Mike Jackness and Putting Yourself in a Position for Success

Hello, everybody. Welcome. I am so excited to have Mike Jackness here from ECOM Crew. Mike has quite a few virtual assistants in the Philippines, actually a full team, and I'm excited to talk with him about how he does this because it's different than some of the things that I do. Mike, welcome.

Thanks, John. It's awesome to be here and good doing this. I mean, I was telling you before we start recording that online jobs have been so instrumental in what we've been able to do with the team. So excited to talk about the team that we built and the things that we're doing and how onlinejobs ph has been a part of that. Sweet.

Sweet. Okay, so let's start. I'm gonna start with your businesses because I want people to know, like, you have two sides of your business, right? Tell us what they are.

Yeah. So we've been doing e Commerce since 2012. Before that, I was an online marketer and SEO guy and doing things like that. So kind of ended up blending both of those things together and starting Ecom Crew, which is a blog and a podcast about e commerce. And kind of new from the early days that attention and traffic is money and eventually we'd have something paid if it got traction. And a million Downloads later and 300 podcast episodes later, we now have a private community and training that we do, but we also are a high seven figure E commerce seller. So we're not only teaching, but unlike a lot of people that teach, we are actually doing it as well, which I think makes us unique. And we. We document everything we do, whether it's successful or not. And I think that's also unique because we're pretty real about business, isn't easy, and this is not the easiest thing I've ever done, but it's been rewarding nonetheless.

So you walk the talk, which I love because there's so many people that don't do that. You teach E commerce, but you primarily run E commerce.

That's right. Yep.

So great. So you're using. Tell us about your. Your vas. What do they do for you?

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting how things have kind of evolved. When we hired our first va, it was. We had nothing but employees in the United States. And then we hire one VA and then another va and things have evolved now that we have one employee in the United States and everyone else is in the Philippines, literally our entire rest of our team's in the Philippines. And so, I mean, they're doing everything that an E commerce business needs from customer support Tickets, creating Amazon listings, doing our graphic design, writing content. Just basically anything you can think of that is required in an E commerce business. They're doing it just generally.

How much do they make your team?

Yeah, I think the average salary over there is at this point about $650 a month, maybe 700. We actually instituted a company wide minimum wage of 600. Just there were some people that were making a little bit less than that. And I just felt like we're asking a lot of these people. We think of them and we'll talk about this a little bit as we go on, but we think of them as team members, not just VAs. We don't really even call them VAs anymore. They're employees, they're our people. And so I thought that it was fair to put it some sort of minimum in. So like, anybody that starts gets at least 600 bucks now. So our average is definitely above that now, but it's still probably below 700, but not much below 700 on average.

Okay, I love it. Is there anything else that we should, that people should consider as they like as perks or added pay or something like that? Like as they start to hire VAs, what else do you guys do?

Yeah, I mean, we try to make what we do with our Filipino employees mimic as closely as we can, as if they were working for a Filipino company. So a lot of people there, they're very concerned about their healthcare, their Social Security, their 13th month pay. So some of these things are very easy to facilitate, like paying their 13th month pay. No problem. You just pay them a second payment in December. Even though it's a little painful from a cash flow perspective. Very easy to facilitate. Paying their health care or their Social Security is a little bit more difficult because you aren't paying directly through a payroll agency. So what we've done is just basically ask them to go down and pay that on their own and supply the receipt and we just add that to their pay when they do it. And so we're effectively doing that for them. We also give them off all the Filipino holidays. So, you know, they don't care about the fourth of July or Memorial Day or Labor Day. Those are not things over in the Philippines. Just as much as I don't care about Chinese New Year, Bhutan Day or Good Friday or some of these other things that they take off. And it's always like the weirdest thing. I'm like, today's a holiday. What are you taking off? Like Chinese New Year? Come on. Like, you guys are not Chinese you don't really. It's a holiday there and we respect their customs and so. And we try to, like I said, mimic as best we can. And the other thing that we do that is very unique, that we might not be able to do in perpetuity. But up to this point, we've been able to let them work Filipino hours. So they're not working the night shift. They do come in a little early. They come in at 7am and so it's kind of a good agreement that we've come up with where they come in at 7am That's a reasonable time for us to be able to talk to them. Us time. And it's good for them in another respect. They get to beat the traffic. So they're not like going to work in the middle of the peak rush hour. It is a little early for people who aren't morning people. For people who are morning people, they're happy. But we allow them to work the day shift in Filipino hours and not a US day shift. And again, I realize depending on what people are hiring people for, if you need someone taking phone calls or doing live chat during US Hours, there's no way around that. But we've. We've decided that for our business, we can provide amazing customer service and provide a lifestyle for our employees that doesn't make them miserable. And I've seen this firsthand. We've been over the Philippines now four times. We work out of IT park, which is this area in Cebu that's very familiar with running call centers for U.S. companies. And it's like dead during the day and gets really busy as it gets dark because they're working US hours. And so it's. It's really tough on the family dynamic. You know, some one or two of the parents are off in the middle of the night and don't get to see their kids. If they're younger people and don't have kids or family yet, it's not a big deal. But this is something that has really bothered me and touched me personally just because I've seen it firsthand. So we've done our best to be able to keep that to this point.

