In this solo episode of the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast (episode 438), host John Jonas shares his "progress over perfection" philosophy for working with online Filipino specialists (OFS). He explains that entrepreneurs often expect flawless results immediately, leading to frustration and turnover. Instead, Jonas advocates delivering work that is merely "done" and then iterating. He illustrates the approach with several concrete examples: using Apply Points on OnlineJobs.ph to filter serious applicants; evolving from micromanaging content drafts to providing clear guidelines; guiding a virtual assistant through multiple rewrites to create an "ultimate guide" on hiring from the Philippines; and collaborating with a graphic designer turned video editor, allowing the editor to experiment and improve through feedback. Jonas also outlines his hiring strategy—favoring interpersonal fit over résumé prestige, employing test tasks, and learning from failed hires to refine interview questions. Throughout, he emphasizes that incremental tweaks in training, communication, and expectations lead to high‑quality outcomes without the need for perfection on the first attempt.
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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 438, progress drives perfection with OFS. So I'm an entrepreneur. I'm a type A personality, a high D in disc. I'm a driver. I'm like, I want to push, I want to push, and I want other people to do their work really, really well. Many of you are perfectionists. I'm not a perfectionist, but I'm a. I'm a pusher for sure. More of a do the least amount of work it takes to get something going and see what happens kind of person. For a lot of you, I see that you hire someone and you expect perfection out of them and you're not getting it. And so then you. Well, a lot of you quit, even though that's probably not in your DNA, you're frustrated and you don't know what to do. And so I want to address this today. So for me, especially in working with ofs, it's all about progress. It's all about getting something done. Not perfectly, not maybe not even correctly, just done and doing it again, which, that's how I drive my business. We implement something, we push it live, we see what happens. People complain about it and we fix it. We just make progress. We make incremental progress that in the end comes up with something really, really amazing. I'll give you an example. This was apply points at OnlineJobs ph. If you're using OnlineJobs ph and not using Apply Points, when you're posting a job, you're really missing out. It took us a long time to get this thing right where we implemented it, and it wasn't right. And so we made some tweaks and we made some tweaks to how workers used it, and we made some tweaks to how employers used it, and we made some tweaks to how it showed up and how you interacted with it. And after doing that for about a year, we finally got it right. And Apply Points to me is really close to perfect in its implementation. Doesn't cost workers anything, but it's a limited resource. It doesn't cost you anything, but it really gives you a good idea of who is serious about applying for your job versus who's just window shopping or who's just applying mass applying for garbage. Right? That's the kind of thing where progress there really achieve perfection with it. So when you hire someone in the Philippines or when you maybe you're not even hiring someone. Maybe it's. You've already have someone working for you and you assign them a task and they didn't do it right. Great. That's how almost, that's how it almost always goes for me. Now it's time to make progress. And you're going to iterate on your instructions and on what they're doing because it's not that they're not trying, because they're definitely trying. Once they get a job, they really want to keep that job. And so now your job is to make progress with them. You're going to make little tweaks to the things you're doing. You're going to make tweaks to your training, to how you're teaching them. You're going to ask them, hey, what did I, what did I leave out here? If they're missing something, you're going to say, hey, what did I miss? What did I leave out in this training? Where are you confused in this? And now I've been doing this for almost 20 years. And so let me give you some tips on the things that I have done to try and improve work, to try and drive perfection in different things we're doing. So at first I just gave more training. I gave more training over and over and over again. And I will still do that in some things. First, I would also micromanage things really well. Like if we were writing a piece of content, I would get it and I'd say back, hey, this isn't right, this isn't right, this isn't right. And they would send it back and I'd be like, oh, this is not right. And so I would rewrite it and I'd send it back to them and say, hey, I rewrote it. Look, I stopped doing that a while ago and instead started giving guidelines on how I expected work to be done. And things have significantly improved. Now there are times where I have something in my mind and I'm asking them to write it. I have a hard time expressing what I want. And so, yeah, I'll have to go through sometimes and give some suggestions. I did this yesterday where they are on their second version of what is supposed to be the ultimate guide to hiring from the Philippines. Well, an ultimate guide to me means like, this is the best piece of content ever written on this. Well, I've already created the best piece of content ever written on the ultimate guide on hiring from the Philippines. That's one VA away. And I'm not asking them to duplicate one VA away, which was 44 pages, single spaced, written before I recorded it into videos. They're supposed to write something that's significantly