Scott Watkins Outsources his VAs for Software Development & Video Games

So I'm like, I'm gonna go to the Philippines and, and meet all my employees. Well, while I was over there I happened to meet my wife. She's not an employee, but. But yeah. So John is the reason why I met my wife. Had it not been for John, I would not have met.

Scott Watkins, thank you for being here today. And Erica, thank you for joining us. Will you tell us what you do for Scott?

Thank you for having me. I'm Brumicon's operations manager for about a year now and so far I'm really liking my job.

Okay, well Scott, tell us what you do.

So brumicon is, you know, at its core we're a software development company. We started out 11 years ago or so, custom writing software for businesses.

When I looked up Brimacon online, there was something very specific that came along with it and it was so unique and so different from I guess anyone that I've seen who uses onlinejobs. Ph, can you tell us a little bit about that specialty?

So yeah, back in 2018, a couple years ago we had a big hurricane. Hurricane Michael came through the panhandle and it devastated all the small businesses in the area, including us. And of course we had this huge staff of VAs and we're like well you know, what are we gonna do? So we made a decision to make video games and try to generate some revenue with that. Well, that turned out to be much more successful than we thought. We all liked doing it, we all had fun doing it. It's like there's no need to go back to working for other people now. We work for the player.

You mentioned that Brumacon is an acronym. Tell us about that.

We first sat down, we talked about what our vision is, what's our goal. We decided that what does our business do? And so we bring remarkable unity. That's what we do with people. We merge imagination and we create one network. So that's where the acronym bringing remarkable unity, Merging imagination, creating one network. That is our vision and our mission statement.

What percentage of Brumicon is software development and what percentage is more toward that video game development?

Currently I would say probably 80% right now. For the most part. Most of us, that's what we do. We make video games. Everyone's involved in doing something video game related.

So how did you get started in that?

2008 or so is when we started Brewmacon. It was just me and their guy. It was actually my ex brother in law. And then in 2015 I bought out the entire company. So Became the sole owner. And from 2015, 2018, with the help of my BAS, of course, we were able to target a lot of the small businesses. It was really kind of on a whim, we had done some work for a financial institution and a lot of like that, small businesses who needed software applications or mobile app. And that was our bread and butter until, of course, the hurricane.

When did you know that this is what you wanted to do?

You know, at first, it was kind of like, what are we doing? Why are we making video games? What are we. What are we doing? But we were having fun, and I guess we had put out. We pushed out a couple games that were, you know, semi popular, but then Fresh Filipino fruit, which I think has been our. I think, Erica, that's probably our number one game right now, right? Fresh Filipino fruit. That had a huge response, especially with the Philippines. And the way it worked for us is we embedded ads, and we get paid between 1 and 5 cents per ad viewed, and we have tens of thousands of people playing the game. So that's kind of how that rolled into that. I was like, hey, we can make money with this and have fun at the same time. Why go back? So somewhere along the line, I don't know if there's a specific demarcation for that, but somewhere along the line, no one wanted to go back to doing what we were doing before, so we just kept doing it.

There's something that makes you as a software company different from other companies.

What probably differentiates us is probably our people that, you know, we have all our Filipinos, and if you know anything about the Filipino vas, it's an innate quality, something inside that they're just resilient, 100% positive. I was once speaking to someone. You'll never call tech support and speak to a Filipino IT support person and then get angry. No matter how angry you are with them, they'll never get angry back. They're always positive. You know, having a team that. That's their default thinking. You know, that's what makes us better.

It's actually just what we are. I mean, if there's something you can do, you. You have to exceed the expectations of what your client or what your boss is expecting from you. So I think that's just what the. I mean, most of the Filipinos are when it comes to their work mindset.

Erica, is there something you particularly love about the work that you do? For those of you who can't see, Scott's pointing to himself, I have the.

Best boss in the world. So, yes, there's nothing not love when it comes to my job. Well, actually, it's the perks that made me love it. Since I get to work from home, I can take care of my kids at the same time, while working, I can work at my own pace, and there's no dress code.

What makes Scott the best boss in the world?

This is my first VA job ever. So when he promoted me as his operations manager, he gave me the training that I needed. He always supports me with all my decisions. He feels it's right. Also, he's very understanding to all of us. If we need something or we are sick, he's always the first to offer us help. And that's really the attitude or the traits of him that really stood out for me.

