What is Possible with Outsourcing - Course Video 2 - John Jonas

Hi. In this video we're going to talk about how this can work really well for you and your business and kind of what's possible here in the Philippines. So in order to tell you this, I'm going to tell you a quick story. Years and years ago, I was not doing super well. I was trying to run my own business. I didn't have a lot. You can see this picture here of the Toyota Tercel we were driving in the antenna on the top of my house. We didn't have a lot and I didn't really know what I was doing in my business. I just knew that I needed help. One day I was talking with a guy who runs a really big online business and he was saying to, he said to me, you know John, when you're ready to start outsourcing some of this stuff, make sure you go to the Philippines with it. And I thought, that's really interesting. I had never thought of that. I just assumed outsourcing was outsourcing. And he says, yeah, because in India when you tell them something and they say yes, that means yes, I heard something come out of your mouth. It does not mean yes. I understood what you said. And you know, hearing that it was, it was very different for me. I had never considered that it might be different, outsourcing somewhere else than what everybody experiences already. And so he gave me a reference to where I could hire someone. And I kind of debated, I went back and forth for a couple months on whether I could keep them busy full time, whether I had enough work for them to do, whether I could afford it. And he gave me a reference where I could hire this person. It was going to cost me $700 a month, they would work full time for me. And I went back and forth and I finally took the leap and I hired someone. And it was the single most liberating experience of my life where all of a sudden I had this guy whose full time job was to do anything I asked him to do. And he was very loyal and very honest and I could work on my business instead of working in my business because he was doing the things that I had previously been doing. Absolutely amazing experience. And I had replaced myself for numerous things in my business for the first time ever. And I solved all kinds of problems. So when I talk about this, typically I find that people have three problems. Number two, the second problem is knowing how to do this, like knowing where do you find people and knowing what, how to hire them. The third problem is knowing how to keep them busy. How do I get these people to do what I want them to do. The first problem is a problem that most people don't know that they have, which is knowing what's possible without sourcing. Because for most people, like it was for me, outsourcing is a problem. It's a headache. It's communication problems, because all we know is India. And what I discovered was something totally different. So let me tell you another quick story about this. Years ago, my wife is seven months pregnant with our third child, and she. We had two other kids at the time. And she went into the doctor's office for an appointment and I went with her and he had run some tests. And the doctor says to my wife, you have preeclampsia. And if you don't go on strict bed rest for the next three to five weeks, you're going to have a seizure and you're going to die and you're gonna lose this baby. And obviously it was a shock to me to hear that. And so on the way home from this, I'm thinking, I'm not about to lose a baby over money. I'm trying to run a business myself, but I have two other kids. I gotta take care of these kids, and that's my number one priority. My wife has to stay on strict bed rest for the next three to five weeks. So when I got home, I sent an email to two of my guys in the Philippines. I love these guys today. I had had them working for me for a little while and I told them my situation. Here's what's going on. I can't work. I need you guys to do everything that I'm currently doing in my business. And so they did. For the next three weeks, I literally worked one hour while they took over everything in my business. Our AdWords account, our marketing, my blog, the comments forums. We were participating in SEO and customer support and bugs and features and updates and everything that we were dealing with, they started doing for me. And I literally worked one hour for the next three weeks. And my wife had the baby three weeks later, the beautiful little girl in this picture. And for the next two months after that, I continued to work very little. I worked about an hour a week for the next two months because I had replaced myself again with these guys. And so, as you would imagine, if you spend a whole bunch of time doing nothing, you learn a lot of things. Number one, I learned just how good these guys are because before this, I had no idea. I had only had them doing menial tasks. And I didn't realize that they could follow instructions and think and come up with their own ways of doing things and improve things. I had no idea. But they did. So the second thing I learned was there's always work to be done. Even in an Internet business, in a coaching business, in a real estate business, in an Amazon business, whatever it is, there's always work to be done. It's just a matter of who's doing the work. Is it you or is it someone else doing the work? Because up to this point it had always been me doing the work and now it was these other guys doing the work. The third thing I learned was this is how you live the lifestyle that you've always heard about. Because I'd always heard about this lifestyle of cars and houses and golfing and all of a sudden I was living this lifestyle where I was taking my kids to the golf course twice a day. And it got to the point where there's only so much competition of nothing you can do before you have to start working again. And I know that sounds a little bit off because not many people get to that point in their life, but I had, I had gotten to that point and I realized like, this isn't that hard to get here. You just need help and you need the right kind of help and you need it at an