How To Efficiently Manage a Large Team of Online Filipino Specialists - Practical Advice

How to efficiently manage a team of online Filipino specialists. Hey, this is John Jonas, and today we're skiing in the backcountry of Big Cottonwood Canyon. And so we're managing our body temperatures, managing our energy consumption, and it's a good time to talk about managing a team of online Filipino specialists. Got my daughter with me. So how do you manage a large team? There's a bunch that goes into this. Let me start by saying there's some cultural things in the Philippines that make this really great. One, they're super loyal, and when people are loyal, they stick with you. Long term, it's easier to manage them. Two, as a small business owner, it's hard to create standard operating procedures and training right up front. And in the Philippines, you don't have to do that. You can work with someone to train them along the way. So how do you manage start? The first thing for me is start by hiring one person. You don't start by hiring a big team. I have no clue how to manage a team when you hire them all at once. I've never done it. I built my team one by one. I have 36 people that work for me now. Actually, I just hired two yesterday to work alongside each other. I started in 2005, so it's been a long time. And when you hire people one at a time, not only do you get people who get good at what they're doing, but you get people that understand the business and they understand things that are going on and things that need to happen.

What?

The training is more personalized. The training is more personalized along with that, as people stick with you for a long time. Which I will tell you that people in my team who are managing others have been with me for 8, 11, 15 years. So they didn't start out as managers. And that's a question I often get. How do you hire a good manager up front? I don't know. I don't know how you do it. I've never done it. I've always hired people to do something. And then as we grow, they want to take on more responsibility. And I've given them options of saying, hey, we're doing this more, we're doing more SEO, so maybe you need some help. Yes, I do, sir. And then we can hire someone that they can look after their work. Then we'll hire a content writer. And now that person knows how the content writing needs to be, and they're managing that person now. We recently did this with our social media. Most of you know that I Don't do social media. I don't ever look at Facebook or Instagram, but I make posts all the time and we run ads. So I had this girl who wanted to run social media for me on my team. She started doing it. She did a really good job, got to the point where she needed help. So we hired a video editor, graphic designer to help. Then we hired someone else to manage all the posting and we hired someone else. Heck, I don't even know what that person does. But she asked me for help and I let her hire someone else. Well, I mean, isn't that kind of how businesses work? Like, you get a manager and their job is to manage their team. It's not just the CEO's job to manage the team. You get people that know what they're doing and then over time they're ready to hire on their own. I gotta take a break from filming, so when I got home from skiing.

I had some thoughts about it that I wanted to add. And I had an email from a customer who had some confusion about managing a remote team. She says, last year I hired too fast and basically I need to hire certain key people who can manage other team members. She asks, how do you know that somebody possesses these people management skills when you interview them in the first place? So that's not what I said and it's not what I did. I didn't manage certain or I didn't hire certain key people who could then manage other people. I hired certain key people who could do things that I needed them to do. And over time, as that thing grew, so I hired them to do SEO, I hired them to do social media management. Over time, as those roles grew, we hired another person to help with SEO and that person works under the person I hired. We hired another person to hire to do social media management and they work under the first person I hired. I didn't hire those first people because they had people skills. I hired them to do that specific task. Today I think we have six or seven customer support people, maybe more than that, probably maybe eight or ten customer support people and they all work together. I don't, I don't manage a whole bunch of people. I manage one person there and they, the first person I hired to help with customer support got really, really good at it. And then they were able to help me hire and manage other people and teach them how the whole process works. So I don't think the big deal here is to hire managers up front who can manage other people because then you're hiring A manager who doesn't really know how to do anything. Now you got to hire other people. And, and my experience over a lot of years says that if you hire one person at a time, you're going to have a better experience with this. As you grow, they'll find ways to manage or to help you build a team of people that are doing better things for you. Back to the snow.

Okay, so here's a few tips on managing them. Number one, figure out how you like to communicate and get really good at it. I like to communicate by talking and recording my screen. I use Snagit. I talk about this all the time because this changed my ability from being able to manage 3, 4, 5 people to being able to easily manage 15. I record Snagit videos every day. I open it up and I just start talking and then it's instantly ready to send to my team. They can watch it however many times they want. For me, that's so dang good. I have a friend that uses Voxer. He will not communicate any other way other than Voxer. Some people want to get on the phone, fine, that's what you want to do. It just takes more time. So find something that's efficient, that allows you to not be at the mercy of others. Time and recording screen capture videos, it's super efficient. Next, you can't be the one who's in charge of daily communication. They have to be. They have to send you a report every day. And in that report you need to structure it so you're getting the information you want from them so that you know if something's going wrong. In our data admin processing stuff where we're verifying people's accounts, there's nothing a ton that can go wrong here. But I want them to report to me how many accounts they needed to process and how many they actually processed. I asked them regularly, are we keeping up or are we falling behind? I ask them, is there a way we can make this more efficient for you? And with that, we found out we're falling behind. We hired someone else. Ooh, that window. I also have an automatic check in system where our project manager system asks them every day, what did you do today? And so every day there's a task for them. It recurs every weekday and that's a big deal. So just so you know, there's not a lot of communication that's required here on my part. But regularly I say, hey, I really appreciate your work and what can I do to help you? And often they'll give me something. Number two, use a project management system. Find something that suits how your brain works and use it. For me, that's Basecamp. I love Basecamp. It allows people to communicate however they want to communicate with the system. My business partner just uses email. That's all he ever does. He never logs into the system, and it works fine. Some people just use their phones. I use my phone and I use their desktop app, and I love the way it works. And we track projects and you can easily tag people. And so when you think about a project, you can say, I don't know where that project is, but I know this person is supposed to be working on it, so let me go look at his tasks. Easy to find next for me. And maybe last is you have to hand off entire systems. So if you're getting work done, but you're still the one that that work falls upon to get completed, like you're getting a partial work done and then the rest of it comes back to you to finish it, you're taking too much time there. You've got to hand off entire systems, entire processes to other people, and that will allow you to be available to help more people. I'll try and link to some other people's advice because there's more than one way to do this. Other people are managing big teams. It's not just me. And I'll link to their advice so you can get a different perspective, because different people do things differently. My name is John Jonas. I created onlinejobs ph which is the largest marketplace for finding and hiring online Filipino specialists. And I want you to hire someone. It's not that hard. You can find talent for anything you want to do online. Go check out 1vaoa.com where you can, where I will walk you through the process of finding and hiring the right person so you can help in your business.

Sam.