So I just wanted to recap a couple things here. You have a bunch of things that you're doing. So number one, the 13th month, which if people don't know what that is, go look up the 13th month. You don't. You're not legally required to pay it, but you should be. Should be paying it. Yeah, you pay their Social Security and their PhilHealth.

Yeah. Yeah, they actually. So what we've agreed to with the healthcare specifically is we pay half their health care bill and they can do whatever they want. And so they can either go through PhilHealth or private insurance, which a lot of them elected to do. People that have families, we have several people who have kids and stuff, where health insurance is more important to them. And so we decided to do the half thing because it makes it flexible to align our interests. So if we just said we're going to pay you anything that you want, full carte blanche, they'll go get the most expensive thing. So this way, if it's important to them, we pay more, and if it's not, we pay less. But we do pay all of their Social Security.

That's cool. I like this policy. So you guys let people choose how they want to do their health care and you're going to pay half of it, correct?

Yeah.

I love it.

The other benefit that we have that's. That's very unique is we have, you know, with an asterisk, unlimited vacation. And, you know, and so, number one, I don't know why this is like one of these things where I just try to do better by the world. I mean, you look at the world landscape and the countries that have higher happiness ratings have people that get more vacation, you know, and they work less hours. And I think that the Western world's got a little crazy in some respect in terms of hours worked. And I like to take vacation, and I don't want to burn myself out. And so I want to give the same thing to our employees. But the other thing that I noticed as we were going there in person and interviewing people is that job hopping seemed to be prolific in the Philippines. People weren't really staying in jobs for more than 12 or 18 months. 24 months was the longest streak. A lot of times I started asking people over and over again why that was happening. And the number one answer was, oh, man, you know, like, my. My grandmother died and I had to go back home. And it. You know, and you got to think about the landscape of the Philippines. This is not the United States where you hop on a plane or you, like, hop on a car and just drive there and you're there in a couple hours. These people are driving to the port, getting on a boat that takes a day and a half to get there. And then they get, like, on a bus, and that takes, like another half a day. And so just the journey alone can be a full week of, like, getting Back and forth, and then they got to go to the funeral and obviously spend some time with their family. And a lot of companies, like, are like, sorry, see you later at this moment, you know, at this hard time in our life. And so this culture has been developed there where people will either just quit immediately, like as soon as something like this happens and they deal with it when they get back, or they get fired. And it really bothered me. So that's why we put the unlimited vacation thing in there. We just let people know, like, if something like this happens, like, we're there for you, like, go deal with your, you know, burying your grandma or your mother or whatever happens. And obviously, like, we're not going to, you know, allow you to do this if it's like your great second uncle or something. But within reason, we allow people to deal with these life events that are much different in a place like the Philippines, in the United States.

That's amazing because I didn't know that. I didn't realize that that was the culture of quit. Because people aren't going to give you your vacation time and you have. It's going to take you a week.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's. Again, it's. It's hard to, you know, until you go. I think a lot of things, like, you look at the Philippines on the map and it's like, you know, it's this big. Even though it's like the thing encompasses this. This huge geographical region and it's thousands of islands, and there's really only three population centers you got, you know, in the north, Manila and the central Cebu and in the south, Davao. And most of the people are coming, you know, just like in China. They're coming from remote parts of the Philippines looking for the jobs. And so they're coming from their family farm or homestead that's in a very remote part of the Philippines, and they can't afford to fly. A plane ticket is a third of a month or a half a month's salary. And so they're taking their local transportation route, which is a ferry. And it takes a long time by ferry to get from one island to another.

So I wonder if I didn't know this because we have the same policy that you do where we. We provide unlimited time off. We don't care how much time you take off. Just let us know ahead of time.

Right.

Or if it's an emergency, just let us know as soon as you can. Right?

