Create A Rock Star Virtual Assistant - Part 1 - Course Video 11 - John Jonas

In this video, we're going to cover how to manage someone into being a rockstar virtual assistant for you. So I want you to notice that I didn't say how to manage your rockstar virtual assistants. I said I want you to turn them into a rockstar based on your management. And I've seen this over and over again where how you manage someone will change how they perform in their job. So having said that, I want to get into eight different pillars that I've, that I have come up with that will help you manage these people really, really well and turn them into rockstar employees for you. Oh, also with that, I say that this only takes five minutes a day. And the reality is it does only take five minutes a day, but you have to spend the five minutes. It's not something where you can spend 45 minutes once a week instead of five minutes each day. It takes that daily commitment on your part to keep them going well and to turn them into that rock star. So here are my eight pillars. Number one, embarrassment. Number two, they're human. Number three, it's a long term investment. Four, what are the expectations? Five, training. Six, you need to be the expert. Seven and eight are communication. And then I have some things that you need to watch out for. So let's get into this. Number one is embarrassment. It's the number one problem you've had. You'll have. I've talked about it before. It's really important that you recognize this. So when a Filipino worker gets embarrassed or when they don't want to disappoint you, they disappear. And they do this because the losing face by having you get mad at them or them disappointing you is worse to them than not having to deal with it. And so often what employers think is, oh, this worker sucks, they don't want this job, they're not good enough, or they're just lazy. And the reality is that's not what's going on 98% of the time. The reality is this person is stuck on something. You didn't give them clear enough instructions and so they're going to disappear because of it. The other situation that this creates is that if the Filipino worker doesn't trust you, they won't try new things. Which means in order to have a rock star employee, you want them to be thinking, you want them to be trying things. You want them even if they're going to fail, they're willing to try it where if someone doesn't trust you, they're scared that you're going to let them go, or you're going to fire them, or that you're going to yell at them when they try something new. If they get it wrong, the consequence is so high that they won't even try new things. Whereas if they trust you, and by trust you mean they know that they're not going to be embarrassed if they get it wrong, because you're not going to berate them, you're going to tell them, good try, I'm so glad that you tried this. Then they're willing to go above and beyond what you've asked them and try and bring solutions to you for things that they're working on. So what causes this situation, this embarrassment is either lack of training or poor training or miscommunication. Often it's the employer's fault, and nobody wants to be told that it's your fault. But 95% of the time when we see this, it's not the worker's fault that this is going on, it's the employer's fault. I can see certain things that they can and should do differently to prevent the situation. So training will often take care of it. Giving a different perspective on something will take care of it. There's a lot of things that you can try, including talking to them, saying, hey, I think you're stuck on something and I want you to. I want to know what it is, what are you stuck on that I can help you prevent? Another couple things that cause this is assuming that they can do something, or assuming that they can do something well, or not following up, you know, just letting them go, giving them instructions and not following up ever again, not asking how are they doing with it, that can cause the situation. So when you give someone something to do, you've got to follow up with them. Also, this is a permanent problem. It's something that doesn't go away with time, which is really unfortunate. But the more you do things with this person, the less of a problem it becomes. So let me give you an example of this one time. I hired this girl, absolutely amazing, super talented, her parents are in the us, she speaks perfect English, she can talk on the phone and solve people's problems. She's really, really great. And I asked her to do some SEO work and she hated it. She absolutely hated it. But she didn't tell me that, and she didn't want to tell me because her boss asked her to do something. So she continued making phone calls for us, but stopped sending me daily emails because she was too embarrassed to say that she doesn't want to do this. And she hates it, the SEO stuff. And after a month or so, I finally confronted her and said, hey, what's going on? You've disappeared. Why? And she finally told me, I hate this, I don't want to do it, and it's terrible. I said, okay, that's fine and easy. You don't have to disappear. You don't have to do this again. Please don't ever disappear again. If you disappear again, I cannot have you work for me. This is too much. So then she continues doing good work for me for a while and then disappears again. And this other time, it was a different issue. But even though I had told her up front, you cannot disappear again like this, or I will have to let you go. We had to let her go. She was a great worker, but it's an ongoing problem that persists. So you've got to do things to prevent it actively. And I don't think with her, I had done enough actively to prevent it. So my second pillar is recognize that you just hired a human. They're going to make mistakes. This is always going to happen. They're never going to do things perfectly. And since they're a full time worker, they may not be an expert at what you have them doing. So there are numerous things that you can do to prevent this or to improve the situation. First, always take the blame. Even if it's clearly their fault. Say to them, you know, I'm sure I made a mistake in teaching you how to do this, or oh, I see where I messed up here. This is my fault. I'm so sorry. If you will take the blame, it will make your relationship with them so much better. Second, always give positive feedback first. So after you've said, or maybe, maybe they didn't do something totally wrong, but there's just things that aren't great and there's things that are good. Always find some way to say, I really like what you did here, or I really like your effort here, or this piece looks really great, then get into the negative. However, we have this problem and let's fix this and let's work through that. The more you can give positive feedback first, such a big difference it'll make. In fact, it's such a big deal that one of my workers brought it to my attention recently that I hadn't been doing this with her and she knows that this is one of the things I talk about. And she said, you know, John, you. You haven't been doing this with me, and it really bothers me so Just the fact that you give positive feedback first really makes a difference. So my third thing is to have patience. You know, you're not