John Jonas reads an email from Austin about hiring Filipino virtual assistants. Austin argues it's not a compromise but smart business: you get cultural fit, strong work ethic, and significant cost savings compared to U.S. hires.
Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing to the Philippines. This is episode 236 hiring great people who Happen to Live in the Philippines so a while back I had a podcast about EJ buying his OFS a laptop and when he sent me this email, he sent me a bunch of pictures of her reaction to it. It was really great. And then soon after that I got an email from Austin in response to the newsletter that I sent about EJ's buying the laptop. I want to read you what Austan says because it really brings up an interesting point that I've thought this for a long time, but a lot of people don't really consider this. So let me read you what what Austin says. He says, I've read most of the emails you send since I first used onlinejobs ph in January of 2021. One of the VAs I hired is still with me. I've come to rely on her and I continue to be surprised by how little she asks for. I've had to encourage her to ask for raises and I brought up the idea of benefits multiple times before she finally agreed. We've got all that squared away now and we figured out how to make various back payments so she'd even be eligible. All that to say I didn't realize how acclimated I'd become to the entitlement of local or US based contractors until I started working with people who are so modest, humble, grateful and reticent. There are exceptions to the rule in the US that is not entitled. And there must be in the Philippines too, which I'm going to interject. There are. There are definitely exceptions to this in the Philippines, he continues. Yet I keep telling entrepreneur friends you're not compromising by hiring in the Philippines. It's not just about the arbitrage of paying less for team members in a country with a lower cost of living. It's about hiring great people who happen to live in the Philippines. Anyway, keep the good stuff coming. Hope you have a beautiful Thanksgiving with your family. So I love the concept of what Austin says that it's about hiring great people who happen to live in the Philippines because that's what every business owner wants. You really just want to hire great people to help you build your company and it doesn't really matter where they're from. Sometimes it's easier in the us, but a lot of the time it's easier in the Philippines. It's easier to find the people because of onlinejobs ph where you can just get access to these millions of profiles of people, you can find someone who can do just about anything. And in the end, I think most people don't really care where their team members are from as long as they're helpful and functional. Now, for a lot of people, a lot of the world and a lot of our customers, hiring someone locally often becomes really difficult. It's hard to find someone. You have all kinds of government regulations, you have employment stuff to deal with and then the cost of layering locally is often prohibitive. Where in the Philippines it's super reasonable to hire people between 500 to $2,000 a month for full time work. And that's like on the low end, like low skilled people on the high end, like really talented programmers, designers, paid ad managers or all kinds of things. Like we're in any industry where you have the upper, upper end of people, you can have that in the Philippines too. They're just like $25,000 a year instead of $250,000 a year. It's a really big difference. And to point out for a long, long time now, this is how I have thought of my team in the Philippines. They are great people and they're talented people. They just happen to live in the Philippines. And the fact that they're in the Philippines, when you start to think about it this way, that good people who live in the Philippines, it makes it easier to communicate with them and to train them and to manage them. It makes giving feedback easier, makes getting good work done easier, and it becomes easier to see them as humans who want to contribute to your business rather than as people on the other side of the world. So if you haven't yet hired someone because maybe you're concerned about them being from the Philippines and it's a world away, consider that you're hiring a good person, a talented person, a great worker who just happens to live in the Philippines, where the Philippines culture is really, really similar to the US culture, at least in terms of work culture. Obviously they have a bunch of cultural differences there, but you're going to have a really good experience and they just happen to live in the Philippines.
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