Yeah. I mean, like I said, it's been asterisk. So I mean, we're constantly struggling with this. I mean, I always say, like, don't let my generosity be a weakness. Like, you can't. You can't take every day off for a year and expect us to continue to pay you. And so you got to get your work done. You got to be fair to your teammates, because we. The way that we kind of help with this is that if you take off, you have to have someone cover for you. And so if you're constantly asking someone to cover for you, it makes you embarrassed, I think, and kind of helps sell police things. And usually that alone has been enough to make it so it's not a problem. And so I think that really helps. So people are taking, on average, about 15 days of vacation. And then if there's any extreme, extreme life event, like, we have one employee who was in a hospital for a couple of weeks. I mean, she got really sick. And I was happy that we were able to let her know that, hey, look, while you're in hospital, we got you. We're gonna pay your salary, and when you get better, you got a job waiting for you, obviously, when you come back to work. And one of our employees had her mom, and her grandmother died in the same year. It was an awful year for her, and she's an amazing employee, and so I just wanted to make sure that she knew that through this awful time that we were there for her. Take all the time you need to go bury your mother and your grandmother, and that means a lot to them, which continues to build really good team and camaraderie. We have yet to have an employee quit. Employee retention is a really important thing, and it takes a lot of time and effort and money and energy and everything to train an employee. And so we do everything that we can to make them want to stay.

I love it. Wow, that's.

It seems so simple, right? It's just like, do good others and build a good deal. It's not really all that complicated.

It really is. It's not that complicated. Like, you treat these people like that. They work with you in your office.

Yeah.

And they treat you the same way.

Yeah. I think that where people really go wrong is, you know, they. They think of, like, a va or this remote employee, and instead of thinking of them as a person, they think of it in some other. Some other way. You know, you got this. This quote, unquote, cheap labor, you know, compared to the dollars that we're working in, whether it's US Dollars or Canadian dollars or euros or pounds or whatever. Like the western currencies. And so just because they're making less in their locality, it's still a very great wage for them. And so globalization is a great thing. But for whatever reason, I think there's some weird human psychology of them paying someone less that they're lesser in some way and that's a really bad trap to fall into. And so again, we really think of it in a completely different way, which is that E Commerce in particular is like a very low margin business. So I'm so grateful that they exist because if not for that labor rate, we wouldn't be able to do these things, period. It isn't just a matter of let's put more money in Mike's pocket. It's a matter of if not for being able to hire people at this rate, we would not be able to function as a business because things have gotten so tight in E Commerce. Again, they're just as much of a part of our team as anybody else and they operate at just as high of a level. And so it even took me some time where like, it's like, because I get asked this question all the time, like, you have your Philippines team do that, you know, and like, yeah, and it took me some time to kind of just think of it as they can do any level of work that can be done in the US it isn't a situation of like, oh, the Philippines can only do this or that. You know, these are really smart people that are also going to college and are very educated and they're hardworking and want to do a good job. And just because again, that you're, you're paying less, you perceive that they're going to do less is just a fallacy.

It took me a long time to figure that out and then once I did, it completely changed my life. I mean, I've worked 17 hours a week now for like 10 years because I realized, oh, they can do everything.

That I can do everything. I mean, and they're excited to do it, you know, and that's something that's amazing. We're in the US and it's another thing that like has drove me crazy. But, and why we've really just switched to everyone in the Philippines, like they're, I like people who are appreciative. You know, it's like we, you know, I spend a lot of my time and energy thinking about people, especially people that work for me. You know, it's, it's really important to me to provide a great work environment. And there's definitely a Feeling in the US of like, no matter what I do, how hard I try, it gets never good enough. It's like, what have you done for me lately versus in the Philippines? Just from a culture perspective, we're able to do things in a way that a lot of other companies aren't willing to do over there. And it doesn't cost us a lot more money to do it. Both the money factor and just the fact that we think of them differently, that I take the time to go over there, that I'm always there for them to get on the call and talk to them. These are things that a lot of people aren't doing. So they really appreciate what we do, which is awesome. Like, and they tell us all the time. And maybe it just feeds my ego and makes me feel good where, you know, again, in a US employee, a lot of times it's really difficult to get that same feedback, which is really frustrating.

But it's, it's not just feeds your ego. It's that they're doing good work because of it, because of that feeling towards you. They're also doing amazing work.

Absolutely. Like I said, it's a very much a two way street. Yeah. But absolutely, yes.

Okay, so I want to shift gears here a little bit. What should the first role someone's hiring be? Because there's a difference between hiring for a task and hiring for a role.