I have a distinct advantage over everyone else. So first, my wife is a partner in the company, and we talk about the company all the time. And so a lot of times, what Erica sees coming from me really is my wife telling me, hey, you know, I'm a Filipino. I understand, you know, like, holidays. You know, they're really big on holidays over there, and they have a whole bunch of holidays that we don't have here in the US And I'm like, you know, what is this right here? I don't understand this. And it's not all peaches and cream. Me and Eric have had some big. A couple times, a couple big arguments that she just messages my wife and my wife and her chit chat in a little Filipino language, and then it's all better. And so my wife's a great coach in the Meteor. So it's not just me. It's really me and my wife. But I know Erica sees it from me a lot of times, but a lot of times a wife is behind the scenes saying, hey, let's offer them the help. Let's do this.

What do you really love about your job?

I make video games for a living. That's. I mean, you know, and I have crazy ideas, and that's some of the things me and Erica will say. You know, I'll say, you know, can we do this? Can we do this? And in my mind, it's like, great. And she's like, mechanically, that's not physically possible. So we have those discussions, but just seeing people play our games, getting the feedback, getting the followers, the fans, you know, we're currently designing a game called anino, which is. Is a Filipino word for shadow. I think it's gonna be really good. It's got a great story. Erica helped make A lot of the storyline for that, but just seeing people's feedback and feeling, the energy that feeds me, that makes me love my work over.

And this is for Scott. Why would you choose this over a 9 to 5 job? What makes it worth it to you?

And we're speaking honestly, nine to five job, working for someone else, there's no. That's really a dead end. I mean, you can get promoted, you can get raises and so forth, but you'll never own your time. Someone else owns your time. And for me, you know, it's great when you first start your career or you just, you know, graduate college or you're trying to develop your skill sets. Working nine to five, that's great. I think, you know, we all started there. The end game is to live the life that I want and to, you know, do the work that I love.

Do you have any other business philosophies?

I think the most important philosophy as a small business owner, starting out is learning to connect with people. And that's Filipino vas, you know, or people you meet at the gas station. No matter what, you know, if you're not a people person, you still can do it, although definitely helps. But, you know, training yourself, you know, every person you meet is someone that can have an impact in your business. Even if they don't buy from you or don't do anything. They may know someone down the road who wants to come work for you, or they might post something on their Facebook account. I think that is probably a very good, important thing to do.

Having genuine care for your employees and the people around you. And Erica, she mentioned earlier, if she's sick, you want to know, you're the first to say, you know, what's going on, how can I help you and whatnot. I think that there's so much more to business when you remember that you're working with people, you're working for people, and there's so much power there.

Later on, I had written down, I don't like calling them. I like calling them team members or, you know, they're part of the family and they really are. You know, sometimes a simple thing, like if we. Erica will tell you, a lot of our employees will have something small come up. It might be their headset broke or the people next door have chickens and dogs, and so they need to cancel the headphones. You know, so I send them a little extra money and, you know, buy something for them, and then they take a little bit out of their paycheck each week. And there's like A million different ways that to help them. I think taking care of them, you always get that back a hundredfold, I think.

So tell us how you got started with outsourcing. Where did you learn about it?

Oh, I think back in the day, we're going back a decade or more. I think it was Elance and Odesk I think were the big ones back then when I first started outsourcing for things I needed. So using all of those platforms are pretty much how I got started in the hiring someone remote to do something we need for us.

When did you find onlinejobs?

Ph, it was a Friday evening. I remember that because I was so frustrated through the week. When you look at and as a small business owner, I think every small business owner out there is at some point went to one of those types of places, you know, first, you know, communication is a real big thing that Fiverr and all the other ones, they want you to communicate only on their boards. They want to control everything. But sometimes, you know, you don't want to share a credit card number or Social Security number or password, you know, over some sort of communication network that who knows, can see what you know. So a lot of times there's sensitive information that you don't readily want to share and that's really impossible with those types of outsourcing platforms. Virtually every one of them is a kind of a transaction based, that's what I call transaction gig is what Fiverr calls it, where you're hiring someone to do a specific task and it's not really a permanent relationship with them. And when that task ends, they may have other tasks lined up for other people. So then you're stuck trying to find someone else and you can't really build that rapport. And you know, the reason I think they do that is because they want that ongoing revenue of the transaction base. And then just like being expensive, you know, I'll call Fiverr out because they're the big ones, you know, that, you know, for someone for a five dollar gig, if I want a five dollar service, you know, they're gonna, Fiverr's gonna charge me $2 for that transaction and then they're gonna deduct a dollar from the person who, the VA who's doing that, that transaction. So that's $3 fiverr made off of a $5, you know, service that's a 60% commission. You know, that's why Fiverr is so big because commissions like that. But you know, that's $3 that I can extra I could give to the VA. And so I knew there had to be a better way. And so I remember the night quite clearly. I was searching, I think I typed in Google, like higher permanent VA or something like that. And about the third or fourth one down, I saw online jobs and clicked on it and went from there.

