How to Run Your Business With Filipino VAs

Virtual assistants have completely transformed my business and my life, allowing me to run an eight figure per year business while working less than 15 hours a week. I've done this for years and years and years because of the team of VAs that I have in the Philippines. I'm going to tell you how to use a VA in your business in this video. So you've heard about using virtual assistants. You're not exactly sure how to use one or if it can work for you. In this video, I'm going to explain it all. How do you find the right people? Where do you find them? Who should you hire? Let's talk about it. So first, what a virtual assistant is, is typically someone who is not working in your office. That's it. That's the only definition of virtual assistant. What we normally think about for VA's are people who work overseas who are less expensive. Typically in today's world, that's in the Philippines. It used to be that people used to go to India to find VAs. And what people found, starting about 15 years ago was that the Philippines is much better suited towards the western culture and people just have a better experience hiring in the Philippines than they do in other countries. You can find good VAs in any country. You just increase your chances if it's in the Philippines. So then what is the goal of hiring a virtual assistant? Well, usually there are two goals. Number one is to get work done. You have something you want done and you need someone to do it and you're going to hire that VA to do that work for you. The goal number two is to save time to get something off of your plate and get someone else doing it so that you can get some time back in your life. Those are typically the two goals of hiring a va. So why would you hire someone overseas? Well, number one reason would be cost. You hire someone from the Philippines, they're typically going to start at around $5 per hour versus in the US where you're going to be somewhere between 20 and $50 an hour. Number two is to gain access to global talent. If you're hiring in the us, you're typically in competition with someone else in the US hiring that person. Whereas out of the Philippines you gain access to this really big talent pool. There's 100 million people in the Philippines and it's really, really easy to find them. So hiring a virtual assistant overseas typically gets you easier access to really good talent. The next reason for hiring a VA overseas is because it's versatile. There's less government red Tape, it's easier to onboard, it's easier to let go. All of it becomes easier when it's overseas versus locally. So next, let's answer the question of what can you have a VA do for you? There's all kinds of things. So number one, you would start with administrative work. You're thinking about answering email and doing calendaring and scheduling, answering customer support, doing data entry. These are all very, very easy things for someone in the Philippines to do for you. So some things you may not have thought about would include marketing. So social media marketing or email marketing, or search engine marketing, or paid ads marketing, Facebook ads, or Google Ads. You can easily have a virtual assistant do bookkeeping for you. Programming work is often done in the Philippines. Graphic design is a very easy thing, or video editing or podcast editing, content creation, blog writing, email writing, managing your website. All of these things are really, really easy to find a virtual assistant to do for you. Then there's the other things that you haven't thought about yet that you could have them do for you. Like I have a friend that hired an investment banking analyst in the Philippines. He said, this guy's a $150,000 a year person. In the US he's paying him $1,500 a month. Or I had another friend that hired an accounting auditor. Super easy. Out of the Philippines. You can hire a CAD designer. You can hire someone who's super experience with Shopify or Amazon. You can hire salespeople to do cold calling or sales outreach or sales closers. You can hire appointment setters. Basically anything that can be done on the phone or on a computer. You can find a virtual assistant to do for your business and you could find someone really good at it. So how do you find these people? I'm gonna give you a couple different ways to find people. When I started, I hired through an agency. I go to an agency, they hired me a webmaster. They weren't very good at hiring webmasters and they just really just brought someone cold off the street, gave them a little bit of training and said, here's your webmaster. Agencies today are probably a little bit better at this, at finding you someone who's more qualified. They're typically going to mark up the salary of the person that you're hiring. So if you're paying the agency $2,200 a month, they're probably paying that person around $600 per month. When I did it, at first I was paying them $750. They were paying that person $250. Now this was in 2005. For me, wages have obviously gone up a bunch and since then. That person that I hired in 2005 still works for me today and his wage is now probably six or seven times what he was making then. But he's been with me for a really, really long time, which is one of the really big advantages to hiring a VA from the Philippines versus locally. 20 years of sticking with someone is a really big deal. So that was through the agency. I haven't hired through an agency since then because there are better ways. Another way to do it would be a matchmaker service where you pay someone to find you the right person. Typically you're going to pay between 500 and $1,500 for them to find you the right person and then they're going to turn that person over to you and probably keep a small monthly fee on the back end. They're not going to do any management of that person. Well, really neither is the agency other than the agency probably has an office in the country where you're hiring the person and they have a computer for them and they're going to stand over their shoulder and make sure that they're working for the full eight hours that day. I Another way of finding a virtual assistant would be through a freelancer platform like Upwork or Freelancer or Fiverr. When you hire that person you have to work through their platform. So through Upwork you have to communicate with your person through Upwork you have to pay them through Upwork so that upwork can take their cut on the back end. They're going to take a 10 to 20% cut out of your pay and then again out of the worker's pay on the back end. There's a high price to pay but you can find people that way. Typically you're going to do this if you're looking for someone short term. This is not a good long term option for most people today. The best way to find a virtual assistant overseas out of the Philippines would be through onlinejobs ph. It's a giant database of people in the Philippines where they've created their profile and typically uploaded their resume. And you can post a job and they're