Another thing that happens I see a lot in the Philippines and I don't know, it's so funny because there's this weird economy of like people think of them as like a lesser or these other things I was like talking about earlier and then also expecting them to be like literally Superman or superwoman. It's so weird. Like, I don't get this. Like these things don't go together. I'm still trying to like figure this out and one day I will, and I'll, I'll have this great way of putting it. But you know, people often will hire a VA and expect them literally to be able to do everything, to be a programmer or graphic designer, content writer, like answer support emails, you know, things that just don't happen.

And they want to pay $300 a month.

Right. And they want to pay $300 a month. And so, you know, the first thing you need, you need to do is just get realistic. Right. And if it doesn't exist in the United States as a role, like that person doesn't exist in the United States. If it does it, they're called entrepreneur. Right. I mean, that's what an entrepreneur does, it's you as a business owner and me. Right, right.

You want to hire me for $300 a month.

Right. And that just doesn't exist. I mean, there's a reason why, you know, entrepreneurs are different. I mean, they're willing and able to be a jack of all trades and a master of none, basically is the typical entrepreneur. And so a typical person, like a more normal person that isn't sick and twisted as entrepreneurs as we are, you know, they specialize in something they're really good at writing, you know, they're a journalist or they're really good at customer support, or they're a programmer by trade or a videographer or whatever it might be. And you know, so the same thing exists in the Philippines. And so the first thing that I would do is hire for a role that you feel comfortable, most comfortable with that's going to give the person you're hiring the most chance of success to be successful in their job and for you to also feel that you've had a win yourself. Because there's a period where it's difficult trusting and working with this remote person, whether they're in the Philippines or they're on the other side of the country. When you're working with people remotely, it's just different. I encourage you to think about the tasks in your company. They're repeatable, that are easy to train for and only have them work on those things. So a lot of times this role is customer service. That's what the Philippines is really known for. There's the biggest pool of people over there doing customer service than anything else. And so you're gonna have the easiest time finding and hiring and doing the minimal amount of training to get them up to speed. And so answering any customer emails, whether they're coming through your own store or Amazon, dealing with social media stuff and just any type of customer service related type things is just a really great place to start. And it's something that by you doing it as the entrepreneur, you're not adding a lot of value to your organization. I would say you're actually adding zero value by you taking time and doing that. And so even if you only have 10 hours a week of this to do, I would still hire someone full time, get them in there, train them, show them how to do your processes and stuff. And then as you get bigger, they'll grow into the role and there's some other things you can give them as well. But I think that success is the most important thing. So putting yourself In a position and them in a position to be successful is really important.

So talk about that because that's an interesting concept, hiring. So most people, when they hire, they're.

Like, oh, I need a website.

I'm gonna hire someone to build me a website.

Right, right, right.

I always say that's the wrong thing to do. That's your least chance of success. So when you say hire someone where you have the greatest chance of success, what do you mean? Like, how does that work?

Well, I mean, again, if you're hiring someone to be the superhero, then you're setting yourself up and them up for failure. Like, if your expectations are, you're going to hire a VA that's going to come in there and do everything, like all these random tasks for your business and throw them in the deep end of the pool and spend very little time or no time training them and then wonder six months later why they didn't do a good job. Then you're, again, you're setting them up for failure, and you're setting yourself up for failure. And you're going to be like, man, like VAs in the Philippines. I don't know what everybody's raving about, but, like, they suck. And that's just. That's what's going to happen. I mean, if you think about it, if you take a step back and just think about it logically, like, duh, like, that's obviously what's going to happen. Right. In any walk of life. So, you know, again, if you can find someone that specializes or you're hiring for very specific, very specific role or tasks within your business, and you actually take the time to train them on that, and you do things that are going to have the minimal amount of work on your part in terms of training, but the maximum amount of output from them in terms of workload. Customer service is a great place to start because you can train somebody on, like, here's the top 20 things that come in all the time. Here's these repeatable tasks. So if I spend the time to train you on, like, company culture and what we want to provide from a customer service angle and just what our company is about. And, like, here's how to handle, you know, here's how to handle these things and you. And you set them up for success, then you'll be happy that they're there and doing a good job versus if you don't, then the opposite is going to happen.

I love that. So customer service is something that you.

Know how to do.

It's something that you understand the process. It's something you can teach someone and it's a high value add, but low value of your time. Right. You have to provide customer service, but you shouldn't be doing it. That's a perfect first task. Can we walk through your hiring process? What are you doing? Well, what do you struggle with?

