Where To Hire A Virtual Assistant Who Can Save You Time & Help Scale Your Business

Hey Miles. Here. MilesBeckler.com in this video you are going to learn where to hire a great virtual assistant so you can free up more of your time to scale your business. It's important for you to stay focused on the highest valuable tasks in your business, which means you need to get good at delegating and handing off those repetitive tasks that others can do. This is where bringing on a full time virtual assistant can be a massive boost in your productivity. And it really, truly has for my wife and I, sort of. So in this video we're going to cover the types of things I outsource to my VAs, where in the world I've found the best virtual assistants and then where what platform to go find these individuals. But before we jump into those three things, I want to know, have you already hired your first virtual assistant? If you've already done hiring and you're looking to grow your team farther, put a yes in the comments below. If you've never hired a virtual assistant, put a no in the comments below. Because I want to know where you are. I want to make more great videos on outsourcing, but I need to know where you're at. So yes, you've already started hiring, know you haven't started hiring yet. That'll let me know where you are. Give me a thumbs up and hit subscribe on your way down there too. Back to the curriculum here. So the first thing, what kind of tasks do we actually hand off to our virtual assistants? I think it's important to hire full time because what that does is it forces you to go find those kinds of repetitive tasks or identify those repetitive tasks that you're doing over and over and over so you can hand them over to your virtual assistant. So I got a little tiny list here where one of the big things is customer support. My VA team runs most of the support on pretty much 100% of the support Social media audits. Looking at social media posts we put on one platform that performed really well so we can go duplicate that out on another platform. So scrolling back through the past two, three, four, five years of our Facebook fan page to pull out those snippets, those memes that we can go turn into Pinterest pins, et cetera, et cetera. Ad comment management. They manage all of the comments inside of my advertisements that run on Facebook. Community moderation. They help out in side of my forum to move the different threads that are disorganized or in the wrong place. They move those around for us. Almost 100% of our Pinterest marketing is run by our virtual assistants. Email audits. Pulling our open rates from the different subject lines into a spreadsheet so we can quickly see how good our emails are doing. So we can go look back through our history to find those subject lines that got Great open rates. YouTube audits. What YouTube videos do I not have content on my website for YouTube to podcast 100% of the process of this video that you're watching. Unless you're on the podcast and you're listening the whole process. Once I upload this, that's it. I don't touch it, but it still makes it onto my podcast feed with every talking head video that's 100%. 100% managed by them. Outreach research. YouTube versus blog. I mentioned that one. Chargeback management, travel research, event research. The list goes on and on. And a lot of times I find myself in a situation where we had something nearly catastrophic happen. Our main membership that has over 350 audio files. For the members around my wife's content, we had an update that eliminated all of the MP3 files. So they're paying for access to 300 different MP3s and they just disappeared based on an update of a plugin. So I made a video showing here's how to fix the problem. I sent it over my virtual assistants and by the time I woke up the next morning, everything was back working. It was in tip top shape and they stayed on top of the tickets to let everybody know who was like, hey, I can't find the stuff that hey, you have now have access to it again. So this is massive because what it allows me and my wife to do is to stay focused on things like this, this video. I can only bring you this video, right? Like I'm Miles Becker. This is the Miles Becker brand. That's obvious. My wife's audio files are the big thing. But then the studying. My wife has free time to read the books and to study and to really kind of maintain her, her kind of finger on the pulse of, of her industry, if you will. So that's one of the big keys. So those are a variety of tasks. And I'm always looking at what am I doing, what can I hand off to a teammate, what can I turn into a process or a. And then make a quick video. I just record my screen as I'm doing something and I send it over and say here, go do this. And then every single day they just go do the work and now it gets done and I can focus on what's that next most important thing for me to do on my business. So let's talk about where in the world next. At this point in my career, I started hiring back in, I think 2011, 2012. I hired my first people. And I have hired people from Africa, from Eastern Europe, from the United States of America, from Canada, from Mexico, from the Caribbean islands, all over Asia as well. So we got the Philippines, Indonesia, India proper. I think I had South America in there somewhere. Like, literally