Matt Leitz on VAs for Technology-Based Companies and Services

I can say that it's not only given me some of the best team members and I would go so far as to say practically family. When you find the right people, there's no, there's no substitute for that.

Hello and welcome to this case study about using virtual assistants for a software company. With us today is Matt Leets from botbuilders.com they have built some of the highest rated chatbots in the world. His business has been featured in abc, NBC, Fox and Inc. Magazine. Half of the team of botbuilders is in the Philippines. So they have a whole bunch of software developers in the Philippines. And Matt today has some really great advice on how to hire great developers and then also how to get them started in their first task. So with us today, along with Matt is also Chelain conducting the interview. So, uh, let's jump into it.

Hey, It's Chelaine with OnlineJobs.ph and today we have Matt Lights with BotBuilders.com we are thrilled to have you. Matt, tell us a little bit about your company.

Yeah, we build bots. You probably guessed that already though. So bot builders, we. If you know what a chatbot is, it's a way that a company can communicate with their customers or potential customers using automation. So if you've ever been chatting online and realized, hey, this isn't a person, this is an actual bot that's doing this, we do that, but we do it in really awesome ways that makes it a better experience really for the company and for the user and ultimately gets everybody what they want faster, quicker, easier and in a very fun way. And the majority of our business, we do have some high end clients, but the majority of our business is mostly an educational company that provides not only training on how companies can utilize bots, but also gives them pre built bots that they can customize and then use in their own business.

Most of the people who are watching this right now are active entrepreneurs. So tell us about how they could utilize your services.

Yeah, I mean bots do three things essentially. They help generate leads, they help make sales, and they automate customer support. So you know, I like to say that, you know, there's a bot for everything and ultimately you can design these things however you can literally imagine. I think the big thing is that, you know, people hear bots and they think, man, this is going to be tacky and technical. And I always say that, you know, at BotBuilders, AI doesn't mean artificial intelligence because I'm not nearly that smart. It means awesome interactions so if you've got a process. And right now the majority of the bots that we build live on Facebook messenger, but they can also be on your website. They can, they're coming. We were one of the first companies to get the opportunity to work on Instagram, which, you know, by the time you're seeing this may already be a thing. So, you know, the bottom line is, you know, when I was first approached by our marketing department and they're like, hey Matt, we got to build a bot. Everybody's building bots. I was like, we're, we're, we're a customer support company. We take care of people. We don't want bots to replace people. But what I've come to realize is yes, bots will take care of the unwanted conversations, you know, like the FAQs or like the tire kickers that you don't want to talk to anyway. But what bots can do, depending on your business, I mean, we have people that do everything from like, you know, online kind of interactions of people, you know, sales, e commerce that you think of, but also like flipping houses to high end coaching and you know, fulfillment. I mean, we've got one of our favorite students is a dating coach and he was able to use a bot to fulfill and follow up and help people and assist people and get them what they needed in such a way that they were even happier than when he was doing all the legwork. And he got to a point where he almost felt like he was unemployed because the bot was handling so much the work. So you know, I hate to say it'll cure widowalia. You know, that might be a little extreme, but bots can help you do a lot of things, that's for sure.

I learned you run three to four, seven to eight figure businesses. How did you get started and how did you end up where you are?

Kind of the whole, I mean my first business was multi level marketing and you know, that was kind of short lived, but learned a lot. Then I started a T shirt company that failed. It's just the classic, like you do one thing and then you go to another thing and just, you know, how I got into bots was I started a company called board games.com to follow a passion. Lost my shirt, lost a whole lot of money. But in the process I'm like, hey, we should build a bot. And just fell in love with them. And it's weird because I started with the mission of bringing people together with board games and I never would have thought that I'd be Using bots, which sounds like the most anti person thing. And it's really just we've been able to create a phenomenal community and really help businesses of all kinds and all sizes.

Can you give us your take on automation?

