Kevin King and Outsourcing for Dropshipping & Shopify

As far as hiring goes, I mean, once you find that one or two really, like, smart, motivated, trustworthy va, it will make your whole business so much easier.

Welcome. My name is John Jonas and I'm here with Kevin King. We're gonna do a quick case study about how Kevin has hired his virtual assistants. He has a really good story, so welcome, Kevin.

Hey, how's it going, guys?

Good to have you here, man.

Thanks.

So you sent me an email about your VAs and kind of how you got started. Can you talk through that process of first wanting to get a va? What was the driving factor behind it?

I kind of dropped out of college and started my first job, shipping business. And so at the time of starting the business and trying to scale it up, I was kind of tight on funds, so I was doing just about everything myself. Then as business picked up, there was more customers and more money. I decided it was time to hire somebody. I had friends that do dropshipping too and have e commerce businesses. So they kind of recommended outsourcing to the Philippines. It was just a little more inexpensive and they spoke good English and they were loyal. Generally speaking, they were loyal. So I decided to outsource to the Philippines and I had a lot of success with it, actually.

So someone recommended to you onlinejobs?

Ph, yeah, one of my friends, Trevor Fenner, you might actually know him.

Yeah, I know Trevor.

Yeah, he's from California. I'm from California too. We skateboarded together. And he's kind of helped me a lot on my e commerce journey. So, yeah, he recommended onlinejobs. Ph. And yeah, that's how I kind of heard about it.

So first of all, you're running Shopify, right? You're running a Shopify store. Like you went to find someone to work on your Shopify, right?

My goal and what I wanted was I wanted someone to answer the phones, to help with customer service, help with product, fulfill orders and yeah, basically just like the daily tasks that can be outsourced. I wanted to outsource that so I could focus on my Google Ads, SEO, email marketing, that kind of thing, which is what I like to do and what I think is the most valuable to the business.

So when you went into online jobs, you started looking like, I don't know, did you post a job? Did you look at profiles? You were looking for a Shopify va.

I just want someone with Shopify experience so I don't have to teach them and they'll kind of just come in and know what they're doing from the get go. But I kind of. As I was thinking of that strategy, I just kind of realized Shopify is so easy to learn. I learned it on my own. I didn't even take any courses. I learned how to design a site within a week or whatever. So I kind of shifted the strategy and what I wanted from a va, from someone who knew Shopify already to just. I shifted from that to just trying to find someone that was. Seemed intelligent from an interview, seemed motivated and seemed willing to learn this whole E Commerce, Shopify type of thing. And that's what I went for. I kind of just picked the best applicant, the one who seems like the most motivated, most intelligent from me. And from what I saw as I interviewed them, that seems to have worked the best. And that's kind of the strategy that I've stuck to.

Sweet. I love it. I think so many people would benefit from from learning that. Like, you don't. You don't have to have a Shopify expert or a woocommerce expert or whatever it is. Right. Like, you want someone who's intelligent because whatever that piece of software is, is not that hard to learn. And then second, like, software changes over time, you know, so if they know it now, you know, they're going to have to learn something new soon.

Definitely, yeah. Shopify is probably one of the easiest. Like, I've used WordPress and I've used Wix, I think. Well, for E Commerce, I think Shopify is the best. Definitely.

Yeah. Yeah, I agree with you. And it's pretty easy to learn and there's some stuff to learn, but you can do it, right?

Yeah, definitely.

So what did you have him doing for you? You hired this guy. He doesn't know a lot about or anything about Shopify, but he's pretty talented.

Well, he doesn't work with me anymore. He was doing, you know, answering the phones, helping with customers, helping with, you know, answering questions about products, fulfilling orders, helping me. They even helped me, you know, doing. Keeping. Keeping my books a little bit. I have an accountant now, but back then I was kind of doing that myself too. And they would help me out with that, spreadsheets, that kind of thing.

Cool. So all kinds of stuff that was like things that you were doing, things you don't like to do, things that you're not good at. But you knew how to do all these things?

Yeah, I knew how to do them all. And that's kind of. I was, you know, I was able to train them on all those things because I knew how to do them and I knew you know, if they were to do it wrong, then I knew when they had made a mistake. So I was able to correct it. Basically just things that I didn't really want to spend my time to, I kind of had them do.