the amount of people I've hired has been probably about 50 or 60 people at this point in time. And for me, I have found that it clicks most from on many levels with teammates in the Philippines, I have found that there's obviously a kind of currency conversion that is beneficial. And the cost of living in the Philippines compared to here in North America is also much lower. So. So there's a value there, but it goes way beyond the value. One of my last jobs that I actually hired out, I did post the job for North American candidates and also Filipino candidates. And I requested a simple task to be done using Excel. And the actual work product I got from the individuals in the Philippines was astounding. Like, it was so much better than what was going on in North America. It actually made me feel a little worried for North American workers because the. Every single applicant, almost every single applicant in the Philippines just nailed it with graphs. They actually, some of them went farther beyond what I even requested, which blew me away to see that kind of thoroughness inside of this, this first task. So other reasons I really, really like the. The Philippines is English is learned and used widely, right? Tagalog is the. The native language. But English is learned at a very young, very young age. And it's also used widely in the school system. So and their, their English is a very Western style of English you also have, which is the business processes, outsourcing industry that has been booming for well over a decade. And what this is, if you've ever noticed, you call your bank, you call PayPal, you call up major airline corporation like American Airlines, and all of a sudden you're speaking with someone in the Philippines, right? So all these call centers moved from North America and many Western countries moved over to the Philippines specifically, which means that they have been teaching and learning about kind of what I would call the standard of customer support, customer service, a lot of the different types of business practices. So culturally, it's normal for. I mean, there's just so many Filipinos who work within this industry of customer support and kind of virtual assistant world And a lot of them have had training at a corporate level, which is really, really quite valuable. Trustworthiness is very big. Loyalty is also very big. And these are cultural things, right? There are some cultural challenges. A lot of times your teammates in the Philippines might not step up and mention that they see a problem or mention that they see a better way to do things. They will follow your word, your video, you send them almost to the T. But this is where building relationship and keeping communications open is so key. And I've really worked with my teammates to invite them, like to invite their feedback, because I want that feedback when they're hands on, on a task, day in and day out. You know, if you notice some better way to do this, let me know. Keep that communication open. And really, it's all about relationship building. I love the ability to be able to pay my teammates again who outperformed their North American counterparts in some of these tasks that I used to kind of test if they were going to be my teammates or not. So not only did they outperform, but they're a better value, which allows me to pay them very, very well, right? I pay them monthly on a salary, whether they have 40 hours a week or not. And I pay them well. So they'll be there each and every month. I don't want them ever looking for other help because now they're part of the team, right? My business needs their help and I'm always trying to think of new things to pass off to, to keep working from there. So that's why I chose the Philippines. The final component in this video is the third part, which is what platform is best to hire. Now, I really think it's important for you to get yourself and your business to a point where you can actually outsource full time. When you have somebody there 40 hours a week, 160 hours per month, it forces you to find more ways to leverage their help. Syndication is big, right? So I put up this video and then I'm done with it. But this video goes out and gets worked on and turned into the podcast and goes out to my podcast feed, et cetera, et cetera, there's a lot of different ways you can leverage it. And when you're paying somebody you know, full time, Even if it's $250 a month or $350 per month for 160 hours of work, it forces you to start to think like, okay, what's that? Next thing I'm going to hand over to them, build up a queue of work in the evening before you're done. This works for us in North American hours and then send it over and by the time you wake up that work product gets done. It's really extremely powerful. So Fiverr is one place that a lot of people think about. So Fiverr has changed a ton over the years. For a while it was five bucks plus a dollar fee and then you'll get back something relatively quickly. Fiverr is now a lot of 10, 20, 30, $40 tasks available. If you ever want something turned around in 24 or 48 hours, that's going to cost you an extra 10, $20 right there because nothing's done quickly on Fiverr anymore. And they have increased their fee on Fiverr for the platform by over by a hundred percent at this point in time. So I don' jive with that