Aaron Cordovez and Outsourcing for Amazon Ecommerce

But we're going to hit the $10 million sold on Amazon market in just a little bit. Hey. Hey.

This is John Jonas, and I am super excited to be here with Aaron Cordova. Did I pronounce it right?

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely perfect. Those are great.

I met Aaron at a Click Funnels event recently and we started talking about him having virtual assistants working for him. And so I wanted to do. Do a case study of how, how the VAs are working for you, how you're hiring them, what you' be successful with them, what they're doing in your business.

So let's start off.

First of all, what is your business? What do you do?

So, you know, I started this business back in 2015. It's an E commerce business. So we sell things online, majorly focused on Amazon. So we sell on Amazon. And by the way, I do want to say it was great. When I first met you, that was awesome. Just as a background story, we were chatting and out of nowhere, you know, you mentioned something like, oh, yeah, I have this like, outsourcing company, whatever. And I was like, oh, well, we use onlinejobs. Ph. He's like, that's mine. I was like, what? Like, no way. Like, this is amazing. And the big thing is with our business, right? We, it's my wife and I. That's why I say we. We partnered in this business together. And I was working. I was basically away from home like almost all day. Like 8:00am I left and I was home literally like at 9:00pm or sometimes later. And my wife actually had a newborn baby. And we're like, okay, we need to figure this out. So we started Amazon. Okay, so that was a while ago. And we probably this month or next month, I didn't check it that closely, but we're Gonna hit the $10 million sold on Amazon market in just a little bit.

Nice, dude. Congratulations. That's so awesome. So let's talk about then. What are your VAs doing for you? Because so a lot of people that get into E commerce, like, oh, I don't know what I would have a VA do, right? So what are your VAs doing for you?

Well, so it's interesting cause so a va, right? Virtual assistant, right? All that means is, you know, normal. You could normally you could ask a person, like you're hiring a person maybe at a whatever salary, in person, right? They can come to your office and they help you do whatever. And there's like executive assistant or personal assistant or business assistant. And that's. That's like kind of old Fashioned nowadays in a way on for E Commerce because, you know, you can hire a person, you know, in the U.S. let's say I'm talking mostly for U.S. companies because we're based in the U.S. we're in Florida. And I would not really think about hiring a person to kind of help me out in person because first of all, normally for a salary that I would be able to pay, especially starting off, I'd never be able to pay up for a real expert person. So a VA. Our first VAs were designers mostly. And we still have VAs that are designers now. But I have no idea about graphic design. I don't know anything about that. So I was like, okay, we need a logo. That was the first thing. And so what I would say is depending on who where you are in starting, right? We started Amazon. I was just looking to make another $500 thousand dollars a month. That was my goal. And that's amazing. Most people, if you add a thousand dollars income, you know, to your. To what you're getting paid and taking home, that's. That's huge. You know what I mean? That was our goal. And they're like, we need a logo. So we hired a VA and they're like, in this case, it was not. This was just like a Fiverr kind of person. Right. So which is a. And the reason I'm bringing that up is though, at the very early needs, it's sort of a freelancer thing, which is very temporary and it's not long term and it doesn't have a lot of value to your business. But that's how I originally started. It is like, hey, I need an image. Go hire somebody for one task. It's done. I get my product and move on forward. Doesn't add a whole lot of valuable assets to your company, which is opposed to what you do and what you offer, which is spectacular in online jobs. Ph. And I can go over that when people have that question, like, what can I have VA do is like the things you don't know. I mean, if you're not a designer, hire a designer. If you know anything about freight, you could ask a person who knows about freight and have them do it. So a lot of times I think it's best to start off with things that you do not know how to do or someone that can help you. Okay.

Okay, cool. I love that you talked about the, you know, you use Fiverr. Cause I did that in the beginning too. And I think most people do that. You fight. You start with freelancers until you figure out like, oh, there's a, like here's a one off task, a logo, for example. That's a great thing to hire a freelancer for. And then you figure out like, oh, I'm running a business, not a task. You know, like, I got to have long term help.