going to get everything done correctly the first time. It's just how it works. Sometimes it will. I have a good friend that says, everything this guy does is perfect the first time, which I don't know if I believe it, but that's what he says. So the more patience you can have, obviously only up to a certain point, the more trust you're going to build in this person where they will start to do things that are knowing that you're going to be patient with them, saying, if I mess up, it'll be okay, and he'll allow me to make this mistake, but I can try new things. So you'll get things. Like, one of my guys, one time, I had asked him to do something on a website, and my instructions were very unclear, and I didn't realize that, but so he goes through it and then sends it back to me and says, sir, this what you're looking for. I'm not sure if this is what you want. And he sent it back to me and he tried something and it wasn't what I had wanted. And I realized, oh, my instructions were terrible here. But because I had had patience with him over time, now he's willing to try new things. So my fourth thing within this is give praise, and give lots of praise when they do things right. Tell them, oh, yes, this is awesome. I'm so happy with you. Maybe give them a bonus. Give lots of praise when things go right. So I want to show you an example of this. So look at this graphic that one of my guys did for me. So in this, I had him lay out this page, and he added this little graphic here to it, this little robot thing, which, you know, this is a page about outsourcing. And to add a robot to a page about outsourcing kind of gives the wrong impression, right? It looks nice, but it's not the right thing to add there. And then over here, these bullet points are like toxic icons. They're for, like, a toxic waste thing. And so when he sent this to me, I had a big mix of emotions and a laugh because he sent me a robot, which he's not a robot. I don't know why he put a robot in this about outsourcing. And these toxic symbols were like, oh, man, we cannot have this. But the page looks good, right? So I said, you know what? You did a great job with this. The page looks fantastic. Here are a Couple things we need to change. Number one, let's find a different graphic here. A robot gives the wrong impression and these toxic things. Yeah, we just can't put that there. So you know, there's kind of a mix there in how often things are going to go right and how often things are going to go wrong and the corrections you're going to have to make in all of it. Just remember you're not doing the work, they're doing the work. So my last thing within this is to recognize that they're human and be human yourself, Be nice to them. Recognize that they have problems and they have families and they have needs and they have things going on in their lives that may cause them to have to fly to Manila for a couple days and not work for you. And don't yell at them when this happens. It's going to happen. And be kind to them. The nicer you are, the better of an experience you're going to have. Other ways to do this is to ask them about their family. You know, how is your family, how's your brother, how's your mom? Give them a bonus on their birthday, you know, send them $15 extra maybe the month of their birthday saying happy birthday. You know, they'll be thrilled. They'll be thrilled that you remembered their birthday along with that, you know, the Philippines is a hard place to live. They have typhoons that come through and just destroy things. And when something like that happens, you might want to send them some money to help them rebuild their lives. Or you know, when their mom has major surgery and they're taking out a loan to pay for it, you might consider helping them pay for it. It'll go a long ways towards them really looking up to you as their boss and really building long term loyalty. So along with the birthdays thing, let me show you, show you this email sequence that I have with one of my guys. So I had sent him an extra bonus for his for his birthday and said thank you for doing great work for me. Thanks for always being willing to improve and listening to my nagging about the daily email. This guy's not good at sending me the daily email and so I nag him about it, but he's an amazing worker. His response back was thank you sir for being a great, fantastic and caring boss. You're the best boss in the world. You know, the more time you'll spend with them and the more you care about them, the better of response you'll have from them. Another thing that you can do with them is Ask them how they like their job. You know, how do you like your job? What don't you like about it? What can I do to help you? What can I do better in my work? You know, what things do you see in our business that we could do better that might make your life easier? All these things go towards showing that you're a human and you care about them and that you recognize that they're a human and that they have a personality and a life and needs. And the more you do that, the more they'll trust you. So my third thing in this is, in my pillars is look at this as a long term investment, where if you're hiring a contract worker, you know it's a short term thing. If you're hiring a long term employee, you know this is going to be long term and you can, your brain will allow you to do other things because it's long term. So one of the things it will allow you to do is to give them training where you wouldn't normally give someone training. And that will help them do things that are different in your business that someone else couldn't do, which frees up your time in looking at as a long term investment, you can also spend time solving problems with them where you wouldn't do that with a contract worker, you know, a contract worker, you would expect them to be able to do it all themselves right now. And with a permanent worker, you can take that extra time, even if it takes you longer to teach them to do it than it would for you to do it yourself. The next time that comes up, it'll take them less time. And the next time something else comes up that's similar but not the same, they'll still have that extra knowledge that'll help them solve that faster. So the more you look at this as a long term investment, the better off you're going to be in working with this person. A couple things to consider in this is providing incentives. One of the things that provides good incentives to Filipinos is to give them ownership of something. It shows that you trust them. So like this project, this is your project. I want you to own this and I want you to take care of it. Assuming of course, you've given them training and you made yourself available to them. Providing financial incentives is often a disincentive to Filipinos. So I've had employers come to me and say, you know, I know this is a long term thing, so I'm going to give my employees a piece of the business if it succeeds and what I've seen is that that's actually a disincentive to that Filipino because they say, oh, if I don't succeed, then he's going to fire me. If I don't do this work, then I'm not going to get this money, he's going to lower my salary, you know, and that often does not. It backfires on you. So in long term, business ownership is probably not a good incentive.