Trevor Fenner and Working Remotely to be Free to Travel the World

So where do you find your VAs now? Where are your favorite places? You mentioned you started with upwork.

Yeah, yeah. For my full time VAs, I usually use online jobs because online jobs I get the best price and also really good quality.

Hey, it's Chelain for John Jonas. We are here today talking with Trevor Fenner of E Commerce Paradise. Super excited about that. I'll introduce myself first because most of you have never seen me. I've worked with John in special projects and content development since 2012 and watched onlinejobs ph kind of explode into what it is over the last decade. It's been pretty cool. I'm especially excited to learn more from Trevor today. So, Trevor, you are the owner of E Commerce Paradise. You also operate a coaching program and run a pretty successful podcast from what I understand, right?

Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So Ecommerce paradise right now is mostly focused around a business model called high ticket dropshipping where we source products from US suppliers, products that are over $500 that range into the thousands of dollars. And we don't inventory or warehouse any of the products ourselves. We simply do the E Commerce store and do the marketing, the advertising and the sales, the customer service, and the supplier fulfills orders for us and we sell it. So I've been doing this business model for like five or six years myself. And a few years ago I decided to go ahead and start a business telling people how to do it too because I'm just really passionate about helping people. So that's how Ecommerce paradise kind of got started.

Awesome. So what's the backstory? What were you doing before this?

The backstory that's related, relatable is I used to have a job, a day job and Los Angeles where I worked in a warehouse that sold lock and security equipment. And I worked there for about five years. About six months later I moved up into sales, working in sales and customer service at the front desk. I'm really good at sales, naturally, so I was able to excel quite quickly. And they put me into a back office cubicle where I would take phone calls and make sales presentations and sell security equipment for a range of things. And then I kind of became the top guy in the sales department for their electronic security department. So electronic locks and CCTV camera systems and access control systems and stuff like that. So I would do sales presentations for people that would come in for school districts or government facilities or even just like small cannabis shops and stuff like that would come in and they would want to know like how to Set up security systems and I would teach them how to do it. I would show them like, what products they should get and then I would do the orders with them. And the distributor made pretty good margins. What I learned was that that whole business model actually works really well with drop shipping. We had a lot of e commerce stores that would buy stuff from us and we would drop ship directly to their clients for them. And I would manage, I managed a couple of those accounts and they would bring in so many orders every single day, like five or ten different POs a day. It was just ridiculous. And some of them were maybe 50 to 100 bucks, otherwise like 500 to $1,000. Some were bulk, like you know, five or 10 items on a PO. So a lot of POs. And my mind started thinking a lot and I was like, why don't I do something like this? You know? So I started talking some of the guys who would come in, locksmiths and stuff like that, and I asked them like, hey, have you ever thought about doing an online business instead of just doing, you know, in person sales? And some of them said yes, you know, definitely thought about doing that. So I started kind of masterminding with a few of them. And around the same time I was going to college taking marketing classes and sales classes because I really wanted to learn how to do my own business. And yeah, then I met a guy who really decided that he wanted to be a partner of mine. Guy in his 50s and you know, locksmith by trade, but just a really excited guy. Kind of could tell that I had some fire in my soul and he wanted to help me. So we partnered up 5050 on an E commerce business selling bicycles. And you know, even though it had nothing to do with the lock and security equipment, I took the same experience from the drop shipping and I applied that to my own e commerce store. And it worked really well. And you know, it took a few years to take off, but it did. Eventually it took off and it was able to pay enough money for me to pay my monthly expenses. So I was able to quit my day job and eventually start traveling around. And in 2017, 2016, I left to Thailand. And now I'm kind of traveling around Thailand and Bali and different parts of the world all the time. Now I'm not even really, you know, I don't really have a home base per se anywhere because I stayed like a few months here, a few months there just because I can. It's a lot of fun. I like this lifestyle, but yeah, that's Kind of like the main story.

