Ep. 422: Training an OFS solves a lot of problems

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 422, training. An OFS solves a lot of problems. So I know this is a sensitive subject because I know that you're busy and you don't have time to train someone and you don't want to train someone, you just want to hire someone who's an expert. And that's all great. You can hire someone who's expert. That doesn't change that training still solves all kinds of problems. So today I want to explain this, I want to explain the philosophy behind it, I want to explain how I do this and I want to kind of help you understand this is not so hard. So in the Philippines, training is really, really important. And it's even like government backed to where they have an acronym for it called ojt on the Job Training. So when someone gets a job in the Philippines, they really expect to get trained on that job. So even if you hire an expert, they're going to go to on the job training when they get a job and the government backs this, they have like ojt.philippines.gov I think as part of them explaining how the on the job training works in the Philippines. So when I first hired someone, I didn't really have a choice but to train them. And so I started teaching this person. This was Joven and this was in 2005. I started teaching him everything that I knew about whatever the given topic was. At first it was article writing and then it was SEO and then it was link building and there was all kinds of stuff that we were that I trained him on. What I didn't realize was the side effects of this training and that side effect really is really more of a primary effect of what training does. So the way that I built my business, which we're an eight figure business, is I've hired skilled people. I haven't hired skills. I've hired people who maybe they had skills or maybe they were just really dedicated and intelligent and then I trained them on what I wanted done. Now even if I hired really skilled people, which for example, I have a really skilled user interface designer, I've still had to train him on some of my knowledge from user interface and what our customers want because he didn't, he doesn't understand the customers the way that I do. And so I've still had to provide training to him even though I can't design user interfaces like he does. I still had to provide training to them. So everybody that I bring into the business, I provide them some sort of training. And I regularly provide them feedback on the work that they're doing, which also usually includes a bunch of training in that feedback. Now, here's what I have found. When you provide training, it builds loyalty in the person that you're training. They want to feel like they're improving. They want to feel like they're doing a good job. And when you're not willing to invest in in training for them, they feel like they don't know if they're doing a good job. Number one, they don't know if they're providing the outcome that you expect. They don't know if they're contributing to the business, and they want to feel like they are valued. Now, a lot of this is just general management principles, but this is especially true in the Philippines, where training shows someone that you're invested in them, and they can feel like they're invested in the business. They can feel like they should invest in the business, like they should put their effort in, because you're putting your effort into them. And so not only does that training give them skills and help them in, help them bring them into your business and teach them your way of doing things, it also builds the loyalty and the culture of your business for your business that you want. And again, this is especially true of the Philippines. So if you're skeptical about this, think about this. I talk about my newsletter a lot. And I talk about Julia. I talked about her in the last episode. Julia has worked for me for a long, long time. I've given her a lot of training. And when I asked her to start writing my newsletter, I still had to give her a bunch of training and a bunch of feedback. And in fact, just yesterday, I had to give her feedback and training on linking. Now, I taught Julia SEO a long, long time ago, and she's actually done a really good job of doing SEO with taking a newsletter and posting it on my website and linking them together and linking them to other things, which is doing SEO for us. She's not part of our SEO team, but she understands that we're doing SEO. But I felt like some of the crossover of that newsletter and the linking and the SEO was maybe a little bit too much and maybe wasn't correct. And so I gave her training on how to do this, and that training is ongoing. Now, let me take a step back to what the newsletter, the origin of the story. When she first started writing the newsletter, I Knew this was going to be really difficult and it was going to take a good amount of my time. And so I started having her write and I gave her a bunch of training on it and had her write, and then I had to give her a bunch of feedback and a bunch more training. And we went through that for months and months of trying to get things right. And it probably took, I mean, it took over a year for sure to start getting it really, really good. And that, you know, that took a lot of my time. It also took my time on my newsletter from two and a half hours a week down to about half an hour a week. Now those two hours a week, you know, times 50, 50 weeks a year is. It's a hundred hours, 100 hours a year, right? That's, I mean, that's a week of a, that's two weeks of vacation a year that I, that I get back by the amount of work that I put in. Maybe I put 100 hours in to teaching Julia, but that now returns to me every single year. And it will return to me not just in the newsletter, but in the training that I did in SEO years ago is returning to me now. So that's