John Jonas explains applying the 80/20 (Pareto) principle to personal life and business—especially content creation—and advocates delegating non-core work to overseas Filipino staff (OFS). He uses a skiing anecdote to illustrate that a small, high-leverage action produces most results, references Steve Ryken’s similar approach, and promotes ready-made OFS training at vasmadeeasy.com.
Chapters
8020 principle. With your OFS. 8020 principle, the Pareto principle, everybody knows it. 20% of the work that you do has produces 80% of the effects. Or in business, 20% of the work produces 80% of the results. The other 80% is kind of silly. And this is true in almost everything we do. This year, I worked so hard with my 8 year old skiing. I wanted him to improve. And if you've skied before, he's doing pizza, he's doing snow plowing, this is his fourth or fifth year skiing and he should be doing better than that. I've worked with my 10 year old to help her ski better and she like clicked with her one, one thing that I taught her clicked with her. So for him, though, it's kind of been a struggle to get him to stop, stop doing the pizza with his skis and to start getting on his edges. And I worked on him with it all year long. I made him ski almost every Saturday. We, we often skied another day during the week. Good skis. I let him pick the ski runs that we did. I forced him to ski steep, gnarly runs. I let him ski flat groomers, I let him ski with friends. I gave him rewards. In the end, skiing with friends was the only thing that mattered to him. And this last Friday, we had just an amazing day with him where everything kind of came together, everything that I had taught him because he got to ski with friends. It was that 20% that mattered to him that helped him change the way he skied. Right? So 20% of the work produced 80% of the results. It was amazing. In my business, that 20% is content creation. I know that creating content is what, is what grows the business. Everything else that I do is kind of like, okay, like this has to be done, but it's not super important or not that it's not super important, but it just doesn't, it doesn't produce sales, it doesn't produce income, it doesn't produce results, right? So for me, even though I don't love it, I force myself to produce content almost every single day. That's my first responsibility. I don't respond to email first. I don't check my basecamp tasks first, what my team is doing first. I produce content first because that's what's going to drive the business forward, producing content. So I even delegate some of that producing content to my team in the Philippines. So, so I let my ofs do a bunch of the content creation or I let them help me with my content. Creation what I'm doing. So, for example, my OFS wrote this email about the 8020 principle, and then I modified it because I didn't love what she had said and how I wanted to talk more about me and how this works for me and for you. So for you, I want to know, like, what's your 20%? What is the 20% in your business that really pushes things forward? And then evaluate, where are you spending your time? Are you spending your time on that 20%, or are you spending most of your time on the 80%, avoiding the 20%. And that's what I did for a lot of time. Then can you delegate some of that 20% to an OFS? And can you delegate almost all of the 80% to an OFS? So almost all of my 80% is done in the Philippines. I would say 35% of my 20% is done in the Philippines. They do, like, 35% of my content creation work. And then I do the rest of it. Can you hand off more? So this is an interesting thing. I got this video from Steve Ryken this past week. For Steve, the 20% for him is sourcing products and creating YouTube videos. He runs an online business. He's been doing it for about a decade. He sells stuff on Amazon. He sells stuff on ebay. He sells stuff on his own websites. E commerce. He keeps his company growing because he understands how important the 20% is, because he focuses on that 20%, because that's what makes him money. And then he has a team of Filipino workers to do everything else. And so I love that Steve focuses on the 20%. He's recognized to focus on it. And then the rest of it should go to someone else. And for me, that's in the Philippines. For Steve, that's in the Philippines. For you, whatever it takes to get that 20% somewhere or the 80% somewhere else, get that off of your plate. If you want to watch Steve's video about him talking through this, there's a link in the description below. So you can. So you can get Steve's video. One of the things that I really love that he talks about is being patient with your OFS as you train them, because it doesn't. It doesn't work the first time. Usually, like, when you give training to someone, it's not. People often, like, expect everything to be perfect the first time, and it's not. And for him, like, he's really successful at this, and he's talking about how, yeah, you got to train your ofs, and then it's not going to work the first time, so you have to work with them through it. If you don't have the training to give to your ofs or you don't want to create the training or you don't know how to create the training, I've created that with vasmadeeasy.com it is done for you trainings that you can hand off to your ofs that will teach them a full principle, a full industry really, and then help you to work with them through that. It doesn't just turn it over to them and say go do this and never talk to me again. It gives them specific instructions on things that they should and shouldn't do and gives you specific things. Your guide is usually about two pages long and it gives you specific things that you need to like make decisions on and tell them and help them work through so that they can do the work for you. These trainings are full blown courses on like Pinterest marketing or LinkedIn marketing or Facebook marketing or SEO or graphic design or E commerce or Amazon or all kinds of things. Lead generation. A bunch of lead generation topics that you can hand off to your ofs. They get the education, they learn how to help improve your business, they gain trust in you. They learn that you care about them, they get to work with you. It just Training works so well and as Steve says in his video, be patient as you go through this because it's not going to work exactly the first time, but it pays off hundreds of times over as you do it. Do 20% of the work, delegate the other 80%. Actually do the 20% that pushes the business forward, delegate the other 80% and delegate whatever of that 20%. You can.