I think it's, it really has changed the game for me. You know, in our businesses are all. Any business that I've ever built has been. Been a relatively small business. We had one, we got to eight figures. But you know, obviously as a business owner you're always making investments and there's a lot of work that needs to be done. And I'm not going to say that automation can, you know, replace humans for everything, but you know, if you're making investments, the only thing that I figured out that I could put a little bit of time and money into and get a lot more time and money out of was automation. You know, if you, if you automate. Right. I mean I, I still have email sequences that I wrote over a decade ago that still make thousands of dollars every single week. And it's just if you think about your time and your energy and where you're putting it, you know, it's, it's like you might as well put it into something that's going to keep going, you know, you know, no matter what's happening. And you know, for us, you know, to kind of segue chelain into like, you know, why I'm really here and what I'm excited to share is, you know, just the combination of being able to create this automation and then have an amazing team of people in the Philippines. You know, for me, the biggest benefit has been that, you know, I have this business because of automation and because of my amazing team in the Philippines. And we shut down our fancy office. I told everybody work from home, you know, Covid hit. We didn't skip a beat. Our business doubled during COVID You know, it's just, it's really been amazing. But I just want to say that your service like this for me was like the one interview where I'm like, I'll do it because I appreciate not only the team that we've built and the quality of people, I mean, just smart, smart, smart. Because everybody always thinks like you outsource, you know, outsource labor. It's all about saving money. I'm pretty sure that we pay our people a multiple of what the standard payment is. And I just, you know, I'm a big believer the people anywhere in the world who deserve it should be, you know, well taken care of. And not only Do I have just world class people? I mean the best team, the best team in the world that all run. I mean I think right now we've got like six or seven people and we're still small. But that, that are on onlinejobs ph. But that we have such an amazing relationship that it's just, you know, at this point, you know, about three years into it, I mean we've watched our kids grow up together and just like we are, you know, like when somebody has a family member die or whatever, I mean it is like it is. Even though at this point, and I'm about to fix this, we've never met in person and I'm gonna make that happen. So if we hit our goal, we're gonna, we're gonna meet up in Hawaii. But I can say that, you know, I've had some amazing teams, have been extremely blessed, but we probably have the most tight knit team that we've ever had. Despite the fact that over half of our company is located in the Philippines.

How did you get started? How did you come across onlinejobs?

Ph, you know, the thing is I had used the alternatives for many years. Back in the day I used a program called Odesk which I think got gobbled up. I love the panel, the ability to find the people and then I love the management tools that are involved. Our first hire just happened to be one of the best hires that's ever happened. Mark, he's our everything, tech, operations, you name it. And he was literally the first ever interview. And I'm sure this isn't typical results. Not typical. First, first ever interview in online jobs at ph. This guy just came on with a big old smile and just he's like, yep, I can do that. Yep, I can do that. You know, and I'm like, well, let's interview a few more people. But this is, I think this is our guy. When you find the right people, there's no, there's no substitute for that. When you, when you have the ability to hire high caliber people, right. We always look for the most expensive people on onlinejobs ph. Even if I pay somebody over there, you know, as much or as near, you know, as I do here, but it's like I can get a higher quality person, then I'm all about it. Because when you have the right people and it's just, I know it's cliche and I know it's super obvious, right? But it's like this thing that I took me way too long to really come to the realization that there are the right people. There really are the right people. You just got to go through a lot of people. And when you use onlinejobs pH, you've got that ability to be able to do that. When we hired Maria, second rock star family member, we were down to two candidates and we didn't know which one to hire and we really liked them both, so we hired them both. And we would have never been able to do something like that if we were paying wages in the United States and the other candidate didn't work out. And she was the one that on paper was more qualified. But because of that and now Maria, you know, I don't want to share too much information, but from where she started to where she is now, the amount of money that she's, she's multiplied, you know, her income and when we do well, I make sure that she does well. And we all have this very symbiotic, like we're in this thing together team and you know, it just wouldn't even be possible without a service like yours. So I'm a huge, huge, huge, huge proponent. Hopefully this gets in front of somebody who's looking at using it because it's changed our business on so many levels. And Chelain, I'll also say this is we don't do a lot of client work, but we do have one client who's his name is Grant Cardone. You know, their company is way bigger than ours. They probably have like 150 employees or something. What's been awesome is that, you know, having him as a client because of our team has so much more, you know, flexibility in terms of our hours of operation because they had a problem. Here's their problems. Number one is they didn't have anybody to take care of chargebacks on a moment's notice. And number two is they don't have somebody to tend to. Comments that are constantly happening in places like webinars and on Facebook and all these various places. So I just went to him, I said, hey, here's the deal is I'll go hire two people at onlinejobs. Ph, literally this happened an hour and a half ago. I'll go hire two people in onlinejobs ph you guys pay us, I'll manage these people. And now we've got two more team members that can help us do all these, all these various things, right? So here's a big company that in all honesty, they never were even open to outsourcing. It was just something they didn't do. If you weren't in Miami you weren't in that office then, you didn't have a job. I was the first kind of guy that broke the mold with them a little bit. And now they're like, yeah, if you got more people like that specifically, they're like, if you can get more people like Maria, hell yeah, go do it. Right? So, yeah, it's helped us in our core business. It's helped us with client work and, you know, just to have that sort of flexibility, you can't beat it.

