John Jonas runs his business in 17 hours a week by outsourcing to a team in the Philippines. He hires one person at a time, trains them thoroughly, then adds more staff. He delegates creative work, research, lead generation, social media, and ads to avoid burnout and spend time with family.
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Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing. This is episode 410. I like working, that's why I don't. So a lot of people that I know well know that I don't work very much. I work about 17 hours a week and actually during the winter, it's usually less than that. Winter's ski season and I ski a lot, so I work less. And I really like working. I like what I do, I like my business. It's fulfilling, it's helpful, it's creative. And that's why, even though I can afford to work less, I still work. I still like solving problems. I like finishing projects, I like being creative and creating solutions. I like checking on my people. But there are also reasons why I don't work more than 17 hours a week, even though I can. The number one reason is I want to spend the time with my wife and my kids. Number two, want my business to last. And number three, I don't want to burn out. So most entrepreneurs I know, they work themselves to death. They work 60 hours a week, they resent their business, they feel like they're overworked and underpaid because they're building this thing that's going to pay off in the long run. But for now, they're killing themselves and they get burnt out and they get sick of the business and they want to move on. And it's when you stick with a business for a long time, typically that the business really starts to succeed. The longer you stick in one industry, the more it'll succeed because you get really, really good at it. But if you burn yourself out, your business can't last. So I have a good friend who, he's really, really good at putting together real estate deals. He's been doing this for years. At one point he owned 17, 17 houses, 17 high end houses that he was flipping. He's moved on and he's building commercial real estate now and he's building really big mixed office warehouse space projects. And he came to me the other day and he said, hey, I need to work less. How do I do that? And I've known, I've known for a long time that he's overworked and he's really good at what he does, but he's sick of it and he doesn't want to do it anymore. And when you work so hard on something, even if it's something you love, eventually you get tired of it. So him and I are having A conversation about delegating work. Even though there's a lot of stuff that requires his knowledge, you can still transfer knowledge to other people. For me, in order to keep myself from getting burned out, I send everything I can to my team in the Philippines. Now, you don't have to have a team to do this. You really just have to have one person. And with that one person, you're just going to send them everything you can send them until you realize, oh my gosh, yeah, they're obviously way too busy and I need to hire someone else, which is exactly what I did in the beginning. So I will send my team. I have a list here. Creative work. Hey, can you try doing this creative thing? Research? Will you research this for me? Or lead generation? Hey, I think we can generate leads by doing this. Will you try it? Or social media? Hey, what if we post like this? Hey, let's try that thing. Hey, what if we do this? Will you do this social media thing for me? Or paper click ads or Facebook ads? Hey, tell me how you do this and let's get good at it and let's work together to make this thing happen. The list of things that I send to my team in the Philippines goes on and on and on. So I only work when I absolutely have to and not absolutely have to. I work to keep the business running and I work to be creative and create solutions so that I'm not mentally exhausted. Things get done in my business and maybe they don't get done the same way as if I were doing them, but I were doing them, they wouldn't get done at all, most likely. And I spend time on the things that matter most to me, like my family or skiing with my family or riding my bike with my family. So if you're feeling burnt out, here's the solution. You're going to start with one person. You're going to hire one person to take something off of your plate, one task off of your plate, and then you're going to give them another thing and you're going to provide them training. And yep, it's going to take you more time than it would just for you to do it yourself. At least the first two or three times it is. After that, you're never going to touch that thing again. And you're going to find this amazing mental relief of, here's this thing, let me pass it off. Hey, here's something similar to that. Let me see if I can pass that off too. Let me make a little bit of training and see what happens. Oh, here's something else. Let me pass that off too. So when I first started, I did this with entire industries like SEO, where I had a good working knowledge of SEO. And so I just taught all of it to them. And yeah, I could have done the work myself. I haven't touched it in years and years now. I mean, probably 15 years. And yet it's pretty reasonable for me to get SEO work done because I've taught it and people on my team understand it. So to get rid of the burnout, you're going to hire one person. You're going to get them working on one task that was yours? Yes. It's going to take you more time. When they're full, then you're going to hire a second ofs, and it snowballs from there. And pretty soon you have a complete team of people that you can send specific things to. And now you have really experts at different things. And when you get something coming in, you can say, hey, will you do this? Because you already understand this piece of the business and here's this thing, and maybe it's slightly outside of what you do, but you understand enough and let me give you a little bit more training. And now you're starting to become the CEO rather than wearing every single hat in the business. This is how you prevent burnout. This is how you spend time doing the things that you love. You hire someone to do things for you. For me, all of those people are in the Philippines. For you. It doesn't have to be all in the Philippines, but wow, it sure makes it a lot easier. It's super easy to find the people and the salaries are super reasonable. And the loyalty really makes running your business long term way, way better than having turnover from US workers. Give it a try. Onlinejobs.