So.

Okay, so talk to me about your first hire. Who did you hire full time, long term?

My first hire was not a virtual assistant, was in person. And that kind of did not go well. So maybe I can start there to see kind of the difference. You know, I figured, hey, our company's growing, we need a person like full time. I need to teach them all the things that I know. And so we hired in the US and actually we were paying a lot just because I was like, I want somebody good. And I just put an ad out for a pretty high salary and I just kind of hired somebody and it really didn't work out so well. And the issue is there's also a lot of like paperwork that you need to do and you need to set up, like just hiring the US it has a lot of complexities and in the end it really wasn't worth it. And that was not very good. I guess I'm not gonna go into that too deeply. Right. I know we don't have like an infinite time, but basically it didn't work out. We lost money, profitability went down. Stressful. How to do a lot of legal stuff as opposed to then later of how am I going to like the first VA that I hired, you know, funny, because I'm from Venezuela, as you know, I told you that before. And I do want, you know, onlinejobs co versus I don't know, maybe you don't want me to bring that up in the interview, but my first va. My first VA was from Venezuela and it was actually a. Because it was a friend of my mom's or my aunt, like kind of somebody like that. And I wanted somebody to do customer service. And you're not gonna find a person for customer service on Fiverr. And luckily, you know, I had a connection with people in Venezuela and my family's from there. And so I hired a first person and you know, we hired her on and taught her some stuff. Now, in Venezuela, not everybody speaks great English. She was probably in the higher end of speaking English, but she did have trouble with some customers. But it actually worked out pretty well. At the time, I was still handling all the customer service emails myself or my wife was. And at that point it was like, at that point who knows? We were selling maybe 30 grand a month or 20 grand. I don't exactly remember the amount of sales we were doing, but when we hired this girl, she was great. And we thought, hey, this is awesome outsourcing. Have a person. Well, first of all, I love benefits just of hiring somebody overseas. Like, there's not a whole lot of legal work that you have to do. You know, they're not gonna sue you. Like, if you're in California, like, you hire somebody and, like, I mean, you're gonna get sued. I mean, I know personally a friend of mine who got sued for, like, discrimination of, like, women or something, and she's like a woman owner. And it was. Anyway, there's. There's a.

There's the U.S. it's so different, right? You go overseas, it's so different.

Yeah, you hire somebody and let's see, it doesn't work out. And of course, this case, it was. It was a family friend, so I had to make sure. And I really work with her. But eventually she went on to do some other job. She didn't like customer service so much. Her English was okay, and I thought it was. It was a good to move on. But we probably had her on for six, seven months for the time being. It was very good. So my initial experience with virtual assistants was pretty good.

Talk about how you trained her. I think a lot of people, they're concerned about, I'm going to hire this person. How am I going to train them? What was the process you went through to train them?

Basically, I think that they just need to know exactly what they're supposed to do. As a virtual assistant, we have a lot more now. I think we're up to maybe 10 or 11 virtual assistants or remote. What do you need them for? If you're hiring somebody, you have a need, right? And so your goal is to have the person understand that need and understand what wherewithal they have and what options they have to kind of fulfill that need. There are people that you'd be surprised how smart people are and the things they can figure out. And so instead of saying like, hey, do this exact thing and don't change anything, you kind of say, hey. Like, you know, customer service, we say, hey. Our slogan actually includes, like, making customers happy and what we talk about. And so, like, our goal is this. Our goal is to make every single person happy. And what I explained to her when starting is like, even, let's say a customer has like a defective product or something like that, normally, you know, company would just give them a return, I'm sorry, would just give me the refund or send them a replacement, right? And I was like, look, there's a baseline, right? If our product broke or did something like that and we just give them a replacement, is it better than if they had, if their product just failed from the beginning or is it worse? I'll say, well, it's still a negative experience because you have to go through the hassle of contacting the company. So what we do is we're like, hey, we'll give you a partial refund and send you a replacement. Or we'll send you a replacement and a bonus because we want it to almost be like, oh, wow, I wish my product broke more often so I can have this amazing experience, right? So I just explained the philosophy, like why we're doing what we're doing and then saying, hey, these are the tools that we use. Orient them on tools and say, please do what you can to make this happen. And so then there's a little bit of wiggle room there. And of course we're not a huge corporation, but basically just what is the purpose of your job? What are the different things you can do? And contact me for anything. If you have any question ever, let me know. And checking in every once in a while. I love it. I love it.