probably paid off a hundred times over. So the point is, I know you don't want to do the training, but there are so many, many benefits to it in building loyalty and building culture, in returning a hundred times over, in getting your time back. Yes, it's going to take extra time for a while. And the example I'm giving with Julia right now is an extreme example of like super duper long training, but where the return on this is really, really high. So now let me shift gears and talk about how I do training because this is, to me is really where the magic is in all of this. So when I first started hiring people in the Philippines, the way that we were doing training was we would write really long emails and then we found this software, I don't remember what it was called, maybe screen steps, where you could write and take screenshots and put it into this document. It was like a, it was going to be a PDF and you could update that document over time and keep publishing it and that, I mean, this is before Google Docs and Google Drive and Google Drive is a great way to create things like that if you're going to do it now. But even that just has to be updated and maintained and, and I don't like to do that. It takes so long to type and to screenshot and add it in and whatever so the way that I do my training changed in probably 2008 or 2009 when I found. When I found Jing. And now Jing is a screen capture, screen recording software that doesn't exist anymore. But it exists in other forms and in fact in a lot of forms, Jing was kind of the original easy use version of this. Camtasia Studio is its predecessor. Jing lets you just take a video and click upload and it would upload it to a server and you don't have to do anything. You don't have to have FTP or files or anything like that. You just upload it to server and then click paste into an email. So Jing does. Jing isn't around anymore, but there are lots of others that are like Loom or Tiny Take or Snagit, which is the one that I use. I use Snagit. So when I want to create training for someone, I. This is always, it's. It's almost always on my computer. If it's not on my computer, I still use Snagit for this. I just do audit. So typically on my computer I will have whatever I'm training on or whatever I'm giving feedback on Open. So today I pulled up part of our website and I said, I opened up Snagit, I drag it out on the area that I want to talk about and I say, hey, so I would like to change the way we talk about testimonials on our website. We say real results on this link and it's kind of obscure. It's not. I mean, it's in the header but it's not really highlighted. Even though I think people think this is one of the things where people get stuck. They want social proof. And we're not offering that in a way that really lets people experience what other people are saying about onlinejobs. Ph, so here's what I'd like to do. So, and then I go through this. I talk, I'm talking about this all on video. I'm using my mouse, I'm using my. I'm using the screen, I'm clicking on things. I'm showing people what we're talking about. I'm showing other websites and I'm teaching people like, here's how we analyze this, right? And then I click stop and click upload and Jing uploads it to a server for me. I don't have to deal with that. And then I send the URL of that video to the people on my team. Now there's a couple things going on with this. Number one it's really, really easy to talk your way through training rather than to type your way through training, where I can talk and show them exactly what I'm seeing. Now they're seeing it because they're seeing my screen and they're hearing my voice, and I can include my face in it, which is an extra added bonus of the training, where they get to know. They get to know me, right? They get to know you personally. They. They. It's important in these relationships that you have a person behind this, not just a skill, right? And so you want your people to know you personally. And so I'm some. I sometimes include my face in these trainings, but they're always hearing my voice, they're seeing my screen, They're. They're on my computer with. So the first part of this is it's really easy to create really effective training with Snag it. The second piece is you're building a relationship with them where they feel connected to you, which makes them want to be loyal to you. It makes them feel like they're part of the business now. The third thing is the way that I handle my training is I send the URL and I often put it into a basecamp project, or I send it in an email thread or wherever I'm putting it. I have uploaded that. That video to a server of my own. Now. I set up Snagit to do this, and I have other videos where I explain how I did this. It's pretty simple because when I create a training or a feedback or whatever it is, I want to be able to reference that again in the future. And if it disappears, then I have no idea what happened. And I have to recreate everything again, which is really, really painful. And so when I create something, I want it to live forever. And so I have trainings that I created in, like, 2007 that are still on my hosting account, because that's where I store all of my trainings. The really good thing is they never disappear. The bad thing is they never disappear. However, what I have found is if something sticks around, like, if the link keeps coming back up to that video, then that training continues to live on. And if I see it again and I realize, oh, I need to change that, well, I can watch it and recognize exactly what it was, and I can redo it. If something doesn't come back up again, then I don't need it again. And it's fine. It's fine that it. That it just kind of disappears into oblivion. And that's how I maintain my training library. It's simple to create and it takes no maintenance on my part other than if something continues to come