Humanitarian Projects and Entrepreneurial Triumphs: Shepard's Story

It's just been such a time saving having a VA that trustworthy and good that can do that.

Hey, it's Chelain with onlinejobs ph and today we are here with shepherd, who is, who is going to give us the lowdown on how he uses VAs for humanitarian projects as well as entrepreneurialism. So Shepard, thank you so much for being with us.

Well, thanks for having me on, Chilaine. I appreciate it. And by the way, way to go with the first three letters of your first name. I like that. That's such a great start.

You know, tell us about what you do.

Well, you know, I have a number of businesses. I spent about 10 years as a police officer earlier in life and then I got into entrepreneurialism and I haven't learned how to pronounce it yet, but I'm into it. And my wife is kind of the business brains of our family operation. And so we've, we've owned a number of businesses. Some of them we've purchased, some of them we've started, some of them we've sold, some of them we still have. And so that's kind of my day to day bread and butter. We have a tourism based business in the Rocky Mountain region. And then I've fortunately been able the last few years to put more of my energy into my humanitarian, human rights activism, liberty type things. And so I've been able to put a lot more focus into that. And so I have a YouTube channel and a number of web pages and I just kind of help out in that community as well. So that's, that's kind of what I'm into and what I'm about.

Basically, you use your VAs primarily for your humanitarian based projects, is that correct?

Yes. There is a person in our movement who does extensive blogging or writing on a social media platform. And so I hired a va, or the VA that I'd hired for other purposes, goes into this social media platform and copy and pastes all of his brilliant quotes into a long document and then helps me edit that document up. And we've now published three books titled this Person's Journal for 2018. For 2019. For 2020. And so it's just been such a time savings having a VA that's trustworthy and good that can do that. Oh my gosh, the things I've learned in the growing pains. But it's just been so very worth it. I can't imagine spending the 10 hours or more that it took for each of those books to go in and do all of the copy and pasting and removing naughty words and that kind of stuff so that it's print ready. So yeah, it's just been wonderful in that way.

How were you introduced to outsourcing? When did that come about?

You know, I was interested. I was at, I go to a convention I have for many years in Acapulco, Mexico. And one of the people that attends the convention started up a online service, a VA service also out of the Philippines. And his was a, I think a 20 hour a week or a 40 hour a week option. And you paid him $6 an hour and then he paid his VA's probably $3 an hour. But they all knew they had steady work and he allotted them a certain amount of time for each person that was a member. And that business model didn't seem perfect. And so I didn't go with his version. But in looking that up, I don't know if it was retargeting or what, but I think I've been a member now for three or four or five years, something like that on online jobs. Ph but I, I don't know how I stumbled upon it, but I did and I thought, wow, I, I really like the, the business model. So yeah, why don't I give this a shot?

Okay, so how did you get started with onlinejobs? Ph, what's the first thing you did?

Well, I think the first thing I did was I looked at the, the advertisement and I love honesty and advertising. I don't like add ons, I don't like upsell sales, I don't like cross sales. I like this is the product we have and this is why it's worth it, give it a go. And I loved the idea that I could sign up for a month, get all the goodies that I wanted and then dump it and never pay again. It wasn't the typical subscription thing that, you know, you count on the person never coming to the gym after January 1st. It wasn't that typical subscription based model. And so I thought, yeah, I'll give it a shot. And so I started out without getting any of the training or listening to any of the good advice. And it was frankly mostly a disappointment. I just didn't do the hiring and recruiting properly and I'm not sure what it's called. I think One VA away or something like that is a recent thing and I spent the 50 bucks and bought that class and it's really smart. There are just a few things that I think about, you know, my VA, our agreed upon rate is $5 an. So when I think about the less than 10 hours that I spend on this, it is saving me so many dollars in the long run by being a better leader for her and using the system better. So that was my introduction is I tried hiring a few people. I think at that point it was for video editing. And I didn't give good instructions. And I made the other common mistake from what I'm now learning of saying, well, I'd like you to do my accounting and my legal work and my video editing and my content creation and my writing and my blah, blah, blah, blah. And then I realized these are human beings. And just like in the United States, 98% of people aren't of very much value to others. Speaking of which, if anybody wants to go on Amazon and buy my book, harsh advice for the unemployed guy. That's how passionate I am about it. I wrote a book about how to just be worth a darn in life. And so I had this expectation that for three or four dollars an hour I could find people that were worth a darn in life and could just do everything in the world and would have my work ethic and my wide and deep interest in various topics. And I learned all this stuff. So why doesn't somebody else. Well, there are probably many Filipinos that have. So I think that that was a big realization that I had was that these are human beings, they're not perfect, and I need to invest the time doing training properly, extensive training and feedback and doing it in a nice way. Once I've taught it once, now I'm golden for the next thousands of videos and podcasts.