So did you just say, hey, here's access to our account and go answer whatever you want or did you have a list of standard answers? Or yeah, there's got to be something there, right?

Yeah, at the time I believe we did. Like my wife set this up, maybe like a five or six page word document that included kind of hey, if it's broken, like a standard response. And it was just in word, nothing fancy and didn't cover every scenario, but it was kind of a starting point. So yeah, we said, hey, there's all things. And in the interview process, we did actually send like, I'm a customer and I sent an email and I'm like, well, how would you answer it without any guidance, without anything like, what would you do in this scenario? We just answered it and her responses were totally acceptable and great. And so that's part of it too is like you can't always predict. Let's say you give some sort of standard operating procedure, right? Sop. You're like, hey, you're not going to cover everything is all I'm saying. So if you give them kind of like this is a question they would ask, what would you answer? And you kind of just get what they would do. Improvising, because it's at least, maybe it's not the best idea. But I think in some cases they are going to have to make their own original thoughts, their own original sentences, communications. Not everything's going to be a rote answer. And so in that case, I want to test that in the interview process and know that if that did happen, it's not going to be a disappointment or communicate totally wrong. So test them without any responses and then once they're on, say, hey, these are the different responses that we have already. This is a kind of tone that we use. And we use Slack, right. It's a chat interface. And on there it's like we have a Slack channel. If you have any questions, put it in there and we'll answer it right away.

I love it. It's super similar to what we do. Like, I love your idea of giving them testing their customer support. Like, if this happens, what would you answer without giving them anything. That's such a good way to recruit, to filter out. Like, it forces them to speak English and it forces them to lets you see, like, what's their tone, what's their competency? That's so good. And then the document that you created or that your wife created, we have the same exact thing. Like it's something we've created over years. We have a Google Doc and then we give them access to it and we give them edit access to it after they, after they're hired so that they can add to it. Like, hey, here's this new question that we keep getting. Here's an answer so that it just makes it easier for everybody else who's doing customer support.

I love that.

So, okay, so let's talk about. Well, can you give me a list of roles that you have filled with virtual assistants?

So again, designer, definitely designer is the most important one. I mean, at least in E commerce, you know, every business is different. Right? But in E commerce, I mean, your design is everything. You know, I think in the region mostly the number one thing is the actual product images. Okay. So we use a lot of Shutterstock stock photos and put our product in there. And now we actually have somebody where we ship them the product and they're photographing it.

So can I, can I clarify on that? So this is a graphic designer.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's not, it's not a logo designer. Because designers are different. Right. It's not a, it's not an interface designer. It's not a web page.

Oh, yeah, yeah, correct.

