Ep. 414: Giving your OFS odd jobs and one off tasks

Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing to the Philippines. This is episode 414, giving your OFS odd jobs and one off tasks. So one of the interesting things about when you hire someone in the Philippines is it opens your eyes to this new world of delegating. At least that's what it did for me. So the first time I hired someone, I remember I was giving him these instructions on the specific thing that I had. And after a few months, I was just stuck, still overwhelmed because I had one person working for me and I was fully at my limit. Right? And most of you listening to this are probably at your limits too. And giving odd jobs is an interesting conversation for this podcast and you're probably interested. So I remember one day thinking, I know I need to renew my passport, but I can't do it. I don't know. Like, I don't have time. I don't have. I don't have the mental capacity to renew my passport. So I sent an email to one of my people in the Philippines and said, hey, I need to renew my passport. It's going to expire soon. What do I do? And I got an email back the next day that told me exact instructions of what to do if your passport is already expired. You need to go here and do this. If you're renewing and not expired or an active passport, then go here and do this and this. And I looked at it was like, oh, yeah, I can. Oh, I can do that. Totally. And it wasn't that I couldn't have searched. I couldn't have googled it. I mean, they could have sent me a let me Google that for you.com link. Right. Because I certainly could have googled how to renew my passport, but I didn't. And I didn't want to take the chance of going down the rabbit hole of trying to figure this out. So instead, I sent it to them and they gave me instructions that were super, super easy on how to do this. And it's that rabbit hole that is the problem, Right? So there's all kinds of stuff that you can give to the people that work for you. And usually they're not gonna mind. They're really just happy to help you succeed. And usually not always, but if they're capable of doing it, then they are probably happy to do it. So I'll just give you some other things that I have given to my team over the years that maybe help you get some thoughts flowing. And I Tell you a story that I got. I got an email from Ryan this week and about what he had his OFs do. And this was unprompted. And so here's. I've given in my. In the past, I've asked my ofs to edit my vacation videos. You know, you take all this video and then it's just like tons and tons of video, and it just sits there. And so I've had them edit it for me, edit this into something functional. And it comes. The first couple times it came back, I was like, ah, that's, you know, that's not that great. But then I started giving instructions like, hey, let's take this and this and this. And it turned out really, really good. I've had logos designed for my kids for a cycling jersey. So, like, we're cycling as a family across Europe, and we're gonna have specific cycling jerseys made. And so I had my team design me a logo for that logo. Like, how are we going to design these jerseys? Super. Not business oriented, but it worked and it was great. Or like, canceling things for me, hey, here's this email that I'm getting from these people. Can you cancel this for me? Figure out how to cancel this subscription box or figure out how to cancel this subscription that I signed up for. Or unsubscribe me from all these newsletters that I'm getting. Unsubscribe me from anything that comes in that I don't want to see. Right? Or, hey, we're doing this thing for a Facebook page, and I don't want to write this. Or we're doing this neighborhood activity. So I want to post this on the Facebook page. Will you write the description for me? So I'll talk my way through it. I'll make a video, I'll screen record whatever, show them what we're doing from whatever I have, and then have them write the description and then I'll go back and edit it. Or I recently needed to have some online thing was requiring me to have articles of organization for an LLC of mine that was like, old, and nobody needs my article articles of organization, unless you're just verifying that I actually own the business. Right. And so I asked my team, hey, can you make me some articles of organization for this? I don't. I don't really know what these articles of organization are supposed to be. So I sent it to them. I know what they did. I know they went to ChatGPT and said, create articles of organization for this. And then they cut. They just Copied and pasted in the name or made sure it was correct. Right. But I didn't have to do it and that was a big deal. Another time I remember I needed some 9 millimeter ammo for one of my guns. Like, I don't have very many guns, but I have a handgun. And again, I was at my limits. I'm not at my limits anymore. But at the time I said to them, hey, will you buy me some 9 millimeter ammo? I don't really care what you buy. I