You work with more than one VA in the Philippines?

Not right now. I have had a number of VAs that I've worked with. However, there has always kind of been a reason that I've decided, no, I'm going to go back to just this one person. Her degree is in accounting, and I haven't asked her to do any accounting yet. Even that's her specialty. So far, it's been just her. In our business, we have a very strong need for phone answerers that are also salespeople. There are so few people, even in the United States with English as a first language who are capable, competent, excellent at that. But we are considering adding more for various reasons.

Tell me more about what Mickey has done for you in the past.

Copy and pasting of the book has been a large project, and then a big project that we're working on right now is for social media. I am a An outspoken person. And so we have a rule within our business that I've instituted that I am not allowed to get on social media because it just hurts our business too much. So what Mickey is doing now is she has compiled photographs of some mountains near where we live, and then we also collected hundreds of quotable quotes. And she is now making memes out of each of those for my business, my wife's business, and a blank page. And then she is going to do the scheduling for social media. And she did the research at my request into various platforms that cost 60, $70 a month to do the automatic posting. So it's an easy upload. And they. And then we kind of came to the conclusion that the cost would be about the same to have some company automatically do it as to have her do it. And she has a son and a husband and she kind of works for extra money for their family. And I thought, well, why not have her get the money instead of some company, some big, you know, Amazon or somebody like that, who's the parent company of one of these automated services that's going to kick my content off anyway. Why don't I support those who treat me well? And then a lot of just little things here and there. We're considering selling our house and we took a bunch of photographs and I forget what it was, but there was some file sharing kind of thing that was just. It was going to take an hour or two and I thought two hours, $10. I would much rather not do that myself, and Mickey would love to do it. So the following day it was done. And so there are a lot of little things like that. She's been very beneficial to us. There is, I think, a challenge that I face is that I worry that I won't have enough work for her. And in her particular situation, her mom was sick a week and a half, two weeks ago, and so she was really worried about not being quick to respond to me. And I said, take a week or whatever you need, just go take care of business. And I've. I've noticed that she isn't passionate about getting as many hours as she can. She has a busy life and they already have income from her husband, so she doesn't quite have the, the desire to work as much sometimes as I wish she did. But it's turned out to be okay because I would hate to have her wanting to work and, and I don't have anything ready for her to go. But overall, it's worked out well.

Is there anything that you've done with Mickey that hasn't worked that you've had to back up.

I think it is just making everything clear in the beginning and recognizing strengths, weaknesses and not trying to do things that, that I don't have time to teach. And so I think video editing is a good example. The video editing that Mickey's doing for me right now, I'm going through, I'm reading a book that is just fabulous. I'm really into logic and reason. And so I'm reading this book with 300 logical fallacies. And so in the mornings I'll get my cup of Joe and sit down and I'll read the page and a half description of a fallacy and then I will turn my recorder on and describe it in my own words. And then I send her that raw audio file and she puts it to a solid background and labels it with the name of that fallacy and then links it to the Amazon affiliate link that his book is on and where people can find more information about that fallacy on Wikipedia. And so that project she's doing, well, there are some things we still need to tune up. She's done two so far that she's done more, but I haven't uploaded them yet. So she did the few. Now I would like her to be able to upload them to odyssey.com and so she will then be uploading those to Odyssey and to the SoundCloud podcast. And little by little I think it's the layering of saying, are you good at video editing? And I gave her the first task of doing one without any instruction. And when I got it back I it just wasn't. There were so many things that I would need to teach and video editing takes a long time to get good at. And I frankly don't have the time to add the business of teaching people how to do video editing in full.

