Episode 59 of the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing Podcast (host John Jonas) recounts his earliest outsourcing mistakes and actionable lessons. He describes three initial errors: hiring in the wrong country (India) before switching to the Philippines; depending on freelancers who handed off deliverables without integrating them into his workflow; and using agencies that produced turnover and margin mismatch. Jonas argues hiring long-term, direct employees is more efficient, reduces turnover, and lets staff learn the business. He closes by pointing listeners to two resources (ofsguide.com for answers to nine common questions and 1vaoa.com for recruiting guidance).
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Hello and welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing Podcast, the podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing your work. My name is John Jonas, and this is episode 59, the first mistakes I made when Outsourcing. So I love to ski. My wife, not so much. And she does it with me, which is great, but part of it for her is just fear. Like, she's a pretty good skier and she actually likes it when we do it, but she just is like, what if I'm cold? Or what if I get hurt? Or what if it's not fun? Fun? Or. And at some point, she's made mistakes, and we all do, and each of these things has happened to her. She's been cold, she's been hurt. It's not fun. But on occasion, it stops her from going with me and having an amazing day like we had last week, where, you know, it's two feet deep and untouched and amazing. And hopefully you can see this. This picture here. So we made no mistakes that day, and it was beautiful. And in hiring online Filipino specialists, I see the same thing from a lot of you. I see fear. I see fear of making mistakes, fear of not knowing what to do, fear of spending time and having it go down the drain. And that fear is preventing a lot of people from doing the hiring and changing the way they work on their businesses, changing their lives. And when I started, I had that fear too. Like, what if I can't afford it? What if I can't keep them busy? What if they can't do real good work? And so had this fear, and the first thing I did was I made a mistake. I went to India, and I know they have a lot of really good workers there, but the culture just doesn't. Didn't fit with my businesses, doesn't fit with many people's businesses. Now I know to go to the Philippines, and the whole experience is better. So there's the first mistake that I made. My second mistake was hiring freelancers. So the freelancer I hired was great. He did an excellent job writing. But when he was done writing, he turned everything over to me. And it. All of the burden of what to do with that content fell on me. And because he was a freelancer, his job was to write. He wasn't to do the rest of the work that the writing required, the SEO and the linking and the titles and the resource boxes and understanding the rest of our content and the digital world. And that made it such a burden on me that I realized, like, oh, I have these 50 articles, now what do I do? And then it ended up that nothing happened. I didn't do anything with those articles because I couldn't handle it. So now I know that hiring long term people is a much, much better solution than hiring freelancers. Freelancers is basically guaranteeing 100% turnover in your business. And that sucks. I've learned the business starts to automate itself when you have stable people working for you, people that are showing up every day and they start to learn more about your business and they start to make connections in your business and then you can start assigning them other things. And the business just gets so much easier to run when you have stable people. So. So my next mistake was the agency route. I tried going through an agency. It took them three tries to find me someone that would actually stick through no fault of my own or of the people. Like they were good people. I had good processes. One of them said, hey, sir, I can't do this work. I hate this. Like, that sucks. Okay, well, thank you to the agency for just pulling someone random off the street. The next person said, I can't continue to do this because I can't handle the office politics here at this agency. Well, that sucks for me. So now I'm two people in to training for, you know, a few days each, and this sucks. And then the third one who actually worked out really well, even though he didn't know anything, the agency just pulled someone off the street. He was like a warm body and I was able to train him and he was hard working and he shows up and it was really, really great. Then we both realized at the same time that I was paying $750 a month and they were paying him $250 a month. And he was like, this sucks, I'm quitting. And I was like, well, that sucks. Like he's not getting paid very much. By the way, today with an agency that it's more like you pay $2,000 and they pay them $500 or something like that anyway, that it was just another mistake. And at the time it wasn't necessarily a mistake. There just wasn't a better way at the time. Like there was no way to go and hire someone on your own without going there. So today I know that going direct is just a lot more efficient in terms of money and time. Like it's so much easier to hire someone yourself than to have an agency hire someone for you. You know exactly what skills you're getting. You've interviewed them. Instead of going through an agency and saying like, oh, I want someone to write content for me. They're like, oh, you want a webmaster? Well, we'll pull someone off the street for you. Well, that sucks. And then the ofs that you hire yourself gets the full amount of money. Like you spend $750, they get $750. That's a big, big difference in terms of quality of life for someone. So. And I'd made mistakes since, but those were like the three starting mistakes that I made. Since that I made mistakes, they're just a lot less consequential. Like, hiring through an agency didn't require me to go through three people before I found someone good. Like, now I know, oh, my recruiting process is good. I'm going to find someone the first time. So I'm going to spend two hours and I'm going to end up with someone who works for me and that's going to be great. Instead of, oh, gosh, I'm gonna spend a few days with someone and then find out that the agency's causing me problems. Right? Or I know that in the Philippines, my chances of finding someone good are so, so much higher than in India. And I know that or I know, like, it takes the exact same amount of time to find a freelancer as it does to find someone full time, long term. And that full time, long term person's gonna work with me for years and years to come. Where that freelancer is guaranteeing turnover in my business. They're not going to work for me for years to come. You know, there's just a lot, I make mistakes now. There's a lot less time inconsequential to me now. So if you would like to know, I have nine questions that people ask me regularly and I have really good answers to them. I put those answers together@ofsguide.com and it's like a four minute read. And I'll answer these nine really big questions that people have about like time zones and taxes and how to find someone great and trust and can you recommend someone for me? No, I don't recommend people for you. It's your job to find it yourself. Ofsguide.com is really a, a great starting point. If you're not sure of what to do but you've thought about doing this before, you don't want to make mistakes. Start there and then head over to 1vaoa.com where I'll walk you through the recruiting process.