No, that's, it's, it's incredible. Tell us where you are right now because we had a lot of fun trying to coordinate this interview because of the time difference. So tell us where you are right now and what you're doing and what you're going to do for fun.

Yeah, sure. Yeah, I'm in Bali right now, which is in Indonesia. And yeah, the time zone is completely opposite of Eastern Standard time. So, you know, noon Eastern time is about midnight, the time out here. So it does make managing one of these dropshipping businesses quite painful if you don't have a team. So what I started to do before I left was I started hiring virtual assistants since one of the platforms I used was online jobs. Another one was upwork.

Before you left, like back in 2017, before you started traveling or.

Yeah, yeah, because I had my E commerce business going pretty good around 2013. In 2014, it really started to take off. You know, we did pretty good numbers and you know, it was, it was starting to become, you know, 10 to 20 orders a day kind of volume. Something that I needed to have a VA help me with. So that's when I started hiring. My first VAs was right around that time.

Okay, so tell us about your. Well first, how many VAs do you have working for you now?

Right Now I have 7 in house VAs and I have probably a good 5 or 10 different project based VAs I use for various things like graphic design and web development and things like that.

So when you say in house, you're not talking like you have an office in the Philippines. You mean like full time or. What do you mean?

Yeah, right. They all work remote. Yeah, in house is the term I use. I guess like love internal team is I guess what I should call it. But yeah, they were full time for me. Basically, that's what I should say, full time.

Okay, so tell us about your first VA and what you hired them to do, how the hiring went down, what you learned from that.

It's a good question. I actually, I don't know exactly which one was my first.

Which one sticks out to you? How about that? We'll go through that.

You know, because how it goes, you hire one and then they don't work out, you have to hire another and they don't work out. Yeah, and then you finally dig through enough of them and you find really good VAs. And that's kind of how it went for me, you know, Like I, I think I first started my journey through UPWORK and it was just kind of like posting jobs and trying to figure out like who's going to be a good fit for it and doing a few interviews and talking to people on the phone and just trying to figure out, you know, what their personality is. Like, are they dependable? Are they going to be, you know, do they have a fast computer? Do they have a home environment that's going to be conducive to like focusing on work, you know, depending on the job? Like, are they, do they have the skills necessary for the job, especially if it's customer service, do they sound good on the phone? Do they have a good microphone and equipment? Do they have a fast Internet connection? So all these things mattered a lot. And I definitely learned over my first, I would say like two or three hires, like what kind of people I didn't want to have on my team, you know, and then so I've kind of used that to hire only like the right people now. You know, like you don't even really know how a person is after the interview process 100%. You really, you really only know like after the first couple weeks of them working with you. That's what I found really is that like you start to get a feel for them, like how reliable they are, how quick communicator they are. Do they have a really good attitude? I think that's the number one thing for me is attitude. Because if they have a good attitude, I can train them for anything they'll do work even off hours. Like good attitude people. Those are the people I want on my team.

Yeah, that's awesome. Attitude and creating the culture super important even across the sea. So where do you find your VAs now? Where are your favorite places? You mentioned you started with upwork.

Yeah, yeah, I. For my full time VAs, I usually use online jobs because online jobs I get the best price and also really good quality. I've used other services like Free up And I found VA's through there. But generally speaking they charge more money per hour of work. And so, you know, with that said, like sometimes you get better quality and of course that's great. But oftentimes I can find Vas for like 3 bucks an hour for time that do really good quality work. You know, I don't expect them to be like absolute masters at their craft. They're certainly not going to be at that kind of a rate. But I do expect that they are have good attitude and they can learn fast because I can make all the training in the world they need and Train them to my systems so I can, I can definitely work with VAs at that price point. And I found some awesome VA's through online jobs that I pay about 3 bucks an hour. And they're totally happy with it and I'm happy with their work and their work ethic is great too. And they're just really friendly and you know, it's been a good experience for them. And you know, I use Fiverr sometimes for finding VAs that are more project based.

Like project based that you're talking about?