Tell us what you started Markout doing specifically. We have a lot of people who come in saying, I need help, but I don't know where to start.

The way that I organize the company is in roles, meaning this is the job that you're in charge of. Alright. And then what are the tasks that are associated with that? Some of them make daily tasks. Some of them might be weekly, monthly, etc. So what happens is when you start a company, the very first step, list out all the roles that you need to have filled. Okay. And then create a spreadsheet that's got this list of roles and you know, Mark, all the roles that he's gonna be filling. Now at first, Mark might have so many roles that he's not gonna be able to effectively do them all. Right? There's 12 things on that list. No human being can do 12 things. But if we put those things in a prioritized order, right? Meaning this is the most important thing. Like this is, you know, when all else fails, don't drop the ball on this. Make sure that's there and then all the other things. And then what happens is as we expand and we grow and we go, okay, cool, now we're gonna hire another person. Let's figure out, let's add another column to the spreadsheet, what roles are they gonna fill? Let's take the roles from the bottom of Mark's or Joe's or Maria's and move them over. And now we've got, you know, we're just like, okay, cool, let's, let's fill the roles that aren't, aren't being filled. I don't want to say that it's the country of the Philippines. That's so. But I mean, just the talent that we've hired has just been very, very organized, very structured, very consistent, very reliable. And we hire people here in the United States too. I want to make sure that that's clear. About half our team is here, half our team is there. So that was. Mark is kind of on the tech end and then Maria was, you know, she was, for the most part, customer support. Now she's expanded, she's done other things. She also runs our email marketing. All right. She handles our chargebacks that I mentioned. So it's just. It really just comes down to having that clear list to who's doing what at any given moment. So we know who owns which procedures.

Can you tell us a little bit about how you hired these phenomenal team members?

There's two ways at onlinejobs ph that you can find people. Number one, you post a job and they found you. Number two is you go looking for them. So you do both because you want as many candidates as you possibly can. First step is, you know, real quick blurb, something exciting, three questions. Okay? And have those answer these questions. And I think it's like 200 words or less, so you have nice, succinct answers. So, like, if it's customer support, what relevant experience do you have that would make you great for the position? While you don't understand our product, let's pretend that a customer messaged in incorrectly saying that they misunderstood a product. How do you respond to that? You know what, what makes you excited about this position? That's always a great one to end with. So you're going to find out who wants it enough, who can, you know, write good English. And then I usually put in there, I always say somewhere along the line, include the word unicorn so that I can make sure that you follow your instructions. The thing that I like to do is depending on if it's just you, you can do a first interview, but what you might want to consider doing, it depends on how much they need to write. It's very different. If the position is graphic design, you're not that worried about English, right? Position is customer support. You're very concerned with English. Right. And it might be spoken, but it might be written. Right. So just because somebody doesn't necessarily speak well or they have a heavy accent, doesn't mean that they can't write extremely well. So obviously, the interviewing process, you know, I'll let somebody that's smarter than me give interviewing tips. But something that I do like to do is if it's somebody that needs to write, and they need to be able to write effectively and efficiently, what I'll do is I'll do either before or after the interview, a chat interview with them. So we're actually chatting in real time. And what that means is like, you know, it's different. If I say, ask three questions and you sit there and you can take your time and have somebody review it or, you know, get a dictionary or, you know, whatever it might be. And obviously you have to give a little time, you know, given the fact that, you know, depending on where you live, Philippines might be very far away. But you know, you're getting their raw, unfiltered answer so you can see how they're writing it. So that to me has kind of been a tip that's helped out a little bit over the years.

