Why the Philippines Is the Best Country for Hiring VAs

Why I only hire virtual assistants from the Philippines. I hired my first virtual assistant from the Philippines in 2005. I had previously hired from other places. It didn't work out so well. That guy from the Philippines is still with me today. When I hired him, he completely changed my business and really my life. After a couple months of working with him, it was almost like there were two of me in my business. And today I have almost 50 people in the Philippines working for me full time. So let's get into why I only hire from the Philippines Now. Now, before I do that, let me say that you can find good people anywhere in the world. You just significantly increase your chances of finding someone great in the Philippines. And let's start with the culture. The Philippines has a culture of honesty with foreigners. Now, not everybody you find will be honest, but the majority of people will. And they'll let you know really quickly if they're being honest with you. This makes hiring much easier and it makes knowing if this is going to work out much easier. If they're honest with you, it's very likely to work out long term. And the culture of honesty makes this so much easier. Next, Filipinos are loyal almost to a fault to where when you start working with someone, they're unlikely to quit unless you're doing something wrong. So once you understand the culture, once you gain their trust and very easy to keep people long, long term. That first person I ever hired, that, that va, he still works for me today. But today he runs and manages an eight figure a year business for me. Along with him, I have people that I hired in 2007 and 2009 and 2010 and 2011 and so on. And they all still work for me today, which as a small business owner makes running that business so much easier. When you have people that stick around for years and years and years and you don't have to keep retraining and you don't have to create these super long, detailed standard operating procedures because people stick around and they're willing to train the next people that come in and they learn more about the business and they can contribute more and more and more culturally. Also, they're very hard working and pleasing. Look, Filipinos just have a really good work ethic. They want to be productive for you. They don't want to be cheating you out of your time. And that makes working with them a lot easier. Another part of the culture is they're not very entrepreneurial or their entrepreneurism stops at about creating baked goods and selling them out of a cart in the street. They don't want to steal your business or compete with you. They don't want to steal your URL or your information or your customers information. They just want a job with a stable paycheck that they can take home and support their families. Now this is different than a lot of other cultures and especially a lot of other cultures where the western world has typically outsourced, making the Philippines a really good choice and one of the reasons why I only hire from the Philippines. Next, let's talk about the English. English is a primary language of the Philippines. Actually it's one of two official languages of the Philippines. Government mandated. Everybody learns English. There are 7,000 islands in the Philippines with 130 different languages, not dialects, languages. Because of that, they use English as the way to communicate with each other. For, for example, I have people on my team who are married, they're from two different islands. They do not understand each other's language. One speaks Cebuano, one speaks Ilocano. They can't communicate with each other. So in the home they speak English to each other. And then their kids grow up only speaking English. I've seen some kids in the Philippines who don't speak any Filipino language at all. They only speak English. And that English turns out is very Americanized English. It's not Indian English, it's not British English. It's typically very American. So for me, as a small business owner, I never have communication issues with them and neither will you. They'll understand you. You'll understand them. And you know this because they watch the NBA. They follow it. They have their favorite teams in the NBA. They watch Dancing with the Stars, they watch American movies. They get it. You'll find people who understand and speak with American slang. They're up to date on the times and on the language. They're watching YouTube videos that Mr. Beast is creating. English is an integral part of of the Philippines and their culture and it makes finding great people really, really easy. And as a small business owner, knowing that when I say something, they're going to understand what I'm telling them and they're going to do it makes a really big difference than me having to guess, are they going to understand this? Am I going to have to jump through hoops for this? It just makes it much easier for me. Next, cost effectiveness. Look, I'm a small business owner and I can't afford to be paying $300,000 a year salaries for programmers. The wages in the Philippines are still very cost effective. We're looking at $4 an hour to 12 to $15 an hour. On the low end is $4 an hour, where you're finding beginner people who don't live in the city, they live on the outskirts. And at the high end, you're looking at $12 to $15 an hour for like really high end people. Programmers, really high end designers, people that run your Facebook ads or your Google Ads, managers, social media marketers. You can find anything in that range and you can find any exp experience amount in that range from like, I'm a total newbie and I'm just graduating from college all the way up to I have 15 years of experience in doing this. When you Compare that with US wages, which typically start at around $15 an hour for a beginner newbie, I mean, I have kids in college right now who are making $18 an hour. They don't really know anything. And making $18 an hour, the cost is significantly different. Which then brings us to the wide range of skills and education. So in the Philippines, most people you find will have a college degree and this is a real legitimate university education. It's a very highly educated country and education is very well valued there. Along with that education, you get really good thinkers and a lot of skills. So yes, they're very good at the virtual assistant tasks, things like scheduling or data entry, but that's just scratching the surface of it. They're also really good at technical tasks, programming or engineering or design, or at content tasks like writing or social media. They're good at thinking tasks, solving problems, coming up with solutions. Because of their English, they're really good