John Jonas shares how outsourcing one marketing task to a VA when his business was drowning saved his company and his marriage. He now works 17 hours a week. Hiring is faster than you think: post a job, write a few emails, pick from dozens of applicants.
Questions this video answers
Episode 243.
About 17 hours per week.
1vaoa.com.
"I probably got 18–20 applications" (spoken as '1820 applications').
Chapters
Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing to the Philippines. This is episode 243. You don't have time to hire an OFS. So when I was starting my business, I didn't have time to hire someone. I had just bought a new house, I had a brand new baby. I had a fledgling business that I was trying to make work and grow. I was overworked, I was alone. I had all those things, everything. Life was overwhelming, and I needed the business to grow because I didn't want to go back to working for someone else. I had had a job for eight months out of college and I had quit that job, and I really needed this to work out. My wife gave me six months and she said, if this doesn't work out in six months, you have to go back to work. And I didn't like being at work. And I knew that if I could just get this one task off my plate, I'd be more productive in my business, which meant that I could make it grow. Now, for me, that one task was a marketing task. It was writing content, writing articles about what we were doing and posting them on all kinds of article sites and linking to my site for SEO purposes and linking them to each other and all. There's all kinds of stuff that went into this. If I could just get this one task off of my plate, boy, what a difference would it make? And I hired someone and it was amazing. I took the leap and I hired someone and wow, did it change my life. I mean, I got this process fully automated by a human who was intelligent and willing to work. And then I turned him on to another process and another process, and things just started to snowball. I hired someone else. I started getting some time back in my Life. Since about 2008, I've worked about 17 hours a week. The thing about working a lot less is you still fill your time. I'm still just busy. Like, I go skiing, and it's part of my routine. Like three days a week, I go out and ski with a friend or with my daughter or with my wife. And that takes a long time. And so on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I get all my work done, which means there's a lot of pressure to get all my stuff done. And we need to hire a new designer, we need to hire a new React JavaScript programmer, and I don't really have time to do this. But every time I think that, I think back to, wow, hiring Jovan in The first time has saved me thousands or hundreds of thousands of hours and it's so worth it. And every time I hire someone and bring them on, we get more productive and the business grows and it runs more smoothly and wow, I'm just answering emails. This is stupid. And so then I take a break and I post a job and it really just takes a couple minutes. It's amazing. And how those couple of minutes, it's so scary to get started. But then when it turns out, it's like, oh, I just had to write like an email. That was super simple. I posted my job. I had to write an email, which is like the job description. I'm really good at writing emails. And so I posted it, I got a bunch of responses back, which happened overnight. And then I just had to like write a couple emails and I responded to those people and they sent their responses back and I did it again. And we have some really, really good candidates for a couple jobs that I need to hire someone for. Just not that hard. And in total, I've probably spent like, I don't know, 35 minutes so far. And I'm really close to finding, to pushing my business forward. So in the end, if you're worried that you don't have time to hire an ofs, like, you're just too busy, think about what happens if you don't hire an ofs, if you don't spend that time, if you don't spend the six minutes that it's going to take you to post a job. Nothing, nothing's going to happen. Nothing's going to change. And that's painful. Now if you don't know how to do this process, that's easy. 1vaoa.com is where I will walk you through the process so that you can do it how I do it. Super duper efficient. It does not have to be a long process. You don't have to go on a bunch of video calls. None of that is how I do this. It's super, super simple. I don't spend tons and tons of time weeding people out. In fact, I probably got 1820 applications. I responded to like six people. I'm having good conversations with those six. And yeah, like, it's just not that hard. One VAOA.com.