shorter than that, although still fairly long. And they're supposed to write it in my style and with what I teach. And frankly, that's really difficult, right? So they wrote it once and it came back and I was like, you know, this is just, this isn't working for me. It's not, it's generic. And so this is the. I'm describing to you how I go through this process of progress, drive perfection. So I gave him this, I gave him the overall of this. Hey, look, you're writing the best piece of content ever written. I expect this to take over a month. And so he went back and rewrote and it was way, way, way, way, way better. And yesterday I went through it and was like, yeah, it's still missing things, you know, like this is, this is supposed to be the best piece ever. And it has a lot of like, kind of generic in it. And generic just doesn't work for me. And so I went back and I rewrote some things and I gave a bunch of instructions and they're going to do it again. He's going to go back and he's going to rewrite things again. He's going to tweak and I'm going to work with him through that until we get the ultimate guide to hiring from the Philippines. It's going to be the best piece of content ever written on this. Now, did I write it? No. Will I have spent the the same amount of time writing it or working on it as if I had just written it myself? No, I will not. I will spend way, way, way less time. Will I still spend time? Yeah, I'm still gonna spend time because I still expect it to be really great, but I don't expect it to be really great the first time. So next, let's talk about video editing. So if you're watching this on YouTube, this has been edited. If you're seeing something of mine on TikTok or on Instagram or on Facebook or on YouTube or whatever, it has definitely been edited. And that editing has been a process. And this process is different for me. So I hired this, I hired this graphics guy years ago. I hired him to do graphic design work for us. And it turns out he's actually a really good video editor. So he starts editing videos. Then he does less and less graphic designing and more and more video editing because he's really, really good at it. And he starts changing things. And I'm like, you know, I really don't love the way you're doing these intros. They're too long. There's too much going on here. So let's shorten these. So he shortens the intros, but he's still doing a good job with other stuff. Then over time, he starts telling me, hey, look, I'm watching more TikTok videos because that's how people are consuming content today. And I'm trying to mimic the current style, the current editing style on TikTok. Wow, cool. So I start looking at the videos that he's doing, and I'm like, you know, I don't love this. I'm not on TikTok and I'm not my audience, right? And he says. And I push back a little bit, like, I don't love this. And he says, well, yeah, but this is what people like. And as we've published these, our data shows this is like, people are engaging with these more, so I'm going to do more of it. And I was like, okay, right. And the point there isn't that I hired this really, really amazing video editor. The point is that he's learning and improving and changing and trying things because I enabled him to do that. Because I pushed him to say, like, hey, you know, you're a good video editor. Let me see you try some things. I don't like what you did here, but, you know, you did a really good job. It's just a little bit not maybe my style, right? And so we've worked through it, and intros are great, outros are great. The middle of it is great. He sent me a video the other day that I had gotten from another video editor that I was like, you know, this just isn't great. Will you look at it? And he sent it back to me, and it was spectacular. And I just responded to him and said, you're so good at this, but we had to make progress to get there. It didn't happen that way the first time. Now, taking a step back, if you're not at this point yet where you're four years in with a video editor, you're looking at your first person. Or maybe you've hired your first person and haven't had success with them. In order to have progress, you have to have someone working with you. And in order to have progress, you probably have to fail, too. If you don't fail, well, I mean, if it's not perfect, then there's. I guess there's no problem. I mean, if it's perfect the first time, there's no progress made, there's no progress needed. So if you've hired someone and it didn't work out, let's go back and try it again. Now you have way better experience. The next time you're going to ask different questions. When you're interviewing, you're going to ask better questions. When you're interviewing, you're not going to fall in love with the first person that responds back to you. You're not going to do a video interview because that's not the right way to go about hiring someone. You're going to negotiate salary with them. As you, as you get to that point, you're going to have someone do a test task. The goal isn't to find the most skilled person. The goal is to find the person you jive with the best, the person that you get along with. Because you're going to interact with this person. It's not a robot, it's not chatgpt. This is a human that you're going to work with probably, hopefully for years and years to come. And you want to know, how well do we work together? So the best applicant isn't the most experienced necessarily, or the one that sounds the best. The best one is the one that you interact with the best. So if you've struggled with this, go back and make some progress for your second time. And then when you hire that right person, approach it with the perspective of, I'm not going to get this done right the first time. I'm going to make progress, we're going to make progress over and over and over again.
