Ep. 315: More Tips About Hiring An OFS For Tax Businesses

Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing to the Philippines. This is episode 315, three tips about working with OFS. So this podcast initially was intended to be a response to the tax podcast that I had. About a month ago. I got a really good response from one of our customers, Win, who had some advice for the person who sent in the original question, Kathy. And he has some really good, really good advice. And then I'm going to expound on those three things that he talks about. If you're watching this on YouTube, you can see I got my yellow shirt on today. It's a new shirt. I only wear plain, plain things, unlogoed or un. I don't really need to be advertising for other people's stuff. The only thing I will wear is something if I own it. And then I just like to have lots of colors so that I can choose what colors to wear with my shorts for that day or my pants for that day. Today I have my yellow and it's brand new and. And I kind of like it if you're on the podcast. Sorry, you can't see it, but it's a bright, bright yellow. Okay, so here are the three tips that Wynn gives in his advice to Kathy. And I'm going to expand upon these tips from Win because they're really good. So Win says, I have so much advice I can share with Kathy, but the top few would be one. You'll manage to find ways to keep your first ofs busy full time. If you hire an income tax preparer, chances are they should know how to keep your books for your own business, even if you don't have any bookkeeping clients. So this is a super common thing that employers are worried about before they hire someone. Oh, I don't know if I can keep someone busy. And what we actually find is you don't know if you can keep someone busy until you've hired someone and then you realize, oh, my gosh, I have so many things that they could do for me if you've hired them on a salary. Now, if you hire them hourly, which you can do, then you don't really care if you keep them busy, so it doesn't really matter. But if you hire them on a salary, part time or full time, when they have extra time, it's amazing what this will do for your mindset as a business owner. You start to find things to pass off to them. You start to give them, like Wynn says, if they're an income tax preparer, well they can probably also do your bookkeeping for your own business. And we've found super similar things. Like if they're a content writer, they can probably also contribute to SEO and to social media. Or someone who's doing customer support can also do data verification. So many of our people have dual responsibilities. Because we hire them, they get into the thing. Either there's not enough work in that one task to keep them busy full time so we give them something el or we end up there's too much work there so we hire another person and then that person gets some other responsibility. Super common to give other responsibilities. Just recognize when you hire someone, if you hire an income tax preparer, they're not going to build your website for you. I see too many people that are like, oh, I want someone who can do my social media and build my website and also do really good graphic design for me. Like, yeah, that's probably not going to happen. I mean maybe you'll get really, really, really, really, really lucky and find someone that can do those things. But generally we keep our people within the same range of skills. Now I will tell you this. So we recently hired one of our so I have a really, really good front end programmer guy. He just does like our HTML. He's not a programmer, he does HTML CSS, front end stuff, the stuff that you interact with on the website. And we hired his wife recently and we hired his wife because we needed some data verification tasks completed. We had way too much going on since we're verifying every single job seeker who comes into the site now. We just had too much volum and we needed another person. So we brought her on. When we brought her on I asked her what other skills do you have or what would you like to do for the business? And she said, oh, I'm actually pretty good at Google AdWords. But she just needed a job because she had had a baby and she didn't have a job and she wasn't working and so she was just looking to find something. I was like, okay, well we have our adwords covered really well so that's not really an option right now. So she started working. It's probably been six months and the role for our AdWords opened up. I didn't like what was happening recently and so she just transitioned and she's working on AdWords and she's still doing data verification. So just so as you get into this, be aware you're probably going to find other things where you can have someone do Work for you. So wins advice. Number two, be prepared to be flexible. As planned and unplanned brownouts occur often and they may not have power and or Internet access. So there's a couple things here. Number one, unplanned or planned brownouts or blackouts. So the Internet goes out in the Philippines. The power goes out in the Philippines often when they don't have enough power supply. The way they deal with that, rather than increasing the infrastructure, they just turn the power off and they plan these power outages. So like they'll say, oh, in this neighborhood your power is going to go off from four to six, in this neighborhood your power is going to go off from 6 to 8 and this neighborhood is going to go off from 8 to 10 and they'll just rotate it and your time could change each day. So that's something to be aware of. You may not know when that is. If you have like very time specific tasks. Well, just check with your OFS and see. Hey, do you guys have rolling brown outs? Do you have them during the hot months? How reliable is your Internet? Just so you know, in the Philippines typically the Internet's pretty dang reliable. When I started it was not. Now it is. And almost everyone can get a wired home connection and they can buy a backup wireless connection, which if they're having to buy both these things, you might want to consider paying for it for them to make things easier for them. Next. So the part about be prepared to be flexible. So what we have found is when someone is super rigid, when an employer is super rigid, like you have to be here from 9 to 5 eastern time and you show up at 9:15 and the employer is really mad at you. Well, I mean that as an employer it's just unlikely to work. The Philippines isn't always super on time. It's an island nation. There's a lot of island mentality. Not everywhere, but depending on who you hire and where you hire them, like having that rigidity can be really hard for a lot of people. And so be prepared to be flexible. We let all of our people work on the times that they want, except for our customer support people where we're trying to cover 24 hour shifts, double covered. And so we let them work out their own shifts among the six or eight of them, whatever it is, I'm not exactly sure. And so they work out their shifts and then if someone's gone, they ask someone else to cover their shift so they can cover someone else else's. I recently saw some, some pictures of Someone, they were at a dinner, they still had shift, their shift to cover. And so they were checking their email during dinner, which is fine with me. I would have told them they didn't have to. But they're trying to get their work done during their shift and. And then when they're off, they're off. So just be prepared to be flexible. It'll be really helpful. Okay. So Nguyen's third piece of advice, he says the better you treat them, the more they will reciprocate and go the extra mile for you. Wow. I cannot tell you how true that is. These are human beings. So often people go into this thinking they're hiring a robot on the other side of the world who doesn't have feelings. They just. Just get the job done. That's all you care about. And that's not how this works. These are people and they have feelings and needs and problems and wants and desires and. And yeah, they want to get the work done, but they also want to be treated well. And the better you treat them, the better they'll treat you. Like, if you treat them well, they will try and go above and beyond what you ask them to do. They will try and change. They will try and improve their skills. They'll try all kinds of stuff to make sure that you are happy with their performance. If you don't treat them well, if you don't gain their trust, if you don't do things to help them, yeah, none of that holds. They are not super interested in going above and beyond if you're not. If you're not treating them well. So Nguyen's three pieces of advice. You'll find ways to keep your people busy, not hard. Be prepared to be flexible. And number three, the better you treat them, the better they'll treat you.