Yeah, like one at a time kind of stuff. People that I can't really afford to hire full time or even if I could afford, it would just be one of those things where it's like I feel like I'm kind of wasting money if I pay someone full time to do something. I don't always know exactly what I need. You know, what I do is I create systems in my business now. So I have like procedures, procedural, you know, videos and documents laid out on like doing certain things. So when I have a system in place, I know I want to duplicate over and over and over again. Then I hand that off to a full time va. I have them just do that. And I have a, you know, a certain system in place to make that happen in my business. So that's when I hire positions. Hire for those positions is when I have those systems built.

So do you have a software that you prefer to use to implement those systems and to communicate with your va?

Yeah, sure. So communication I use actually Facebook Workplace. I've tried a bunch of different ones and for the one that I like the most, and also my VAs and it works for them has been Facebook Workplace. It's strange, but it works. It's just like Facebook, except it's without all the distractions. So works great for them, works great for me. So that's what I use for direct communication. I use Google Sheets, just plain spreadsheets for organizing, you know, all the different steps and training videos. You know, for the VAs, I use loom.com to make the training videos. That's really good software because for 10 bucks a month I think you can make unlimited videos. And you basically just click a little Chrome extension, film the video or whatever, and then click it again. It's done. It automatically uploads to the Internet, gives you a link, you can share it with your va, you can download it, you could embed it on any website. So Loom is great for that. And of course Google Docs for kind of making Like Word document versions of the spreadsheet procedures and stuff like that. And then I just pay everybody through PayPal. That seems to work really well. In the past, I've had VAs where, like, their account got banned, so I had to use a service called Zoom x o o m dot com. And they charge, like a $5 fee, I think, instead of the. Instead of the regular PayPal fee. So the VA agrees that I can just charge them that fee and they're cool with it. That happens to be. But we work it out. And if I have a customer service va, I'll have them do a lot of the work to communicate between me and the suppliers and the customers through Shopify, because I use Shopify for all my stores now. And so it just makes it really easy to just do the customer relationship management right there in the comments of the order pages, and then they can just shoot out emails from there, so on and so forth. Of course, we use Gmail for all the communication back and forth.

Awesome, awesome. And do you have any tips or advice for anyone who's on the verge of either getting out of their day job and making the jump like you did, or deciding, I think I'm ready to hire someone, but something's holding them back. What would you say to them?

Yeah, okay, so two different people here. Because I think if someone. Well, I mean, maybe it's the same person. I don't know. If you have an online business already and you're thinking about hiring, but, you know, you're kind of holding yourself back about it. The main thing is you just have to understand that before you hire somebody, you have to make training on what you want them to do. Okay. Don't hire somebody. Expect them to be like, the master at their craft. They're gonna know exactly what you mean. Especially in the Philippines. Because if you just write somebody a message and tell them one thing, you know, and this goes for people all over the world, too, but since we're hiring mostly in the Philippines these days for customer service and other things, the English doesn't really translate the same to them as you think it does to you. And like, this is just goes the same with any written language, right? So videos are the key to having training that actually they can use and follow. Like, I found that if I make videos, trainings, and tell them, follow that video, take notes on it, and do it every single time, then the success rate on that project is usually close to 100%. Whereas if I just tell them how to do something written, it's Almost like a zero percent success rate. And it's only because honestly, like they just don't really understand what you're saying. When you just write it, you have to make a video on it. So first things first, just make a video of everything you want them to do. In your business, just film yourself doing it. Use loom.com and a spreadsheet to organize the videos and film each thing you do and kind of like title it and stuff like that. Kind of like you would do a course maybe like on how to manage your business. And then once you have that ready, go and hire a VA to do those systems for you and just know, like, get your mindset in the right place. If you are going to go hiring VAs, you're not going to find the perfect one the first time. I mean, maybe you will if you're lucky, but usually you have to dig through a few of them to find the perfect one. This means you've got to make a job posting that's super clear. And in the job postings, one of the hacks that I usually use to make sure that the VAs are really good, you know, is have them film a video of themselves doing the task that you want them to do. So, you know, whatever that happens. Yeah, if I'm hiring a VA to like upload products to Shopify, for instance, I say, okay, guys, go to this website, you know, film yourself uploading products to a trial, free, trial shopify store for me and show me how you would do it. Because I want to know kind of where they're at with their knowledge of how to do it already. How much am I going to have to train this person in order for them to, you know, understand fully how to do it? And once I find a video where the person is just like doing it quick, they know exactly what to do. Boom, boom, boom, boom. No problem. That's the person I want to get because they're already advanced and if I can pay them, you know, three bucks an hour and they're cool with it, that's amazing. That's getting the best value for my, for my dollar. And generally speaking, those people that do great work right off the bat are going to have also the better attitude as well. So doing the interviews, you want to get an idea of their personality more than anything. So, you know, ask them kind of questions about their lifestyle and then make sure you ask really key questions about, you know, like what I was talking about earlier. Like, do they have a fast computer, do they have a quick Internet, a fast Internet connection. Do they work from home? And if they do, what is their work home environment? Like do they have kids, do they have pets, you know, do they have, are they married, that kind of thing. And are they available to work full time? In other words, are they working other jobs at the moment or is this kind of going to be another part time thing for them? Are they going to be available to work for certain hours that you need them to work, like daytime hours or nighttime hours? Customer service VAs, for instance, have to work overnight in the Philippines for us, you know, from they started 11pm their time and work until like you know, 7am or whatever their time. So that's.

