Changing Your Lifestyle Through Outsourcing - Course Video 13 - John Jonas

I'm going to talk about in this video changing your lifestyle through outsourcing. So I have a friend who has eight Filipino workers, yet he. And he's been doing this for over five years, yet he still finds himself working a lot of hours. And I've seen this quite a few times with people. And so I wanted to talk about how I have been able to cut my workload down based on my workers. So the first thing, and I think the most important thing in this comes from my decision making. What are your goals in what you're doing and what decisions are you willing to make to get there? So my goal with everything that I do is to build long term, passive, recurring income. With recurring and passive income, I'm rarely under pressure to say, oh my gosh, I got to make money right now. Because the problem with I got to make money right now is you're willing to trade your time for money. And one of the things that I found with Filipino workers is they allow me to do long term work rather than really quick short term work. And yes, they're good at doing short term work, but if I'm not trading time for money, I can have them spend their time on doing tasks that will build my business long term into the future. So someone comes to me and says, I really want you to coach me. I'm willing to give you $10,000. I can say, you know, $10,000 is good money for me to do coaching, but if I spend that time building my business instead of doing coaching, I may only make $40 in that time, but that $40 might be repeated a thousand times over the next two years and that's a lot more money. Or in that time, I might just implement a couple features with what we're doing. Those features might bring in 100 new customers which would pay for that $10,000, but it's also going to do that for the next five years. So one of the big things that I've always done to cut my workload down is I make decisions based on long term. The second thing that I do is any business opportunity that I have, I look at it and say, who's going to do the work for this? Am I going to have to do the work? Or is someone in the Philippines going to do the work? And if it's me that has to do the work on this, or if I have to be a major part of it, or if some piece of this can be done by the Filipinos, but then it depends on me to do some piece of It, I'm gonna say no, because that means that it requires my hours to do it. Whereas there are other opportunities that I've seen where my Filipino workers are good enough, or if they're not, I know I can hire someone else who is good enough in the Philippines to do this task for me or to fill this process. So let me give you an example. I've had a hundred different people over the years come to me and say, why don't you open an office in the Philippines and do what these other guys are doing? You know, have a company over there and recruit Filipinos and bring them in, and then you can manage them and you mark them up a lot. There's these great margins in doing it. And as I look at that, I say, you know, we could do that. We could easily do it, and we would probably make a bunch of money doing it. But I know that as soon as you add infrastructure, I'm going to have to be involved. And as soon as we add 50 employees there, I'm going to have to be involved more. It's going to take a lot more of my time. And so I've always said no to it, even though it might make me a whole bunch of money. I say no because I know that I'm going to have to trade my time for money there. So anytime I'm looking at trading time for money, really trying to avoid it in favor of doing things that will build passive recurring income where it'll make me money, where I'm not there. Another piece of this is in being willing to let go. So, you know, in the business, very often the CEO, you're the best. You're the best at doing most things, and yet if you continue to do those things, you're not working less. And so what I have tried to do, and I got to try this hard because it's not easy, is to get someone else to do a lot of the things that I'm doing. And so if it's writing a newsletter that's supposed to come from me, it sure is a lot easier for me to write that newsletter than it is for me to ask someone else to write it and me to edit it and give them feedback and have them rewrite it and give it back on me to edit it and give them feedback and have them rewrite. It's just a lot easier if I do it. But every time I do it, that means I have to do it again, and I have to do it again. And if I give it to them, I'll Tell you this week I had one of my girls write a newsletter and it was fantastic. And it's taken me a long time to get to that point, but now I don't have to do it anymore. And that's a big deal. Being willing to trust someone and willing to go through the process of saying, this is going to take more time than if I just did it, but knowing that long term I'm not going to have to do it anymore. So that's another big piece of advice that I can give you, is be willing to spend the time to get someone else to do it, even though it's easier to just do it yourself. The last thing I'm going to say about this is kind of a different one. When my wife had preeclampsia and the doctor said you have to be on strict bed rest, I never imagined that would be an amazing blessing to me, that it would force me to stop working and force me to trust other people. But that's what it did. Another experience of that was the very first time I bought a season pass for golf. This was probably eight years ago where I bought the season pass. I had spent the money on it and now I had to play golf every day. And it was almost like, well, I got it, I paid the money, so I got to go golf. And that was really good for me, where I could look at things in my business saying, oh man, I have to go golf to get my money's worth, so what am I going to do in my business so that I can go golf? So that was a big deal. I had a similar experience with it when the first time we took a mini retirement and we went to Costa Rica. And while we were there, the Internet wasn't as good as I thought it was going to be, and so I couldn't work as well as I wanted to. And when I was not able to work, I. I was forced to come up with other solutions to things in my business that were like, I wouldn't have done this otherwise because I would just be doing it because I'd be at home and it wouldn't be a big deal and I'd just keep doing it. And yet when we went on a mini retirement for a month, it was a month of either stuff is going to stop or I'm going to come up with another solution or if it stops, is it really that bad? I guess maybe it's not. It's not making us that much money. It's just making a little bit. So let's focus our efforts on something else. So those are three things that, you know, it's not an easy step to try. It's not easy to just say, oh, I love to go mountain biking, so I'm going to go buy a super expensive mountain bike and say, well, I got to ride my bike or I'm going to buy a golf pass and now I got to play golf. So my brain is going to figure out other solutions or I'm going to spend the money and go on a month long mini retirement. And while I'm gone, I'm going to figure out other solutions, things in my business not easy, easy steps to take. Yet they're definitely things that have propelled my business, or that's not true, propelled my lifestyle forward towards working less and spending more time with my wife and my kids and spending more time doing the things that I really want to do rather than spending time working on my business as I've developed other solutions because I was forced to develop other solutions because the situations I was in and some of those were hard situations or really good situations, either way, they forced me to come up with other solutions. I would highly recommend you and to my friend who has this question, put yourself in a difficult situation and see what your brain does. You know, I would guess most people watching this, you're pretty smart and your brain is pretty good at things. And when you put your brain in a different situation than what it's in the day to day grind, it'll think differently and it'll come up with different solutions. And that's where I've really been able to change my lifestyle.