John Jonas leaves town for 80 of 157 days without telling anyone by delegating customer service, social posts, and lead follow-up to Online Filipino Specialists. He took a Lake Powell houseboat trip with Starlink and kept his business running. His advice: hire someone for one task, iterate until it works, then delegate more.
Questions this episode answers
Episode 359.
February 21, 2024.
80 out of 157 days.
Lake Powell (houseboat on the lake).
Starlink.
Chapters
Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with OFS. This is episode 359, how to go out of Town and Not Tell Anyone. So I recently went to Lake Powell a couple weeks ago. Hopefully you can see a couple of the pictures that I have here. And I didn't tell anyone that I was going. We went for a week and took our houseboat out a couple hours into the lake and stayed there the entire week. Now we had Internet while we were there. Stuck. Starlink is amazing and really contributes to a week where you have no other human contact on the lake. But nobody knew that I was out of town or that I was going out of town. And frankly this summer I spent 80 out of 157 days out of town, not at home. So more than half the time I spent out of town. And almost every time I didn't tell anybody that I was leaving. So sometimes I went out of cell service, sometimes not. But either way I just don't tell people about it. And also I don't bring a laptop anymore. I never bring a laptop anymore. Any work that I'm going to do I can do from my phone. So here's the amazing part about this, is that while I'm gone, so I'm at Lake Powell and when I'm at Powell, I'm not really answering email. I'm not really. I'm not. I'm not creating, that's for sure. So while I'm there, customer service still got done. Onlinejobs, PH software still improved, social media posts were still made, new job seeker accounts were approved and verified or rejected, ads got created and posted, leads got generated and followed up with nothing really changed while I was gone. Everyone still did their work. So now I'm not saying that your business can do this, maybe it can, maybe it can't. Maybe your business depends a lot more on you than mine does on me. But that's probably a choice now. But I have never yet once met a business that could not improve by a little bit of human automation to free up the owner's time. So whatever it is you need, whatever you need to get done, you can hire a specialist who will work online from the Philippines, an OFS Online Filipino specialist to help you get that thing done. So now how do I go out of town without telling anyone? And how can you do this? So first off, this is not something that's going to happen overnight. This is going to take time, it's going to take a process and it's going to take you being purposeful with freeing up your time and delegating your tasks. So if you haven't hired an OFS yet, the first thing to do is to hire someone to do something that you are currently doing in your business. Something that will get some time off of your plate. And that really is the key to leaving, to walking away for your business and not being responsible for things. You have to be delegating things to other people so that they are then responsible for those tasks and you are no longer responsible. The buck doesn't stop with you anymore. So for me, this took a lot of years. I started with one task. I had someone else do it for me. I worked through it with them. They didn't do so great at first. And we worked through it and worked through it and worked through it until it got great. But I'm still doing that today. I recently took something that I do and I gave it to someone else. Now I'm at a point now where I'm giving really, really perf, personal and high level things to people. And when they did it the first time, it just, it wasn't that great. I had to go through it again and again and again and again until we got it right. And there are also other things where now I'm handing off like I don't want to make these four clicks every day. So I want you to make these four clicks for me so that it saves me eight seconds. Yep, saves me eight seconds. But if I can do that across a whole bunch of things, it does more than just save eight seconds. It saves my, saves me from having to make decisions. It saves me from having to think about it. It saves me all kinds of things that. But then that's not my responsibility. And so I can focus my brain power, my decision power on really critical decisions for the business. So you want to go on more trips away, you want to get away from your business more, you want to go on vacation more, hire more help. It's affordable, it's easy. Onlinejobs, phone.
