Ep. 376: How hiring an OFS compares to hiring a VA agency

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 376, hiring an OFS versus hiring through an agency. So it would seem that you could hire an ofs, an online Filipino specialist through an agency. And these two things are not mutually exclusive. But that's not actually the case, as I talked about in the last episode, where the agency's very unlikely to find you a specialist. They are more likely to just pull a warm body off the street and tell you, here's your webmaster. Which is exactly what they told me. They said, do you want a webmaster or a programmer? And I said, I want a content writer. And they said, well, do you want a webmaster or a programmer? I said, okay, I'll take a webmaster. And they said, here's your webmaster. And it turned out he didn't know anything about the web. He couldn't build a website or manage a website or. Or he couldn't do anything. All he did was know English. Right, so they weren't providing me an online Filipino specialist. They were providing me an online Filipino warm body. Right, so what's the difference between hiring an ofs, whether that comes from online jobs or upwork or fiverr or wherever, versus an agency? Here's the benefits of hiring an ofs. So the first thing is you get exactly what you want. If you go to onlinejobs phone and you are looking for a senior accountant, well, it's really easy to find that person at online jobs. If you're looking for someone to make cold calls for your real estate business, well, there are hundreds of people experienced at cold calling real estate prospects like you can find super duper specialized skills. Then you get access to talent all over the Philippines. There's a hundred million people in the Philippines. That's the population of the Philippines. And rather than having to have people within 10 miles of the agency, which is such a tiny fraction of the population, you get to recruit people from all over the Philippines because you don't really care what region they're from. All you care is that they speak good English and that they fit your personality. So when you go to onlinejobs ph, you get to recruit from the entire country, millions of people versus the 6 or 7 that the agency is finding that might have some skills maybe within their tiny, tiny area. It just doesn't make sense. Right then in addition to that, you get to find someone that fits your business. You get to find someone that fits Your personality, because personality matters. You get to find someone that you're excited to work with because, and I've done this, if you get someone that you don't like, getting an email from them each day, it bugs you. You don't like the way they respond. You don't like the attitude. Well, you know, I mean, I've hired that way before because the skills looked right, which that's what the agency is going to find. They're just going to find someone that the skills look right. Personality doesn't matter there because they don't know your personality. They don't understand it. It's too difficult to make that match. But you get to make that match. When you're hiring from onlinejobs, you get to make someone's life better by not having a commute. A two hour commute is so draining on someone's life and on their children's lives and on their spouse's life. And when you get to allow someone to work from home, wow, what a blessing it is to them. And then they want to put that effort into you and they have more energy when they work for you. Then there's the price. So a three times markup for an agency that you just don't have to pay, I mean, so maybe that, maybe that saves you $1,500 a month. Maybe it saves you $2,000 a month. Maybe it saves you$1,000 a month. Okay. You know, it's not like the end of the world, but it's significant and it's significant to a lot of people. And you know, if you're hiring, when you start to hire 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 people, it's the difference between paying an extra hundred thousand dollars a year. Right? I mean, it's significant. Then there's no contracts. So at onlinejobs, ph, you hire people how you want, when you want, where you want. You don't have a, you have to have a six month commitment. You have to have this many hours a week. You have, there's no contracts, there's nothing at all required. You pay what you want, when you want. If it's not working out, you let them go. If it's working out great, you give them a raise when you want. There's no requirements. You're not tied to us in any way at all. And you're not tied to an agency markup or to their timeline or anything of the sort. And I talked about this in the last episode, there's the management thing. There's no middleman between you and Them. A lot of people think that they'll provide supervision for your people, and that's a benefit. And reality is that supervision more likely than not is going to cause turnover rather than improve performance. I cannot imagine something worse for a small business owner than turnover. It's just soul sucking. Especially when you lose someone who's good because of a supervisor that's supposed to be helping you and they're hurting you, it's the worst case scenario. And you don't deal with that. When you hire through onlinejobs page, you get to be the supervisor. And if something goes wrong, it's your fault, not someone else's fault. And