So with all of your experience, do you have a few bullet points that you'd be willing to share with our entrepreneurs about how to find success and.

Follow what they love, Be excellent, a positive attitude and being excellent. And by excellent I mean don't do anything part way. And if you do, make up for it. So I like to tell my clients, we are going to provide you with these four things at this cost. Well, we never provide them with those four things we have built into our systems that we provide them with five or six or seven things and we do it even better than they have ever experience. So that when we book people for our activity, there are three layers. So if we Mess up on one of them because people are human. The other two layers will catch the mistake. So never with almost 20,000 clients over the last 11 years, never have we not been there for an appointment. Just meet that, do what you say, do it pretty well and be friendly and nice about it and be honest. And then I would add one thing for. And this kind of. I wrote about this some in my book. This is for the person who isn't yet a real entrepreneur, doesn't have their own business, is interested in it. Start businesses and fail them. Fail, fail, fail, fail. This is something so important is think about something and you look and you look at that beautiful plant off to your left and you think, what could I, ooh, I could do a watering service. And so you start your plant watering business. And of course first thing every entrepreneur does is go and get business cards made. Then some nosy neighbor sees you watering plants without a city business license and they go complain to the government and the government comes to you and says, hey, you have to get a business license. And then you think about your business and you think, huh, I was going to make $250 a month doing this as just a little side hustle thing. But the business license is 250 bucks. Is it really worth it or do I want to do the right thing, which isn't the legal thing, and continue producing value for people and just kind of do it under the table. Oh, there are taxes. Oh, there are. I could knock over a person's painting that's worth a million bucks while I'm watering their flower. Oh, I need insurance. They have learned five things way better. They've learned it deeply way better than if they had read a lot of wonderful books.

Is there any advice you would give to beginning outsourcing entrepreneurs?

But really, truly, that course of the 50 course of 1 VA, the 1.

VA away challenge, yep, yeah, it is really worth it.

And basically, I mean, yeah, it's done in a smart way. And of course I'm supposed to buy other stuff afterward. But I'm really glad that I spent the 50 bucks because even if I only got three or four things out of it that I know that help me, I think it is enough that I would actually buy that before I would subscribe to online jobs. Ph, watch all the videos and then go back through them and then follow along at the pace you're supposed to because it's kind of a day by day challenge kind of thing. But I would say invest the time up front. Know that you're not going to get a completely skilled turnkey ready to go CFO on day two. It's going to take time to build. But I think that video series and I actually challenged John online on social media and said, is this one of those things where I'm going to buy this and then you're going to want me to buy something for $997? And is this one of those clickbait sales funnel type things? And he says, yes, there are things that we want to sell you. However, it is also a good work alone or standalone product. And his honesty there and the fact that the CEO of the company would just get on and respond to some dude that made a comment, that's, that's, that's really makes me trust the company. And so, yeah, I think buying the $50 course, that would be my one piece of advice. You're going to save yourself so much time and hassle if you buy it and follow that advice.

Shepard, thank you for your time today.

Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.

Absolutely. Share with us again the link to your book and if there's any other way that our viewers can connect with you, let us know.

The book is harsh advice for the unemployed guy and I'll send a link to you. And that is available on Amazon. And the books that Nikki has been helping do are called Larkin Rose's Journal. It's a series of three and there are two more that we're going to release hopefully within a year.