And I want to know, Erica, how did you find onlinejobs? Ph.

In college I was looking for a part time job where I can do what I was. I was a.

Tell her what you went to school for, Erica.

I took aviation logistics for college.

So imagine that.

Interview aviation school statistics. This is just a taste of the versatility that you get when you employ.

In the Philippines, right?

That's exactly right.

So I was looking for a job and then no one's contacting me. So I. I look for physical jobs like office here, but it's so exhausting. So when Covid. When Covid came here and then we have to lockdown the whole country. Most. Most of the city. So I started looking again and then Scott messaged me like, are you still interested with the PA job? And on the spot I got interviewed. So I got hired the same day.

The backstory to that was our previous operations manager, who's angel, who'd worked three something years for us, our previous administrative assistant who kind of works for both of us, had left and so we were looking to replace that and we had interviewed Erica and Angel really liked her and so we hired. That's how that started. So she was hired in as an admin assistant and then I don't know what, three, four months later, our previous operations manager had gotten pregnant and wanted to leave for that, which she left in great terms and worked wonderful for us. But then I needed someone and Erica fit the bill.

Erica, can you tell us what your job is like as an operations manager?

For my day to day task, since we are a digital company, so we produce assets every day, so I have to manage those. Check if it's in right format, if it's in right size, and if it's. If we can use that to our. What we are developing. And daily we have our team meetings. Sometimes individual, but usually it's a team call. In Filipino, not me. Yeah, in Filipino. I speak in Tagalog with my. With my other teammates so that we can understand each other more so that all tasks will be delegated correctly. And I always update Scott with the progress of our project all the time.

Yeah, so you have a ladder going on here where Scott's outsourcing to you and you're outsourcing to the rest of the team and then you've got a report system. So it really streamlines the whole system there. That's fantastic.

And if you know about Filipino, you know a nosebleed is correct. I'm assuming the nosebleed from the Filipinos is. If you talk too much English to them, they say they get a nosebleed, meaning they're having too much problem translating in their head. So that's what they say is a nosebleed.

Yes.

So Erica's job is to keep all the other people because I talk a lot, obviously, so she takes what I want, keeps them. Yeah, that's.

So most of the time I. I am the one who's got nosebleeds, Johnny.

I'll just talk and talk.

Kidding.

Okay, Paul. Okay, Paul.

And how much of your communication is done via email or Skype chat?

We'll do team calls or team conferences. We have some group chats set up. Erica's really the only one. I mean, yeah, I talk to her every day for a couple hours.

So how many total Filipino vas do you employ? And like you said, you don't like to call them Filipino vas. Tell me again what you prefer.

So every time we hire somebody, Erica, what do we say?

Welcome to the family.

That's right, the Brumicon family.

Welcome to the boomicon.

Yeah, we're like the Italian mob here. We have 12 right now. Right, Erica?

Yeah.

Rain and Jeff, they do graphic design. Well, Rain does more characters and Jeff does more environment. I think we have a sound engineer, audio person makes audio for us. We have a server administrator. We have a person who does C programming in Unity. That's the platform we use make games is Unity. It's a platform. We have a PHP API, that's Michael. We have a marketing manager. Karen does our dedicated YouTube vlogger. If you see her Rumicon channel, make sure to click on the subscribe button. She'd want me to tell you that we have a social media manager. We have product tester and researcher. We have Jasmil, she's our administrative assistant who we hired after promoting Erica.

How many of your family members, Mafia mob members, did you hire on onlinejobs? Ph of year 11. 100%. Okay, tell us about your process. Tell us how you find them, how you recruit them and what your system is.

Does John still sell those hundred dollar classes? I don't know. That was, I think every person that starts. I think that should be like a prerequisite. They should watch that video right now.

