John Jonas takes month-long vacations while his Filipino outsourcing team keeps working. With proper training, clear responsibilities, and project management tools, the work gets done and unnecessary tasks disappear. He walks through his pre-trip checklist: announce your absence, set response expectations, flag what's urgent vs. deferrable, and identify decisions that can't wait.
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Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing to the Philippines. This is episode 133, how my Filipino team works while I'm on vacation. So for the last month being in Europe, riding our bikes, I was on a mini retirement like Tim Ferriss talks about. In the four hour work week we started in Paris, we rode east into Germany, into the Black Forest. The riding was amazing. Then we rode south into Switzerland, rode along the Bodensee into Austria, rode up over some passes which was spectacular, back into Germany and through the up the romantic road and into Munich and into Austria and Salzburg and lakes area of Austria. And it's. It was really cool. I didn't take my laptop, I didn't have a laptop, I just had my phone and I did very little work. So it was really like a mini retirement. The first time I took a mini retirement was in 2008 and it taught me a, a whole lot of things. In 2008 I took my family for a month and we went to Costa Rica and sat on the beach for a month. Then we repeated it in 2010 and went to the Philippines for five weeks. Then we repeated in 2011 and went to Florida. And so we've done this a bunch of times and every time I've learned some things. So how do I know that my Filipino team is working while I'm on vacation? Well, to be honest, like the first time I did it, I had no idea what was going to happen. I didn't know if they were going to keep working. I didn't know. Like all I knew was there was still work to be done and I had given them processes to do and what would happen. I thought I'd be able to communicate with them really, really well. And then the Internet in Costa Rica sucked and I did very, very little during that month. They also knew that I wouldn't be back for a while. And so I was half expecting them to kind of slow work down, which work definitely slowed some while I was gone the first time I did it. But my business didn't fall apart, that's for sure. In fact, when I came back, things were better than when I had left it. Not that the business has without me, which it had grown, although I was directing things still. But what I found was that unnecessary things got dropped. Like things that I thought, oh, I'll just continue doing this, but they were, they weren't required in the business. They kind of just fell by the wayside. I didn't Keep doing them. People in the Philippines weren't, didn't, weren't doing it yet because I hadn't given stuff off to them. And those unnecessary things got dropped. And while the important things got solidified and moved upon and improved upon and got passed off to other people. So those were two really big lessons for me, like drop the unimportant things. The important things need to be better, systematized and improved and done, which is that all happened in the first mini retirement that I did. Since then, having done this multiple times, I've realized a number of things. So when your OFS has the right training, the right tools, and a clear set of responsibilities and tasks to do, you really kind of don't have to worry about them. Stop working while you're gone. None of my team has ever really just stopped working. Things have slowed down maybe when I wasn't giving direction or they didn't have all three of these things. They didn't have the right, the right tasks to do. They didn't have clear responsibilities. Maybe they didn't have the right tools. Maybe I was still too involved in those processes. And so when I left, I wasn't as involved and things slowed down and. But now that I have 40 people working, 40 or so people working for me, I also have people doing project management in our team and things have continued to run really smoothly while I'm gone. The biggest thing that I need to do now when I leave is just let them know, hey, I'm going to be gone. Don't expect responses from me. And here are the important projects that we need to continue to move on, and here are the ones that can kind of be pushed to the side, and here are the decisions that need to be made. So those are the things that I do now when I leave, and then the business continues. So while I was gone for a month, just now, everything continued, everything grew. Things are really good. When I got back, all I had to do was catch up on email, which I had mostly kept up on, and then start to push projects forward again. It's really good when you have a team of people working for you and especially when they're trained and things are systematized and you have processes in place and tasks and responsibilities. To that end, the reason I created VAs made easy was to allow you to give training to your workers to create systems and processes in your business without you having to create the systems and processes. We've done that work. You give it to them. You have to work, you have to set those things up in your business, but the training is already there to help you create these things. Vasmadeeasy.com.