This is a graphic designer.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We don't have like a UI designer or like even. Well, this person does do like some packaging, but even that, like, it's a graphic design skill set, at least for E Commerce. I think this is the most important thing out of anything that you can do is like, your images need to be better than anybody else's. And we used, no joke. We've been through at least 10 different designers and some, a lot of them are freelance. Right. We're trying to test and we're like, hey, do this job. You know, we'll pay whatever, whatever the price is that person's charging, get it back. What's the lead? How long, how fast does it take to return? How long does it take them to do the job? How long, how much are they charging? What's the price per image? What's kind of the lead time? Can they take as much work as we have? And using all those criteria, you kind of just learn people and take different styles. And so for us, a big key is launching products. So we've released many products on Amazon and the listings are everything. Just the main images. You have images at the bottom, you have video. There's so much stuff needed. So. And little, little tiny tweaks where you just like change one little thing, you know, could pay for the person's salary for the year if it's a good tweak. Right. So this is key, right? It's kind of like, I don't know if you're, if you're in a retail store, I know that in traditional retail, Walmart or whatnot, they pay attention out to the box because the packaging is what they see in the retail. And that's like, they could spend millions on freaking packaging and displays. And they have employees. All they do is like pick displays in the stands and all that stuff. Well, now for E commerce, that's literally your images. It's your main image, your supplementary images. And so the big focus I've had since I started, you know, with, from freelancers to VA designers, is who is going to be the absolute best to do this? And that is, that's everything. I mean, they will pay for themselves if they can do the job right. And you need to have that person in house to understand your style. You don't have to reteach the person everything. What are you trying to get at? And they learn and, and I even teach the designers that I've had. I always teach them, what is the goal? Cause sometimes you'll have some theoretical guys like, oh, I have this really fancy thing. I love my image or whatever, And I tell them, no, I don't care what you think. I don't care what I think. Who's buying? You know what I'm saying? And that comes from a huge marketer called Sergio Ziman from a book called the End of Marketing as We Know It. Amazing, amazing book. But it's like, this guy used to sell for Pepsi. Not that I like Pepsi. Pepsi and Coca Cola. He went back and forth, like, huge guy. And we sold, like, billions of dollars. I don't like Pepsi. I don't like soda. I don't drink it. I think it's horrible. But the guy's an amazing marketer. So he was doing a pitch to the, I think the CEO or the owner, some huge, huge corporate person, and he did the pitch, and the guy goes, I don't like it. And then Sergio's like, okay, are you gonna buy 2 billion barrels of Coca Cola and the seals? Like, no. Okay, then it doesn't matter. Like, oh, man. Like, boom. So. So anyway, so that's the idea, I tell the designers, too, is like, you need to get detached. Look, we're put it up and see if the conversion rate increases. And I make these guys think with that and know what the actual goal is. What are they trying to accomplish? Not like, hey, I think this thing looks beautiful or that I think it looks beautiful. I almost don't even give my opinion. They ask me, and I'm like, let's test it. And so I don't know. That's how I teach the guys, the designers. And yeah, I love it.

Okay, who else do you have and what do they do for you?

Okay, good. So designer, right now we have a person who handles all the supply chain. So orders, products, plans of forecasting. We have a person, a copywriter. We just hired them on just recently from onlinejobs. Ph, that's awesome. And let me see who else. We have a customer support rep. We kind of have two customer support at this point. Funny, I met with a guy last week, and he has 10 customer support team selling. That much. I guess you get it. A bunch of questions. Anyway, Customer support, we have basically two. What else do we have? Oh, so I have two sourcing agents. Let's see. I have. I could probably look in on a list here, like, whatever. Okay, that's good. That's okay. Yeah, yeah, that's great.

So there's clearly a bunch of roles to be filled. So do you have specific tips that, like things that you do in the recruiting process? You've already mentioned you're using onlinejobs ph at this point? A couple times, yeah.

Yeah.

Do you have specific tips for as. As you recruit?

What.

What things are you doing? Well, what things could you improve on?