Yeah, I mean, we're at a point now where we have a full time HR person and like all the hiring happens completely autonomously over there. And so the first time I hear about an employee at this point is like when they're hired. Like I don't get involved in the interview process at all anymore. And so at first I was. It failed. And I want to kind of talk about that a little bit. I mean, I kind of did some of the things I'm telling people not to do here, you know, which was I kind of had the same expectations. I'm going to hire someone that's going to take care of all these things. I'm not going to spend any time training them and they're just going to like figure all this stuff out. And that didn't really work out well. And so when I took another crack at it, we put a lot more effort into the hiring process. And so I think just this is one of these things where it will take you more time and effort initially than you're spending right now. And that's something you have to like internally rectify. Right. And come to terms with because you're already probably working 80 hours a week and you're feeling this sense of burnout and you probably need to hire this person a year ago, but you didn't. And now like you're just frustrated. You want to like just throw them into the hot, hot end of the pool and expect them to be able to survive. But you have to be able to find the energy in yourself to spend the time that like to hire the right person, you know. So that process is, you're just going to take more time than just finding the first person that sends a resume in. And so the things that we really found that, that work well, like when posting an online job, specifically on the job, the PH is to put like a little nugget at the bottom of the job description, making sure people have read the whole thing. So to apply for this job email, I think we have a really cute email address like I want to be or something or I want something like that at our comm or I belong, I think it is or something like that@taran.com and so we say like, you know, in order to apply for this job, please email your resume in PDF format with a cover letter and the subject line of xyz to I belongarent.com and so it filters out all the people who are just like, check, check, check, check, check. I don't know exactly how the platform looks like from an employee standpoint on the back end, but I imagine it's very easy for them to apply for a job because we would get tons of submissions. And so we don't want people that that's how they're going to treat their job. We want people that are going to be more detail oriented by just by default, we're looking to hire like really like the top 1 to 3% of employees in the Philippines, but not just the Philippines. Again, this applies to anywhere. And so we don't just think about it in the Philippines. This is just our hiring practice period. So just by putting that one little thing in there, like immediately the level was raised and then the emails that come into this email address, if the subject line doesn't match what we asked, they don't get considered. If they don't send their resume in PDF format like we've asked, then they don't get considered. Little tiny things. We're just like, if you can't follow those basic directions, you're probably not going to be a good fit at our company. And you know, we read their cover letter and then we start the interview process. And so now instead of having this overwhelming burden of going through hundreds of resumes that most of whom aren't even qualified, you're exhausted by the time you even get to the point where you've interviewed your first person. We already now have a really good pre qualified core group of people that we are now interviewing that are probably meeting at least a certain bar. And then we have them take a test. We have a standardized test we've kind of put together specifically for the customer service position. It's a Google form. And we just have them take the test. It's basically there's 10 questions, there are mock questions that talk about our, you know, that mention our brands and some like real life questions that come in. And we just see how people, how they respond. And so we see at this point, you know, we'll notice that some of the people are clearly in their responses, like going to our website and like finding this product and reading a couple sentences about it before they try to respond to this mock question. And then someone that's like taking that effort to do that is going to be way better than someone just starts typing up the answer. The process is almost completely automated. It doesn't actually take a whole lot of work to get the one out of 200 people that are going to be actually worth talking to. And this is what's made the process so much easier. So now like when we're talking to people at that stage, you know, they're very well qualified. And now I'm really picking from the cream of the crop. I got two or three, maybe five people to pick from that are interviewing for this position. And, and it does take some time because unfortunately not a lot of people follow directions. And this is not a Filipino problem. This is. We have the same problem. We put the resumes on Indeed or whatever in the U.S. but again, we're finding people that meet a basic level of detail orientedness. They're applying for the job because they assume they actually want the job. They actually have read our job description. They actually understand what makes us better and different. The benefits and the things that we talk about. They understand. They've gone to our website, we have Tamron.com and they see, okay, well this seems interesting. This seems like a really cool place to work. And this seems like something that I would like to do. And then we have them take a test, simple test, to just, you know, be able to read their written responses and make sure that they make sense. Because there is one thing that's really interesting that I've learned from traveling the world. You know, just because someone speaks English doesn't mean it's the English that we're used to in the United States. And people in the US are, are very hoity toity about the way things are written, right? So if you get responses, if you're, if you're in the US and you get a response that's written from someone that's from India, you immediately like look down upon this, which is stupid because like this person probably speaks seven languages and is way more educated than you. But you know, in the US like people just have this bar that's so unrealistic of how the rest of the world works. And this is just an unfortunate thing that I can't fix this. And we have to provide a level of service that meets what's going to make our customers happy. I mean, there's certain things that I can do to affect change in the world. Certain things that I can't affect how it's going to, you know, I got to be realistic as a business person. And so we just make sure that their English, like, makes sense and that they're not using, like, UK English or, you know, British English or, like Indian English stuff and things that just don't quite make sense. Even though, like, you understand what they're writing. It just doesn't quite. It doesn't quite work. Right. It's kind of hard to explain, but.