We do have what's called the One VA Away Challenge. And you can go to One VAaway Calm. And John takes you through seven videos higher. Yeah, he takes you through and teaches very specifically every step he takes to hire. Hire his personal VAs.

I wish that would have been available 10 years ago.

So there you go. It's probably the equivalent of whatever he had at that time.

Well, to answer your question specifically, I think the process usually starts with Erica identifying there's a need either someone else is, you know, resigning, which we don't have a very. We have a very low turnover occasionally. You know, our most recent addition is we need someone to make sound files and a voice actress. We wanted a, you know, designated voice actress. So she says, hey, we need this position. And so we look at the budget and we allocate how much funds we have available for that, the range. And usually she'll go draft a some sort of job posting on online jobs. And Jasmine will usually start proactively, looking ahead of time for different qualified candidates and send that list over to Erica. Erica will then usually send them a request saying, hey, why don't you check us out which one cool feature I like about online jobs is they have the save template that saved us so much time. So thank you, whoever designed that. On the back end of online jobs, if you're sending out 50 of the same thing, you can save those a template. So that's a very nice feature. You know, then we wait back for responses. We have developed an online application that asked the default things like, you know, what's your computer specs? What is your, you know, do you have a microphone? Are you okay to using remote monitoring? So all the basic stuff from there, Erica will usually choose, I don't know, four or five applicants. And then she'll do the first interview, which is really the only interview. If she likes them, you know, she'll pick two or three out of those and she'll do an interview with me. But I'm usually there just kind of as a formality. She's really seeing how good they interact with in English environment and a formal environment. And then from there sometimes she asks me my opinion, sometimes she doesn't. Then just make a decision and then go on to onboard them. And then we have a streamlined process for onboarding.

Will you tell us about your onboarding process? It's such a delicate transition or can be to not overwhelm Erica.

What's your secrets onboarding?

I usually create them a company. A company email so that I found.

That that's something I Started. Wait. I think giving a va a company email makes them feel part of the company. And that's just a little thing. Even if they never use it. Give them a company email with their name@brumicon.com. that in itself I think is, I found, you know, is one thing I.

Think gives them a sense of belonging and permanence. Yeah. So smart.

Well, we actually use Trello and Microsoft365 to manage our projects. So I add them there and I make them their own board so they can list their what, what needs to be done or sometimes I list there what needs to be done until they get comfortable with our system, with what we, how we manage our project, with how we, how we send them things. That's where I let them go. Do your own thing.

So yeah, you let them do what you hired them to do. You kind of let them create their own.

And that's, that's got to be.

Go ahead.

Something else. Yeah. So Erica, one thing Erica brought to us, this is probably six months ago, she drafted a company policy that kind of just outlined things like our 13 month, the dreaded 13 month payment. How we handle that, how we, you know, we don't, there's different religions of course, you know, and we don't, we don't tolerate intolerant, everyone's equal and all the different things that we expect. So and so one thing she does is she'll go over that and she'll have them sign it, scan it and send it in. So I know Erica's, she's downplaying herself, but she's very, very efficient at that, very organized on that.

What is your training process?

We don't usually give in depth training.

Since.

For every role in the company they already know what to do with that. We just have to give like for our character designer. Okay, so this is, this is the character that we want built. You just have to give him a specific brief description of the character that you want made. And then you just submit me a, just submit me your output and I will check if we are thinking something. We are imagining the same thing most of the time. That was it.

I think Erica spends a full day with each employee walking them through how to use our system. So there's a. I think she trains with how to use the Microsoft 365.

Is there anything that hasn't been successful?

But as not being successful is. I think the onboarding process is probably the most important thing. You know, I think when we first started out we hired someone and then we kind of Just said, okay, well, let's do this. But we weren't clear on anything. So just taking the time to spend with them, I think in the beginning, getting them to the point where they feel comfortable and what their expectations of them, and then letting them go versus just letting them go from the start.

So how many hours would you guess a week that you outsource just to Erica?

I can message Erica 24. 7. And she's pretty good at saying OPO, which is yes, yes, sir. So usually send me a daily email with a. With an ongoing. With. She keeps a running tally for the month of how many hours and what the current salary is for everything. Usually, I think in a given week, probably 500 hours, maybe. Wow.

The reason I ask is because you obviously only have so many hours a week on your own, Scott.