What could I improve on is probably the onboarding process and teaching these guys. And what I'm just changed. I just changed it this week because we hired a person and I wanted them actually funny to learn click funnels and do all of click funnels and take it over. And. And I. And I have click funnels for two kind of aspects. A software business that I have called the Samurai seller, and then our private label business. And our software is for Amazon ads. Right. And so at that point I was like, hey, just make some funnels, do some ads. Like, figure this out, here's a course, and do it. And what happened is a person is very not productive because they have no buddy. We did a whole reorganization, our own company to focus on what's bringing us actual revenue. And what do we focus on? Because we could focus on so many different things. And then it gets dispersed, it gets scattered. And what happened with this one guy is that he seemed like a pretty good guy in the interview. Everything's great, but he's working on this thing and doing a bunch of stuff without guidance. And so that's the worst. That's the worst scenario. So out of all of the hires, when it inevitably fails, is when you kind of say, hey, do this. I don't want to be involved in it. You take it over. Go ahead. It doesn't work at all. It's the worst thing. And so we've just repurposed that. That position and that person to go focus on. Hey, we have the sourcing guy. There's a bunch of stuff that he needs help with. You're now buddied under this person. You're now buddied with them. And they're there during the entire workday working together, answering any questions like, I can actually learn something and become competent. Because what's happening is in this sort of scenario, you're not hiring a freelancer who is already an expert at something. You're hiring a virtual assistant who's going to be an employee. And a lot of times as an employee, you take a specific job or specific task, you're going to learn it and then do it. And so for me, doing this now has made a huge difference. We have the last two guys we hired from online jobs. They're both extreme. I mean, one of them is actually spectacular. They went under one person who were selling on some other platforms with a person in the US that's taking it over. So she turned the. She just. They're like buddies. And then she taught her everything and now she took it over in that way. It's very, very successful in the onboarding. When you have a person that they're gonna. It's like a buddy system. You need a buddy, you need a brother, a sister, somebody to guide you through. Because when you just throw person some training and kind of like, go figure it out. If they were that magical, you know, probably they'd be. They wouldn't be looking for a job, you know? You know what I mean? Online jobs, they're just like, hey, figure it out. Like, sell on Amazon. Make it like you're gonna sell too many dollars. Like, if someone was gonna do that, they're probably not gonna be in the employee in the VA market. I love it. You need to guide them.

That is so good. So I picked out two things that are super important there. One, I see this all the time. Like, I want someone to run my business. Like, no, that doesn't exist.

Sorry, man.

Like, that's not a thing. And I love your reasoning behind it. Like, if they were gonna do that on their. If they can do that for you, they'd be doing it on their own.

Right?

You've got to guide them. You cannot hire someone to say, I don't want to be involved in this. And I've made this mistake too. The second thing, and this is critical, like, every time I do an interview like this, I see reasons why you are succeeding at this. You didn't just let them go. Like, you spend a bunch of time recruiting someone. During the recruiting process, you're looking like, are you intelligent? Are you capable? It's not just like, do you have this specific skill? Do you have click funnel skill?

Right?

You don't even care about that. You want to know, are you intelligent? Can you figure stuff out as soon as you hire this person? Like, you've put in a ton of effort and you know, like, this person's competent and capable. They're not doing well with this thing. So let's change their role. You know, let's find something else for them to do. And I can't tell you how many times I've done that in my business where, like, I hired someone or I gave or I gave someone old, someone who's been with me for a long time a new task and they hate it and they didn't want to do it. And it didn't work out. And so I was like, okay, let's transition you to something else. And it has worked out so well when that happens because they learn to trust you that you're not just going to let them go. Like they have a stable long term job. And once they figure that out and they figure they can trust you, dang, dude. They're willing to put in so much into you and your business because they know you're willing to put some into them.

That's very true. And just to add to that, so one of the people that we hired, so it's also easy to see the difference. We've also made a hire that is not a workout and you can actually tell the difference when it's the person and when it's the job. I mean, I don't know if it's not like some sort of sixth sense, it's just obvious. So one person, they had, you know, experience with Facebook marketing bots, right? Messenger bots, right. We hired a person to take over some messenger bot marketing stuff and they were an expert, right? And after we hired them, well, there's some clear red flags, right? So first of all, like, hey, like, okay, let's get on Time Doctor. You know, Time doctor is just monitoring their time. They're like, oh, time Doctor. Like, I don't do Time Doctor. They're like, well, are you not working? Or like, why would you not be on it? So a lot of times that, that's for me, I mean, that's so far for us, it's been a red flag. When they're like, when they're like, oh, why do you need to do that? Like, if they're just starting, they're in a different place. They're not going to be in your office, you know, some sort of monitoring. There was a. They were doing work, some work. And the person was assigned with them was like, hey, so how's it going? And didn't respond for like an hour. And they're like, hey, how's it going? Like, oh, sorry, I didn't know you were. I don't know. You guys were so strict. Like, what? Like it's working hours, like, huh? And so anyway, we let the guy go really fast. But you see, it wasn't something that you can recognize. Like, this person just will not work out. It doesn't fit with the culture of the company. It's not a good fit. And then in those cases, we don't just like repurpose them. It's just like, hey, this person did not work out for our company. We let them go. Let's find somebody else. So this at the same flip side where you can find, hey, this person's good. But like, I recognize that as a leader or as a, you know, person, I wasn't giving them enough direction. And you could, you could sort of.