that's a really big deal. So then there's also a couple other things that you wouldn't really think about that you're gaining in this. So for the person you hire, it's actually safer for them to work from home, especially given how traffic is in the Philippines, how dangerous roads are, how commuting at night or in the dark can be dangerous. They don't have to spend money on extra clothes, nice clothes to go in the office, or eating out for daily meals. There's all kinds of things that are hidden. Benefits when they work from home that they don't have when they have to go into an office, which means salaries are less for you and safety for them goes up, their expenses go down. It's a big deal. So now, all right, I'm obviously biased in this, so let me give you a couple of cons of hiring someone from home. Number one, you're going to have to deal with power outages and Internet outages. When I started, these were actually really common. But that was 2005. There's been a lot of infrastructure improvement in the Philippines to the point where power outages are really uncommon now. And if they're happening, they're planned and predictable usually. And so your team can, can plan around the power outage. They can make sure they're gonna work when the power's on. Internet has gotten significantly faster and more reliable in the Philippines to the point where, I mean, a couple of my team members in the Philippines have faster Internet than my neighbors do here in the US and then they. It's very common for them to have a backup Internet. So cellular Internet as a backup is very common in the Philippines. So if the wired Internet goes down, which happens, they have a wireless backup that's quite inexpensive and they can use it when they want. It also allows them to go to the beach and work if they want to do that. Or take their kid to school and sit at school in the parking lot and work there while they wait for their kids so that they're not commuting. I have an OFS that does this. They. They travel an hour to take their kid to a specialized school. They work while they're there, then they bring their kid home from school rather than going there and back and there and back. So, yep, you're gonna have to deal with power outages, Internet outages, but they're so much less common than they used to be. Another downside is this is probably gonna take you a few days longer your first time when you hire someone than it would if you went to an agency. So, yeah, you're going to have to put in more effort if you want my help in finding that great person. I will walk you through the process@1vaoa.com and it is a really good process, super easy and quick to follow. It'll shorten your time. I can't. I mean, obviously it's mine. I'm biased, but I can't speak highly enough of the success that people have when they follow a really good recruiting process. And if you know someone else that has a really good process that you can follow, great, go for it. I don't care if you follow mine or someone else's, just follow a process. When you hire someone, you'll find hiring is faster, easier, and you'll have a much higher success rate. Another downside of hiring someone on your own is that they will have to deal with their own benefits and taxes. Now, if they go to an agency, they'll probably deal with some of that for them. But look, these things are just not difficult. And we have instructions for your ofs on what they need to be doing to pay their taxes, how they can handle benefits. We have instructions for you onlinejobs, ph benefits that will teach you exactly what you can do for them. If you want to provide some benefits for them, like insurance or poggybig or SSS or the 13th month. And you don't have to do any of these things and you won't actually do any of them. If you're gonna provide them, all you're gonna do is send them extra money and require a receipt back from them. You don't sign up for any government things. You're not going to have a login to pay taxes or anything like that. That's all up to them. You won't do any of it. You cannot under any circumstances classify them as an employee, no matter how many benefits you provide. The Philippines government will not allow you to classify them as anything other than an independent contractor unless you set up a physical business in the Philippines, which is really difficult to do because the Philippines government doesn't want you to do it and you don't want to and don't need to do that. So through all of this, you don't need an employer of record. You won't classify them as an employer. You can't send them a 1099 because they don't have a US reporting number. There's nothing else for you to do. Hiring through an agency just complicates that process. Okay, so yeah, I mean, the better solution is obviously onlinejobs ph and obviously I'm biased. But thousands and thousands and thousands of people every month do this. We have over 15,000 active customers this month. We've had hundreds of thousands of customers and people very, very often come back. In fact, over 50% of our customers return again. Whether it's next month or next year or six years later, people return because it's just a better sol to hire on your own. You get better results, it's better for them, it's cheaper for you, they make more money, they work from home. The whole thing is better. When you use onlinejobs, phone.