Do you expect that from, from that's just your customer service workers. Do you let the other workers work on their own time?

Totally, yeah, that. My other VAs that do like the store building and stuff for me, product uploading, they work during the day, usually 8, 9 to 5 kind of thing in the Philippines their time. Which works great for me because I'm around, I'm in Bali, so I can communicate them with them during the day.

Well, I'm gonna, I'm going to rewind because I know you've also got this coaching. Since I asked you about two different people originally, what would you say to those who are, who've worked their way out of the warehouse, figuratively and are seeing some other opportunities and want to go to Bali and want to do these things that are, that are on their bucket list, maybe before they're retired, what would you say to them?

When I first thought about quitting my day job, I was all over the place. I didn't know what to do. You know, looking at this, looking at that, I was thinking real estate investing might be one, stock investing, you know, I could do some sort of E commerce. Affiliate marketing came to mind. There was many different business models I was looking at and I went to seminars and I went to school. Of course I went to college classes and took marketing and sales and all that. I would say for sure know that you can these days learn anything online. Okay. So don't think that you have to go get a college degree if you haven't already, to be professional e commerce person or to have an online business, to become a digital nomad, that kind of thing you really don't like. If, for instance, you want to learn and you want to be a web developer, you can take coding courses online really easily. You can learn any code you want to learn and you can go and work remotely in Thailand for you know, for clients all over the world, building websites for them or coding apps or whatever you want to do. So that's what a lot of people do do. If you want to, you know, get into E commerce and drop shipping and stuff like that, that appeals to you, just know that you can learn it all online. And of course it happens online. Just know that what you're getting yourself into with any business model, any business model is a real business, not a get rich quick scheme. So you have to put a lot of work up front into it before you start seeing payoff later on. You know, it can take three to six months to even get a website and like store going and then another six months to two or three years to actually see like a good steady monthly profit that can, you know, pay your income. So as long as your mindset's in the right place, know what's coming, you know what kind of work you're going to have to put into it and you're ready for anything, you know, that comes your way, any kind of setbacks and stuff like that, you can, you can handle it, then you'll be able to do it. And you know, never stop learning. I think that's the key. I always just read tons of books, marketing books, sales books. I knew that's what I wanted to do was marketing and sales and whatever it happened to be in the future. And the Internet's expanding a lot these days, so you have tons of different softwares and platforms you can use to do stuff. So you're probably going to have information overload as well. And don't let information overload stop you from taking action. Know that you, you do need to consume the right kind of information, right, and learn things, and learn how stuff work. But while you learn, you also have to take action. And for instance, I was going to college, I was learning how to do marketing and stuff like that. I was taking marketing courses and as I was learning marketing courses, I was taking what I would learn in the class that night because I was taking night classes after work and I would apply it to my website. So if I learned about a certain way to say something to somebody or a certain way to market something, whatever that happened to be, I would try to apply that to my business that same day or that next day. And it really helped me grow the business a lot by knowing that if I took action while I learned that things would grow and they definitely did. So it's a long road, but it's a lot of fun once you kind of get the ball rolling on it and start seeing that snowball effect happen where you get momentum. And I think momentum is key in this kind of thing. You really have to get momentum going. And once you do, once your business starts growing, you start seeing sales and you have customers and going back and forth a lot. It's really exciting. It's a lot of fun. And just know that you're in it for the long haul. That's just the beginning. You're going to have a lot of things to deal with over time. But if you're an entrepreneur at heart, then you'll enjoy the whole process of it.