See that this has been awesome. So, you know, we've gone, I think we've gone like 25 minutes and you've had so much good to say. I appreciate it. So is there anything, like, any last things that you would want to say to someone? Like, you know, this is, this is. I find this makes a difference or don't do this or anything specific that jumps out to you.

One thing that I want to say is that I know this is, this is one tip that you had, and I think it does make sense. So I think we were doing a lot of, like, Skype interviews, and I don't think Skype interviews are bad, although I think you might have a different opinion. We do spend a lot of time writing messages and just doing queries with the person. So when you put up, there's so many applicants. I mean, the platform is super lively and super active. I think almost any role you put up there, you're going to have applicants, you're going to have people. It's a very known place to be, right? It's kind of like in the US you're going to indeed or something. It's like you can find people in indeed for any type of role, any always, like there's going to be people there. So when you put a job post, you're going to have applicants, right? And so you need to just have a process of, like, how you screen these guys. Because you can spend days and days and days talking to everybody if you really think you're going to talk to everybody. But if instead you have like every person that responds, okay, I'm going to write back to them with these six questions or these three questions, or have some sort of process that will filter through the people, the guys. And you need to, you need it on your posting. You need to make yourself very appealing. Hey, this is this company. We've grown 300% in the last year. We're doing this and this, we're innovating on these things. This is a super cool place. We have people in the US you have people in Philippines. Just make it very appealing. So the people, they're like, wow, I really want to work for this company. Because the sales process goes both ways. You know, they're trying to sell you on hiring them, but you're trying to sell them on working for you. And some of the best hires we've had is people that have gone through hoops because our ad was so appealing. And they're like, I want to work for this company. And they like go through a contact form, they go through an email, they're like reaching out to us, they're following up and they're like, hey, trust me, I want to do this job. So if you do a good enough job in your sales pitch, you're going to attract very good people. And then you just screen and if somebody's persistent and they're not going to give up, like they'll answer all your screens. They're going to, you know, they're going to get through the process and do something above than just a person who's like, I don't know, maybe their mom is making them apply to 20 jobs a week because that was a requirement. You know, I mean, they're just like sending random stuff and you're trying to hire that person. So do something that'll, that'll show at least in that, in that process to weed some people out.

I love that. So do you want to talk about like your, your weeding out process? I mean, you mentioned some of it because for me, this is where you get great hires and you avoid poor hires. Is in this weeding out process. It's not in the post a job. It's. It's in this process.

Right.

Do you want to talk about it or did you say, you know, it's.

Interesting because I think the last round of we've hired like three people just this last month from onlinejobs.ph, we've been growing a lot. And I didn't actually do the screening myself at this time. I have somebody else now. We hired an executive here in the US and my wife also working with him. And so I can't tell you the entire process, but I can tell you that some, there's some just red flags when the guy, you know, you put on a job and like within two minutes you have a response. It's like three pages long. It's like, these are my skills and they just list every skill in the book. And like I work with this and it's just what the person's not really saying anything. They're just spamming. They're just spamming these places. So if you can kind of see at least a person who thought out a response and said like, hey, you know, you sold on Amazon. I sold on Amazon before. I think it's a great market. Or, I don't know, just some sentence. It's real. That means more than just the person spamming out applications, which definitely people do do that. Awesome.

I love it. That's great. Thank you, Aaron, so much. This has been so good to have you.

I appreciate it.

I'll talk to you later.

Okay, see you.