on the phone. So they can do customer support, they can do phone support. They're actually really good at doing sales. There's such a wide range of skills because of their education that it makes finding the people that you need, the skill set that you need to fill your roles really easy. And as a business owner, for me it's. It's really nice to know that I can go across all this range of skills and all within the same culture so I don't have to learn a new culture and a new way of managing and a new way of dealing with people. It's all going to fit within the Philippines. And for me, as a small business owner, that's really a game changer. Next, let's talk about loyalty. I already mentioned that the first person I ever hired still works for me and I have multiple others. Here's why that's important. I have a friend that went to hire someone from India and the first question they asked him was, well, what's your business model with this? And he was like, well, I don't see why that's relevant. And they were like, oh, we just want to know. The reality is they were interested in knowing, can we steal your business from you? Can we come into your business, learn it and then do it ourselves? Where in the Philippines? They're not interested in doing that. They want a stable job that is long term and they can stick with you and learn and progress and have a career. One of the big fears of hiring virtual assistants, they're going to jump ship as soon as they get a better job offer. And in the Philippines that's not the case. So one time I gave one of my people the assignment of working on social media and she was going to work with our customers on our social media. And I said to her, hey, look, you're going to start getting job offers from my customers because they're working with you and they know you work for me and they know that you're really great. And so they don't want to go through the work of hiring someone and they're just going to offer you a job. Her response to me was, don't worry, sir, I get job offers every single day. I'm not leaving, I'm not going anywhere. And as a small business owner, having put in time and effort training her, what a big deal that was for me to put my mind at peace. Well, you know, that was about eight years ago. She still works for me. The long term stability and loyalty of the Filipino people is a really big deal. As a small business owner or an entrepreneur in knowing, as long as I treat this person well, I gain their trust, I can teach them things I would never teach an hourly person in the U.S. because that hourly person in the U.S. is going to move on, they're going to take another job, they're going to quit, they're going to look for a job that pays them $2 an hour more and they're going to leave. Just not the case in the Philippines. So the next reason why I hired in the Philippines is because of taxes and benefits. So there are none because I'm not a Philippines employer in the Philippines. I don't have a physical presence in the Philippines and neither do you. You don't pay any taxes on their wages. You don't do withholding. You don't have to deal with their personal income taxes. That's their responsibility to pay. You don't have to pay us taxes on their wages. You also don't have to have any benefits, you don't have to offer insurance, you don't have to do paid time off, you don't have office space in the Philippines, so you don't have to have utilities, you don't have to pay unemployment, insur all of these things. Where the government is involved in the US typically changes when you're hiring in the Philippines and that as a small business owner for me makes the whole thing so much simpler. I know I can hire someone new and I don't have to go through any compliance with government. I'm not going to have to add them to my withholding, I don't have to have a payroll account for them. We bring them on, we pay them their wages after they've done their work and it's really just that simple. In the Philippines, when you've found someone, typically it's a matter of when can you start? And they'll say, well I can start tomorrow sir, what do you want me to do? Most of the time they're already unemployed so they don't have to wait four weeks to put in their two week notice and quit their current job. They're not going to move to your office, there's no moving. Typically it takes a couple days to find someone great and then another day to get them started. The speed with which you can find great people and hire them@onlinejobs ph really makes this great as a small business owner where I don't have the time or the resources to put into a headhunter towards finding local people, towards spending weeks and weeks on someone to find out they're not going to work out. It's so much easier out of the Philippines where I can find people quickly, hire them quickly, test them quickly, and if it doesn't work out, I haven't wasted a bunch of my time. Which leads me to the Filipino people are easy to work with. They're good at communicating, they're anxious to work, they want to do a really good job. Very often they'll go above and beyond what you've asked them to do because they want to show you that they're willing to work hard to keep their job. They want to contribute to your business, they want to think where in most other places they're looking to do something to get paid and get off with as little work as possible. And that exists in the Philippines too. But that's not the norm. Culturally they're very resilient and that makes them really easy to teach and to give feedback to and for them to fail and to come back and try it again. So to recap, there's a whole bunch of cultural reasons why I only hire from the Philippines. And it's not that I couldn't find great people elsewhere. It's that I just have a much easier chance of finding great people in the Philippines. The cultural compatibility, the English, the cost effectiveness, the skills and education, the stability with the loyalty, the lack of government intervention for taxes or benefits, the speed of hiring people and the ease with which they are to work, it all makes a really big difference. Especially as a small business owner. When I need to find some talent for a role in my business, the Philippines is the place to go. Now. Where do you find these people? Well, onlinejobs PH is the number one place that most people go. It's a huge database of Filipino resumes. You get to contact them directly. They don't take a cut. There's no middleman. You can post a job and they'll apply to your job, and you interview the best ones. There's no contracts, there's no requirements, there's no minimums. Onlinejobs PH is really the standout place to find really great virtual assistants, or more than virtual assistants from the Philippines.