up over and over again, then it's useful. If it doesn't come up, then it's not helpful. And since we store everything in a Project Manager system in Basecamp or in a Google Drive and spreadsheets or whatever, anything that's needed to be referenced can be referenced again. And so they'll come up again and again and again and things that aren't needed disappear by the wayside and they're gone. Now they're still on the server and they're still taking up space. But storage space is so cheap and easy that I don't really care if I have a million videos there, probably not a million, maybe 100,000 videos. So now I hope that you understand that the value behind training and what it creates, the culture it creates and the loyalty it creates, that it brings people into your business, helps them want to do a good job for you. I hope that you understand now how easy it can be to create training because it doesn't have to be this big, long, drawn out process. And when I do this, when I create these videos, usually I'll create one video that explains a bunch of it. But I missed a bunch of stuff and that's okay. Usually I'm going to send it to them. My team is not going to do it right or they're going to get. They're going to miss something or they're going to say, hey, you left something out. And then I'm going to create another video and it's going to take me another two minutes or five minutes, whatever it is. Super, super simple, I'm going to send that video in the same thread. So now that both of those things are together and they're going to try it again and it's not going to be correct and we're going to do it again and I'm going to do it again and I'm going to do it again. So now, instead of spending hours on creating this training, I've spent two or three or five minutes a couple times. And it's a better set of training than it would have been had I spent hours trying to collect and gather. And because what you don't know when you're training someone is you don't know what you need to teach and you don't know what you're missing because you're not getting feedback on it. And getting that feedback from them is really, really important as you Create the training. Okay, so two more things in this. Number one, I always recommend that you start by hiring someone that to do something that you know how to do. So if you hire someone to do something that you know how to do, creating this training is really easy. You know, you know what you're doing, you know the process. You can create a video, you can show the steps. It's pretty easy. You know the outcome, you know the skills you're looking for when hiring that person. It just makes everything easier. Then on the other side of it, you're also getting something off of your plate that you were expected to do before. Now you're not expected to do it. It's very likely it's going to get done the way that you would have done it and going to feel really good about that. You're going to accomplish something. It's a really amazing way to get started working with someone in the Philippines. Now, if you need to hire someone to do something you don't know how to do, that's okay. You still need to provide some training. That training doesn't need to be teaching them how to run Photoshop. It doesn't need to be teaching them how to build a website. You're not going to teach those things. But what you do need to train on is they're an expert. You still need to show them what you like. You need to show them, here are social media posts that I like. Here's what, here's how I want to run our social media, or here are websites that I like. You're going to build this. I want you to mimic this and this and this. They're going to do the work. You're going to give direction. Here is content that I like. Here's this pillar content for SEO. This really great piece of content that someone else wrote that's in our niche, that. Look how good this is. Look how, look at the structure. Here's this one, here's this other one that I like. Now you can go write one that is similar to that. I'm not going to teach you how to write, but I'm going to show you things that are related that will help you accomplish your job. So even if you're hiring someone to do something you don't know how to do, you're still going to provide training to them which helps them understand the outcome. It helps them understand your expectations. Last thing, it's just providing training that really makes this all work. That training doesn't actually have to come from you. Now you're going to have to give feedback to them. But the initial training doesn't have to come from you. So if you want to hire a general virtual assistant, you wanted to have them manage your email and your calendar. Well, you don't have to be the one providing them the training on that. Now, there are certainly going to be some specifics that you're going to have to train on because everybody does these things slightly differently. Now, we have training@vasmadeeasy.com that you can provide to your people so they can get good at whatever that thing is that you want them to do for you. The trainings that we have are designed to take someone from either like beginner, beginner, nothing, to being pretty good at it, or some of them are designed to take someone who has an idea to take them to being really, really good at it. Now, the point in this isn't that, oh, you don't have to give any training ever again. The point is, this will make your training job so much easier because you give them this training, it's going to give them a really, really good start on this, and then you can give them your split, specialized knowledge for how this training works within your business. So now training shouldn't be such this huge, daunting task and hopefully you can see how it solves so many problems and it's not that hard to provide training and feedback and to build loyalty and culture within your business.