John Jonas built a remote team in the Philippines while traveling 80 days out of 157, hiring one person at a time to handle tasks he already understood. He paid $1,000–2,000 monthly for full-time developers and says hiring forces you to organize and train, breaking the cycle of overwhelm.
Questions this video answers
Episode 365.
80 days out of 157.
USD 1,000 to $2,000 per month.
1vaoa.com and onlinejobs.ph.
Chapters
Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing to the Philippines. This is episode 365. When you're overwhelmed, rely on your team. So I actually want to take this a little bit different direction than I want than what I was originally planning on. So less about being overwhelmed. Well, let's. We'll talk about being overwhelmed. So I have a calendar in my, in my house that is. It's a one year calendar. It sits on the wall. It's all one year all at once. And I write on it the things that we do. And I do it as putting my kids to bed because it sits in between their rooms and as they're brushing their teeth. The other night, I started counting the number of days that I have been out of town since summer started. So between summer and fall, I was out of town 80 out of 157 days. So more than half the days I was gone. And I was gone either vacation or at a bike race or backpacking or hiking with my wife or Lake Powell or backpacking with my kids or bike races with my kids or New York or wherever it was. I've been out of town. And with that comes, I mean, there's a lot of work. There's a lot of work in between trips. You. You get home from hiking the Grand Canyon over, you know, I've been gone for five days and I get home from hike at the Grand Canyon and I have one day at home and the next day we have to leave for a bike race and there's a lot of cleanup to do from one thing and prep work to do for the next thing. And there's a. I mean, there's just a lot going into it. Now, obviously I'm not, I'm not saying you should feel sorry for me for having been out of town for 80 out of 157 days. None of those were for work. Every bit of that is, is fun or vacation or family. So there's certainly no reason to feel sorry for me. But there's a certain amount of stress that comes with that. And I don't, I don't like to call it stress, but there's a, there's an amount of work that comes with it. And my work comes into that because there are people certainly depending on me. They're all in the Philippines. But they depend on me for having direction in their work and having purpose in their work and having instructions. And some of that comes to me. And so as I sat down one day, I was a little bit overwhelmed. I mean, I hadn't been at work in a week and a half, and I got through my main email in like, 20 minutes, which I don't know how that happened other than I had been kind of keeping up on it as I was out of town. And as I assigned something to someone on my team, I realized I am so grateful for these people in the Philippines who take my assignments and complete them, and I can rely on them, and they do great work and they're loyal and they're honest and I can trust them. And I was just so grateful that I had spent years and years and years building this team of amazing people. And, like, it wasn't an overnight thing. It wasn't like, oh, I'm going to go out and hire five people and build myself a team. Which is. I hear that often from people, and that just. That's not how this works. I had spent years, and I had hired one person at a time, and that person's job was to do this thing and this thing, and. And then later on, those things stopped working. And so I moved them and we shifted and pivoted, and all of a sudden they're doing these things, and then those things aren't. Aren't relevant to us anymore. So now he's managing and all kinds of things like that, where I've built this really great team of content writers and social media people and programmers and system admins and data verification people and quality assurance and HR and graphic design and video editing and podcast editing, and all of these things that get done in my business, because these are the things that are relevant to me. I just have this really great team, and I built it one at a time with really great people. And they weren't all super talented when I hired them. In fact, most of them were not talented. I mean, like, very little talent, actually, when I hired them. But I stick with them and they stick with me, and we've both grown together, and they're really amazing now, and I'm still fine. I'm okay. But with them, we do amazing things. So what I want you to get out of this podcast are two things. Number one, if you haven't started hiring someone, hire. Now's the time to start. If your goal at some point is to work less and make more money, which obviously those are, that's like the most generic things that people can say, I want to work more, I want to work less, and I want to make more money. Yeah, everybody wants to make more money. And work less. Right? Duh. But there's an actual path here to that. It's not just a pipe dream. It's not just a work less, make more. Right? There's. There's an actual path here to. Yeah, I can see that. If I hire someone from the Philippines who are super affordable and maybe they're super talented, or maybe they're not, doesn't really matter. They're going to stick with me and I'm going to stick with them. And together over time, we're going to grow and build something amazing together. And so if that piece of it is at any point part of your goal, work less, make more, then now's a really good time to get started. Hiring someone to hire one person. Now, the second thing was, if you're overwhelmed, then this is a really good way to take something off of your plate and get some of that overwhelm off of you. Hiring some of the Philippines isn't magic. They're not magic people. But it is really amazing what happens when you hire someone and you're overwhelmed because you can't hire someone because you're working too much. And then you have to prepare all this, all these sops, and you have to get organized and you have to do all these things that are holding you back from hiring someone so you don't ever hire someone. It's a vicious cycle that never ends. And what I've seen, and I've seen this I don't know, hundreds of times, and I've seen it dozens of times in my own life, where hiring someone is actually the first step in getting this overwhelm out of your life. It's not getting organized. That's not the first step because getting organized never happens. It's the actual hiring of someone which then forces you get organized because you can see a light. Then if you're just getting organized in an attempt to hire someone, well, there's not really a light at the end of that tunnel. But if you have someone hired now, your purpose of getting organized and creating training, there's an immediate purpose for it because it's going to take some work off of your plate immediately if you get that done now. Whereas before, yeah, there's not really a deadline. I'm not really. I'm not organized and it's okay because I don't have someone waiting for me. And then I still have to go and hire someone. And that's gonna suck. Even though it really doesn't suck, hiring someone is the first step in that process. So for getting overwhelmed out of your life. And for starting to build a team, start with one person. Hire one person to do one thing that is something that you know how to do in your business. This is what leads to the four hour workweek or the 80 out of 157 days out of town lifestyle. So then let me just end this with on one of my trips I was talking with a friend and he runs a software development company and he pays his developers well and they're pretty successful. He pays people over $100,000 a year and he was asking about the Philippines and I told him about hiring comparable developers to I mean he has people in the us I have people in the Philippines. Talent wise they're probably similar maybe. I mean I would put a couple of my developers up against any developers in terms of talent and I was saying yeah you can. I mean 1,000 to $2,000 a month for full time developer who are just as good as your developer. His jaw hit the floor. He had no clue that he is paying that much for something that can be that affordable. Yeah, he didn't know and now he knows and well now he's actually he's recruiting. It's super reasonable to hire people. Check out 1vaoa.com if you want my help. If you don't need my help, go to onlinejobs.ph Post your job. It's so simple.