There'S some oddity to it.

Oddity to it? Yeah. And so we want to just make sure that that isn't there. And so again, by the end of that process, we've got some really amazing candidates. And if it's something like graphic design, we have them do a different type of test. Like, we give them, again, it's a standardized test of like, you know, here's a product, like, make a mock listing for us for Amazon. And for these types of projects, we pay them and so we tell them upfront. The customer service thing, that only takes maybe like a half an hour, maybe an hour. And so we don't really pay them for that because it's just kind of a part of the job application process. But the graphic design thing, I mean, we're going to put a lot more effort into getting responses back and seeing actual samples because that's a great way to test the graphic designer. So we'll pay them, you know, $50 or something like that, which is way above market rate, to do this test. And it's the best 50 bucks we ever spend. Right. Because it's way more difficult to hire somebody, have them on board for two or three months, realize it's not working out, put them on a performance plan, ask them to do a better job. Know what? Two, three months goes by now, you've paid them for five or six months. You got to give them severance. You feel bad having to fire them. They submit a crappy sample graphic design project, you pay them 50 bucks and tell them you'll get back to them later, and there's no hard feelings. Right. And so that's worked really, really well for us. And we've been able to hire graphic designers that make us look like Fortune 500 company. It's amazing.

I love it. So that's a cool. So there's a couple things you do straight up front, like you're making it difficult for people to apply.

Yes.

Which is cool.

It's actually not difficult.

It requires some specific steps, like turn your resume into a PDF. You gotta go figure that out. Right. And that's cool. Apply with a specific subject line and then you make them take a test, which I would imagine you have tests for certain positions. Like if you're hiring a copywriter, maybe you don't have a test for that position.

What do you do? Oh, we do, we have them write us writing samples. So same thing as the graphic designer. And so we, we give them, we give them actually a real life subject that we want to write about because like if we're going to pay for the article, like the graphic design thing is just all fake. Like we're having the same thing test every time. It's really difficult in the moment to like how something you really plan on using in the wild from a graphic design standpoint. So it's just, it's just again, it's the best 50 bucks we ever spend. When we, when we do it from the writing standpoint, we'll pick one topic that we're actually trying to write about at that moment and then if there's five or six people that make it to the test phase, we'll have them all write about the same thing, hoping to get one article we're actually going to post. But yeah, I mean we're gonna pay them again 50 bucks to write the article and see what they turn in. And we give them some instructions of what we're looking for in terms of word count and some keywords and other things that we're looking for. And we give them the spiel about the way that we do SEO, which is that when we write content, we want it to be the best piece of content ever written about that subject on the Internet. So the bar is really high in terms of that. We don't want to content that's written just for, just for Google. Right. We want people that are going to come to the website and read the content to actually get something out of it. And the other thing that we tell them is that when, when someone searches for something like how to hire in the Philippines and they go read our article, that they don't have to click back and go read another article to find more information. Like our article answers everything that they would ever want to know about that subject. And that's actually a metric that Google uses for search. So we, we tell them that that's the bar and then we wait for the article to come in and the person or people that are able to meet that are the ones that we hire. And I will say that this has been the most difficult position to hire for in the Philippines because we do have such a high bar for content. He's a copywriter, a writer, a copywriter. Like a full out writer. We do have a few people and stuff that do it and they do an incredible job. I mean, it's just amazing. But these are the jobs that remain open the longest when we're trying to hire.

Okay, so the next step of your hiring process, do you guys do interviews? Do you do a live interview? What do you do?

