John Jonas trained his Filipino virtual assistant Jovan from zero knowledge to running multiple teams in his company. The video shows how structured training and support built Jovan's confidence and capability to manage the business.
Questions this video answers
2005
2007
Design, development, quality assurance, and marketing
Chapters
A follow up on Jovan, the manager of onlinejobs Ph. So about a month ago, I made Joven the manager of onlinejobs Ph. And I've talked about this on the podcast a couple times now. He's currently managing our design, our development, our quality assurance and our marketing teams. Joven is amazing. He was the first person I hired in 2005 and so he's been with me for a long time. Was he always capable? So here's this was my question. Was he always capable of managing these things? And as I thought about it, no way was he capable of that. In fact, when I hired him in 2005, he knew nothing. And so he. I didn't know that at the time, although I quickly figured it out. But in 2007 I got an email from him that said, sir, when you first hired me, I knew nothing and I was so scared that I was going to mess something up and you were going to fire me. Which, you know, that was never. That was. I didn't really know that he was scared of that. It wasn't really a thing for me. But so what changed between the 2005, 2007 Jovan to the 2022 Jovan who is managing so much of my business. So one thing that changed was me, where I realized that he and realistically so many other people in the Philippines were capable of running teams like this now. Yes, they have to have experience, they have to know what's going on. And that's so dang helpful that he understands the business, he knows the people in the business, he understands our processes. He's been through it for a long time. Right? So I don't feel like I could very easily pull someone off the street and have them manage what Joven is currently managing. But I realized, oh yeah, he's way more capable than I thought he was. He had to realize this too because like I said in the beginning, he, he knew nothing and he kind of realized he knew nothing and he was so scared of messing up. And for a lot of years I think he was really scared of messing up until he realized, oh yeah, I'm not gonna let him go if he messes up. And he went from knowing nothing and I really, I can confirm he knew almost nothing to like building websites, to doing SEO, to creating and running pay per click campaigns, doing all kinds of marketing, helping to create our admin verification system where we verify workers like through a full system of processes to. He started managing a team of people and then he started managing multiple teams of people. So how did Jovan go from like, oh, I know nothing and I'm super scared to fully managing everything? Here's how it happened. Training. I've said this in the last couple podcast episodes, but here's what. In 2007, that conversation continued. He didn't just say, I knew nothing and I was scared. He said, I was so scared you were going to get mad at me and fire me. But then you started to give me training. You taught me how to do things. I realized you cared about my success. That training gave me confidence so I could try new things. It gave me confidence to learn new things on my own. So I didn't know that. I just wanted him to do something that I wanted him to do. And what that did with him was give him confidence. It changed his outlook on things like, oh, yeah, I think I can do this. And after a while of giving him training of different things, SEO and pay per click and marketing and content creation and websites, after a while this, he started putting things together. He started creating connections in his brain, and he then started learning things on his own. And this is where I've told this story a lot of times where I asked him to do something and then I stopped paying attention to it. And after like six months, I asked him, hey, what's going on with this thing? And he says, oh, yeah, sir, I did it the way that you told me to do it. But after doing it that way a couple times, I did some research on my own and I found out that if I do it like this and like this instead of what you said, and if I do it this often instead of how often you said, it's way more effective for you. I hope that's okay with you, sir. And I was like, yeah, that's okay. Like, that's amazing. Right? Well, I didn't, I didn't realize that was because I had giving him all this training, which has given him this confidence to be able to say, yeah, I can do this on my own, I can do this better for you. Right? It wasn't, it didn't give him confidence to say, oh, I'm going to go out and leave you alone and I'm going to quit and go do this on my own. It was no, because that's the part of the Philippines is their loyalty. It was his confidence to say, you're not going to fire me, you care about me. You're going to give me more training. I'm going to try and contribute too. I'm going to figure out how to do more stuff for you. So training and I know a lot of you are thinking oh man, I don't want to create that training. I don't have the time to create that training. What if I don't know how to create those trainings that you're talking about? Is there a shortcut? Yes there is. Starting in the next podcast episode I'm going to show you the training that I have created so that you can now get that training. Hand it off to your new OFS or your experienced OFS or your beginner or someone you've had working for you for a long time. Hand it off. They'll get the employee part of it. You get a little bit of employer instructions so that you can work together to accomplish this task. They realize you care about them. They get better, they see future work potential. You have a whole bunch of trainings that you can give them. It snowballs from there. Next episode.
