John Jonas avoided hiring for years, thinking he had no time. He started with remote workers from the Philippines in 2005 and says posting a job and reviewing applications is how you actually find time to hire. The work that gets handed off frees hours for what only you can do.
Episode 55, you don't have time to hire someone. So when I was just starting my business, this is 2004, I didn't have time to hire someone to help me. And really, I didn't know how to hire someone to help me. I didn't. There weren't, like, options like there are today. I just bought a house. I had a new baby. My business was very small, and it was really scary. Like, the thought of hiring someone was, you know, like, it was a big risk to me. Plus, I was working 50 or 60 hours a week. And to take time away from that, like fixing software problems or trying to do some marketing, to try and hire someone that was questionable was like, it was questionable. And yet I knew that I needed some help because the business wasn't going to grow if I kept doing everything on my own. I knew that, like, there wasn't enough time in the day to get everything done. And there were more things that I kept learning, like, oh, I need to be doing this, I need to be doing that. We need to be doing ads, and we need to be writing content, and we need to be creating software, and we used to be doing customer support, and we have to be doing lead generation. And there were all these things that I knew just wasn't gonna happen if I didn't have help. So I tried hiring people locally, and that didn't work out for me. I tried it four times, actually, and the first thing they did was quit because they realized, oh, you're making money online, and I see your whole business, okay, let me go do this on my own. Four times that happened to me. So finally, when I. When I came to hiring someone in the Philippines, I knew that if I could just get one task off of my plate, this task, this one thing that I'm trying to do, super effective for my business, I just hate doing it, and I don't have the time to do it, even though it's super effective. And so if I could get that one thing off of my plate, my business would grow. So I made time to find someone. Now, making time back then wasn't really hard because there was an agency, and I went to them and I just sent them an email like, hey, I need someone. Well, at least I thought it wasn't hard. What it really did was it got the ball rolling. And that's my tip today, is to get the ball rolling. Here's what happened to me. I talked about this a couple episodes ago, but so I sent an email to this company, and they're like, well, what kind of person do you want? And I told them and they kind of find that kind of person. And it didn't work out because they didn't really care. They were just putting a warm body in a seat and marking up their salary to me. And that person quit after a week saying, I can't, I can't do this work. I don't know how to do it. So the agency comes back to me with another person and within a couple days they quit because they couldn't handle the office politics at the agency. So the third person they find, like I said a couple episodes ago, they knew nothing, but I was able to teach them how to do this thing that I wanted done. And that right there, like sending that initial email saying, hey, I want someone. Got the ball rolling. And once it was started, well, I couldn't really stop it because the agency came back to me and said, okay, well, here's the next person and here's the next person. And I spent so much more time in training those initial people and communicating with the agency and communicating with the workers in the beginning than if I would have just hired someone on my own. Put in the two to three hours that it takes to hire someone. Unfortunately, at the time that didn't exist. Like, there was no way to put in two to three hours to hire someone because there was no job board to find people in the Philippines. Today it exists. That's onlinejobs ph. So that was 2005. That one person has saved me, I don't know, probably a thousand hours since. And then I've hired 35, 40 other people that work for me currently today, full time. And I don't know, that's like, you know, I can't even tell you how much work, how much productivity and profit and time savings and time gained has been created from that one. Get the ball rolling that like it I. That I didn't have time for, that I had to make time for how much it has changed my life. So if you're worried about hiring an OFS that you don't have the time to do it, here's what happens in six months from now with your time. Nothing. And that's the problem. Nothing happens if you don't do something different. And that's something different today, at least for a lot of you, is hire someone in the Philippines. Get the ball rolling. Here's what you can do to get the ball rolling. Go to onlinejobs ph and search for the skill that you're looking for. It's not super hard. Just do a search for your skill. Like you want someone to manage your social media great social media manager. You, you want someone to do Pinterest marketing. Pinterest marketing. You want someone to be just a general virtual assistant. Virtual assistant. Type it in, look at some profiles and then post a job. Once you've done that, you've posted the job and it doesn't have to be super long, it doesn't have to be super detailed. It just get something out there. Once you start getting job applications you can't stop the ball from rolling. And so the initial just get it rolling is the most important piece of this. It may not change your life like it did mine or like I've seen thousands and thousands and thousands of other employers but it might like that's the best ROI that I've ever seen is something that gives you time. Dang, that's good ROI and it's not going to happen immediately, it's going to take time but get the ball rolling.
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