Well, before we had an office there, the live interview was just me interviewing the people over Skype. But once we, our first employee ended up becoming our manager and we eventually ended up opening an office over there where everyone comes to. And so what was in my mind from day one was that instead of having people dispersed all throughout the Philippines as we're hiring, it would be better to have them all in one spot. And this was really for selfish reasons because I envisioned myself going there to visit at some point because I like to see my employees at least once a year, wherever they're at. And so I wanted them all in one spot so I could fly to one place and go there. And it just happened to be that the first employee that we hired was in Cebu. And so that's why we ended up picking Cebu. If I was to go do it all over again, I honestly probably would pick Manila. It is a little bit more expensive to hire people there because the going rate for salaries there is about 25ish percent higher. So instead of being $600 a month for an average employee, it might be more like 800, which I guess is a third more, but there's five times more people there or whatever it is. Like the pool is so much bigger. There's also a lot more direct flights in an Amanilla. There's also a lot more traffic there, which is kind of crazy. And so that part sucks. But Cebu is a little bit hard to get to. There's no direct flight from the US anywhere to Cebu. You got to connect. And so these are things that become a factor as you travel a lot and you're trying to plan a world journey of, you know, going to Hong Kong to speak at an event and like try to tie that into going to Cebu to see your employees and also get back to the US and do this in an efficient way. Those are things that I didn't really think all the way through to begin with, but we ended up in Cebu and then we just found a co working space, something where you didn't have to sign a lease. We found a great co working space in Cebu. So it's just super flexible. We can add people or take people away as needed. And the rest of the interviews that we did at that point we started hiring more people were in person. So at first I had our first va that again that became our manager find the office for us. So she went and found all the options. So when we first went to Cebu, we went and toured all the different office spaces and we picked the one that we liked the best and that became our co working space. And at the same time I was like, these are the jobs I want to hire for. Let's bring them all in for interviews or find the people that you want to bring in for interviews. And so I was there for those initial interviews and I was able to, you know, train her on the things that I was looking for in terms of like hiring. And she had never been through it before, so I was also showing her just how to go through that process. And then quickly our process became the next stage. Was she wanting, you know, place the job ads. She did all the initial phone screening interviews, an in person interview. And then when she found a candidate that she thought that we should hire, we did a final Skype interview with me, her and the Kennedy. They would come into the office there and we would do that, you know, so it was a semi in person, semi over the phone interview and we would hire probably about half of the people that she brought to that stage. And now it's basically 100%. So like once I got to the point where I was confident enough that she could do this all on her own, I was like, you know, I don't need to be in this process any longer. So we're at that point now and we've also hired an HR person to help because this has become a full time job just hiring and maintaining our staff over there. But everyone's going to start with just one person, one hire. And so again, going back to all that hire for a role that puts them in a position to be successful. Make sure that you train them, don't expect them to do too much, do these tricks that I mentioned in terms of, you know, ask them to respond to a certain email address with a certain in a certain way and make sure that they're detail oriented and just following those simple things will get you 99% of the way there and you're going to have a good candidate that's self motivated and hopefully detail oriented and seems to work well with you because you've already done a Skype interview with them and you've now set yourself up for success and them for success.

I love It. I've gotten so much from this, which is so awesome. I've been doing this for 15 years and this has been cool to hear your perspective on how you do this, how you do some of these things. It'll be really good for me as I move forward. I'm hiring two people right now, and I'm going to go back through some of my hiring process.

There's a really great saying that someone told me, which is be slow to hire and quick to fire. And so if you put more effort into the hiring process, you're going to have a better chance of being successful and have less of a chance. You're going to have to fire them, which is always difficult to do. I don't care who you are unless you're like this, you're Mr. Scrooge and just this ruthless, awful person. No matter how bad of a job someone's doing, it still feels awful. Telling them you're fired. It never feels good. There's been maybe one case in my 15 year entrepreneurial career and a couple of hundred employees that I've hired over along the way where it felt good to fire somebody. And it was someone that was like just stealing and just incompetent. And I was like, get the F out of here, you're fired. And that felt good. But everyone else, it's just like, no matter how bad, I mean, like, they're still, you know, got a family to feed or themselves to feed and bills to pay and like, you know that you're setting someone up to go through a bad part of their life, you know, it's not. It never feels good to get fired and it never feels good to fire someone. So, like, don't put yourself in a position over and over to be doing that. Like, take the time up front and it's way easier. Realistically, even though it feels hard in a moment to take the time up front to find the right person.

I love it. We've gone almost an hour. Any last things that you want to give advice for, anything that you guys do well or mistakes you've made that you want to tell people.