affordable rate. And so just so you know, these guys that I was paying were not Harvard MBAs. They're making about $250 a month for full time work and they're doing, they're running my business, they're running a six to seven figure a year business. And just so you know, at $250 a month it's a totally tax deductible expense. There are no, I don't pay insurance, I don't pay utilities, I don't have an office in the Philippines. I don't have, there's all, I don't have to pay government taxes. There's all kinds of stuff that I don't have that people hiring locally do have. And so it's even easier than what it was before. So just so you know, outsourcing to me is not about big business, not about, oh my gosh, Walmart sending thousands of jobs overseas. This is about me replacing myself. You hiring someone to replace yourself. This is also not about India, just like I talked about. And this is very different. And it's not about Odesk or Elance where you're going to hire a freelancer. What I do is very different where I hire a full time worker and they work for me and only for me, and they work for me long term. And that's a very different situation. So let me tell you kind of what happened here. You know, I spent the three weeks before my wife had the baby and the two months after my wife had the baby working almost none. It got to the point where I was bored. I felt like I needed to work more. And so I was gonna kind of take what I learned during this time of these Filipinos, and how far could I actually take this outsourcing thing? Because I learned they're way better than I thought before. So I was gonna see if they could actually run a business for me from start to finish. So here's what I did. I came up with a business plan that I thought was pretty reasonable. I understood the business plan really well. And that's something you have to understand as you do this. These guys are not going to take a business and build a business for you without you being there. So I'm the CEO of this business. So what we were going to do is write product reviews about products in a specific niche, and we're going to post them on our website and we're going to do the marketing for them and bring traffic to our site, and then we're going to have affiliate links on them. They're pretty simple business. So here's what happened. I bought a domain and I sent it to. I sent it to one of my guys in the Philippines and I recorded myself talking for 45 minutes explaining the business. I explained everything I could think of for this. So I explained what the business was to look like, how we were writing the reviews and what they were look like, and why we were writing them, and what the goal was with them and what steps we needed to take to reach those goals and how we were going to make money from it and why it was going to work. I explained everything I could think of and I sent it to this guy in the Philippines and he takes the domain and sets up on my hosting account and sets up WordPress on the domain and starts changing it, according, as I had said in this audio that I sent him. And he sent it back to me a couple days later. And frankly, it was terrible. It was not what I had envisioned. And so I sent him some feedback. And the feedback said, you know, this is good and this is good, but we need to move this over here and I want this like this. And so I sent him a whole bunch of feedback and he starts changing it. And two days later I get another email back from him that says here, look at the website now. And it was getting closer, but it wasn't quite right. And so I had to go and send him some more feedback, and he gets it right. And so in this, I want you to understand a couple things. Number one, this is not going to work out perfectly the first time. They're not going to do everything right the first time. That's not how this works. However, the point of this is I didn't do the work. He did the work. And after that, when we built another website, he got it right the second time instead of the fourth time. And the next time we did it, he did it correctly the first time, and I didn't have to do anything. So the point is, I spent some time training him here and working with him so that in the future life got way easier, and I'm not the one doing the work now. So after this, he. I sent him the next test, which was to write the reviews. And he writes the first review, and it was terrible. And I had to go through the same process with him again, where we went through the review and I tweaked it, and I gave him a system where he could find the right information and write the reviews. And he writes them really, really well. People that find them online love the reviews. They are super thrilled about them. Then after that, I give him some more. I give him more systems to implement for me. And so he starts doing the marketing of the website, the SEO and articles and videos and YouTube and Facebook and Twitter and RSS feeds and all the things that you hear about that you should be doing in your business, but that there's not enough time in the day to do. I was doing these things in this business, except I wasn't doing them. I had this other guy doing them for me. I was just telling him what to do, and he would go do it, and I had to teach him how to do it. And it took us a long time to get this done. However, the first month, that business made me $200. And within three months, the business was making me about $1,000 a month. Within six months, it was making me three to $5,000 a month. Within a year, it was making me 10 to $15,000 a month. And I was the CEO of this business, and I had implemented everything that I knew. I just didn't do the work. So when I talk about the Philippines, it's a different situation than elsewhere. And I want you to understand what's possible here, because until you understand what's possible, you can't do this as well as you should. So now you know a little bit about what's possible and you're getting excited about this. Next I'm going to talk to you about why the Philippines is different, what makes this work so you'll understand how to do it better.