When Are You Actually Ready for Your First Filipino VA?

Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with OFS. This is episode 213. When are you ready to hire an OFS? So let me a quick story before I get into this. I have some friends that recently asked me to take them on a mountain bike ride on some trails. And so they just recently started riding. And mountain biking has a certain amount of experience required to do certain things, and they are new. And I said no. So the trails they're asking to ride are really amazing, but they're really hard and they're not ready for it. And if I take them on these trails right now, then they're going to crash, they're going to get hurt, and they're not going to like it. And then in the future, they're not going to want to ride those trails again because they'll just remember those trails as being horrid. So I said no. Now is just not the time. And I feel like there's a time for a lot of things. There's a time and a place, and there's a time to say no, and there's a time to say yes, I'm ready. And one of the questions I often get asked is, when are you ready to hire an ofs? What's the indicator? Is there a way to know that you're, like, ready for this? And I've always felt like there actually there is a really, really good indicator for this. If you have something in your business that you, you know how to do is repeatable and is something that you feel like you could teach someone else to do, you're ready to hire an ofs. No, you don't have to have a standard operating procedure in place. You don't have to have a guarantee of success in that thing. I'm just saying you're ready to hire someone. And the first time I hired someone, and actually probably like the first six or eight times I hired someone, I didn't have everything organized. I didn't have an sop. I didn't have all the tasks that they're going to do. I didn't have the role defined find before I hired someone. I just didn't. And I'm not very good at those things. So I just hired and got them doing one task. Now, let me say to a lot of other people, if you don't know what you're doing in your business, if you aren't sure why you're hiring an ofs, if you aren't sure what they'll do for you, or if you don't really have something that works, then you're probably not ready to hire someone. It's not a good idea for you. So now that you know that what that key indicator is like, do you have something that you could teach someone else to do? What you're going to hire someone to do doesn't have to be to do that thing. It could be, and that's great. And that can just be one of the tasks that you hire them to do. You don't have to have everything ready to keep them busy full time because once you get them that one task, you get something off of your plate. Now you have the ability to create instructions for a second task because that person's already doing something else for you. So then the second question that I very often get asked, the follow up question is, well, who's the first person you should hire? And to me, that person is to do something that you know how to do. And that's really the key. So like, you know you're ready to hire someone when you have something that you could teach someone else. That's when you know what the first person to hire is. Hire someone to do something that you know how to do. So it doesn't have to be that first thing, but it can be something that you could teach, something that you know how, you know exactly what skills you're looking for when you hire someone. You know what questions to ask, you know what the outcomes look like, you know how to give feedback, you know how to give training. It just makes the whole thing way, way, way easier. So what's the first person you should hire? Someone to get something off of your plate? Doing something that you know how to do will just make everything easier as you start.