going to apply to your job or you can search the database and contact individuals and interview them. Hire them on your own. Now the good news about onlinejobs PH is they don't take a markup the person they give you direct access to the people that you're looking for so you can find exactly the skills you're looking for in a person, you can interview them exactly how you want to interview them, and then you aren't forced to work with them in the platform. You can take them off and communicate with them through your project management system or your Gmail, and you're directly working with them. There's no middleman involved. Now what most people find is they're scared to do the online jobs route at first, then after they've done it another way that they realize, oh, online jobs is a much better way of doing this. It wasn't as scary as I thought it was. So while it's perfectly acceptable to go through an agency, typically what you find is they found you a person, that person isn't exactly what you were looking for and you would have done a better job recruiting for yourself, but they did find it for you with no effort on your part. Now they have a manager in between you and that person, which creates some friction, although it's not a ton of friction usually. And then you pay a triple marked up salary or you can go through upwork. Then you find that you're still just locked into the upwork system, although they do make it really easy to pay that person, which is also really easy through an agency or through onlinejobs. Ph. So most people end up when they're ready to hire a virtual assistant at OnlineJobs ph because of their lack of getting involved in your hire. It allows you to hire virtual assistants as staff and bring them into your company and work with them how you want to work. So then let's talk about what skills you should be looking for when you're ready to hire a virtual assistant to bring into your company. Usually when people do this, they think, oh, I need someone with admin skills or I need someone with data entry skills. And I'm going to give you a little bit different perspective here. Someone can easily learn admin skills, not that you have to train it, although even if they have admin skills, you're probably still going to have to train it a little bit. Someone can also easily learn the data entry that you want, or they can learn social media marketing pretty easily. What they can't learn is to be interested and invested in your company. And so when you are hiring someone, the number one thing you should look for is are they interested and hungry? And I like to call this young and hungry. So do they really want to learn? Do they want to try new things? Do they want to be involved? Do they want to answer questions and ask questions? Are they looking for training or are they Already insisting they're an expert, they don't need you, which that typically, what I have seen over the years in virtual assistants is that's going to cause a problem. So then the skills you're really looking for are reliability, communication, time management. Does this person show up every day? Do they respond to you quickly? Because that means they're really interested and once you hire them, they're going to respond to you quickly, or do they take a lot of time in responding to you when you're interviewing them, which probably means they're going to take a lot of time responding to you after you hire them. Do you enjoy communicating with this person? Because you're going to communicate with them a lot. If you don't like the communication initially, then it's probably not a good fit, regardless of their skills. I've done this in the past where I hired someone because they had really great skills. I didn't really love the communication. And then after I hired them, it all got magnified and got worse and it was actually a really terrible hire, despite their skills. So for most virtual assistant hiring, you're looking for someone who's a good fit for you rather than someone who is really skilled. There's all kinds of information out there on how to find great people. One of the best resources would be 1vaaway.com where I talk about exactly how I find great people. I've been doing it for 20 years and I don't ever question if I'm going to find someone great. I do it every single time. And that training will help you find someone great every time also. Next, let's talk about tools, tools you're going to use with your va. So there are a bunch of tools that most employers are using and there are some specialty things that you're going to use that I don't know. But for what most employers are using, these things include Google Suite. So you're using Google Drive, Google Sheets, Google Docs. These are really, really easy to use with the person you're working with. You could also use Microsoft Teams for most of these things, where it provides you an access to a suite of tools that you can use and they can use, and it's really easy. These are both also very affordable, super reasonable to use. Another common tool that people are using is Slack. It's a really great communication tool that people use. Instant messaging, you can separate your conversations. It's really easy. My team uses it internally among themselves and only involves me in certain specific things for doing video conferences with them. Zoom is probably the standard. You use it in other things. You could use it with the people in the Philippines. Their computers and their Internet will handle a zoom meeting with you just fine. You could also use Facebook messenger for this. And sometimes with some people you can use FaceTime on an iPhone. Not everybody in the Philippines will have an iPhone, but some of the people on my team do and some do not. For those who do, we often text message back and forth using imessage. It's actually really, really nice. At my team we use Basecamp as a project management system. We also use just normal email to communicate with each other. For doing training, I use Snagit. It's a really easy way to create screen captured video recorded trainings of what I want them to do. You could use Loom as another option or Tiny Take is another option. The specific tools you use don't really matter as long as they're helping you to communicate and organize and get work done. Some other tools that a lot of other people have told me that they use include Asana and Monday. People use Canva for design work for AI. A lot of people are using Grammarly with their team in the Philippines. The number of tools that you could use is really endless and what you're going to use in your business will depend on your current needs and the current tools you are already using will probably work with a virtual assistant overseas. So now let's talk about some cultural things you should be aware of when hiring a virtual assistant. Number one, this probably shouldn't be very different than hiring someone locally. So if you're going to hire someone in your office, you're probably going to interview a number of people, you're going to collect