Anything else that you would recommend to our viewers?

Yeah, I mean, just oftentimes too we'll hire people and we'll put them on a one week trial paid, you know, but it's like, hey, we're going to put you in and we're going to see how you do for the week. I've also, I think now I think there's two or three people that have hired on onlinejobs ph that I've let go in less than a week. And it's not bashing onlinejobs ph, but I'm very upfront with people. You know, I just remember we had a gal, it was a guy we hired at the same time as Maria. She just showed up just like, you know, for a meeting. I think she was late, she was wearing a ratty T shirt, chewing bubble gum and just kind of like, you know, where Maria was like professional, she was on it and like within I think it was 24 or 48 hours, I'm just like, sorry, it's just not gonna work. But you gotta be upfront with people. If you don't have that upfront conversation, that's really not cool to do that. But if you're like, hey, look, here's the deal. We want to try you out, make sure you work. We'll pay you. If after seven days or 30 days or whatever that, you know, that trial period is, you know, if we're not feeling it, then we'll just, we'll cut it short early. Is that cool? Okay.

Do you have any tips for new outsourcers as far as training goes?

You know, I'm not a tech guy or I would, I very rarely, you know, would Recommend Tools, but loom.com literally changed my life. Like, I'm not even exaggerating that it changed my life. It literally changed my life because before to provide instruction to people, you either needed to one, type out a long list or two, you, you needed to create a video, upload it, download it, blah, blah, blah, I don't even know, and then send it. You Know, I mean, which was a painstaking process. So, you know, this to me is a whole nother world of being able to communicate with people. I make loom videos all day, every day. Oh, that's great. Cool. Do this. Awesome. Cool. Boom, click. Done. Probably the biggest advice that I have is, is that if I were. If I wanted to do, say it's a process online, right? Is like, you know, post this widget, blah, blah, blah. Okay, I'm gonna do it on. On a loom video, right? Okay, cool. So I've done it once. Like, do the process once. Because if you don't, you're just. You don't know. You know, it's like, so no matter how good of people that you hire, chances are because you're in a position where you're hiring them, there's. There's gonna be some value that you're gonna bring to them that they might miss. So do it yourself, right? But don't feel a need to document it. This is the tip. So you do it. You explain it to them, whatever it is, right? Then what you do is you have them do it and document it. As in like step by step procedure, right? Screenshots. Da, da, da, da, da, da, da. Right? That does a couple things. First of all, you can check on them, make sure. Oh, yeah, that's it. You got it. Nailed it. Go. Cool. All right. Second of all, now if you ever need somebody else to do it, it's there. You know, we on Google Documents, any process, if you just search in our Google Documents for sop and then it's just sop, whatever it is, right? So at any given moment, anybody can find anything that they need to do. Okay? So just. It's this thing where you just, you teach it, they transcribe it, they put it into the step by steps, and then it's, you know, obviously the first time they do it, you check on it and then from there, whatever, the pick some sort of regular kind of reporting methodology to keep it consistent. That's the key, is just being disciplined about everything that happens is SOP whatever it is, and stick it in Google Docs. You know, I think it's amazing. And just, you know, any stigma that might have been associated with outsourcing. You know, I just. To me, we have the relationships that we've been able to build through this platform. I just want to say thank you not only for helping me build an amazing business, a profitable business. You know, this isn't the biggest business that I've built, but it's going to have the biggest profit margin of any company that I've ever built. And the workforce from onlinejobs ph is a really big reason. But you know, just lifelong friends is by far the biggest benefit that I can, you know, really imagine taking away from your service.

So thank you. We are vying for that trip in Hawaii for you and what is the best way for our viewers to reach out to you?

Probably, you know, the easiest thing to do. If you want, there's a free training that you can get started, learn all about bots, learn about how you can use our bots and not have to build them from scratch. Yeah, Chelain. I have a brand new YouTube channel as we were discussing. If you hurry, you can be one of my first thousand subscribers. It's YouTube.com matlights M A T T L E I T Z Appreciate. You know, I would love to have an audience and building it as I go so would mean the world if I could, you know, help teach you anything on there. Just let me know what I can, what I can teach. I'm looking for topics every day. So thank you. This has been a lot of fun. Appreciate it.

Thank you. It's been a pleasure.