John Jonas (host of the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast, episode 437) argues that hiring one Online Filipino Specialist (OFS) can transform an entrepreneur's business by buying back time and enabling creativity. He shares his own 2005 origin story plus testimonials from Liz, Nicole, and Duncan to show common trajectories—from hiring one VA to building larger teams—and offers practical cues for when to hire a first or second OFS.
Chapters
Welcome to the secret sauce of outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with online Filipino specialists. This is episode 437. It all starts with just one ofs. So I want to talk today about hiring one person, because for most of you, you either haven't hired someone or you have one person. And I want you to let. I want to let you know what it looks like down the road. When I started, I. I hired one. I didn't know what this was going to be like. This is 2005, and I just had these really poor outsourcing experiences and it was like babysitting. And then they quit and then they were trying to steal my business and it was really a poor experience. And when I hired someone in the Philippines the first time, wow, that was. It was so life changing. It was like I had two of me in my business. It was me to do whatever I could do. And there was him doing whatever I was previously trying to do. I was just now teaching him to do the things that I was doing so that I didn't have to do it. It was really great. I just finished reading buy back your time by Dan Martell. And his concept is hire someone to buy back your time as an entrepreneur. That's your job over and over and over again, is to buy your time back through your hiring. Not to hire someone else to do something that you don't know how to do, but to hire someone to do something you do know how to do because it frees you, the entrepreneur, to be the most creative version of yourself. So let me talk about a couple people that have come to me recently with their experiences. So the first one is Liz. Liz is probably like you. She never imagined herself with people in the Philippines working for her. And really the problem isn't that she didn't probably. She probably imagined having a virtual assistant, someone working in Indiana or something like that where that person's helping her. She never realized that, oh, this person would be in the Philippines and would be super duper helpful for her. She always thought that she would have the time to do everything she needed to do to create the courses and meet with clients and do social media. But then maybe, you know, she imagined something else. It wasn't where she is now. And she realized at some point she needed help. She needed more help than she imagined before. And so let me, let me just play this for you. Play for you what Liz says about this.
I would never in my life would have thought that I would be working with a Virtual assistant and I have two and actually just started with a third one. And I just cannot believe the space, the opportunity that they're giving me. I'm now working on. I've been doing some beta one one to ones with clients because I've got more time to do that and develop things. And because of the support that I'm getting, I am able to be creating my first online course that I'll hope will be launched soon. And the thing is I'm using Kajabi. I wouldn't have a clue and I'm just not geared that way. So I have One of the VA's helping me there, which is incredible. Then I have support with social media. I have somebody ready to help me with customer care and it's so reasonable. And all of the ladies are from the Philippines and I have to honor what they stand for and how they support me and want me to be really successful in sharing what I want with others because I really want to support others. And I have to say, online Jobs was the first place that I ever went to look to see what was possible. I signed up for the first month and I still read through John's emails that he sends and it teaches me about their life in the Philippines, what it means to people when we support them supporting us and just I would recommend working with a VA so much. It's life changing and I can't wait to see where I go with the services that I want to offer. And I'm always thanking them because I don't feel I would be doing this right now without them.
So that's Liz, right? And then there's two emails that I got today. So the first one, I'm just going to read a little bit of this. This is from Nicole and she says first I want to let you know that I bought your class, which walked me through the process of hiring an OFS through online jobs. So that would be one VA away. She says she started full time on October 1st. Her name is Tasha and she's fantastic. And that's the experience that most people have. You hire someone and it turns out, wow, like this is fantastic. And there's all this stuff that I can have this person do for me that I never imagined. So the next email that I got today is from Duncan and, and Duncan says, hey, I'm trying a different approach with my team. And he puts in parentheses, which is up to 18 ofs now, which that was the point of this conversation of it all starts with just one ofs for Duncan. It started with one and now he has 18. For me, it started with one and now I think we have 46. And that's over almost 20 years. For Liz, you know, she started with one and it was really this amazing experience for her. For Nicole, just one. But that's where it starts, is just that one hiring to buy back your time to get the freedom of having someone else doing the things that you're currently doing so that you can be more effective and creative and efficient in the rest of your work. So a couple things to add to this. When you know you're ready for that person. Well, you're ready when you have something you could teach someone else to do. If you have something, anything in your business that you feel like, oh, I could get someone else to do this, and I could teach someone else to do this for me. You're ready to hire someone in the Philippines. When are you ready to hire your second person? Well, you're going to ask that first person you know, can you handle more? Are you busy full time? Is this taking you full time? When they're busy full time, then, yep, it's time to start getting more done. Or if you have more things that you want them doing and they're not getting, they're not completing every one of them every day, well, then it's probably, probably time to hire someone else. Or if there's another skill set that, like, oh, you hired a data entry person, now you're ready to hire a marketing person and you understand the marketing and you're doing the marketing, and now it's time to buy back your time again. Well, now, yep, you're ready to hire a marketing person. All of this starts with just one. And it takes a leap. It takes a leap of faith. It takes. I mean, it's scary. It's scary to bring someone overseas into your business and give them access to your stuff. But the reality is it's not that different than bringing someone locally into your business. They're probably actually more trustworthy than local people. They're definitely more loyal. They're probably less likely to steal your time than someone locally, certainly going to cost less. There's just so many reasons to hire that one person and to take a chance and to take that leap of faith and see, like, oh, does this actually work how John says it does, how Liz says it does, how Duncan says it does, how Nicole says it does, or any of the other hundreds, or really, I mean, it's been thousands, but we've only published hundreds of the testimonials. That we have at online jobs. If you go and click on real results at the top, you'll see hundreds of real results from people hiring out of the Philippines who have changed their businesses. And maybe they've hired just one person, or maybe they have a whole team. They probably started with one, and most of them probably now have a team because it really is amazing to have a team behind you, but it starts with just one.