resumes, you're going to interview them, and then you're going to bring them in and you're going to orient them. It's probably the same thing. When you hire a virtual assistant, you're going to collect a bunch of resumes, you're going to do some interviews, you're going to hire them and you're going to orient them on your company. With someone locally, you would probably provide them some training, regardless of what the role is, to bring them into your company and to orient them to your customers and to your market. You should do the same thing when you hire a virtual assistant. Let them know what your customers are like and what they expect and how you want to treat people. Along those same lines, you should probably treat a virtual assistant the same way you would treat a local person that was in your office. This virtual assistant, whether they're in the Philippines or in the next city is still a person, they're still a human. And often we think, oh, they're overseas, they're a thousand miles away, and we don't have to treat them very well. That's a poor way to go about this. And you're much more likely to have good success if you think about them as a local person. Next. When working with another culture, typically feedback is really, really important. So you hire someone, you give them work, they do it wrong, give them feedback and help them accomplish it. The more you do this, the more they'll get things right in the future. Same thing with training. If you provide training to them, they're probably going to get it wrong at first, and then they'll get it right. Next. And then, because the Philippines has this really amazing culture of loyalty, Like I said, the first person I ever hired in 2005 still works for me today. The training and work that I put into him in 2005, in 2006 and 2007 is still paying off now, so, so many years later. So while you think you might just be hiring someone for three weeks or three months, chances are really high that you're going to have them for a lot of years. I know so many people that have had their virtual assistants working with them for years and years. The next cultural thing to be aware of is trust. Yes, I know you don't know if you can trust this person and bring them into your business, but they're thinking the same thing. And actually their feeling is probably stronger in that they don't know if they can trust you. They don't know if they can trust you to be a good employer. They don't know if they can trust you to pay them on time. They don't know if they can trust you to not yell at them. So when you start to work with this virtual assistant, you should probably do some things to gain their trust. If you do, you're much more likely to succeed at this. Now, what is it actually like to have a virtual assistant work for you? When? Well, here's how it works for me. So I have a task that I need to get done. It's usually something that would fall on my shoulders, but this time I'm going to assign it to someone in the Philippines. I create a short video, maybe five minutes of training on how to do this thing. I send it to them in my afternoon. They're typically going to work overnight because I don't force my people to work the night shift. You could that's fine. I'm going to send it to them. I'm going to sleep. They're gonna do the work and send it back to me in the morning. Usually, if it's the first time we're doing this thing, it's not gonna be correct. The very first time they're gonna send it to me, I'm gonna look at it. I'm gonna give them feedback in the morning on my time. I'm gonna go throughout my day doing my work without interruptions, without them asking me a million questions. I'm gonna send it back to them. They're gonna do the work. At night as I sleep, it's gonna come back correct, and we got the work done and I didn't have to do it. Now, the next time I need to do that thing, I'm not gonna give any training or anything. I'm just. And they're going to do the work and send it back. And because of the way I work with virtual assistants and the way that you can too, because of the Philippines, that person's going to work with me reliably for a really, really long time. Now, the next time I need something similar done, I probably don't have to provide as much training because I've already taught this person this whole task over here. Now we're going to do this similar task, and so I'm just going to provide a little bit of instruction, and they're going to use their knowledge from here to incorporate it into this task. Same thing the next time we do a related task. And this applies across the board. Let's say you want to get some SEO work done, and you're going to teach them something about your market and they're going to go learn some SEO. They understand your customers. Now you want to do social media marketing. Well, they're pretty dang similar. Now you want to do some paid ads marketing. Well, that relies directly on the social media and the SEO. Now, your paid ads on Google Ads and Facebook ads are actually really easy for you to implement. I did this recently. I had someone who was working for me. She understands our market and our customers. I transitioned her from social media to paid ads, and she's running our Google Ads and our Facebook ads to the tune of about $100,000 a month. And she does a really good job at it because she was trained on a whole bunch of other things. She's been with our company for about five years and will probably be with us for as long as I'll have her. And for me that's what having a virtual assistant is actually like. For most people, hiring a virtual assistant is scary. You haven't done it before and you're scared you're not going to find the right person. You're going to make a mistake. You could get ripped off. All of these things are unlikely if you just take the leap. And that's really, in the end, I myself, when I did this the very first time, I had to take a leap. I was scared. I didn't know if I could keep them busy. I didn't know if they could actually do good work. I didn't know if I could find someone good. I took a leap, and it was a leap of faith. I had to just hire someone and see if it worked out. And he wasn't that great. But I started giving him training and I started working with him. We started accomplishing simple tasks that turned into more complicated tasks. And again, he still works for me today. And today he's amazing. You can find really amazing rock stars. You can also find people who are young and hungry who want to be rock stars. They're just not there yet. But if you work with them, they'll become that rock star and will help you build your business for years and years to come. Now, there's a lot more that I can tell you about hiring virtual assistants. And I want to tell you that. And if you want, you can subscribe on my YouTube channel, or you can take the leap and head to onlinejobs ph and post a job and try and hire someone. You could also do both of them at the same time. Subscribe, head to onlinejobs ph post a job, try and hire a virtual assistant today.