote to me: Dear Mr. Carmichael, I'm in Los Angeles currently working on creating a virtual company in advertising. I spoke with a few ad execs. That feel I'm crazy for trying to start a virtual company. I was researching the topic and came across a Forbes article and it hit me, I'm not crazy. I'm a writer, director that works a bit on the side in advertising and wanted to create a plan for a virtual company. As I have no idea how this works or requirements necessary for the project, I'm looking for advice, reading materials, suggestions, a mentor. Thank you for your time and consideration, Ben. So Ben, a couple of ideas here for you. First off, it's entirely possible to create a virtual organization. The Forbes article article that featured me. I spoke about all the different people that I had across the world who were doing different projects for me, and I almost completely outsourced everything that happens in my organization. The first thing you need to do when you're thinking about creating your own outsourced company is what is it that you're going to do? So think about your skill sets, what you're really passionate about, what you're really good at, and write those down. That's what you're going to focus on, and everything else you want to try to outsource to other people. A great resource that I would encourage you to check out is a website called oDesk. It stands for outsource desk. And these provide lists of all workers across the world who want to work on different projects, have different skill sets that will complement what you're really good at. So if you need accounting support, if you need marketing support, if you need admin support, you know, technical support, it's all there on oDesk. What happens, you can bid on a project, so you can put up a project, say, here's a budget I have, or I'm looking to hire somebody who can help me with my website, or help me with admin tasks. People will start to submit applications and they will tell you what their hourly wage is and you can often get a pretty good rate, especially if people are overseas and don't have as high standard of living as you might in Los Angeles. People will submit their bids, you can see their picture, you can see previous work they've done, you can see ratings that they have, you can see what tests they've taken, if they're actually skilled at what they say they're skilled at. So you can think about, you know, do you need somebody who speaks perfect English or not, or do you need somebody who has really good programming skills or not, and all those tests and requirements requirements are laid out for you on oDesk. You can then interview people and from there decide who you want to go with. An example for me, I make these videos, so I try to upload a couple videos every week to my YouTube channel. I started off doing everything myself to learn the business, to learn how it works, and I did all my own video editing. And I quickly learned that, you know, I'm not the best at video editing. The best thing for me to do is answer the questions record it all, and outsource the actual production of the video. And so I went on oDesk and I created the job posting saying, hey, I've got an opportunity for somebody who wants to edit my videos, and I had a number of people who write back. There were 5 who I shortlisted, and I agreed to hire everybody for an hour, give them a video, and see what they could do with it, see who I wanted to go with. So you have a chance to interview people and also try them out if you like, hire them on short-term projects. And one of them wrote back, a guy named Saad, who I ended up hiring, so he's the one editing this video. Hi, Saad. And he wrote back saying, "I don't charge for spec work." So he just did the project and I liked it and I hired him. And he's been working for me for a number of months and it's worked out great. I just upload everything to him and he sends it back to me, final videos all edited. And it's great, so it's saved me a lot of time, it's created some extra income and livelihood for him, and we all benefit from it. And hopefully you guys benefit from these videos as well. As well. So definitely check out those— oDesk as a resource for you to be able to help build that virtual organization. The last thing I would think about is remember that just because you're hiring somebody overseas or you're outsourcing some of your work, it's still somebody that's part of your team and you want to treat them like that. So you want to think about them, you know, they're a person, they have feelings, you don't want to just shove work on them and expect it to get done. You know, try to learn a little bit about them, try to be understanding when they have issues. So for people that I've hired and they've been outsourced, You know, sometimes they get sick and they're not able to do work right on time, or sometimes something else comes up, maybe their computer crashes or they have a family emergency. You know, that kind of stuff is going to happen, so you want to be able to make sure that you can support that and be understanding and try to, you know, be that team leader because, you know, when you are faced with a situation where you need something right now, right away, super urgent, which is going to happen, when you get in crisis mode, you're going to want people on your team who you can trust will deliver for you. So try to give them a little bit of a break when you can, remember that they're part part of your team and they're only human and they'll reward you with loyalty and hard work and really care about the business and care about working with you for the long term. So I hope that helps. If you guys like the video, please give it a thumbs up. If you have any other questions or ideas that you want to share, I'd also love to hear your thoughts and feedback if you want to leave a comment below this video and stay tuned for the next episode. [MUSIC] [MUSIC]