So I'll do both. One on the do well and one on the mistakes. So one other tip that we've realized in the Philippines is they love food. It's just a huge part of the culture. And so I remember going down there and doing like this big corporate hoo ha meeting where we take them out to lunch and then we rented a meeting space for the day and then we did a party at night. And I announced all these new benefits, the unlimited vacation and some of the other stuff. And I also announced that we were going to have unlimited snacks in the office and a weekly lunch. And when I announced that, it was like, if you can imagine a scene from, like, graduation to college where, like, caps and gowns are flying and everyone's, like, cheering that, like, got the best response over everything else. I mean, it was crazy. I was just like, oh, my God. Like, you know, it's so, you know, a really good lesson learned is that oftentimes, like, things that are very inexpensive or free matter to people more than anything. You know, it's just getting recognition costs you nothing to give them. Just tell them, good job, like, thank you. But that's, you know, means more to someone than giving them a raise. And the snacks is just something that is, again, it's a part of the culture. They love that. And, you know, having a weekly lunch and team outing and stuff, like, they love that stuff way more than the pay. And so that's something that a great little tip and something we kind of figured out. And so if you just. Even if you only hired one person and they're just working from home and you haven't got an office yet, you know, a cool thing could be that's just like, on Friday, we're gonna pay for your lunch order. Whatever you want. It cost you like, three bucks. You know, it's like, food's cheap over there, you know, and then just like while they're eating lunch on Friday, they're thinking about you, you know, and it's worked out really well in terms of mistakes. I already kind of mentioned it, but I just. I think it's worth reiterating. And just thinking you're going to hire a superhero is just such a fallacy, you know, it's just. I see this happen over and over again, even though I tell people, like, over and over again not to do it. You know, it's a part of. A huge part of what we teach in our community is hiring people remotely. It still seems to happen all the time. You know, it's just like, I'm going to hire this person for whatever reason they think that they're going to be able to do every task and do it without any training. And just like anything else in life, you get out of it what you put into it. And, you know, so it's just. I'm telling you from my own mistakes, like, don't do that. I think we. It's a tendency to. Everyone has to kind of go through that and if you can do yourself a favor and skip that step, you'll be way better off.

The step of I don't have time to do this. Yeah, hire someone for me. I don't train you, you know, like that. It just doesn't work and you don't get your time back doing.

Yeah. And the thing is, like, the thing that's really cool is, I can tell you now that's exactly how it is for me. I don't have time to do that. Go do that for me. And it just goes and happens. But like, I had to look back and realize like how much effort I put into it to begin with. It wasn't easy. And we still make an effort to go over there every year and spend the time with them and make sure that we're handling the culture piece of it and making sure that they feel loved. And it's always, every time I go over there, same thing every time. I can't believe the CEO of the company is like coming over here and spending time with me. You know, I take, every time we go over there, every one of them, we take them all out to lunch or dinner. And now we had it like, because we have too many people to just go out for lunch every day. So we, you know, take them out, everyone out to a meal and spend an hour with each person one on one. Also have a meeting with them one on one in the office over, usually through the meal. Like, I talk about personal stuff, you know, you know, it's just like, you know, what's your family life look like, what's your hobbies, what are you doing? You're just getting interest in them personally. And then we also have a half hour one on one meeting with them in the office just like. And it's always just so interesting, like how reserved they are about telling you any feedback. But like, the reality is I do care and I want to hear what they have to say and make sure that they're happy and invest in them. And like, no one really takes the time to do that. And so by putting that time and effort into it, we've built like a family over there. It's, it's like I'm so proud and like in of like of them and just like what we built over there, because you go over there, it just like gives me warm fuzzies, like seeing how they interact with each other and they're just like constantly smiling, having a good time and producing amazing results. And they all feed off of each other and that's been like the huge benefit of having them all in one spot. And so it's taken time, but people look at what we're doing and just assume that, like, I just snapped my fingers and it, like, all happened and that it took a couple of years to build.

That's interesting to hear you say that because that's how it is for me too. And I hadn't realized that, like, yeah, this is what I do. Like, oh, I don't have time to do this. Go do this.

Yeah, but.

But it took years to get to that point. Yes, A lot of effort. Like, you've worked for me for 12 years, right?

Yeah.

That's why I can tell you anything I want and you go do it. That doesn't happen week one. Yeah, I don't care who you hire. It doesn't happen week one.

I mean, another great analogy of this that entrepreneurs can understand is that, you know, the same thing happens when you try to start a business. So you got a business that's working, that's really successful. You think you're going to go repeat that really easily and it's just going to, like, take off like wildfire. And you get back into it. You realize, like, how you forgot how hard it was to start that business from scratch. And, you know, it's very similar to, like, the employee thing. And so you have to put the effort into just like you did in your business to. To begin with, to get it to where it is and be successful. You gotta do that with human capital as well.

Mike, I love it. Thank you so much. So if you guys want to read Mike, Mike has a really great article about how he hires Vas. We'll put the link below. It's on ecomcrew.com and we'll probably link to a couple other things of yours, because I love what you do and I love how you do it, and I love the way you treat people. And I'm sure the way you treat your employees translates to the way you treat customers. Yes, very much so, for people learning ecommerce. So I love it. Thank you so much, Mike. This has been awesome. We'll talk to you later.

Thank you.