website. I've found very poor work product and it's never building a relationship with someone who I can rely on long term. I've had a few good experiences, but I've had a lot of bad experiences on there and I prefer to have someone on my team who I can really rely on, being there, knowing they're there each and every day. Upwork is another one that a lot of people use and talk about regularly. So Upwork, about a year and a half, maybe two years ago, increased their fee. They completely doubled it again, 100% increase in their fee up to 20%. So Upwork takes 20% of the outsourcers pay just to be the platform, which I find to be an exorbitant fee. But you also have a couple other challenges on upwork. Number one, people are actually buying fake reviews and buying fake star ratings and this means that you don't actually know and you can't really trust the reviews. You got to spend a lot of time reading through those reviews, et cetera, et cetera. That's more on the how to hire stuff, but that's just one of the challenges. Also there's inflation going on on upwork. The prices that that outsourcers even, even in the Philippines are charging is significantly inflated ver directly with the individuals themselves. So that's why I prefer online jobs. Ph now I am an affiliate so if you go to milesbeckler.com forward/va, you'll go to their website. And if you do sign up to use the platform, it's a monthly thing, I do get a kickback. That's not why I'm making this video. It just gives you an opportunity to help support the channel. In these types of teachings. So onlinejobs PH is the largest job board in the Philippines where people from western countries, Australia, Europe, United States of America, Canada, et cetera, are able to go work and find Filipino and Filipina outsourcers and teammates through a variety of different tasks. Right? You find designers, developers, coders, virtual assistants, customer support, content creation, individuals, all kinds of different jobs. So that is a platform that I personally prefer and they have two levels of membership. So for $67 a month, you get access to the whole job board. You sign up for a month, you turn it on, you go post up your job listings, you go email and do your hiring and then you could turn it off when you're done and that's it. You pay your individuals yourself through like payoneer or through Zoom. And that pretty much is the game, right? So you can use it on demand. They have a higher priced option that's $97 per month. And on this option you actually get access to a full course. And the full course is how to find, how to hire, how to train your virtual assistants, which is a really powerful course. And so that's 97milesbeckeler.com Outsourcing is a URL that'll take you to that course. And when you sign up for that course, you actually get access to the platform for a month as well. So that's really the best value because you get that training as well. So I've had by far the best success. I've got multiple teammates who I've had with me for several years now that came from that job board and they're like an extension of our family in a major way. Right? Like we, one of our teammates just had a baby and, and we hired a backup for her because she's got a baby now and we want to make sure she had the ability to, you know, have sick days as needed and care for the baby days, etc. My designer, my developer, we use an audio guy who does all of our audio work. He's in the Philipp. So really, truly, that's kind of the it, right? I really think that online jobs PH is that direct route that allows you to connect directly with the teammate, directly with the individual who's going to do the work. So they don't really take a fee from you for like the, the other ones do. So on Fiverr, every time you do a job, there's a fee for the platform. On upwork, every time you pay there's a fee from the platform. Whereas on online jobs you pay to get access to the job board, you're able to do your hiring and then you turn it off. And six months later, if you want to hire another teammate, you sign up for another month, turn it on, and so on and so forth. You don't have to pay. So I've now been paying some of my teammates, you know, tens of thousands of dollars over the course of several years. And they're not taking a percent off of all of that, right? They're not taking 20% of that, which is absolutely ridiculous in the long term. So that's why I prefer it. If you have other questions, right? If you have something, if there's some aspect about outsourcing that you're just, you're. You're stuck on, you really need to know the answer to. Give me those questions inside of the comments so I know what kind of videos to make for you. If you enjoyed this video, give me a thumbs up. All of the links be down below in the description. I do appreciate any support, but whether you use my affiliate link or not, onlinejobs PH is what I use. Right. So that's why I'm sharing it with you. It is because it's the platform that I use. But if you go to milesbecker.com va I do obviously appreciate it. Be sure to subscribe. I got three videos a week coming out. Any questions, get me in the comments. Thumbs up. Share it, like it, grab the URL, spread it out around the Internet. Do what you do. I appreciate you and I look forward to connecting with you on the next video. Until we meet again. Be well.