So what I'm hearing is you've got this confidence, obviously. I mean, it's coming through the computer. You've got this confidence that's fueling the momentum of this is what I want to do. This is why, like, I mean, first you took the step to identify, this is what I want my life to look like. This is the picture that I have of my life. Then you say, this is what I love, and I want that to be a part of what I'm doing. Then you have the confidence to move forward and work your tail off while you're learning and working at the same time. Because you had to also be prepared for the long run, where it was going to take time. It's like you said, not a get rich quick scheme. I know John is real adamant taking that approach to people who think that about outsourcing. I'll say you guys got to understand, like, this is a business process. And so it's really fun to hear that reflected in your experience as well. Well, thank you. This has been incredible. You've given us a lot to work with here. We really appreciate your time and your experience. All your information you've been willing to share with us. Is there anything else that you want to throw out there before we sign off?

Yeah, if you guys want like a resource to learn how to start E commerce, you can check out my website. It's ecommerceparadise.com you guys want to learn, like, what business model is the best one for you? I would just recommend going to YouTube. YouTube, you can get like any training for free. That's one of the best places. You just have to know that, like, there's some stuff on YouTube that's kind of crappy. But if you, if you look for the top results, usually the YouTube algorithm will tell you, like, what the best quality kind of stuff is. Just go through YouTube. I've learned so much through just watching YouTube. Videos. And you know, when I first started making, trying to make money online, I just typed how to make money online on YouTube and I found all these videos on like SEO and keyword research, content marketing, affiliate marketing, those are the first things that pop up because a lot of people do affiliate sites and stuff. And then I started looking at drop shipping, then I started looking at other things. And so just know that like YouTube should and should always be your number one resource besides books. And books are going to be the best place to probably get like the mindset that you need to succeed. So read as many books on business and marketing as possible. As far as like sales and marketing online goes, I would recommend reading a book called Dot Com Secrets and another one called Expert Secrets by the same guy, Russell Brunson. He's got an amazing way of telling stories and writing that's really easy to understand and it'll help you understand the online business model a lot better. And then if you want to learn drop shipping, I have a book called E Commerce Paradise. There's also a book called I recommend called E Commerce Evolved. And you know, I would recommend reading all the old school marketing books. Seth Godin is great author and if you're interested in becoming location independent, the four Hour Work Week is a great book as well. And if you really just want like a good financial foundation, rich dad, Poor dad, the richest man in Babylon, and for mindset stuff, think and Grow Rich is amazing and how to win friends and influence people, there's some foundational books that really changed my life and I would definitely recommend anybody who wants to get in business should read those.

Oh, I love, I mean I've read many that you, that you've listed off and they're so good.

So good.

Thanks for sharing. Thanks for sharing that and thank you for your time and I'm really glad that outsourcing has been able also to be a part of creating your freedom and creating this ideal lifestyle across Thailand and India and Bali and this states and it sounds, it sounds pretty incredible.

Yeah, it really has.

All right, well, thank you. Thank you.