168 hours.

And you just turned yourself into 500 hours of work, essentially by outsourcing. And so that's plus.

Right. Once you start down that path, you've hired a VA and you see, you know, you get over the initial obstacles of, you know, figuring them out, how this works and finding your, you know, your click there. Once you get past that, they become really addictive because almost anything that you want, you know, your time is value. What is your time worth to you? You know, and if I can pay $4 an hour or whatever it is to have someone else who's got a college education, who's very committed, and they can do that for me, you know, that's freed up an hour for me. And what's that, three or four dollars that I'm giving that person, it becomes very addictive. It's kind of intoxicating, really, because for.

You, about how many hours do you put in each week managing, what do you say?

Managing? I don't really do any managing the company. I check in and chat with Erica because I choose to, not because I have to. You know, John, I think, recently put out a new video about the four hours a week that's probably. He's embellishing a little bit. You probably do it one or two hours a week, really. Especially when you get to the point where you can hire someone who's dedicated at managing the other employees like we have. Erica. I wish I would have. I wish I would have had an Erica years ago. I probably put 20 hours a week talking to Erica and annoying her. But.

No, but tell us about something that has not worked specifically. You mentioned a video that you tried as far as training goes, at some point.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So this was something we did way back before the operations manager. I found that I was spending a lot of time, you know, managing the VAs. You know, they were all doing great work, but I would hire someone in, and I didn't want to spend the full day with them on training, which I knew they needed. So I had tried creating a series of videos that basically walked them through how to use our different systems that we had and how to install this software and how to set things up. What I found was, first, I was very impersonal, and I think that we lost some good VAs, because I just kind of dropped it on them. And they watched the video, and they didn't have the ability to ask questions. So I learned along the line that it was, I think, important to when you hire va, spend the time with them. You can't make them watch a video, you know, no one can, I don't think.

What are some of your favorite ways to motivate and connect with your VAs?

And there's last holiday, December, we gave away tea and hot chocolate to our team members. So sometimes, oh, I'm drinking this hot tea.

It turned out to be, let's send everyone basically a gift box. Earl Grey tea. I got all the female employees. Some perfume, I think, right? And then bath and body works type stuff. And all the guys, like, I got some jerky, like, from the. Anyways, we made these gift boxes, and she secretly sent them out to all the employees. So every one of the employees got, like, a secret gift box.

Well, and what a fun way to build company culture, too.

Oh, yeah, we have brumicon shirt. We got a whole bunch of swag. So Brumican games. She went and had, like, some shirts made up and said, brumacan. You got any of those pictures, Erica? You need to share those. But anyway, so, yeah, about once a quarter, it's usually on a Friday. We'll pick a day and it's required. All the employees are required to be there, like, regular work day. But we'll just all log in and we'll have, like, planned activities. The last one we had, I think we did murder mystery. We had the virtual escape rooms where we're all logged in and we had to, like, solve the clues and you could touch things. And so it kind of interacted together to different Filipinos. So it kind of just makes it fun. And everyone was, you know, we had just a fun day. It was just a whole day about playing games and socializing.

Let's take a second to get technical. What software and systems do you use.

As a business owner? That's really. It's dynamic. That'll be changing probably even after this. Obviously. One thing I like about the online jobs is they. They offer the remote management software, which is wonderful. You know, I use that for the first eight years I think of our business. Eventually as our team grew larger and larger, we needed a few extra things. So we use Work Pulse. The advantages it has is it can track specific activity and then automate the process of adjusting hours. So if an employee decides to go on Facebook for 10, 15 minutes or do something that's not work related, Erica can go there and actually program those so it flags it and auto adjusts their hours if they go idle for 10, 15 minutes. About a year ago, we transitioned to The Microsoft. The Microsoft 365 that makes sure every got a legit copy of Microsoft Office.

Yeah, absolutely. You covered all the bases. So.

Yeah.

Do you have any other questions for me or anything else that I could do for you?

I don't think so. Tell John to put a plug in for us. That was a personal plugin for us, but other than that, we're good.

Okay, perfect. We'll see what we can do about that. And Erica, thank you for just.

Thank you.

Having the guts to be here and be vulnerable and answer honestly, that was fantastic.

Erica's awesome.

Thank you so much.

We'll let you get back to your life. Thank you.

Bye bye.

See ya. Thank you. Bye Bye.

Sa.