Ep. 402: Remember before you knew about OFS?

Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at insourcing from the Philippines. This is episode 402, remember before you knew about OFS. So this episode stems from an experience I had many, many years ago. And I want to just take you back to before you knew about ofs. So if you haven't hired someone yet, I wish I had something more strong that I could say that'd be like, oh, yeah, I guess I'll go do it today. If you've listened to all my episodes and you haven't done it yet, then if you have though, think about this. So you know that when you come up with a problem in your business, you can go to the Philippines, go to onlinejobs ph, and find someone who can implement that thing for you, who can solve that problem for you. You know that, oh, you need designs done. Cool. It's super easy to find someone. You know, I have this really awesome software idea. I can go find a programmer in the Philippines to build this for me. That's super easy. Oh, we need content created. Well, yeah, I'm gonna go find a content writer out of the Philippines. Super easy. All of these things, you know now, right. But before you do, you remember what it was like? So I'll just tell you my experience. One time I had a chance to partner with a really successful businessman, in fact. So he started myfamily.com and ancestry.com ancestry.com is the surviving piece of that. And Ancestry is a billion dollar company. And I mean, they're huge and they're just down the road from me. And years ago, he had stepped away from. From the operations of the business and had put people in charge and the company was running fine, and they took it public and then it went private again. He wasn't part of any of this. He just owns part of the company still. Years ago, I had the chance to partner with him on a project, and this is like 2004, probably. We wanted to take this entire dropshipping library and make a website out of it so we could just sell the stuff and someone else would do all the fulfillment. Which this is like early on in the Internet. This doesn't really work today, but. Or maybe it doesn't, I don't really know. But so. So the thing was, there was this library of all these products, like thousands of products, and they had a tiny bit of content for it, but it wasn't sufficient to make a difference online in SEO or in getting traffic or really in making People want to buy it, right? And so he said, well, you'll just write descriptions for all these things. Which when he said that, I was like, oh, yeah, that's just definitely not gonna happen, right? Cause I'm not gonna write the descriptions. The thought of writing the description, the thought of writing even one description for me was just sickening. Almost like my body just not do it right. And so I was a programmer and I knew I could take this data feed from this drop shipping company and I could plug it into a shopping cart system and I could make it all work. Technically, that was super easy. It was the content piece that really was not possible for me. I didn't know how to make it happen. And we weren't gonna like, fund what we were doing. And so there wasn't a way to pay someone locally $15 an hour to write the content. And the whole thing just fizzled because I didn't know how to solve this. What. How are we going to write unique content to get traffic to these things? And that opportunity for me just. It went away like it never happened. Nothing ever happened from it. And I think today, like, I would love to have that business that would have started, you know, in 2004 and I mean, I would imagine that could still be going today, making, I don't know, you know, making money, I don't know how much money, but it never happened because I didn't know the Philippines at the time. And looking back on it now, I could like, oh, if I had that opportunity or that problem now, it's like, oh, yeah, that's super easy to solve. I can easily hire three content writers or five content writers to write the content for this. In fact, I recently just did that for basically the exact same situation for onlinejobs. Ph, we wanna do a whole bunch of SEO. We need a whole bunch of unique content. Well, that's easy. I'll just go find some people who are really good content writers and who know SEO. And I mean, I put a job post out and had two people immediately h who are really, really good and they're working out really, really well. And I mean, it was just so easy for me. So then I got this email from Shelley recently and it really kind of hit home going back to this experience for me. So let me read this email from Shelley. So she says, I just saw your recent email and I wanted to say that we found two of the very best workers at an affordable price on your website. Then we just hired another one last month and plan to hire more in the near future. We are a newer company on a limited budget so these professionals are a godsend to us. They've been with us an entire year now, have permanent positions with titles and responsib just like everyone else at our company. They are dedicated, hard working people who have grown as we grow. And that was, that was the piece for me that was like it really hit home. A new company, you have the opportunity to hire these people, which I didn't have because I didn't know at the time. And your new company is growing because of it. Congratulations Shelly. That's so awesome. Now I'm also going to congratulate you on the rest of what your email says Shelly. So here's what the rest of this and this is a really good take home for the rest of us. She continues Having said that, I will say that we treat them with respect and always keep good lines of communication open with them. You have to make special efforts to keep them informed and to have meetings when it's not the middle of the night for them. There has to be some give and take on both ends to make this work. But once you establish that trust in the relationship, this is a win win for everyone. Thank you for having onlinejobs. Ph Shelley. So Shelley, thank you for the respect with which you treat them and for being considerate to them. I mean I see so many people that are like oh no, they didn't show up at my time and which is fine. Yeah, what Shelley says about once you establish that trust with them, it really is a big deal. And that's when they, they're willing to go above and beyond. That's when they want to help you out, that's when they want to do good stuff for you. Before that they, before they trust you, they don't trust you. And not having that trust from them is really, really limiting factor from them. So going back to my original point, even though this was a long time ago when I didn't know how to fulfill this part of the business that I needed, I still remember it really vividly. And I remember the first few years of my business where I was just trying to do everything myself and I didn't know what to do and I didn't have the time to do it. And there were things I didn't like doing but I knew how to do them and I didn't want to do them. And I remember like trying to get those things done and it taking away from the things that I did like and even then the things that I did like were programming, and that was all consuming and it affected my personal life and my family life and it was taking all of my time and I couldn't do anything else. And that was all before I hired my first va, which was Joven out of the Philippines. And Joven really kind of changed everything for me. Not that he was very good, he wasn't an ofs, that's for sure. He was a va. He was a virtual assistant. Not skilled, not professional, not that great. But he helped me replace myself the first time and that was a really, really big deal, him being there to help accomplish the things that I wanted to get done and the things that I didn't like or the things that I didn't mind, but I didn't have time to do or maybe I didn't know how to do. Joven helped me accomplish all of those things. And then we moved on to hiring someone else and hiring someone else. And today we have about 40 full time people. And it really is amazing to have a really good team around me. When you get specialists to help you, or not even specialists, just anybody to help you, it's amazing what a small business, a new fledg business like Shelly's, can do and can grow with that help. So if you haven't hired help yet, onlinejobs PH is where you're gonna hire. If you're questioning things, go look@ofsguide.com it will start you off on the right foot and give you the confidence you need to take the next step to move forward. OFSguide.com.