Ep. 01 Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing!

Hello, and welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing Podcast, the podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing your work. My name is John Jonas, and this is episode number one. Every episode of this podcast is going to contain something to help you get better at outsourcing. It's going to contain tips, it's going to contain new ways to find people. It's going to contain better ways to manage people or to find people, or tips on things that they can do for you. So my goal with this is every episode you listen to, you'll come away with something that you think you could do to improve what you're doing in outsourcing. So. So with that, I'd like to start with where my journey came from and how it relates to you and where you are right now. So, in 2004 is when I got started. I had just graduated from college. I was working a job, and I was trying to run a business on the side, and it was hard. I was working, you know, 60 hours a week, and I would come home from work and I would work. And I decided at one point I just needed help. And I decided to do the only thing I knew how to do, which was to find someone local that would work for me. And that was a risk to me at the time. I mean, I wasn't making that much money. My job was paying $35,000 a year, which wasn't that much. So paying someone $15 an hour was really kind of risky. And I didn't know if they could make enough money to make it justifiable, you know, if they weren't super productive, it just wasn't going to work for me. So anyway, I tried it, and I tried it four different times, and the first thing every one of them did was quit because they realized, oh, you're making money online. This is not that hard. I'm gonna do this on my own. And that was enough for me to say, like, okay, until I have something that's, like, really solid that someone couldn't go do on their own, I'm not gonna hire someone locally anymore. The next thing I tried, obviously, was India, because that's what everyone does. You go to India where there's a billion people, so you've gotta be able to find someone good there. At least that's what everyone talked about. So I did it, and it was a disaster. Like most people's outsourcing to India experiences. It's not that India is not good. It's that there's some serious Cultural barriers to making it work there that this is why most people think outsourcing is a disaster. Outsourcing is a headache. It's a babysitting job. It's just a problem. It comes from this. And it's not just India, it's Pakistan. It's that area of the world. They're good people. It's just really hard for outsourcing. So the next thing I tried was Upwork, which actually, it was Elance at the time. Elance and Odesk merged into Upwork a couple years ago. And I tried. I thought, this time, yes, I figured this out. I found this guy, and he's gonna write these articles for me, and I don't have to do it. And this is amazing. And when he wrote the articles, this burden came crashing down on me, where his only job was to write articles. That's all he would do because he was a writer and he wouldn't do anything else. And then the burden of, oh, I have to do something with these 50 articles that he wrote, I have to do all the rest of the work now. And it just gave me more work to do. I'm already working 60 hours a week, and I don't have time to deal with these articles. And this just isn't going to work for me. And at that point, I was frustrated. This is probably. This is mid-2005 now. I'd spent a good year trying different things, and, you know, I'm frustrated, and I'm still working a job, and I'm still working my own business. And I had a conversation with the owner of backcountry.com, which obviously they're a huge company. And he was doing a side thing that was similar to my main thing. And he said, you know, when you're ready to start outsourcing some of this stuff, make sure you go to the Philippines with it. That was a big surprise to me. I was like, what? Why? And he said, well, you've tried India. In India, when you tell them something and they say yes, that means yes. I heard something come out of your mouth. It doesn't mean yes. I understood what you said. And to me, that was like, what? Like, I had no idea. And this just kind of gave me hope. Like what? He said, maybe there's something different out there. And I had. Because I never considered that maybe a different country would make a difference. And I didn't do it. He gave me a reference to where I could hire someone. I didn't do it. I waffled for a couple months I went back and forth like, I don't think I could keep someone busy full time, which is the reference he gave me. It required full time work. I don't think I can afford this. I don't, I don't know that they can do great work for me. And after a couple months, I decided finally, you know, it doesn't matter. None of these worries matter because I can't keep doing what I'm currently doing. You know, the three other ways that I've tried this hasn't worked. And I can't keep doing what I'm doing. So I have to try something else. So I went through this agency, I paid them $750 a. They brought me a person and they said, okay, here's your guy. And I started talking to the guy and he knew nothing. He knew nothing. And it completely changed my life. It was the most liberating experience I have ever had. All of a sudden I had this guy whose full time job was to do anything that I asked him to do. And not that he knew how to do it, but I could teach him how to do whatever I wanted him to do and he would do it for me. And I had to fill his 40 hours, which meant I had to step away from working in my business so much and I had to work on my business in order to keep him busy, which all of a sud. Just freed up tons of my time. So that whole process of that I talked about the articles thing. Yeah, I handed that over to him. He wrote the articles and then he submitted the articles and then he wrote the headlines and he wrote the. He created the links and he started linking them to my website and linking other websites together. And I started teaching him SEO. And so he started doing all these other things for me. And it was like this amazing burden of I know how to do all these things and I'm trying to do all these things, but I just don't have the time in a day to get all these things done. And now he was doing it for me and I was able to focus more on more important things. And that's the experience that I hope this podcast leads you to. So if you're listening to this podcast, you're in probably one of two situations. Either you have people in the Philippines working for you, you have a virtual assistant, you have a social media person, you have a designer, a programmer, a webmaster, something like that, Right. Or you're in the second situation where you want to have someone working for you, but you don't know how to find someone. You don't know where to find them. You don't know how to hire someone. You don't know how to find someone good. You're worried about finding someone good. You're worried about taxes or how do I trust this person? Or what are the downsides? Or there's all kinds of things that I'm gonna cover as I go through this podcast that will help you feel comfortable in saying, okay, I know where to find someone. I know how to do it. I know exactly what to do here. I know how to weed out the bad. I know how to find the good. I'm gonna cover these things for you. So my name is John Jonas. The format of this podcast should be about four times a week. I should have an episode and it should just show up for you. And they will be very short. They could be two minutes. They could be 10 minutes. They won't be very long, though. Each one of them will have probably a story about my life, the people that you're hiring's lives, or someone else who is successfully hiring people in the Philippines and their life and what's going on for them and how they're doing this. Stay tuned. I'm super excited. See you in the next episode.