Sweet. So why doesn't he work for you anymore?

This particular individual? He actually found a higher paying job. He has a family. I don't know how many kids he has, but he definitely has a few kids and he needed a higher paying job before he quit. He actually found a friend to take his position. And so when he came to me to tell me that he would be leaving, at the same time introduced me to the new guy who would be taking his place if I was interested. And of course I was, because that eliminates me having to sift through applications and go through that whole process again. So I took the new guy in and actually the guy who was quitting helped train the new guy. So I didn't really take a lot of my time up to train the new one.

So I have 26 people that work for me in the Philippines today. And the situation you described to me has happened almost exactly word for word to me where. So you told me before that the first guy that you hired, the one who quit, he had like some significant managerial experience. He was used to making a lot more money than you were paying him. Like you were paying $3 an hour. And he had found a job making $12 an hour.

Yeah.

And which, you know, neither of those numbers are super uncommon in either situation, like on a low end person or a high end person. Right. But he probably found work in a different line of work, the management stuff. And I've had that same thing happen to me where I had someone, they were making $500 a month full time, they found a job making $2,500 a month full time, and they found their own replacement. For me, almost the exact same thing. It's not super common for that to happen, but it can exist and it shows you a bit of the loyalty of the Filipinos. Like, I'm not just going to leave you high and dry. I'm going to help you out, I'm going to find you a replacement. So from there, the new guy, talk about what you've got, because today you have a bunch of people working for you.

I have two main VAs that work full time. I have three full time and about five part time. So somewhere around eight, seven or eight. So when one quits or disappears, you know, the, the other two, they have friends, you know, that They've met through the years working in the call centers that are always looking for jobs. So they'll kind of just hire people. They won't even really like, they won't even really tell me. They'll just, they'll hire people when they need it and it's kind of, that's kind of what I tell them to do. Like if you need, you know, if we need people, like feel free to just hire your friends. You know, find people. We have people on standby too. So just in case we get a lot more business, we can kind of keep up with it.

How do you handle paying those extra other people?

Well, we use PayPal, but actually I'm just starting to. I gave access to my PayPal to one of my VAs because I really trust him. So he's actually starting to pay the part time vas through the PayPal account that he has access to. So he actually kind of just takes care of them. So. So we pay them every two weeks.

So you have three VAs that you work with. They hire other friends of theirs. Like they contract with them, they figure out their rates, report their hours, and you pay them. And now your VAS are paying them?

Yeah, basically. I mean my main va, they know what a new VA would get paid. They know that when they ask their friends if they want a job, they kind of, they already know what to tell them and what they should expect. It's pretty cool actually because I don't have to spend a lot of my time hiring people.

But you did in the beginning. Like your first hire. You spent a good amount of time recruiting, making sure he was right.

Yeah, definitely. So I mean if you post a job on onlinejobs, ph just and it's something more general or lower barrier of entry, I guess you could say like a shopify VA or something general like that. You're gonna get a lot of applic. So I got, I don't remember, but probably at least 60 to 70 within the first few days. So yeah, I did spend a lot of time sifting through applications, but it was worth it. Picking the right one and taking that time definitely paid off and it's still paying off today.

Any last things you want to say to people? Is there anything that you do particularly well? I mean you've done. There's some cool stuff that you're doing that as I look at what you're doing, I'm like, hey, I think we should implement this. Like I'm gonna get some of my team hiring other people. We have a few of them doing that but not like you are and I love it. Any other things that you do well or advice you want to give people.

As far as hiring goes, I mean once you find that one or two really like smart, motivated, trustworthy va it will make your whole life, your whole business so much easier. And I think I was in the article I wrote for me scaling the E commerce stores that I have. I have three high ticket dropshipping E commerce stor now. Being able to scale them up depends so much on how I don't have to spend time training each individual one because I can focus on marketing and other things like that. Taking the time to get that one good VA is pretty huge in my opinion.

Kevin, this has been so great. Thank you so much for being here and thanks for telling your knowledge man. It's been great.

Of course, thanks for having me. Bye.