John Jonas learned to hand off creating done-for-you trainings to online Filipino specialists by first failing at direct delegation, then hiring external experts who underperformed, then getting involved to set standards and train an OFS to manage the whole hiring and vetting process. The key: be involved early, expect iterations, create clear structure, and be patient.
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Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with OFS online Filipino specialists. This is episode 218, handing off a process to an OFS. So in this episode, I want to talk about how I typically hand off a process, whether it's a simple process or a complicated process. In this case, it's a complicated process how I typically hand something off to someone, and you can take what I do here and apply it to your business and how you do things and. Or you can try and do it a different way. It doesn't really matter as long as you're handing something off and understand the pitfalls that go along with it. So it would be super nice to hire someone and say, hey, go do my SEO for me, or whatever it is. Typically, that's not how it works, though. Usually just saying, hey, go do something you're an expert. Go do this isn't going to work super well. They're scared of doing it wrong. They're scared that you're not going to be happy with the work that they do. There's all kinds of pitfalls with that. So here's typically what I'll do. So for a lot of years, I wanted to create these done for you, trainings for you, so that you can hand them off to your workers. And Years ago, like 15 years ago, I was creating these for myself, and then I started making them available to other people. But after a number of years, I stopped creating them for myself and I stopped making them available and I stopped updating them. So I stopped selling them because I didn't want to sell something that was outdated. So. But I knew, I knew people really, really want these. I've had so many requests for them over the years, and when I was selling them before, tons and tons of people were buying them, so I wanted to create them again. So the first thing that I wanted to do was I wanted to say to someone on my team, hey, go do this. But I knew that wasn't going to work. So I created the concept, which. The concept is that I'm going to create a training. I'm going to make sure it's filtered for the Filipino va, the ofs, foreign employer relationship, because there are some interesting dynamics with that that I've talked about lots of times. So that's the concept. I'm going to create that training. You're going to give it to your ofs. It's going to be a general thing for any business, so you can give it to them. So that's what I want to create. And I determined early on I'm not the one who's going to be creating these trainings. I need to find experts to create them. Number one, I don't have the knowledge in all of these different areas to create these trainings. Number two, I just don't have the mental capacity to be creating trainings in addition to whatever else I'm doing. So at first, I just tried explaining this process that I had invented in my mind to one of my ofs. Nothing happened. We didn't get anything done. So I tried adding a different person. I was like, oh, maybe you're just not the right person to do this. So I added. I added another person to it. Again, nothing happened. Which is not to say that they didn't do anything. They tried it and it just didn't work. And I had given them, you know, a good idea of how to make this work, I thought, and what I told them to do, it just didn't work. And so nothing was happening. But I didn't understand where it was failing. So at this point, I've done enough of this to recognize, okay, I have to be involved here in the beginning to figure this out. And so I went to onlinejobs.ph I created the job posts for hiring people to create training about SEO or paid ads, marketing, Facebook marketing, or like Pinterest marketing or how to create content. I created a bunch of different jobs and post them and put them out there. And I got applicants of people who were willing to create training about these different subjects, people who were really good at it. And I started interviewing them and I realized, oh, yeah, my job post just isn't right. So I went back and I modified my job post. I got much, much better qualified applicants this time. So I started interviewing them and I hired someone for a couple different things. And then I started getting training back from them and it was really terrible. And so I went back to them, was like, okay, well, now I have a better framework for this. I understand. I see what you've done, which is someone who doesn't work for me that is just now creating something for me. And so I went back to them and I created a structure around it. Now, this isn't. None of this is to say that someone on my team couldn't have done this. It just would have been really difficult for them because they're trying to create it to my standards, but I don't know how to do that. I don't know how to create it to my standards. Because I haven't done it and they don't know how to create it to my standards. They don't know what my standards really are. They don't know how to do this. So I understand. And I've done this enough times over the years that I needed to be involved. So I went through the entire process a couple times. I got a couple of these trainings done, then I had a really good idea of how to turn this over to someone on my team. So I went back to that very first person that I asked to do it the first time and had them do it with, given what I now knew. And they went through it and hired someone and it worked perfectly and I gave them some feedback through the process. And the second time we went back and did it again and I didn't. I wasn't involved at all that time. And since then we've created. I think we're working like number 45 training, number 45 right now, or something like that, where I haven't had to do. I had to do like the first two or three of them and then I had to work through numbers four and five a little bit and then nothing else again because I was willing to work through that initial process with them. So now when we create these trainings, it's my OFS who posts the job, who interviews the candidates, who ask for their outlines, who watches over their training. She picks the best person. She makes sure that they know what they're doing. She makes sure the training is correct for the. For the OFS foreign employer relationship so they don't disappear on you. There's all kinds of stuff going on there that they're capable of doing. It just took me to be involved a little bit. So the point of telling this whole thing is ofs aren't magic. Like, getting something off of your plate isn't magic. It's not just like, snap your fingers and it's. And it's done. It's a process. And it's a process for me still. Even the first time I did this was 2005, and it's still a process for me in different areas of my business. Sometimes though, it's like, oh, yeah, I'm just going to create this screen capture training and hey, here's what I think I want you to do, but you can figure out this on your own and go do it. I don't really care. And sometimes it's super simple like that, but other times it just takes a lot more work. And once that work is done, it gets really amazing for a really long time. So if you're willing to be patient with this and you're willing to work through things a little bit, you can get really amazing things done by amazing people at super affordable rates. You just have to be willing to be patient a little bit.