don't really know enough about it to say, and so don't spend more than $100. And here's my address and here's my credit card. And I think I'd already given them my credit card, but now they had my address and they knew where to ship it. And a couple days later, ammunition showed up at my house. And this is probably 15 years ago. I don't know if you can still do that today. I would guess you can, but it was just something that I didn't want to do myself. I didn't know enough about it. So I let them do some research and see like, oh, do they find something is better than others? I don't really know. I don't want to go down the rabbit hole. And same thing with the articles of organization. I didn't want to go down the rabbit hole of do I include this or do I need that or do I. Whatever, whatever, whatever. I didn't want to go down that hole and spend the time. And it's just so much easier to send an email to someone and say, hey, will you, will you try and do this for me? And if they can't, usually what I find is, well, first of all, usually they'll try. They'll try really hard. And so like the passport, they couldn't renew my passport for me, but they could get the ball, get the process started so that when it came back to me, I was confident that they had already looked at it and I knew what I needed to do. Simple description given to me and it was very easy to do. Right. Same thing with the ammunition. I didn't know if they would get it done or not, but I knew that they would then at least do some research and tell me what I should buy. If they couldn't do it for me, Turns out they did it for me and it was sweet. I didn't have to do anything. Or here's another thought. So I'm a really, really bad gift giver and fortunately for me, my wife is Gifted giving, gift giving is not high on her needs. And so I'm really bad at it. But occasionally I know I need to give a gift. And I've had my team research gift ideas for me in the past, like, hey, look at my wife's Instagram. See what she thinks or does. Or I don't know, maybe, I don't know if I gave them her Instagram login maybe, and said, hey, look at this and come up with gift ideas for me. Find me something that I can buy for my wife to give her something nice, because I suck at it and being able to give it to someone else and say, hey, will you. And if you. So if you only have. You're trying to give a gift to your wife and you have one ofs, and he's a graphic designer. Well, is he married? Like, does he have a wife that he could say, you know, you could say, hey, can you ask your wife? What would you. You know, and. And I get that they're not in the same culture and they don't. They don't know your wife and they don't know all the situation. But to me, over the years, what I have found is if there is just a little bit of movement towards something, it makes me moving towards the rest of it, the final solution, so much easier. Or if they'll do 40% of the work for me or 80% of the work for me. It's such a big deal towards me getting the rest of it done. Okay, so this week I get this email from Ryan, and Ryan has had OFS working for him for a while, and Ryan has had some really good success. And he sends me this email recently with his story of being on vacation. So, and I'm going to read this, and I'm going to read this to you because it was cool. So he says, hey, John, I thought you'd get a chuckle out of this and also appreciate it. I was on vacation last week and my son broke his flip flops. My OFS found me a pair in the town we were staying in. Silas was happy. That's his son. I was happy. And we kept enjoying our vacation. And that was all he sent me, except he included a picture of the flip flops, which I hope you can see in this video. And so I responded to him. I want to know what. What happened here? How did this. How did this happen? He says, as I was driving into town to get groceries, I thought to myself, why not ask her to do it? So I called her and told her my problems. Silas has broken his flip flops. I need to source size 5 Men's flip flops in black, not slides because he says he's particular lol. Wow. Like what? What a cool request. Probably. I mean, what a cool request from Ryan. What a cool thought. I need size 5 black, not slides because my son doesn't like slides and he just wants flip flops. And then probably kind of a cool thing for his OFS to receive from him. Oh, you're trusting me to do this thing for you? That's cool. He continues. She knew the area I was staying in, so she started searching. I had to give a bit of feedback, but she was able to source at 85% better. Her doing the 80% and I do the 20%. He says it worked out great. That's the kind of thing that you can Once you have someone working for you and you start to build some trust and you start to think, you start to learn how to delegate them, doing the 80% for you is a really, really big deal. Even just some of the thinking, some of the research, some of the knowledge, any bit of it, at least for me, is significantly helpful in me pushing things forward.